Corona Render 1.0 for 3ds Max – released

Corona team is releasing the version 1.0 of Corona Renderer for 3ds Max today. Cannot wait another second? Go get it now!
Licensing

Corona 1.0 is the first non-free version of Corona. It can be used in demo mode without any limitations (no maximal resolution, no watermarks, …) for 45 days. After that, purchasing a license will be necessary. You can read more about the licenses here.

Even though the demo will work for 45 days, Corona developers strongly recommend you get your license sooner, as there is 45 days launch promo discount for all FairSaaS and Box licenses. With the discount, you can get Corona for as low as 19.99 € per month. See the prices and licensing for more details. Also various discounts and bonuses will be provided during (and sometimes after) this period.

Major New Features

• Interactive rendering supporting virtually all materials, maps, geometry, and Corona features. It uses the same engine and produces exactly the same results as final frame rendering.
• UHD cache: new biased caching solution. This cache is very similar to the good old HD cache, but it produces less bias, and does not flicker in animations, even when no precomputation is used.
• SSS and volumetric scattering capability
• GGX microfacet BRDF model that allows creating realistic metal materials easily
• Reworked UI dialogs: Corona now uses 3 tabs instead of single one, eliminating scrolling and searching for the correct rollout.
• CoronaMultiMap texture allows easy randomization of colors and texmaps with instances. It works with any scatter, and with 3ds Max native instancing.
• Improved Blend material support: it now renders faster, supports nested Blend materials, bump mapping, render elements, emission, displacement, BDPT/VCM, and more.
• CoronaScatter improvements: controlling density and scaling with maps, option to remove instance collisions.
• ShadowCatcher improvements: added more texture inputs, bump mapping, light lluminators, more reflection controls.
• Uninstaller and Licensing server included in the installer.

Performance Improvements

• Displacement parsing is now multithreaded (up to 450% improvement in i7)
• Heavy instancing is now processed more efficiently. We measured improvements up to 60% better traversal performance, 30% faster parsing.
• Faster scene parsing: we made multiple improvements here, including making the whole thing multithreaded. Some of the artists reported speedups of up to 1200%
• Saving big renders is now about 50% faster.
• Direct light sampling has been reworked and is now more efficient, meaning there is less noise in the same time. The difference is particularly visible when using strongly directional lights.
• Sampling of dim reflections on diffuse/refractive surfaces has been improved. This should fix a lot of problems where the subtle noise did not go away even after long time.
• HDRI-only lit scenes rendering is now 5% faster.

Other Improvements

• New material energy conservation mode, closer to Mental Ray and VRay models. This model is now used by default on all new materials. Materials imported from older version use the previous model so the rendered image look does not change.
• Added time estimation and better progress bar when using progressive rendering with time and/or pass limits set.
• Added two sided emission to Corona lights
• Reworked CoronaCameraMod to make it more usable and less confusing
• Separate category for Corona maps and materials in the list of all maps/materials
• New “Add sky” button in CoronaSun, that saves some clicking when setting up Sun/sky environment
• Photographic exposure can now also be adjusted in real time.
• Improved UI of CoronaSolid texmap (now named CoronaColor)
• CoronaMix now works with bump mapping
• Renamed some Corona maps to make the naming consistent
• Renamed most Corona Maxscript parameters to make them consistent.
• Render settings no longer need to be closed when changing Corona parameters via maxscript
• Top/Bottom and Doublesided standard materials are now supported
• Added direction offsets to CoronaAO
• Ctrl +, Ctrl – now zooms in/out in Corona VFB. Double clicking adjusts the VFB window size to the render size
• Added support for disabling “Display maps as 2D”

Major Bug Fixes

• Body objects and adaptive splines now render correctly
• Fixed various bugs preventing stable noise pattern in animations
• Fixed a bug that caused trees with incorrectly set up materials to be randomly visible in the image even though they were occluded by other geometry
• Fixed bug causing random excessive displacement parsing times
• Fixed display of CoronaRenderer properties in Maxscript
• Fixed incorrect evaluation of BRDF, removing some shading artifacts and performance problems
• Fixed bug causing DrServer to not recognize newly installed 3ds Max versions, and fixed other various distributed rendering bugs.
• Render elements now have correct gamma when using 3dsmax default VFB

What is Next?

It does not end with the Corona Renderer 1.0. Dvelopers would like to speed up the development of Cinema4D version (and release an OSX version), release first public alpha for Maya, and start development for other applications (we are particularly interested in Rhino, Modo, and Lightwave).

As for new features, developers would now like to focus on the following areas:

• Further speed and memory optimizations
• Adding “render region” controls to Corona VFB
• Creating CoronaBitmap 3ds Max plugin (e.g. for loading HDRIs)
• Creating a Corona displacement modifier, adding option to keep unsmoothed edges from tearing
• Removing the limitation that causes images to suddenly became more more noisy when using more than 250 separate lights.

Learn more on Corona Renderer site.