1.7 Daily Builds Changelog

Corona Corona for 3ds Max Previews
1

just placeholder now, but we are already hard at work :wink:

tumblr_d1b4f27b35abab300938633e8a4d6e87_810fa5d3_400.gif

2

Scatter

  • Fixed scatter UV pattern random offset moving all objects only in one direction. Now the objects are properly moved in random directions. Old scenes are preserved via legacy checkbox.
  • Fixed a bug causing low CPU utilization when setting spline scatter random seed

DR

  • Fixed incorrect status report that the remove side is not responding
  • Fixed incorrect representation of non-ascii characters in camera name on slaves (https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2669)
  • Fixed hang when closing DR server during render
  • Better error reporting when slaves do not have a 3ds Max version capable of rendering received scene

Image Editor

  • PNG files are now saved with proper alpha channel.
3
  • Fixed Corona Proxy crashing in max 2018
  • Martin Geupel’s (deadclown) coronaConverter script bundled in the installer updated to version 1.36 - fixed: standard lights shadow conversion overwrote already existing CoronaShadows settings
    • fixed: Mental Ray Multi/Sub-Map slot order
    • added buttons to enable or disable legacy mode in CoronaRoundEdges map
  • Fixed crash when exporting a scene to invalid location
  • Fixed DR bug causing warning messages about failing to accumulate EXRs
  • Fixed occasional crash in standalone and image editor when the license was not activated
  • Fixed CoronaBitmap producing artifacts in some cases with HDR maps as light source
  • Fixed spelling in tooltips, added translations of new tooltips
  • Fixed significant slowdown from Corona VFB when using sharpening
  • Image Editor - Fixed crash when opening curve editor when no image is loaded
    • Installer now issues a warning when .cxr and/or .cexr file extensions fail to be associated with image editor
    • Fixed zooming using mouse wheel not always respecting the cursor position
    • Added command line version usable for batch image processing - this variant is still experimental and may contain bugs
4
  • Fixed converter and init scripts in installer
  • FIxed NaNs caused by very small lights far from scene origin
  • Image editor: Fixed vignetting giving different results from Corona VFB in some cases
  • DR - Fixed slaves sometimes rendering with 3ds Max version different from the one used by master

—> Released as 1.6 hotfix1

5

Major new features

  • Added support for hair, added HairMtl. Ornatrix, Hair Farm, and native Hair&Fur (max 2013+) are supported. There is also Corona Hair material. Currently still very WIP!

  • Added bump convertor map, that converts any map to a bump map

  • Added UVW randomizer map, that allows applying random offset/rotation/scale to different objects

  • Massive speedup of interactive rendering in scenes with heavy instancing

  • Layered mtl and rayswitch mtl no longer come with default CoronaMtl plugged into them

  • Fixed crash when deleting Corona Display filter

  • Fixed unnecessary IR restarts when navigating slate material editor (2016+)

  • Updated to new embree (3% general speedup)

  • Updated to new instancing system inside embree, yielding lowered memory consumption, and faster interactive updates

  • Additional 2% general speedup

  • Added texmap on/off checkboxes to Corona Triplanar Map

  • Added snapping to CoronaLight, TODO: other objects

  • More translations fixed

  • FIxed: ortho view clipping thin objects: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2609

  • Image Editor: Fixed rotation direction of the glare effect to match VFB.

  • Image Editor: Fixed denoising of rendered regions

  • Image Editor: Fixed sometimes loading different LUT than what was selected in VFB

  • Added maxscript access to noise level: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=16298.new#new

  • Faster adaptivity recomputation (speed up by factor 2-3) - this should prevent low CPU usage when rendering small regions

  • Added blurring multiplier to multimap

  • Improved listing of (un)supported maps and materials. Physical material is now correctly listed as supported, and Corona materials no longer incorrectly report as supported to vray.

  • UHD cache and LUT is now asset-tracked, meaning it gets packed when archiving scene, can be retargeted, and there is warning when it is missing upon opening a scene

  • DR: Fixed displaying of some non-ascii characters in DR tab

  • DR: DR can now be turned on (or off) during render by checking (unchecking) the ‘Enable’ checkbox in DR rollout

  • DR: Showing error message when DR slave is missing a texmap plugin

  • Corona combo boxes (channel list and LUTs in VFB): Fixed scrolling when mouse cursor hovers over the combo box without clicking (worked previously correctly only on Win10), Fixed selected item not being properly highlighted when scrolling using the mouse wheel, The popup window with selection now properly scrolls to alway display the selected item, Items can now be scrolled just by holding the up/down keys instead of one push == one scroll

  • Reduced flickering of Corona VFB during interactive rendering

  • Fixed: scatter name in viewport not being correctly refreshed sometimes due to 3ds max bug

  • Reordered estimated remaining time in VFB

  • Added tooltips explaining various VFB statistics

  • Removed non-working rawafake sky model parameters

  • Updated VFB UHD Cache stats

  • “Add region” button in VFB now enables regions if it is clicked while regions are disabled: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2731

6
  • Fixed crash when using hair&fur with multimap
  • Fixed crash when zooming the VFB with blurring/sharpening enabled
  • Fixed crash in multimap - https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2754
  • Image Editor - fixed whole system sometimes lagging during denoising
7
  • Image Editor - Fixed wrong alpha handling while denoising and applying bloom and glare effects.
  • Fixed crash when applying light material to hair/fractal objects
  • Fixed crash when assigning material to a node which has material override exclude while in interactive mode
  • Changed UHD cache default file to blank, to make asset tracker less annoying with Corona
  • Fixed mouse wheel scrolling working incorrectly on older Windows versions
  • Fixed hair sometimes rendering with wrong z-depth (behind objects)
8
  • Fixed estimated time remaining not working when resuming render: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2652
  • fixed fetching missing textures required by native 3ds Max lights on DR slaves
  • Licensing request key is now displayed in system>about rollout
  • Fixed crashes in hairmtl UI https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2763
  • CoronaBitmap no longer changes its classname
  • Improved hair shading model (glints)
  • Fixed too big step while zooming with Ctrl++ and Ctrl± keyboard shortcuts.
  • Multimap tex now has 25 slots, up from 15
9
  • Fixed worldToCam and camToWorld matrices being switched (causing a problem with PSD manager)
  • Corona EXR saving made compatible with 3ds max/Cinema4D (alpha premultiplication)
  • Made hair render faster, tweaked shading model
10
  • Fixed adaptivity unnecessarily focusing too much on render region edges
  • Hair&Fur now reacts to IR changes, and works with mr shader slot (plug CoronaHairMtl there for best results)
  • Fixed NaNs/fireflies in hair shading
  • Improved hair shading (made highlights beter match reality) - experimental. Feedback would be appreciated
  • Improved denoising on hair
11
  • Removed old and unused image samplers
  • Added new and improved image sampler, capable up to 100% speedups, on by default for all new and old scenes
  • Changed rounded edges algorithm: new one is much faster, and produces no noise, but works on same object only
  • Removed now obsolete parameters of rounded edges - samples and include/exclude mode
  • Updated Spanish and Ukrainian tooltip translations based on user revisions
  • Fixed shading in bump converter map: https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2756
  • UVW randomizer now has no upper/lower limits for parameters
  • Unified “self-illumination” and “self illumination” labels
  • All objects now properly snap in viewport/during creation
  • Faster/better adaptivity calculation
  • Render regions in VFB drawn with less clutter

hair

  • Increased default hair tesselation rate to 8, as there is practically no performance penalty
  • Made hair rendering faster
  • Fixed crash when using hair&fur instance mode
  • Significantly lowered memory leaking when using hair&fur (there still might be some)
  • Made the length-based mapping work in HairFarm
  • Improved hair shading when applied to non-hair geometry
  • Added Corona Hair Mod to control hair geometry look per-object
  • Hairfarm renderer atmospheric effect, that causes massive slowdowns, is now always ignored

Attached is the comparison of the speedup. In this scene, the new sampler clears the noise about twice as fast as the old one.

old.jpg
old.jpg960×480 179 KB

new.jpg
new.jpg960×480 171 KB

12
  • Light preparation time is now correctly considered in VFB stats https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,16964.0.html
  • Maxscript cameras extended from the Physical camera now properly parse
  • Another significant speedup due to better sampling: scenes with glossy surfaces clean up faster, hair renders much faster and no longer produces faint colored fireflies

Attaching before/after images - they are (±5%) rendered in the same time - disregard renderstamp, as they were rendered on different machines

cornell old.jpg
cornell old.jpg510×640 111 KB

cornell new.jpg
cornell new.jpg510×640 92.4 KB

hair old.jpg
hair old.jpg640×480 70.3 KB

hair new.jpg
hair new.jpg640×480 65.6 KB

kitchen old.jpg
kitchen old.jpg1024×626 230 KB

kitchen new.jpg
kitchen new.jpg1024×626 220 KB

13
  • Fixed bad performance of thin glass (see images below)
  • Added zoom buttons to VFB and CIE
  • Fixed round edges working incorrectly when plugged into diffuse slot (or other slots than bump) on object with scale other than 100%
  • Render element memory optimization - most elements will consume 25% less memory, while some element types (like the dot product element) will consume up to 75% less memory

hybrid glass before.PNG.jpg
hybrid glass before.PNG.jpg957×568 61 KB

hybrid glass new.PNG.jpg
hybrid glass new.PNG.jpg957×568 58.4 KB

14
  • Fixed unhandled exception/crash when enabling bloom & glare during the rendering
  • Fixed occasional crash on 3ds Max startup
  • Fixed crash when using LightMix during interactive rendering (introduced in previous daily)
  • Fixed wrong VFB zooming in some situations
15
  • Optimized glass/water sampling
  • Fixed crashes in IR
  • Fixed gathered denoising data being unusable in CIE
  • Fixed rare race condition adding more noise in small renders/regions
  • Speeded up parsing of geometry with non-corona materials
  • Fixed double displacement applied when using 3dsmax built-in materials.
16
  • Fixed denoising blurring the image too much
  • Fixed CIE not loading denoised beauty saved from Corona
  • Fixed elements without anti-aliasing (normals, etc.) sometimes producing incorrect results for small renders/regions
  • CShading_SourceColor and CShading_Albedo render elements now use 33% less memory on CPUs supporting F16C instruction set (Ivy Bridge/Bulldozer and newer)
  • Improved denoising of hair - requires gathering additional data not supported by CIE yet
  • Added support for scripted light plugin rendering
  • Added dispersion to CoronaMtl
17
  • Fixed denoising not being applied with resume last rendering
  • Added new command saveAllElements to the CoronaFp interface to allow saving all render elements at once, same as when using VFB button
  • Color picker eye dropper now supports averaging colors of neighbouring pixels (up to 31x31 pixel patches)
  • Camera Map per Pixel map is again listed in mtl editor when corona is active renderer
  • Added improved hair denoising to CIE (introduced to Corona in previous daily)
  • Fixed some bugs in dispersion shading (e.g. artifacts on grazing angles)
  • Show VFB button/command now brings the corona VFB to front if hidden behind other windows
  • Fixed crash when using some (giant) LUTs
18
  • Improved algorithm generating thumbnails in render history
  • Added support for .hdr maps with formally incorrect format (which are widespread and other applications support them)
  • Default denoising value changed to 0.65
  • Added Corona Camera
  • Added CoronaSkinMtl, and SSS to Corona native material
  • Fixed “Lock sampling pattern” checkbox not working. This was also backported into 1.6 hotfix3
  • Fixed too much noise in images when using DR/renderfarms/resume rendering with the DMC sampler. This was also backported into 1.6 hotfix3
19
  • Fixed incorrect mapping in viewport of CoronaBitmap plugged into another map - https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2797
  • Fixed incorrect bokeh when CoronaBitmap was used https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=16841
  • Text map, shapemap, vector map are now reported as supported by Corona (previously shown as incompatible)
  • Fixed bump converter map not working with triplanar map
  • Improved quality of material editor preview (to be identical with Corona 1.5) https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=17230
  • Added Corona material library - Launched through Corona->Material Library in main menu
    • Materials can be simply dragged to scene object or to material editor
    • Just few sample materials for now, but many more will be available in subsequent dailies
    • Probably will not work in Max 2014 and older yet, we’re still working on that
20
  • Fixed Corona triplanar and UVW randomizer not working with each other
  • Fixed render freezing when using skin mtl
  • Fixed Corona Bitmap spamming MAXScript Listener window - https://corona-renderer.com/bugs/view.php?id=2562
  • CoronaMtl: anisotropy controls freezing when no anisotropy is used
  • Material Library - Asset path is now set automatically.
    • Materials can be now sorted alphabetically or by overall usage count.
    • Fixed some occasional problems with drag & drop
    • Double clicking on material now displays a separate window with higher resolution preview