Corona Renderer is a new renderer developed by Ondra Karlik. It's available as a 3DS Max plugin or as a standalone renderer. While the standalone renderer doesn't support as many features as the Max plugin, it's still very fast, very powerful, and can produce very high quality images using a number of different biased and unbiased rendering algorithms.
You can download Corona Standalone here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/kgzu0cqy9.../%21Standalone
Download the Blender exporter on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ohsnapitsjoel/render_corona
Standalone features (and exporter features) include:
- Diffuse, specular color, translucency, opacity, reflection, refraction, and emission image textures (bump/normal mapping are not supported yet)
- Instances / dupligroups
- Mesh lights
- Physically correct sun & sky
- Environment texture mapping (latlong maps only)
- Physically correct depth of field
- Unbiased/consistent rendering with path tracing, light tracing, bidirectional path tracing, progressive photon mapping, and Vertex Connection and Merging
- Progressive and bucket rendering modes
- Blender material conversion to Corona material
- Render passes
- Orthographic camera
- Environment texture ray visibility overrides
- Portal materials
- Point lights
To install and use:
- Download the exporter from bitbucket.
- Extract the exporter and place it in your /scripts/addons directory. Optionally, rename the directory something useful like "render_corona." In fact, name it that way exactly, and everything will be dandy.
- Enable the exporter in Blender's User Preferences > Render category.
- Select Corona as the renderer from the render engine dropdown.
- In the render panel, set the path to the Corona Standalone directory containing Corona.exe
- Set the export path.
- Render. Large scenes may take a while to export and load in Corona, so be patient.
Exporter To do list:
- Convert all materials to Corona materials with a single click and assign default material to objects without materials.
Warnings:
- Every object needs a material, or rendering will fail! This is a hassle in large scenes, but it's currently necessary.
- Only UV-mapped image textures are supported. Other projections and texture types are not supported.
- Some non-manifold and loose geometry (vertices, edges) will break rendering. Geometry needs to be clean. Check the console for errors if rendering fails; Corona will report which .obj files are giving it trouble.
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