***You can always get the newest build at the usual location *[/b]**
- File open dialog changed from 3ds Max dialog to Corona’s one in all 4 usages - CProxy, CoronaLight ies file, CoronaCam lut file, and ColorCorrectTex lut file. The open dialogs now remember the current file path and open from there.
- Added support for RailClone 4 segment materials
- When opening older (pre-v5 scenes), when there is no displacement used, Corona automatically switches to 2.5D displacement. We still ask for permission when there is any displacement used, so that scene appearance does not change without user input
- Optimizations - CoronaBitmap - Optimized memory storage of textures whose dimensions are not a power of 2. 20-30% total memory reduction in few real world scenes we tested.
- CoronaBitmap - Up to 66% memory reduction when using RGB textures that hold only gray colors
- Improved performance of Density map slot in Corona Scatter (e.g. speeds up common setup with Corona Distance map plugged into it).
- Bugfixes - Fixed the “update to 2.5D displacement” popup lowering screen size of an instanced displacement modifier multiple times
- Fixed scatter not updating viewport when scale map mode is changed
- Fixed LightMtl using wrong UV coordinates in some specific cases
- Fixed blurring of caustics at the edge of the screen
- Fixed crash when scene is reset while docked IR is running.
- Fixed crash when caustics are used with native 3ds Max regions
- Fixed randomized assigning of materials in RailClone
- Fixed Corona Scatter not to recompute on changes in material of original model objects (could cause freezes in some rare cases)
- Changes - Introduced a new way to activate corona - you can set your email & password or a path to the licensing server to environment variable CORONA_ACTIVATION: - For email and password, use format “email:password”
- For licensing server address, use format “LS:address”
- Material dispersion Abbe number minimum value changed from 10 to 1.
- Added render stamp token %ptg which is replaced with the scene geometry preprocessing time (in milliseconds).
- Removed perfect backwards compatibility of very old CoronaMtl. 5+years old Corona materials (Corona 1.2 or older) might now render slightly differently.
- Temporarily removed Corona Standalone from the installer. We’re currently doing a full rewrite of the Standalone code and it will be much faster if we don’t need to maintain full backwards compatibility in every step during the development. The new version of standalone will be ready for v6 release.
- Bugfixes - Fixed vector displacement not working correctly when no specific UV channel was specified
- Fixed crash when creating Corona Scatter in 3ds Max 2016 (and possibly earlier) while Corona license is not active.
- FallOff map in distance blend mode in 3ds Max now renders in Corona the same way as in scanline renderer
- Fixed issue where light mix/postprocessing settings in VFB where not accepting values if mouse was outside of the VFB window
- Fix of crash of layered material with empty rayswitcher
- Fix of reparsing suns everytime during IR - should be done now only when some sun is changed
- Masking render elements can be propagated through refraction/reflection. To propagate them you have to set it in the material (Corona Mtl → advanced ->propagate masks) - https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000066916-how-to-use-masks-with-reflection-refraction
- Fixed Corona toolbar not to possibly cause 3ds Max crashes during its shutdown on fresh Corona installations.
- Removed support for 3ds Max 2013. This 3ds Max version is barely used anymore and maintaining it took too much from our time which could otherwise be spent on making new features.
- Added a way to tell 3ds Max which Corona version to load on startup when multiple Corona versions are installed at the same time (requires manual installation) - https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000066819
- Fixed Corona toolbar not being correctly reset after its deletion in 3ds Max 2018 and newer.
- Fixed wxWidgets asserts being raised when using DR.
- Fixed density map in Corona Scatter that could be evaluated slightly differently in each run.
- First material library update (second will follow before v6 release): - Added 15 new Flooring materials
- Added 19 new Carpet materials
- If you are using the offline libarary file you will need to download the new one here
- Added new adaptive environment light sampler based on the one in V-Ray - Noise clears up to 2x faster in interior scenes in general; up to 9x faster in certain extreme cases.
- The new solver is now used as default for all new and old scenes.
- This solver should remove the need for portals in most scenes.
- Fixed the updated material library not working with 3ds Max 2016 and older. Note that this fix is applied retroactively and the previous daily build installer will download this fixed version as well. - If you are using the offline libarary file you will need to download the new one here
Daily build 2020-03-16
- Removed portals from CoronaCore - Portals are no longer needed because of the new adaptive environment sampler which fully replaces them.
- The portal material is now deprecated and won’t show in the material editor.
- When opening a scene with portals, you will be notified that they are deprecated now and can be deleted.
- Fixed adaptive enviro sampler together with shadowcatcher producing artifacts
- Fixed crash when rendering with Phoenix FD version 4. Corona now supports both version 3 and version 4 of Phoenix FD.
- Fixed crash of VolumeGrid when Checker map is assigned
- Fixed sometimes incorrect evaluation of scale map in Corona Scatter when the map is switched to Object XYZ or World XYZ mapping. Legacy scenes remain unaffected unless the Legacy switch gets turned off.
- Toolbar now correctly shrinks (both horizontally and vertically) when some of its button gets removed via context menu.
- Fixed 3ds Max asserts appearing during scene loading.
- Improved UI of Corona Converter - it was reorganized, made more consistent and updated
- Fixed toolbar’s right click context menu deleting incorrect button.
- Added support for PhoenixFD Foam - Note that interactive is working only with the latest Phoenix nightly build (6.4.2020)
- Fixed motion blur not working in 3ds Max 2017 and older
- Fixed crashes and wrong displays of some maps (introduced in v6)
- Cgeo loader (CoronaProxy) made robust against (0, 0, 0) normals
- Fixed wrong computation of normals during 2.5D displacement while having complex smoothing groups.
- Fixed rare crash in IR when removing light select render element
- Performance improvements of adaptive environment sampler
- Fixed crash when closing VFB during IR session
- MultiMap - Fixed wrong result when mixing two maps with non default frequencies
- CoronaProxy - fixed crash when picking geometry from scene.
Daily build 2020-04-28
- Fixed multimap behavior in case all slots have frequencies equal to 0 - now the slots are all picked equally based on random in that case
- FumeFx no longer supports Corona renderer
- Selection of the sun for the sky model computation has changed for scenes having multiple suns
- Updated IntelCPUAI denoiser to version 1.2
- Implemented new and improved Sun & Sky model - Supports sun below horizon
- Current version does not support turbidity, but it will be added in next iteration of this model
- Can be selected by using “Improved” sky model in CoronaSky map (this is now the default)
- Can be selected by unchecking the “Use legacy color” checkbox in CoronaSun (legacy mode is available only in old scenes)
- Material override now ignores the deprecated portal material.
- Optimized rendering of Falloff Map
- Regression fixed: V5 and V6 renders LightMtl against the sky differently
- Added support for Phoenix foam and splashes into velocity render element
- Sun and sky improvements - Added ability to manually pair different skies with different suns
- Automatic sun-sky pairing finds the most similar corresponding names
- Sun turbidity is taken from enviro map that uses the sun
- When sky texmap is created using “Add CoronaSky environment”, it is paired with the given sun
- Fixed display of reflection/refraction (there was a glitch in Phoenix Foam rendering)
- Added warning about unsupported cutter geometry for PhoenixFD foam.
- Fixed regression bug: Animated Env/Background map not updating in IR, Corona V6 DB
- Fixed - Changing the CoronaRoundEdges map to fast mode causes 3ds Max to CTD (Note that this bug was introduced in v6)
- Added Wire Color mode back to DataTex
- Added new random sampler “Blue noise” - it is the default sampler for new scenes, old scenes still use the “New improved” sampler
- produces less visually distracting noise in low pass renders
- Blue noise vs DMC 1 sample | Corona Renderer
- Blue noise vs DMC 1 sample | Corona Renderer
- Added displaying of name of the sun that is linked with the sky when the sun selection is set to automatic
- Fixed crashes when Corona Sun is disabled
- CIE now saves JPEGs with quality 100 (and not 98).
- Added “Dissolve with previous image” to IR controls in Render Settings Devel/Experimental rollout. - When unchecked, the rendered image is refreshed only after the first pass has been finished. This is the current behavior.
- When checked, the previous image will be kept and will be gradually replaced by the new image during the first pass of IR render. This was the original behavior from before we introduced IR subsampling.
- Fixed dispersion being disabled for low GI/AA values
- Added (randomized) tiling support to UvwRandomizer map - You can specify how many tiles to make in each (U-V) direction
- Optionally each tile can have a different randomization applied
- Concrete example | Corona Renderer
- Default tile 5x vs RandomizedUVW_Marbles | Corona Renderer
- Default tile 8x vs RandomizedUVW | Corona Renderer
- Fixed crashes when unsupported map is plugged into mono/bump evaluated map slot. This is a regression from recent daily builds.
Build 2020-06-03
- Added Improved lens effects - These include aperture editor accessible from Corona VFB
- 16-bit textures now take 2x less memory
- IR now makes 3ds Max UI less laggy when “Dissolve with previous image” is enabled
- Made the effect of “Conserve memory” checkbox more pronounced: memory reduction is increased by up to 18% overall, but also speed decrease is up to 30% bigger overall.
corona-6-3dsmax-daily-2020-06-18.exe
- Fixed Crash when using bitmap with Corona Volume Mtl in “inside volume” mode
- CIE UI updated to support the new lens effects
- CoronaConverter - fixed outdated link for error reporting.
- Added “Size” parameter, controlling the size of Bloom and Glare, to Camera/Postprocessing tab.
- UVW randomizer now takes into account the UV scaling of the input maps. This allows better handling of real world scale textures.
- Lower memory usage when denoising is not enabled
- Added option to disable caustics adaptivity/optimizations. The option should be used in the case that issues associated with caustic solver appear (black spots in caustics pass, disappearing caustics).
- Fixed issue of Improved Sky model with strange spot appearing below horizon with large horizon blur.
- Added high quality blending into the UVW randomizer - Greatly increases the quality of result especially on the tile boundaries at the cost of slower computation
- Enabled by default
- blending new vs old - complex | Corona Renderer
- Fixed square artifacts appearing when using IR with the adaptive environment sampler
- Fix of regression with Railclone - Corona Multimap no longer worked in mesh element mode.
- Added new secondary GI solver - 4K cache - It is now the default secondary GI solver
- Produces less flicker in animations than UHD cache
- Render results with this cache are closer to path tracing than when using UHD cache
- 4Kcache vs UHD - Default Settings ex.2 | Corona Renderer
- Fixed UHD cache producing different results when 3ds Max render region is used
corona-6-3dsmax-daily-2020-07-07.exe
- Fixed textures mixed with Corona Mix not rendering in Phoenix displacement
- Improved scene export to better handle scenes with many (scattered) instances.
- Fixed handling of LightMix and exclude lists for scattered instances in export for standalone.
- Improved performance of parsing scenes with many instances.
- The behavior of MultiMap randomization is now consistent with V5 (except of Forrest Pack scatter).
- Fixed producing of NaNs in rendering after baking LightMix
- Fixed crashing of proxy when rendering
- Bloom and glare “Size” parameter in the CoronaCamera is no longer editable when the legacy bloom and glare is enabled
- Improved error handling when invalid command line argument is supplied to LicensingServer
- Fixed DR crashing when mr_prim is enabled for hair & fur
- Added support for 3dsmax Mix map mixing curve feature
- When starting a comparison with render history in VFB, the comparison vertical line is now initially always drawn in the middle of the visible area independently of the zoom level
- Corona Scatter no longer freezes UI when recomputing in heavy scenes, also when using Corona Distance map in density slot. - UI of the scatter is generally more responsive and performance is greatly improved.
- Loading scatter scenes is faster (on average by 28%, in extreme cases by 78%, depending on number and size of textures used in the scenes and number of scattered instances there).
- Also fixed the viewport not updating when changing time on the timeline in some cases.
- Fixed the viewport not correctly displaying instances in some cases.
- Fixed rare cases of different scatter results between master and node in DR environment.
- Added support for psd files during conversion between max/corona bitmaps to Corona Converter script.
- Improvements - Improved 4K cache precomputation speed, leading also to faster IR
- Autobump is now turned on if the user clicks on the warning message about 2.5D displacement and if the scene is older than Corona 3.
- Noise level is now not shown in VFB when using “Render only masks”
- Corona toolbar now uses High-DPI icons in 3ds Max 2017 and newer.
- ‘X’ menu (global search menu) now offers actions from the Corona toolbar and keyboard shortcuts can be assigned to them.
- It is possible to add 3ds Max’s buttons to our toolbar and vice versa.
- Removed Corona’s top bar menu from 3ds Max (the functionality is replaced by Corona’s toolbar)
- Bugfixes - Fixed issue where rendering with Blowup mode caused 4K cache to generate too many records.
- Fixed crashes in some corrupted scenes
- Fixed crash when using CoronaColorCorrect map with curves
- Fixed issue where instances generated by MultiScatter were not scattered when distance map was used for density slot.
- CoronaDistance map “no object” shader no longer changes hue with different EV
- Fixed issue where user could not use hex input in CoronaColor map.
- Fixed incorrect computation of opacity when CoronaColor map is used in the opacity channel
- Fixed black artifacts in the CTexmap render element when AO map and materials with opacity are used
- Fixed issue where native Max VFB was not refreshed during rendering
- Fixed: Incorrect gamma error message not showing in logs
- Fixed: Editing curves in CoronaColorCorrect map during IR causes the IR to constantly refresh
- Fixed adaptivity when parts of the scene are excluded (using render selection, etc.).
- Fixed a bug that caused that using render element with no filtering may have lead to incorrect accumulation of other render elements.
- Fixed wrong evaluation of render elements when using opacity.
- Fixed issue where one could not use linear interpolation for curves in CoronaColorCorrect. Selecting linear interpolation led to reverting back to cubic and restarting IR twice.
- Fixed crashing when using CoronaColorCorrect and CoronaUvwRandomizer with “Randomize each tile” and “High quality blending” enabled
- CTexmap render element is no longer propagated as masks
- World displacement size is reduced by 1.5 if 2.5D displacement is enabled in the warning log for legacy scenes.
RC1, entering the final stretch
- Optimized user properties storage in geometry. This should especially help in speed and memory requirements when parsing “extreme” scatter scenes.
- Added standalone export support for 3ds Max ColorCorrect map
- Added standalone export support for 3ds Max Falloff map
- Added clamping of light mtl intensity to ensure that the value is really between the min max specified in the paramblock (Could have been raised higher by max script or baking light mix).
- CoronaColorCorrect - Curve interpolation mode is no longer changed when hitting reset button. Also interpolation mode is correctly displayed when changing curve type or loading curves.
- When opening older scenes, CoronaUvwRandomizer blending weight will be set to 0 instead of the default value 0.25, to preserve old behavior and prevent any performance hit. - Unfortunately due to a glitch this also resets the blending weight in all scenes saved prior to this daily build, sorry for that.
- You can use the attached script to quickly set blending of all CoronaUvwRandomizer maps in a scene to a specific value. By default it sets everything to the default value 0.25, but you can easily edit this value at the top of the script.
- Further optimization of precomputation of 4K Cache - Speedup is up to 2 times in normal rendering, up to 6x times in IR (when just moving camera)
- We’ll be continuing with more optimizations in further builds.
- Fixed issue where light mix values were randomly overridden
- EULA changes: - Added notice on the use of trademarks and other logos belonging to Chaos Czech or its partners (article
and updated our privacy information with a reference for a further reading to our Privacy Notice (article 15).
- Otherwise we did stylistic and technical changes allowing the EULA to be used with other software we may provide.
- Refactored Bezier curves support in Corona. This gives better match of curves between Corona Standalone and 3dsmax for e.g. Output map
- Added reporting of warnings & errors during 3ds Max map substitution
- Added option to reset the settings in the new bloom & glare aperture editor
- Fixed CoronaColorCorrect connected to bump slot not producing any bump when brightness adjustment was set to 0
- Changed the new bloom & glare default size to 15
- Toolbar starts even in first session of fresh install (or after ENU folder removal) of 3ds Max 2017 or older.
- In Customize User Interface toolbar actions moved from Corona to Corona Renderer category.
- Deprecated Corona top bar menu is now properly removed during 3dsMax startup.
- Bloom & Glare “custom aperture” editor checkbox is grayed out when disabled
- Warning is shown when rendering masks only with noise limit (when pass and time limits are not set)
- IR subsampling and “dissolve with previous” options moved from devel/experimental rollout of render settings to system settings. This also means that these options are now per-computer, not per-scene.
Edit:
I forgot to mention one important update - we’ve added anonymous product usage statistics to Corona. This will allow us to make more informed decisions where to focus our future efforts, knowing which features are used the most. It is enabled in default, but you can turn it off/on in the very first screen of the installer and/or later from 3ds Max in the System Settings dialog.
In short what we’re gathering is:
- Which components are selected in the installer. I.e. how many poeple do install CIE.
- Which versions of 3ds Max are used and with which plugins.
- What resolutions are rendered and what types of objects are in the rendered scene.
- Some statistics about the finished render - ray/s, memory usage, number of unique/instanced primitives, etc.
To see which data is gathered in detail you can use the “Save message preview to a file” button under the “Product usage data” section of the System Settings dialog. This button will save product usage messages generated from the current 3ds Max session to a human readable text file. Even when the product usage data sending is currently disabled, you can still use this button as a preview of what would be sent if this was enabled.
changeCoronaUvwRandomizerBlendingValue.ms (304 Bytes)
RC2
- Added possibility to add secondary GI precomputation time into VFB render stamp - with %pts
- When the environment is visible through a reflection or refraction during mask propagation, the result is now a black color instead of the mask of the reflecting/refracting object.
- Fixed crash when saving scene with Corona Scatter switched to point cloud display mode.
- Fixed freeze when loading some Corona Scatter scenes.
- Fixed material library layout when displaying materials with long names
- Fixed crash when modifying material in the material editor while IR is running when “Enable material editor” option in the IR section of system settings is disabled.
- Fixed issues appearing in light material (exclusion and black enviro after hidden in mask works for light material now)
RC3
- Fixed crash when exporting 3dsmax bitmaps to standalone
- Fixed crash in some cases where motion blur is used with changing mesh topology
- Standalone export: - Fixed crash when exporting more than 40M triangles
- Old displacement is forced on export since standalone does not support the new grid displacement yet
- Improved error detection when loading cgeo meshes - both for corona proxies and loading exported geometry in standalone
- Memory statistics are now available through maxscript - Accessible through getStatistic() - Chaos Docs
- Fixed differences in rendering on different CPUs (mostly Intel vs AMD)
- Added clamp tiling mode to Corona Bitmap
- Added new materials to the Corona material library - 13 new concrete materials
- 31 new ceramic tile materials
RC4
- 4K cache was marked as experimental and UHD cache was reverted as default secondary solver
- Fixed ‘Now’ update button in Corona Lister listing scatters.
- Fixed Corona Scatter wrongly scaling instances displayed in the viewport after clearing the scale map slot.
- Improved user experience in Corona Scatter scenes using high-poly distribute-on objects. It is faster now.
- Fixed maxscript function getStatistic returning slightly different value for rays/s from what we display in VFB stats.
- Fixed masks being generated incorrectly for objects with opacity less than 0.5 when mask propagation is disabled
- Added missing support of SiNi SiClone sweeps
- Fixed occasional crash during parsing when scene contains mesher compound object
- Fixed distance map not working in displacement modifier