Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max - Daily Builds Changelog

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*You can always get the newest build at the usual location *[/b]

This post is reserved to be used for compiling a full “all changes since v6” changelog as v7 daily builds get released.

Note that all changes in this build will be released in v6 hotfix, so this is more of a hotfix preview than actual v7 daily build.

  • Fixed crash when Falloff Map with fresnel type and world - z axis direction is applied to refraction
  • Fixed DR being stuck when rendering second frame of an animation
  • Fixed the issue where having Norwegian locale lead to 3ds Max crash at startup.
  • Fixed: Scatter missed update in IR causing “popping” while scrubbing timeline
  • Fixed LEGION_STOP in scene with falloff + RGB multiply maps combo
  • Reverted behaviour of the no tiling mode in CoronaBitmap which was causing unwanted results when used as a mask
  • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-11-13.exe

  • Fixed: IR no longer crashes when deleting (model) object being instanced by Corona Scatter.

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-12-01.exe

  • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2020-12-10.exe

  • Added new grounds up PBR material - CoronaPhysicalMaterial - Renamed CoronaMaterial to CoronaLegacyMaterial
    • There should be no change in existing maxscript which uses CoronaMaterial
  • Fix of “No sockets could be bound!” DR failure
  • Fixed memory leak when rendering hair




corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-01-04.exe

  • CoronaPhysicalMaterial changes - Fixed the bug where multiple warnings may spawn when selecting a new preset value
    • Improved metalness tooltip to inform about the texture values
  • Displacement - Added support for light emission from displaced geometry
    • Added support for fast mode of rounded edges when displacement is enabled

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-01-08.exe

  • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-02-19.exe

  • 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: Artifacts caused by many overlapping volumetrics Overlapping Volume Fix v7 vs v6 | Corona Renderer
  • General Bugfixes[/li]

    • 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

    [/list]

    • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-02-26.exe

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-05.exe

  • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-22.exe

  • 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.

See our blog article which explores the new material in depth: https://blog.corona-renderer.com/behind-the-scenes-the-physical-material/

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-03-30.exe

  • 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
    • Removed VCM, VPL, PPM, LightTracer algorithms

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-04-21.exe

  • CoronaConverter: - Fixed the Converter to not delete maps such as refraction color, but materials containing these maps may require some manual tweaking after conversion.
  • Physical material: - Complex IOR can now be used instead of using edge color (in advanced rollout) - How to use the complex IOR: https://coronarenderer.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/12000079075-how-to-use-complex-ior-for-coronaphysicalmtl-
    • Added glossiness/roughness mode switch to system settings - Existing scene materials will keep their current settings
    • Improved glass model
    • Fixed the issue, where hue of metal reflection sometimes did not correspond to the selected base color (e.g. base color = (64,0,0) is a bit bluish).
    • Fixed clear coat bump being affected by base bump
  • General - UI of Corona Scatter got polished and condensed.
    • CoronaLight is now correctly rendered in the viewport in 3ds Max 2022
    • Denoising time added to render stamp (%ptd)

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-05-10.exe

  • 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).
    • Examples: - solid glass - V6 vs V7 | Corona Renderer
  • 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-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-05-14.exe

  • 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

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-05-18.exe

  • 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.
  • corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-05-20.exe - Corona Converter - Fixed a problem which sometimes occurred during conversion of V-Ray lights to Corona lights.
    • General - Updated embree to version 3.13.0 - various small bugfixes and optimizations
      • Lowered the amount of noise generated by optimization of multiple transparent hits

corona-7-3dsmax-daily-2021-06-01.exe

  • Optimizations - Added asynchronous Corona proxy loading - On average between 10% and 30% speedup loading scenes which contain Corona Proxies

  • Corona Converter - Show selected objects maps in viewport now works with CoronaPhysicalMaterial and CoronaLegacyMaterial

    • Reset Material editor materials now resets materials to CoronaPhysicalMaterial
    • Fix bitmaps using “Mono Channel Output” now works with CoronaPhysicalMaterial
    • Removed legacy options and buttons
  • General - Open Image Denoise (Intel AI denoiser) updated to version 1.4.0 - various bugfixes and optimizations

    • Fixed possible crashes in Corona Scatter when some scattered instances get scaled to zero while using collision avoidance.
    • Improved warning message when setting presets in CoronaPhysicalMaterial
    • Fixed crash caused by memory overflow when rendering media