Hello Evgeny,

Thanks for your response! And congrats with the first ever reply! Call your friend here! Come on
I will reply in English so that other people world-wide may read what is happening here.

So, briefly Evgeny says the following:

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1) Problem switching the render resolution in real-time.

Reply: This problem should happen when the Output Size in Common Tab is not Custom in the combobox. When selected "Custom" it should work real-time in CentiLeo frame buffer without touching Render button.

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2) Evgeny asks about the chance to integrate Altus or internal denoiser.

Reply: As for denoiser there are pros and cons. The main disadvantage of denoiser is very big memory consumption especially on large image resolutions. It is more apparent problem for many image beauty AOVs. As far as I know Corona denoises only the main Beauty AOV and not the others. We will see, maybe it can be tolerable solution.
However, we want to implement such a feature internally (i.e. avoiding the communication with 3rd party solution which is not very convenient). Before that we will attempt to improve the current light transport solver, there are several good experiments that need optimization and integration.

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3) Evgeny asks about preview for textures/shaders.

Reply: Seems to be that this problem is in Compact Material Editor. We will see what 3ds Max SDK offers about that. Otherwise will make a custom solution.

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4) and 5) Lost texture paths.

Reply: what is the length of the path in characters?
We use the standard Max asset tracker mechanism for resolving texture paths. It usually searches them in scene project root folder or in root/Textures and in some folders which can be specified somewhere in Max settings. Need to figure out this.

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6) cntlTextures not visible in viewport.

Reply: we know about this. We will try to fix that. It will be probably hard to evaluate the full shader tree for Viewport since our shader tree is complex. But maybe a lowres will be fine. We will see what can be done and how good there. Thank for that. UVW Mapping manipulation must be convenient. Probably we will make it using a more flexible functionality of our IPR mode (CentiLeo frame buffer when we will add more AOVs where you will be able to select specific shaders to display as color rather than property of material).

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7) What is the TangentUVset in cntlStdMat.

Reply: this is the array of UV channels that are used to compute the smooth tangent space which is necessary for anisotropic reflections (which are available when you increase roughness and shift anisotropy from 0 to +1 or to -1). Uvset_spherical is procedural and is based on sphere projection. Uvset_mesh_map0 corresponds to the first Uvmap channel in the modifier list of object at which this material is applied. Try to use them and change anisotropy. Later we will add supporting more UVsets from the modifiers list.

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8 ) Evgeny says that cntlTexture preview works after the settings are edited several times.

Reply: this is some jkind of feature which progressively loads the texture with more time. We will preload them for materials to make them visible at the first load.

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9) GPU is not always utilized at 100%

Reply: it should happened because our interactive mode is working in a separate thread and it shares resources with the other tasks of 3ds Max. If you have another small GPU then you could assign it for display and assign you powerful Titan Black to render only and it will give you even more performance.
Btw, because of that multi-threading things (which make interactivity possible) the production render mode (when you push Render button) is slightly faster to render because it works in the same thread as Max main thread.

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10) Lights are selected if the selection filter is Geometry.

Reply: we will try to solve this. What is your version of Max?

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11) Pixelation problem (see image).

Reply: I know about this stupid bug. You can avoid it if in the Camera rollout you enable DoF and increase the DoF focus distance. This is because of small default focus distance.
We will need to increase precision in some place of code.

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12) Noise is resolved strangely (see image).

Reply: I know about this problem. In our previous tests it was 100 times smaller visible and we haven’t solved thinking it is not important. Thanks for showing that it must be improved. Will work on that more.
Please, can you send us this interior scene for tests? E.g. you can save it on dropbox and send a link to info@centileo.com. If you need an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) for this scene then we can sign.

Thanks,
Kirgman

First of all I would like to say thank you for your hard work, and wish to see the growth of your Render Engine.

Please find my thought only as suggestions:

1. First and most important it
   is the scene conversion, let me explain why it is so important, your
   engine is pretty yang and the way you will find new users is only from
   existing ones. And here the best way to bring them from competitors is
   take the scene and maximum help user to get the "same" result
   after conversion. I can tell you that on my experience this is the most
   important stuff. Currently I am using couple of different engines and each
   of them work best in different situations. I would say the biggest success
   for Corona Render over Vray is all about how they people who first time
   tried their product is was able to almost continue working with their
   scene, and now it extremely easy to jump from vray to corona because you
   get almost 90% result of final image. I would suggest to spend a little
   more time on conversion part, this will make the transition much faster.
   
2. Second is simplicity, as you
   could see all engines not go to simplified interface, and put all
   difficult stuff under "expert mode check" or so. First of all
   your product is for work, not for tinkers, and as professionals render
   artist I would choose instrument which will save me time, that’s why
   Arnold render is on the peak for production, even for their slow speed,
   but you will choose the simplicity and consistent result in all different
   situation. That’s why render man is not so popular for small businesses.
   
3. I really like how your engine
   is handle the amount of geometry, but still think that global noise update
   is little old fashion, I really like how the latest builds of CPU render
   engines is using adaptive calculation, a surface with solid color cleans
   firs and details and corners last, you just get much faster understanding
   of final result.
   
4. I would move or duplicate
   Post parameters to frame buffer, this will help control the image faster,
   and now this getting more common.
   
5. After conversion lights which
   were instances, became all unique.
   

This is just short list after 20-30min of using. I will continue play around with this and will try to give you more my thoughts.

And again thank you for giving this pretty cool engine to the public, I think it has very huge potential.


Best,

Eduard