Added support for Ornatrix v7 (the older versions are no longer supported)
Fixed scene parsing taking longer in each frame - Does not fix prolonging geometry parsing, this will be addressed in the future
Fixed crash of 3ds Max caused by our quad menu
Fixed falloff map built-in color mixing
Removed the old displacement method. Only 2.5d displacement method remains. - This currently breaks combinations of displacement + light emission and displacement + fast rounded edges mode. This will be fixed over the course of daily builds
In Corona Scatter, the parameter limiting number of instances displayed in the viewport is now colored when the limit gets exceeded.
Added displaced primitives to the VFB stats tab - Added new render stamp option: displacement primitives: %sd
Displacement primitives are also published in maxscript with getStatistic(15)
Fixed bug in Light solver precomputation that caused crashes in IR
CoronaBitmap now automatically removes NaNs and INFs from input images
Fixed CIE to correctly apply B&G in case of cubemap panoramic renders.
Fixed rare issue where B&G might not be updated in VFB
Fixed crash in Aperture dialog when it is destroyed and update is still running
Fixed crash related to using map hierarchy with multiple fall off textures connected to each other
Fixed Corona Scatter not to crash in case of spline scattering with zero frequency set to models
Displacement: - Normal displacement is now properly clamped in 2.5d displacement - only [0, 1] interval from the map is considered
Fixed incorrect handling of blend material with empty sub-slots. When one of the 2 submaterials is now missing, the default wire color material will be properly displayed.
Uninstaller - Corona uninstaller now removes installation info from registry
Added an error window which is shown when the uninstaller fails to restart in an elevated mode
CoronaPhysicalMaterial changes - Fixed problems (extreme memory consumption and crashes) caused by too low roughness value of sheen in Physical material
General Bugfixes - Fixed saving a render to disk (png,tif,tga) saving Alpha channel as black when Sharpening/Blurring is enabled
Optimizations - Significantly improved rendering quality for scenes far away from origin by internally shifting the scene so the camera sits at origin. No changes to scenes are needed.v7 vs v6 - scene 10 meters from origin | Corona Renderer
Improved the High Quality denoiser speed by 20% on average, up to 60% in extreme cases
Optimization of multiple transparent hits resolving - achieves up to 30% speedup in scenes with opacity and media
Global medium is now enclosed by a sphere - which should result in more predictable and consistent behavior. This also fixes the following: - Fixed: CoronaVolumeGrid bounding box always visible when rendered inside a global volume material Bounding Box fix | Corona Renderer
Fixed: Visible border when using global volume material
Fixed: CoronaVolumeMaterial casting incorrect shadows when set as global volume material
Fixed extreme parsing times in scenes with large numbers of instances and displacement (introduced in earlier v7 daily builds)
Fix crashes on second render of a scene with some specific material configuration
Fixed issue in CoronaDisplacementMod where displacement map was not taken from the material, even if it was requested
Fixed image texture cache. This improves memory usage when the same image file is referenced multiple times using different file paths (e.g. when symlinks are involved).
This also resulted in some internal changes which unfortunately break backwards compatibility of the Corona Standalone exports.
Corona Standalone now gives a more relevant error message when trying to load a file of unsupported version.
Enabled PhoenixFD Foam and Particle maps in the material editor
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Toolbar/Quad Menus - Actions on the Corona Toolbar have been renamed and reordered to be more unified (applies only after deletion of the toolbar in Main Menu > Customize User Interface > Toolbars; or for new Corona installs).
Removed old Corona usermacros - as a result, user-defined menus entries/quad menu entries/toolbar items which use those macros will not work anymore. They can be safely removed from the UI and replaced by entries executing actions exported by our C++ action system (available since Corona 6), which are better integrated to 3ds Max
New - Added possibility to have a camera’s origin as an input to distance texture - Hence, in Corona Scatter it can now define density falloff based on distance from the camera’s origin (by plugging such texture into the density slot).
General Bugfixes - Fixed incorrect rendering when a refractive CoronaPhysicalMtl is inputted above any other PhysicalMtl base material
Fixed NaNs in certain scenes by enforcing minimal focal distance in camera
Fixed loading of 4K/UHD caches precomputed in older builds - This fixes a slowdown in rendering times compared with earlier daily builds when a UHD/4k cache file generated with an older daily build was used in a newer build.
Fixed few bugs in scene export introduced in recent builds
Fixed normals element in camera space which was broken in recent builds
Fixed licensing server not loading in the daily build 2021-02-26
PBR Material - If clearcoat bump map is not supplied, clear coat does not use any bump-mapping (previously it used bump map from base layer)
Added accurate Fresnel for metals into Physical material
Added translucency color
Fixed thin glass mode
Modified presets to use edge + base color based on metal complex IOR, lowered some high albedo values
Changes to UI: - Introduced edge color and translucency color, moved parameters around accordingly
Moved plug slot for maps in slate editor to more correspond to the old legacy material
Moved maps in the common dialog to correspond to their new positions in slate editor
Fixed some enable/disable issues
CoronaConverter now converts all materials to the new CoronaPhysicalMtl.
CoronaConverter now converts CoronaLegacyMtl to CoronaPhysicalMtl.
New - CoronaDistance map can now compute distance from any scene object. - Note that due to 3ds Max limitations the include/exclude dialog supports only adding geometry objects. Other objects (e.g. camera) can be added only using the “+” button.
Added options for propagation to some render elements (Mask, ID, Wire color, Zdepth, Texmap)
General - We now render the image in 32x32 pixel buckets. 5% speedup on average, up to 15% in some scenes.
Added support for 3ds Max 2022 - Fixed crash during initialization of scatter UI in 3ds Max 2022
Fixed crash related to render setup dialog in 3ds Max 2022
Optimizations of rendering speed - Up to 30% speedup in empty scenes (both interactive and non-interactive)
Up to 10% speed up in standard rendering in our real world testing scenes
Changed the way the bucket rendering is applied - It is applied from the beginning only in IR+subsampling or DR slave renders
In all other cases we start with the old progressive render and switch to buckets after 5 passes.
General - Fixed: CoronaConverter no longer duplicates nodes in SME - only for 3ds Max 2020 and newer
Fixed Bad allocation exception/Crash in 2.5D Displacement for extreme number of verticies
“Propagate element” checkbox in render elements which support this functionality renamed to “Allow propagation through reflection/refraction” to better indicate its meaning + added explaining tooltip
CoronaConverter: - Fixed the Converter to not delete maps such as refraction color, but materials containing these maps may require some manual tweaking after conversion.
CoronaPhysicalMtl - Added IOR mode to Physical material. It has two options - 1/ IOR - material behaves like before
2/ Specular - all IOR inputs (base, clearcoat) are replaced with Specular inputs
Moved CoronaPhysicalMaterial in the material editor to be the first Corona material displayed, for easier access
Fixed volumetric scattering controls not becoming active when opacity is lowered
Improved hybrid glass - it now looks much closer to real glass (caustics on) and changing roughness from 0 to 0.001 does not result in significant change in a look.
Improved thin glass - now it blurs refraction depending on the roughness value. It also correctly simulates bouncing within the thin glass.
Changing IOR from 1 to 1.001 no longer results in drastic change of look (previously it did especially for high roughness values).
Converter - Conversion from VRayLightMtl to CoronaLightMtl correctly propagates “Two Sided Emission” parameter, Shellac material is converted to CoronaLayeredMtl, the conversion process might be more performant in some cases.
General - Fixed object list spinners in Corona Scatter to show correct values in case they are animated and time on the timeline changes.
Updated Intel Denoiser to the latest version - fixes some bugs, especially the denoiser adding “ghosts” of objects that should not be visible due to lack of lighting
Fixed licensing server UI log not showing anything
Fixed a “reset to default” button in pop-up window warning users that not all logical cores are used during rendering. Until now it did not work as expected during interactive rendering.
Fixed possible NaNs when rendering Skin and Hair materials
Fixed problems with NaNs caused by some scenes with degenerated matrix
Fixed occasional crashes when rendering Corona Layered material
Added warning when a scene previously saved in a stable version gets overwritten in a daily build - The problem with this is that a scene saved in a newer version causes all sorts of problems when opened in an older version. The motivation of this is to prevent overwriting production scenes when experimenting with daily builds.
Unfortunately we can’t cancel the 3ds Max saving process, so we just offer a chance to backup the original save file to another location before it is overwritten.
Corona Converter: - Greatly improved accuracy of conversions from VRay2SidedMtl.
Resulting shading networks might be simpler in some cases.
The conversion process might be more performant in some cases.
Improved detection and printing of conversion-related warnings.
OptiX (NVIDIA GPU AI denoiser) updated to version 6.5.0 - All OptiX files are now part of the regular Corona installer, no longer requiring any additional download.
Requires NVIDIA GPU driver version 436.02 or later.
No change in supported GPUs, it should still work with Maxwell and later.
General - Added maxscript function to bake lightmix settings into the scene (same as clicking the corresponding button in VFB) - CoronaRenderer.CoronaFp.bakeLightMix
Optimisation - CoronaBitmap now loads texture files in background after the scene file has been open, while you are already working with the scene. Reduces scene open times by 20-40% in most cases, up to 70% in some extreme cases.
Corona Converter: - Added an option to automatically treat all translucent objects as objects with “Thin shell”. This improves conversion of scenes where translucency effects are frequently used - e.g. scenes with vegetation.
Property switchToCoronaRenderer renamed back to switchRenderEngine, to avoid breaking any user scripts which may use it
General - Fixed Corona Scatter not to cause repetitive restarting of V-Ray GPU IPR when a scatter object gets disabled.