One of the major features of the upcoming Corona Renderer 7 is the new Corona Physical Material. With the introduction of this new material, we also had to update our Corona Converter script.
This thread is intended for collecting feedback on everything related to the new Converter script (its functionality, features, issues, what you like about it and what you don’t like).
If you just install Corona 7, the converter script will be available under the right-click quad menu as usual. If you are using some alternative installation method (i.e. you do not copy any files into your 3ds Max installation directory), then you can find the new converter script in \Corona Renderer\Autodesk\3ds Max 202X\scripts\CoronaRenderer.
Before testing, make sure that you are using the converter script version 1.51 or newer! (it is printed in the title bar of the converter window) NOTE: When using daily builds, the usual precautions apply! Backup your scenes!
What we are especially interested in:
Corona Legacy Material to Corona Physical Material conversion. This is the most important thing for us.
How similar are the conversion results?
How complex are the resulting shading networks in the material editor?
The easiest way to test both those things is opening a scene created in Corona 6 in Corona 7, converting it, and rerendering it.
What else is important:
We improved the conversion of VRay2SidedMtl to CoronaPhysicalMtl. If you have a scene where you used the VRay2SidedMtl, please test this, and let us know if anything does not look or work as expected.
Please check that all buttons in the “Tools” section of the Corona Converter work as expected. While this may sound like something our internal tests should take care of, there are always some edge cases which we might have missed, so we appreciate testing even very basic features like this.
Known issues and limitations:
We know that the shading networks created by the Corona Converter might be quite complex in some cases (especially when many texture maps are used). If you have some ideas how to simplify such cases once you encounter them, please let us know.
The newly created CoronaPhysicalMtl will only use those parameters, which were also available in the original material - i.e. if the original material did not feature sheen or clearcoat (which is the case for CoronaLegacyMtl), the converted CoronaPhysicalMtl will not use neither sheen nor clearcoat parameters (you can, of course, enable these parameters manually).
It is possible that we changed some MAXScript function names which our users may want to use (i.e. broke the MAXScript API described here: https://www.racoon-artworks.de/CoronaConverter/mxsDocumentation.html ). The reason for this is that we used our coding conventions during the last rewrites of Corona Converter and therefore we changed some function names which weren’t conforming to these conventions / weren’t descriptive enough. If this proves to be a significant and commonly encountered problem, we may revert some of these changes.
We are planning to remove some legacy options / buttons from the Converter. If you rely on the removed functionality, we will consider reverting some of these changes.
We do not support conversion to CoronaLegacyMtl anymore. The materials are always converted to CoronaPhysicalMtl.
Additional notes:
Vray Mtl to Corona Physical Mtl conversion may currently not be working perfectly, but big improvements are coming!
Specular to IOR conversion is a work in progress
If you have any other notes / remarks / complains - please do let us know.
Thank you in advance for your feedback!
I run into issues when working with projects, where i want to keep materials in legacy “mode” as it might happen, that these objects will be rendered in corona 6 or before.
So converting materials of selected objects only converts them into physical objects… would be great to have an option to convert them into legacy instead of physical.
its a bit forced into physical, while even lots of scripts doesn’t even support physical material yet.
Sorry, but this is listed as one of the limitations in my original post, and it’s something we do not want to change. Only conversion to the new Physical material is possible.
Also, you mentioned converting objects and then using them in Corona 6 again. Please note that this is an unsupported scenario and it is not expected to work at all. If something is saved in a newer version of Corona, it must never be loaded back into an older version of Corona.
I just noticed that my previous message could have sounded a bit underwhelming, sorry for that, I didn’t intend it. So just to avoid any misunderstandings: the reason why we are not planning to reintroduce conversion to the Corona Legacy Material is because we believe that the Physical Material offers many advantages over the Legacy one. It’s easier to set up, the workflow is more in-line with the leading material creation software, and most importantly the end result that you get is more realistic. We treat the Physical Material as the new standard, and the Legacy Material as, well, legacy.
Also please note that the Legacy Material will work just fine in Corona 7, there is no need to convert it if you don’t want to.
I wasn’t following all recent Infos in detail - i just tried to figure out a way to work with current releases of scripts and plugin - as they not always support those changes made in corona 7 yet.
So i will work with the previous v6 corona-converter for now.
… mainly i use corona converter… if merging objects from various 3d-model sites into my scenes. when they were provided with vray material or other - and for now, when working in an environment, where some coworkers do not want to go the step to corona7 … its best to work with legacy materials. That might change in future times…maybe
A material made with Corona 6 consists of 1) after conversion with the latest converted, the newly created material contains many maps and nodes 1) + 2); That’s so frustrating; Is there any workaround?
tallbox, romullus, thank you very much for your feedback, we’re already working on changes which should result in simpler shading networks being generated.
Will the updated material converter convert 3dsmax’s Physical Material to Corona?
Models that I bring in from other Architectural apps default to that. It’s such a pain to manually convert them all. Even if it just copied the bitmap paths over to the diffuse channel, I can set the rest of the settings.
when converting legacy material without textures, I am doing sss as an example, the converter sends me coronamix maps to the material I skip the gloss changes on the left material after conversion
Another issue is incorrect recognition of metal materials, non-metal in the case of vrayblend conversion turns the materials from the machine into metallic
Hello Javadevil, thank you very much for your feedback. Conversion of 3ds Max’s Physical Material is very high on our “what to do next list”, however before adding support for another material to Corona Converter, first we want to make sure conversion of already supported materials works as expected. So currently we mostly focus on simplifying the shading networks, since this is something which troubles lots of early adopters of Corona 7. If everything goes well and we’ll manage to address all the issues with currently supported materials, hopefully we would be able to start working on support for Physical Material soon
Hello lzanlorenzi, thank you very much for your feedback, we’re already working on changes which should result in simpler shading networks being generated.
Hi
Not the 1st time mentioned, but here is comparison of Corona 6’s and Corona 7’s conversion results. Corona 7 tries to keep front/back colors which is really good, but gives a mess of mix maps which (IMHO) have no sense. The tree model taken from Evermotion Archmodels 207 collection where material structure of all models is about the same.
Thanks for the feedback! We are aware of this issue, and one of the upcoming daily builds will include an updated converter which greatly lowers the number of nodes created in the conversion.
