Chaos has updated its CPU-based Corona renderer to version 10 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D users. Chaos also revamped its Corona benchmark.
Chaos continues the tale of two renderers, V-Ray and Corona, and updates and improves them both. Most recently, the company showered its attention on Corona, releasing Corona 10, a plug-in for Autodesk’s 3ds Max and Maxon’s Cinema 4D. (Corona is more commonly used for architectural visualization, and its stepsibling, V-Ray, is popular among the VFX crowd.)
With Corona version 10, users have more creative control when generating their visualizations, thanks to a range of new features. This includes the ability to control individual material channels affected by Corona Decal, without having to change key attributes. Small changes to diffuse, displacement, and more can be blended easily into the underlying material.
Also, the update lets users place Corona cameras anywhere within a scene, even within volumes, as it has the ability to fly through clouds and fog, pass through fire, and even rise and surface from below water to above it within water simulations.
Other major features include:
- Improved DOF blurring of highlights
- Better handling of scenes with new Listers
- Brighter, more accurate caustics
- Clouds can be affected by Sun Direct Color feature
- Application of Triplanar, Color Correction, and Mapping Randomizer to multiple maps (3ds Max)
- Use of Scatter onto other Scatters (Cinema 4D)
Corona 10 is available now for 3ds Max 2016–2024 (64 bit) on Windows, and for Cinema 4D R17–2023 (64 bit) on Windows and Mac.
Corona is a CPU-based rendering engine that can perform biased and unbiased rendering. As such, sometimes it is used as a benchmark for measuring CPU performance in multithreaded workloads. With this in mind, Chaos also released a new Corona benchmark for measuring CPU performance while using Corona 10. The benchmark provides a summary of the user’s system, the frequency it operates at, the number of physical and logical cores it has, and how much RAM is installed. Users can review scores submitted by other benchmark users to gauge the performance of their own system. The benchmark is free for anyone to use and does not require a Corona license. It can be downloaded here.