Since I fully switched over to Corona around 18 months ago I’ve always relied heavily on the Interactive Renderer to fine-tune materials/lighting etc etc. I’ve even used it ‘live’ in client meetings to get real-time feedback and critique. It was flawless around 1 year ago, probably around version 1.4 if I had to guess.
I’m not sure when it stopped working fluidly but IR is now becoming useless for anything but the simplest of scenes. I have plenty of RAM to handle the scale and complexity of my interiors but I find myself waiting constantly for updates and restarts when performing the simplest of changes to my scenes. Often I have to zoom in/out to keep IR ticking over, otherwise it just fails to interactively update.
I haven’t gone as far as submitting bug reports just yet but I was curious to know if any other users have noticed IR becoming slower and less interactive recently?
(Corona Camera or Camera Mod always used as I know there are issues with Physical Cam)
Sometimes I have the same issue, I tried to solve forcing the IR to use only Path Tracing, but for interiors scene is not the best option, and it doesn’t fix the issue completely.
I really hope this can be solved in the near future!
Maru - I thought exactly the same, I have more RAM than ever, better hardware all round in fact. Add to that all of the optimisation that you guys have carried out and it should mean that interactive rendering is quicker or at least more responsive than older versions.
giona4 - I’ve also tried the force Path Tracing option but as you say this isn’t very good for cleaning up interiors.
I will capture an interactive session as soon as I can and post the link here.
Hi
Do you guys use proxies and animation in your scenes? I mean even if you render static pictures, but you change for some reason frame number to render?
Hi Bormax, sometimes I will keyframe scene changes but not always. Have you found this to be a cause of IR sluggishness?
Rawalanche - Regressions definitely sounds like an adequate description. It actually reminds me of VrayRT, I never really know what it’s doing anymore or why it needs to completely restart if I change a light’s intensity or tweak a colour in the mat editor.
I tend to use the zoom functionality quite heavily, both max’s 2D pan/zoom and frame buffer zooming to focus sampling on a specific area. This often messes up my IR sessions once I’m back at 1:1 (zoomed out). This isn’t the only cause but it’s one I encounter everyday.
Yes fraine7. Actually it makes problem not only for IR, this issue slows down parsing scene process and as a result IR starts to be not responsive especially in scenes with big amount of proxies, at least it’s still true for my computer with dual Xeons. I posted about it here, check this link https://forum.corona-renderer.com/How to avoid long parsing time?#msg94525
That was the reason why I didn’t use IR even for quite simple exterior scenes with normal amount of greenery, and always thought - what is the problem with my computer (it’s not the slowest one :))?, and why in tutorial videos IR works fast for much more complex scenes with no problem?
Since the moment I get the point and exclude animation from my scenes I use IR constantly
Thanks Bormax, having read your own thread in the link it seems we work in a similar way. Animating the sun position or some other object/light/material etc. I don’t use proxies much so I don’t think they are to blame but IR is clearly affected by key frames being present.
I have been reading through some of the other IR related posts and I am convinced that something was broken in an earlier version of Corona which has gone under the radar, getting progressively worse as the software evolves and new versions are released. As Rawalanche suggested with the compounded regressions.
Kind of glad to know I’m not the only one experiencing these issues as it means we have more chance of getting the developers to look into possible causes.
For me is the same, after 1.4 IR is very less interactive, sure i work with heavy scene, but with 1.4 when i change one material, or one light outside light mix, response was immediatly, now is very slow, sometime freeze for a 5 - 10 seconds, and then start, every time, restart from 0, with " big pixels" and i need wait a lot until i can see my fixes. I’ve a lot of different comp, from I7 12 4930 K until xeon 2680 v4, all ssd 64 gb of ram and windows 7 and windows 10, i i’ve a scene with few thousand poly until hundred millions of polyg, i use scene standard, scene with proxys, scene with displacement, scene with easy shaders scene wirh complex shaders, scene with xref and so on… scene start from 0 with corona 1.5, 1.6 and now 1.7, old scene … and i’ve 4 guys work in different mode …
Corona render was perfect because it’s simple, fast, effective, and instant .. now it’s getting more complicated with many features, I do not want it to eventually become like other slow and difficult to use engines. Immediate speed and ease of use are the elements to be pursued, photographic rendering and the end we must achieve. Who wants a complicated, slow and difficult to use software knows where to look … I think it is better not to distort Corona Render.
I also have to say that crown 1.7 has much less freeze than crown 1.6, it seems more stable. I think it is useless to continue running behind a rabbit to try to overtake it and have the short breath .. better to walk slowly and stay fit.
If you want to change the “big pixels first” (which is subsampling to give you a faster overview of the scene while waiting to show more detail), then that can be adjusted in the Devel / Debug section, smaller numbers give less subsampling (smaller “big pixels”) and vice versa:
Yes. My preferred setting for Subsampling is 1 or 0 (off). But still IR feels slower - especially the very first use after loading a scene (just like regular render).
now IR run faster than 1.4 for me and without subsampling IR will gives less interactive feel. so I think there is no any benefit in disabling the IR subsampling.
and imho the lag at the very first IR is acknowledged, IIRC there is a thread said that it is caused by the transition from 64x64 output size to our setting and why there is 64x64px output size, because of the need of pre-render minimum RAM usage..
Subsampling only takes place once IR is up and running, this doesn’t explain why IR needs to completely restart when a light intensity or material colour is changed slightly.
It’s not so much that IR rendering/cleanup is slower (this would be where subsampling comes into the discussion) - the real issue is the sluggishness of updates/feedback in general.
Recently I have found that rendering a draft image is quicker than waiting for feedback using IR, this is a huge backward step and is something I used to have to do in Vray as VrayRT just wasn’t fit for purpose.
Huh? So you want that IR would hapilly render without even noticing that user changed material’s colour from red to green? It needs to restart to reflect changes made in the scene. Of course it would be great if IR wouldn’t restart just from navigating in material editor or selecting objects or anything that does not change output appearence, but i believe that in 9 cases out of 10, it’s more 3ds max’s fault rarther than Corona’s.
+1 here, whenever a change is made in the material shaders, or HDRI, sun, etc.. it’s as if the whole scene is reloading, huge lagg - then finaly, it updates - sometimes suddenly after being stuck for 2 minutes the vfb reloads and did a number of passes - stressing me out: waste of time to use corona-IR in this state
using proxies makes everything much worse, same for forest pack pro objects etc
always reloading…
IR is usable for small scenes, terrible for larger or heavier archviz scenes
ALSO: whenever browsing in material shaders for some reason also refreshes the IR - very annoying since I didn’t make a change :-/
I get that it would need to restart to some extent, but is it not caching or storing some data in order to speed things up, thus making it interactive? There is nothing interactive about changing a wall colour from mid to light blue and then waiting 60 seconds to see the effect.
My main concern is that it used to be much quicker to get feedback from Corona IR, I have no idea what has changed, all I know is that it isn’t what it used to be.
3dBoomerang - You’ve hit the nail on the head, ‘always reloading’ even when it has no reason to
As a note, I wasn’t suggesting that disabling or changing subsampling will speed things up In fact, it will mean a longer wait to see the preview (this is why subsampling is introduced, so you get a faster, rough overview of the scene) - I just mentioned it as someone said they didn’t like the “big pixels”, to make sure they were aware they could adjust this. But it has no bearing on the other speed / performance questions from folks.
For me, on larger more complex scenes, it’s almost quicker to just hit render look at the first few passes rather than deal with the freezing/lockups that IR gives me
In fact, it will mean a longer wait to see the preview (this is why subsampling is introduced, so you get a faster, rough overview of the scene) - I just mentioned it as someone said they didn’t like the “big pixels”, to make sure they were aware they could adjust this. But it has no bearing on the other speed / performance questions from folks.