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CORONA render?


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You guy's should be careful, it's only in alpha and really anything can change during this time. I'm reminded of the Maxwell alpha/beta fiasco, early versions were very promising, the imagery was beautiful and many people were using it in production. We all felt good about the prerelease versions we'd purchased and many wonderful claims were being made by the company regarding its forthcoming updates. What we didn't know was the engine powering Maxwell had hit a development wall and the company was forced to take it in a different directions which meant rewriting large portions of the software. After several years of development hell and lots of bad blood Maxwell finally came out with version 1 that was underwhelming to say the least. Anyway I say all that to make the point that prereleases and alpha versions are great but they are by no means a fully functional matured product. Don't invest too much into them even if the company swears the final product is right around the corner, you never know what's really going on.

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I bought into Fryrender...no need to warn me of how a product can change direction from pre-release to final. I think it has turned into a nice enough product, but it is far different than what was being promised early on, and the upgrade paths became very convoluted and I had no interest in the direction it went so I just had to write it off as a lesson learned.

 

I have also seen it work the other way though with VRay, and to this day I kick myself for not buying in early to secure myself a personal license that I would have gladly kept up to date myself.

 

I have a personal license for Thea and Twilight. I had been keeping Twilight in my back pocket JIC I end up in a situation where I do not have access to Max, but now I think I can probably replace it with Thea as all I would have to do now is pay for an inexpensive plugin to use Thea with virtually any 3D DCC app available.

 

Oddly enough, most of my rendering tasks today take place in Mental Ray even with the render engines that I have at my disposal. Part of me feels that as long as I am working in Max, Mental Ray is the safest bet since it is bundled with it. I became heavily dependent upon VRay for my workflow, but I did not have access to upgrades from v1.5 so I felt that I needed to invest my time in something that I could count on moving forward with.

 

Reading the Corona forums and blog gives me a good feeling about it, and if the latest blog entry is anything to go by, then the investment shouldn't be very steep as the beta will be freely available as well.

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I dont see any need to be too careful with Corona, its currently free and very easy to use, so where's the risk? Its not like you need to spend an age learning it, just load in your HDR and hit render! I've used it on some arch scenes and now on an animation scene, (see attached). In Mental Ray this scene takes an age just to FG but here Corona is waaay faster, the results are also far better out of the box. Of course its not ready for larger studio workflows yet but for smaller ones and freelancers, why not. Corona works like a render engine should.

flow_test_02.jpg

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  • 2 weeks later...

Here is some my test renders (scene converted from VRAY to CORONA with coroanconverter script attached to corona archive):

Widok_01_Converted.png

Ikea_Interior_Test_02.jpg

test_05_PT%252BHD_test.jpg

 

Quality and speed is outstanding, simplicity of GUI and materials settings are just awesome.

Just download and check power of this render engine:)

Kind regards

Hris

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I'm using DayLight system and after installing corona there is NEW light in daylight system (CORONA SUN). Vray lights i'm converting by myself. But i saw in corona renderer forum some posts about LIGHTS converter script:

https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php/topic,79.0.html

And sorry but all these scenes are rather commercial projects which i've done for clients:( i can't share :(

 

Kind regards and greetings

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It's not supposed to be final-render-ready after converting. Path-tracers have few own rules to abide. There is a separate converter for lights and for materials. Corona doesn't have its own camera (only an optional modificator), it works naturally with both regular and vray camera.

With that said, for intermediate users (of any engine), the process can be done under minute for close to identical result.

 

The converter is the best up to date I have seen. Other renderers should take notice in this regard.

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  • 5 months later...

Today I had a go with the corona renderer on an older mental ray project.

In this case for even a better quality (less noise) corona was about 2 times faster. Had no hassle with the material convertor.

Only changed mental ray daylight system to a hdri.

 

Anyone else on the forum is using this renderer and planning on buying it when it releases?

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I will definitely try it out since it has the name of my favorite beer.

 

But realistically speaking isn't it kinda futile and don't they really have no chance at all because Max/Vray are so deeply entrenched in the ArchViz business as the de facto standard? Like someone trying to compete with Word or Windows.

 

In any business something better might come along but if the existing standard is so firmly established (like the qwerty keyboard) it's all for naught.

 

But I guess Vray was able to trump Lightscape so anything's possible.

Edited by heni30
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vray is so deeply entrenched in the archviz community only because there wasn't any real competition (as far as speed/quality/ease of use is concerned, of course there are other renders but none of them come close) which is now being completely redefined by corona

 

case in point: pretty much everyone I know who tried corona even for a very short time is now switching over, most of them from vray

Edited by martinhoura
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In any case, it is VERY healthy for Vray to have some serious competition because they

will be motivated to keep improving and competing in price.

 

Perhaps, though chaos group are arguably at a size now where they have bigger fish to fry, going up against the likes of renderman and so on in the film industry.

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I've been a mental ray user for many years and have done a couple of projects in Corona. The difference to me is night and day. The render speed, ease of material setup, and overall great image quality have just about convinced me to purchase a license when it is released. The only thing that vray apparently has that I would really like to see in Corona is the VrayLightSelect render element. There's also a little hiccup with distributed rendering that I'm not sure is a bug or user error, but beyond those things, I'm sold.

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But realistically speaking isn't it kinda futile and don't they really have no chance at all because Max/Vray are so deeply entrenched in the ArchViz business as the de facto standard? Like someone trying to compete with Word or Windows.

 

Once you try Corona and see how easy it can be, you'll never want to go back to that swamp of AA, lighting and renderer settings, both in Mental ray and Vray.

 

EDIT: not to mention interactive rendering, which you think you don't need, until you try it and realize you do need it :D

Edited by blank...
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Today I had a go with the corona renderer on an older mental ray project.

In this case for even a better quality (less noise) corona was about 2 times faster.

 

I immediately gave up on corona because when I tried it (alpha v7) on an older project it was so extremely slow to clean the noise that it was unusable in any real production scenario for me... Maybe I was doing something wrong or there was something specific about that file, but it was also slow on the demo apartment scene they give out.

 

The converter worked fine, the render looked pretty good, but nothing special compared to the vray version. Just so painfully slow... I don't know, maybe I should give it another go...

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