Hey guys. It’s been a while i don’t post anything here. Actually i have never posted any work images until now.
Because Vfx content is tricky on the ownership side of things i only showed these to Keymaster privately but heck..is been a while now and we have something called fair use :).
I also hope my fellow vfx corona users could contribute, discuss and push with more impetu on this threat and on the feautures threat for things that Corona might be missing for vfx work.
These images are the result combination of multiple corona passes and ps work in a nuke setup of mutiple camera projections. in some cases is a final frame before comp and in others a wide cam rendered out of nuke before cropping or adding fx, characters and stuff like that.
Using Corona in these type of work wasn’t as easy as it might look. Generally there is no support for tools that fall so far from the established pipeline but sometimes there is no other choice that to go for it. Corona did excel in the times i could use it despite its shorcomings. Once proven useful we actually managed to pull many many shots out in no time and that was having zero render nodes.
Images belong to:
Dawn of the planet of the Apes / 2014
Godzilla /2014
The hobbit trilogy / 2012-2014 ( changing from vray to Corona at the time )
Star trek beyond / 2016
wow, that’s cool! congrats for you and Ondra
never knew that corona has been used in movies since 2014? or am I misunderstood something?
upload the animation views please
just curious, please tell us more what about the tricky side of vfx contents ownership from movies?
I don’t know if i could post animations but will post soon snapshots of the final shots as they were realeased. don’t know about anim gifs
Christa. The thing about content ownership is that whatever you produce in house for film generally belongs to the Studio ( like FOX ) and they allow vfx houses to use the content for marketing and all but for us mere mortals is not so easy even if you actually did the work. but as long as you are not profiting with the images ( like selling postards ) its not an issue. For a professional gathering like this forum i would asumme its ok ( hence “fair use” ).
Ravalanche!
Well that’s the juicy question right there. I just got my licence for 1.5 and have been very happy since. ( all the stuff i posted we used A5 and A6! ). But not a day had passed and i find myself forced to pick Arnold because there is a Client doing a sequence that involves multiple types of work like fx sims, lighting and so on. I do environments and generally doesn’t matter what i use as they plug into the comp end parallel to everything but clients require sometimes a consistent solution across diferent fields. For example this case i mention has a big sim done in houdini and there is lighting work done in maya i think ( diferent freelancers, etc whatever ) and the sims in this particular case interact with the environment in a way that makes it no so easy to just comp resulting renders from difrent packages. So the client wants to see his sims and all looking awesome and consistent with other env work we have done using Corona and Pumm!. no can’t do. No openVDB support and then everything goes downhill from there and i have to start using Arnold which is an amazing tool but damn is so far from ‘‘rendering is magic’’ and figure out now how to do without my lovely corona scatter and to make a simple material ..hehe, you get the idea.
I personaly dont need VDB support and all that stuff. but not having it gives to situations where you might end ditching Corona out of the pipeline even if Corona was already the best tool for the bulk of the work. So that’s one.
The other big one is not having EXR 2.0 supported. Its a similar problem. Is not something you might need much in many cases ( i personally can get away old school for comping elements ) but there are cases deep data is requeried due the way a pipeline is built. and it is a powerfull tool when you are dealing not with a super good looking single image but with hundreds of shots.
I think those two can be considered basic pipeline compatibility tools.
The ones you mention are of course key things as core rendering /shading elements. Heterogeneous volumetrics absolutely. I would add a Thin layer shader into the list and maybe get some ideas from Arnold’s SSS shader and they way is implemented.
And if Ondra can bring back the ReflOcl pass that would be swell :).
I think the rest are just little day to day goodies that make using the tool a pleasure or that overcomes Max own pretty much dead development like interface things and the sort. Is not missing much there really.
Zdepth pass could have separate X Y Z controls. that’s handy.
Being able to lock to camera certain Corona scatter values like rotation.
A killer multi camera projection shader maybe.
Little stuff like that
Anyway. I do think Corona can maintain its elegance and fit much better in a vfx pipeline with very few key additions. i don’t think it needs to go overboard and be like Arnold to be widely embraced in Vfx but it could easily blow out of the water some mayor tools for medium size projects, specific types of sequences, comercials, etc. by adressing those additions.
damn, another vote for OpenVDB… it is starting to look inevitable for 1.7
doing the old reflection occlusion would be easy, we can actually squeeze that into 1.6.
just curious, where were you working when you did these? just surprised and assumed the VFX houses that worked on those films where using maya and other renderers. i know star trek had some max/vray but the others i didn’t know.
Generally that would be true. But these are backgrounds/matte paintings. And those guys are generally allows to do whatever they need to get the background out. Paint it, render it in whatever, Photoshop and Nuke it until you get thumbs up. It is quite often one-man-job as most things cannot be reused (the mountain backdrop can’t be in that many shots.. the monkey would) so there is much more flexibility in their tool of choice.
VDB is how we store Volumetric Data - as Blocks “Voxels”
VDB describes a grid in 3D, how big it is, how high the resolution (number of block in that size) is and how the voxels change over time.
OpenVDB is a standard, which is free and has no licence cost, which provides a clever way to store and manipulate the data.
Simulation programs use openVDB to create, manipulate and store the Volumetric simulation and renderers implement the openVDB library, so the data is read and input into the rendering environment.
Most of the industry uses openVDB for volumetrics, which is why there is such a fuss about it. If you implement openVDB, you automatically support most volumetric simulation plugins and programs.
Thanks Ondra for the reflOcl
But i must confess i was so cheap i got my 1.5 licence minus the extra 1 year daily build acess .
VDB i guess will only make sense until the Volume shaders side gets fully developed. makes sense. Good to know you guys are aware of the need of those standards.
What about EXR 2.0. What would make it complicated to implement from the programing point of view?. i would imagine the data is there and you just need to add this output.. or is it more involved than that?
The more i have to work with Arnold the more convinced i am that you guys are doing the right thing with Corona in the sense of keeping things lean and getting rid of some cg legacy stuff. and integration to Max is flawless not to mention speed. But still there are really good things about Arnold worth looking at ( from a Vfx integration point of view ) like their diagnostics options, some utility shaders and so on.
i wont start listing features here. will take that to another thread :0 .
CompanionCube:
Tomas answered pretty well. but maybe is not so much like whatever tool we need to get the job done but rougly yes and not always, actually less and less these days, the shot is a simple background :p. There are still technical and political implications. Every case is diferent. And we still have to cover every angle as much as possible to avoid a conflict with other tools, processes.
In the one show we used Corona the most we were lucky that we were pretty much abandoned to our own devices as the prod support was focused mostly on huge character work and other fully CG ( pipeline cg )sequences.
In other cases the full might of an in house pipeline doesn’t get the job done just because the more people you put into a task eventually makes the problem worst and those pipelines are designed for a huge subdivision of work. And in some cases there is a transition going on from one technology to another and the task can be so simple but somehow falls trough the cracks and you can’t get it done with what used to work.
Still..it was always a thin rope to walk trought!.
.