Hi Haggi,
thank you for letting me join the beta. My first impression are that I am very pleased with Maya to Corona, it looks really stable, very responsive, well-featured and nicely integrated into maya for a beta. I do miss all the utility nodes of maya but I guess some of them will come along the way some day.
I have noted all the little things that were not behaving as expected - or some ideas - but it's really nothing... I was able to complete a first scene as I would with any other renderer. I only had one crash but I don't think it's related to Corona. When I started from a new scene it has been 100% stable.
So, my notes are:
- IPR not working
- frame buffer crashes
- absorption / sss values changes do not appear in shader swatch
- It would be nice to link attribute of the sun intensity in the render settings (along with the sky multiplier) instead of going in shape tab
- For the fresnel map of the corona surface, it would be AWESOME to add a falloff map like in 3DS max, maya users have wished that for a long time. Would it not be possible to hack a ramp from the Remap Value node of maya and control fresnel ramp with that? I did not find any info on this fresnel map attribute, not sure how to use it.
- maybe add a multiplier for file environment, when you use an exr to hdri you scene. I did not know how to light properly with those, the luminosity was too dark and could not fix it...
- ctrl-leftClick-slide in the render settings do not step correctly for some values, maybe lower the step (highlight compression, contrast)
- contrast does not go below 1.000
- Autosave crashed once... I will look further into that - I was not able never to repoen my .ma (I started from an old scene though)
- no support for hdr, from what I understood in the forums?
- corona surface does not appear in my right-click menu favorite materials, even though it's added as a favorite material
- There is no turbidity for Hosek and Rawafake, how do you add atmospheric dirt for those two... without a volumetric solution...?
- Could we have an option in maya for converting to tx? Arnold does it and even replaces a jpg with the tx version at render time - so you can still view your textures in viewport 2.0 and render with mipmapped.
Finally, some questions:
1. Are the Corona surface shaders energy-conservative? They looked blown-out with high diffuse and reflection in my hypershade?
2. I know that you cannot support maya nodes, but it would be very useful to have something like the layered texture, I use it all the time... I know that there is a corona layered shader. Having an ambient occlusion texture and dirt texture would be cool too. AO is a must I think : )
3. You mentionned in the first email you have sent me that there was a "pdf" (for maya to corona?). Can you link me to it, maybe a sticky thread for that would be useful, even if it's not updated at each version of the beta. It was supposed to indicate which maya nodes were supported. Any generic info on
THANK YOU! I love my new toy : ) I was really surprised how stable and responsive the plugin was. Congrats!