System Tab

This tab includes Corona system-wide settings, frame buffer appearance, image filtering, options related to Corona licensing, and distributed rendering.

UI Path: ||Render Setup window|| > System tab (Renderer set to Corona)

System Settings – Launches a system settings dialog. All options in this dialog are system-wide, that is, they are not saved into the scene, but rather used for all 3ds Max sessions on this machine.

Export scene... – Exports scene data for rendering in Corona Standalone application.

System Settings

Lock 3ds Max during render – When enabled, the entire GUI of 3ds Max is locked during rendering, except the VFB and render progress dialog. This is the default behavior in other renderers that can occasionally prevent crashes caused by modifying the scene while rendering.

Enable devel/debug mode – Enabling this checkbox shows a new rollout in the Performance tab with truly experimental, unfinished, and debug features. Use at your own risk!

# of threads (0 = unlim.) – Number of cores to use for rendering. Positive values work in a straightforward way, a value of 0 uses all system cores, a value of -1 uses all cores but 1, a value of -2 uses all but 2, etc.

Interactive Rendering

# of threads override – Number of cores to use for interactive rendering. Positive values work in a straightforward way, a value of 0 uses all system cores, a value of -1 uses all cores but 1, a value of -2 uses all but 2, etc.

IR Subsampling – Values higher than 0 make the interactive mode render in lower resolution for first few passes. This makes it faster and more responsive, but also "pixelated" for few seconds, until more passes are added.

Image upscaling factor – Specifies upscaling factor for the image rendered during interactive rendering. By increasing this value, render resolution gets reduced which makes the interactive rendering more responsive. This might be useful for High-DPI displays.

Enable material editor – Enables rendering of material editor shaderballs during interactive rendering.

Dissolve with previous image – When enabled, the newly rendered image gradually dissolves with the old image. When disabled, the new rendered image appears only after it has completely replaced the old image (i.e. after one pass).

Output Autosave

Enable autosave – When checked, automatic saving of rendering output is enabled. Useful for comparisons, and for backups in case 3ds Max crashes.

Autosave interval – The interval with which the render output is autosaved during rendering. The value is in minutes.

Number of images kept

On render end – Number of most recent (auto)saved image files kept on the hard drive. After reaching this number of files, older images start to get replaced with newer ones. This value applies to the final number of images after the rendering has finished.
During render – Number of most recent (auto)saved image files kept on the hard drive. After reaching this number of files, older images start to get replaced with newer ones. This value applies to the number of images which are being kept during rendering.

Filename – Path and file name for the autosave file.

"Open" button – Opens the folder specified under Filename in Windows Explorer.
"?" button – Shows a list of variables that can be used in the autosave file name to include various statistics and information (for example: current noise level, total elapsed time, number of rendered passes, current date and time):

VFB Settings

Type – Sets the frame buffer type used for rendering.

Corona VFB - Uses Corona's own customized frame buffer with extra functionality (recommended).
Native 3ds Max VFB - Uses the default "Scanline" VFB.
None - Does not display any VFB (the image still gets saved if file output is configured).

Update interval [ms] – The interval (in milliseconds) at which the VFB is periodically updated. Decreasing this value gives more fluid feedback at the expense of processing power that could otherwise be spent on the rendering itself. When the VFB refreshing takes too much of the rendering time, Corona adaptively lengthens this interval to up to 5 times of the set value to maintain adequate rendering speed.

Title – Window title of the Corona VFB.

"R" button – Resets the VFB title to defaults.
"?" button – Shows a list of variables that can be used in the VFB title to include various statistics and information (for example: current noise level, total elapsed time, number of rendered passes, current date and time):

Render History and A/B Comparison

Automatic saving on render end – If enabled, a new item is added to the render history in the Corona VFB after each render ends. If disabled, items are only added manually via the button in the VFB.

Size on HDD (MB) – Maximum size in megabytes of the folder that holds the render history. If the size of all stored items exceeds this limit, then oldest renders get automatically removed.

Tooltips

Enable settings tooltips – Enables the render settings tooltips.

Language – Specifies the tooltips language.

Material Editor

Custom previews – When checked, previews in the material editor use Corona's own material editor preview scene. When unchecked, the native 3ds Max one is used.

Enable caching – When checked, renderings of materials inside the material editor are cached in order to speed up material editor.

Preview quality – Quality of the material editor previews. Higher quality provides less noisy previews, albeit in a longer time.

Def. roughness mode – Determines whether roughness or glossiness mode is used as a default one in the Corona Physical Material. Note that this setting only influences newly created materials.

Default IOR mode – Determines whether IOR (Index Of Refraction) or Disney Specular mode is used as a default one in the Corona Physical Material. Note that this setting only influences newly created materials.

Def. normals filtering –Choose the normals filtering mode for new Corona Physical and Corona Skin materials. "None" offers unfiltered, detailed textures, but can be noisy. "Linear" smooths textures but can lose detail at a distance. "Roughness mod." in Corona 11 maintains detail across distances and resolutions, balancing detail and render time. Applies only to new materials.

Out-of-core textures

Limit cache size – When enabled, you can limit how much HDD space is used by out-of-core textures by specifying the exact amount of taken space in GB.

Keep % of HDD free – When enabled, you can limit how much HDD space is used by out-of-core textures by specifying the percentage of total HDD space that must remain free.

Folder – Specified the folder in which to store the out-of-core textures.

Product Usage Data

Send Product usage data (takes effect after 3ds Max restart) – Controls whether sending of Product usage data is enabled. The change of this value does not affect currently running instances of 3ds Max, it takes effect when a new instance is started.

Save message preview to a file – Saves the Product usage data to a specified .txt file.

About – Shows a dialog with additional information about Product Usage Data:

Clear VFB between renders – When enabled, the frame buffer resets to black before each rendering. When disabled, the last render stays on and gradually is replaced by the new one.

Render Stamp

Checkbox – When enabled, text with render information is added to the bottom right corner of the rendered output. Click the "?" button next to the text input to see the list of all available %-variables you can use.

Text field – The content of the render stamp. It accepts text and the special %-variables listed under the "?" button.

"R" button – Resets the content of the render stamp text field to its defaults.

"?" button – Displays the list of all %-variables which can be used in the render stamp to display various data (e.g. render time, CPU name, output file name).

Image Filter

Type – Image pre-filters suppresses Moiré patterns and other artifacts by slightly blurring the image. Most filters produce visually almost equal results.

High quality – Produces better anti-aliasing and DoF than other filters. Does not work with AI denoising.
Box – Has the most significant blurring of all the filters.
Tent – Offers a good tradeoff between blurring and sharpness.
Symmetric tent – A variant of the tent filter with bigger diagonal blurring.
Parabolic – Has the second most significant blurring of the filters.
Hann – Has low diagonal blurring and a smaller tail than the other filters.
Blackman-Harris – Is the sharpest, resulting in the least blurring of all the filters (except for None).
None – Disables the filtering entirely, resulting in a perfectly sharp image.

Width [px] – Filter radius in pixels. A larger value slightly blurs the image to improve anti-aliasing and removes Moiré. The default value of 2.0 works fine in most cases.

Highlight clamping – Clamps all samples to this maximum value before they are written into the frame buffer. This can help reduce noise and improve anti-aliasing around bright light edges at the cost of bias. Setting the value too low results in visibly clamped highlights. Set to 0 to disable for unbiased, highest-quality output.

Text box – Lists details about the currently installed version of Corona.

Open license server – Opens the Chaos License Server that provides licenses to this Corona installation.

Open My Chaos website – Opens the my.chaos.com website in your web browser. This website can be used to manage your Chaos software licenses.

Configure license server address – Opens an external application to configure address of a license server used by Corona. Note that the external application needs to run as an elevated process (run as administrator), so you are prompted by the system to allow running this application.

Online Help – Opens the online help website.

"Enable" checkbox – Enables the use of distributed rendering.

"Search LAN during render" checkbox – When enabled, Corona searches for any machines with the Corona DR Server application running and adds them to the rendering, even after it has already started. As a result, any machines where the Corona DR Server application was launched at some point during the rendering, will join, and any machines where the rendering was interrupted due to an error or user intervention, will be able to re-join the rendering again.

Render nodes list – List of available render nodes. The list is populated after clicking the Search LAN button below.

"Add" button – Manually add a render node to the list.

"Remove" button – Remove the selected render node from the list.

"Search LAN" button – Search the network and list all machines available for distributed rendering.

"From file..." button – Loads IPs from a specified plain text file (one IP per line).

Synchronization interval [s] – The interval at which the node machines send rendered data to the master machine. Lower values increase the update rate at the expense of network traffic and vice-versa.

Max pixels to transfer at once – The size of packets into which the data from the node machines is split. Lower values decrease network traffic and memory usage.

"[DEBUG] retain EXRs" checkbox – When enabled, the EXR files received from the nodes are stored in the folder C:\\Users\\[username]\\AppData\\Local\\Autodesk\\3dsMax\\[maxversion] - 64bit\\ENU\\en-US\\plugcfg\\corona\\drDump\\

"Open EXRs location..." button – Opens the folder where the retained EXR files are stored. Available only if the [DEBUG] retain EXRs option is enabled.