Is it good practice to load all bitmaps within a Corona bitmap shader? Until now I have been loading bitmaps directly in to the diffuse texture slot. I was having a play with Tone Map Control and couldn’t get it to function properly. With all the exposure, LUT & tone mapping checkboxes unticked, the output looked garish and compressed. Not at all as expected. Then I tried loading the bitmap in the Corona bitmap shader and hey presto… it worked!
This got me thinking, have I been loading textures incorrectly all along and should all bitmaps sit within the Corona bitmap shader??
Yeah this topic has not really set the world on fire…
I’ve not been using it so far and haven’t seen a reason for it other than in conjunction with the tone map control. However, it must be there for a reason??
Afaik in 3ds Max it should potentially speed up the render times - by a very small amount. Should be similar in C4D. Other than that the Corona bitmap should offer you some settings that the native loader doesn’t. In 3ds Max it has a few extra options (and a few missing) than the original UI but thats about it.
Gotta be honest, I personally rarely use it in either application.
I think CoronaBitmap will be more important when Corona materials become cross-platform. Similarly to nkilar, i rarely use CBitmaps too, except for loading HDRIs, where it has noticeable speed advantage and superior projection modes.
The reason I kicked off this thread was because I loaded a 4k texture (parquet floor) into the Corona Bitmap shader and it took aaaaaages to load in the material browser. The it kept stalling and trying to refresh the preview. I converted it back to a standard bitmap and it loaded instantly.
I’ll see if this happens again in the new daily build but it seems odd considering it’s intended to be a quicker solution…
