We are proud to present to you Corona Renderer 1.4 for Autodesk 3ds Max! This release focuses on significantly reducing your render times (just check the stats that have been reported below) and speeding up your workflow, as well as increasing stability. The team has worked hard on this, and I’d like to thank them for taking Corona to the next level.
The long awaited release of Corona version 1.4 is getting closer! We’ve had a release candidate out for a few days, and we are just hunting the last remaining bugs. Once again, we need your help with that!
Just like for version 1.3, we are doing a little giveaway – we will reward the best three bug reports with a free 1 year Corona FairSaaS license (1WS + 3 NODES). All other meaningful bug reports will be rewarded with a 50% discount on a 1 year FairSaaS license.
Read more for full details…
Continue reading Corona 1.4 Release Candidate and Betatesting Giveaway
We are honored to showcase these amazing stills and an animation by Alex York and Iain Banks of Recent Spaces:
We were commissioned by an interior designer to produce a series of still interior shots of a London apartment called Seaford Court. The flat was to be refurbished to a very high specification and the client required CGIs to understand the designer’s vision before committing to it (and particularly the furniture and lighting choices). Most of the furniture, lighting and objects were specified by the designer and are real-world pieces.
Continue reading for a comprehensive commentary on creation of this project, tricks used, and problems encountered…
Today we have finally updated our standalone benchmark. Download it and share your results now! Compared to the last benchmark we have updated the rendering core, made the scene more challenging, and added easy verification and sharing of render times. Everything is a one-click solution now, no manual copy/pasting required. All times you choose to publish are displayed in a table here. This comes handy especially when you are selecting a new hardware to run Corona.
From the technical standpoint, the most interesting thing is that the benchmark showcases the possibilities of our new standalone format, which is now much more powerful than ever before. It supports procedural maps, shader networks, and the compressed Corona proxy format for geometry. We are hoping the standalone application will become a viable alternative for distributed rendering some day. You can try it yourself today if you are feeling lucky. Both export and import is a one-click solution, no 3ds Max is necessary, and speedups of up to 30% were reported compared to rendering inside 3ds Max. Some maps are still not supported, but we are working on that.
I would like to thank Robin, who was the primary developer of the benchmark application. That is it; everything left to do now is to download the benchmark and share its results with the community so we can build a comprehensive database of Corona Renderer performance with different CPUs. Stay tuned for the next blog post, in which we will talk about licensing and pricing improvements we have in mind for 2016.
Ondra
The first blog post of 2016 is finally here, and it is almost a year since we have released Corona Renderer 1.0!
I would like to use this blog post to evaluate our first year in business and also share some information about our upcoming plans so you will get a better picture of where we are heading.
Thank you for being with us in 2015. We wish you great holidays and creative projects in the upcoming year!
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We would also like to announce that our office will be closed starting today, until 4th January 2016. Corona Support will be limited during this period.
We are proud to present a stunning project by Canada-based studio Tendril. The short animations were created for Bell Media Space Channel as a part of brand refreshing.
You can watch the full set of ID’s below:
Continue reading for details on the project and team members’ impression on using Corona in production.
We are releasing a quick update of our Cinema 4D plugin to address the issues that emerged after the Alpha v4 release. They were caused by a massive internal changes due to the interactive rendering support. The plugin is still under development, in free testing phase, so more issues may arise. If you spot any problem, please do not hesitate to report it . The production (non-interactive) renderer should be stable now, and we will work on the interactive renderer stability for the A5 release. Here is the detailed changelog:
Few days after the release of Corona 1.3 for 3ds Max it seems there are no major bugs left in. We would like to thank everyone who tested the release candidate builds for making this possible. As we announced earlier, we will reward 5 most useful bug reports with a free 1 year FairSaaS license. We went through the reports and decided to reward these 5 users:
We will contact the winners to deliver the reward. We have also promised to reward other useful reports with a 50% discount for a yearly license. We won’t list all of them here, instead please contact us to claim the reward if you believe you made such report.
Thanks again for making the smooth launch possible.
Ondra
We have just released the first release candidate (RC) build of Corona 1.3. This is a daily build that we intend to publish as version 1.3, unless some previously unknown bugs are discovered. And we need your help with searching for any hidden problems to make sure the 1.3 version is as stable as possible.
To reward our beta testers, we have decided to do a little giveaway – we will reward the best five bug reports with free 1 year Corona FairSaaS license (1WS + 3 NODES). All other meaningful bug reports will be rewarded with 50% discount for a 1 year FairSaaS license.