After 9 months of development, A new public version of Corona Renderer is being released today, called Alpha v6. The new features include support for distributed rendering, new robust API, ability to save and resume rendering later, improved light solver and motion blur, physically based camera, exposure and lights, and more. Because it is still in development, the plugin is free to use and can be downloaded at the official website after registering at the forum. It has no restrictions like limited resolution or watermarks, and can be used for commercial work. Commercial versions with artist-friendly pricing are planned for the future.

Feature image by Bertrand Benoit.

Corona Renderer has picked a big following in the past months with Alpha v5 and lots of great work was shared on the forums grabbing Best of WEEK’s too. I’ve recently started to test and use it in my studio with great results.

Alpha v6 has an impressive feature list and I look forward to see how far we can push it!

QUICK FACTS

Yes, it is still free for commercial use

No limitations, no watermarks

Offers Biased and Unbiased Rendering

and Rendering By default very slightly biased

CPU based

Fully integrated into 3dsmax , standalone A6 version will follow

, standalone A6 version will follow ADD + NBP  Artist Driven Development & No Bullshit Policy

MAJOR NEW FEATURES INCLUDE :

Support of third-party plugins

Corona Renderer A6 does support the following plugins:

All 3ds Max procedural shaders

MultiScatter

Multitexture

Forest Pack Pro

Forest Color

RailClone

BerconMaps

Wacoscatter / MDO Scatter

VrayHDRI

ColorCorrect

Save/Resume Rendering

Yes, with Corona Renderer A6 you are able to save and resume rendering later. Also you are able to save your render and continue rendering on a different machine.

In the future we will also release a utility which will allow you to MERGE two (or more) renders rendered on two different machines (they do not have to part of the same network, so it can be your machine at work and your machine at home).

Resulted merged image will have the noise reduced (simply put: if you used two identical machines, result will twice better)

Improved light solver

Dramatically improved light sampling in some more complicated scenes, where geometry lights and CoronaLights are combined.

(GIF Image : Click to see Old cs. New)

Distributed Rendering

A pilot implementation of distributed rendering was added. While currently still having some limitations, it can be already used to speed up your still shots.

Physically based camera & exposure & emission

Added photographic parameters to the camera, physical exposure, and physical light emission units.

Support for 3dsmax standard/photometric lights

While the standard 3dsmax lights are nowhere as physically plausible as CoronaLights, we understand that some users like them for their unprecedented artistic control ability. Thats why we are bringing them to Corona.

Internal Color Space is now WIDE RGB

Why?



Corona Renderer was previously using the XYZ color space, as opposed to the sRGB color space used by most renderers. There are several reasons why using wide-gamut color space improves rendering, even though the final rendered image is converted back to sRGB.

For more about this feature and others read the release article on the Corona Renderer blog.

Here are some more examples of work that was done with previous builds of Corona Renderer :

Image Credits :