We have moved this previously separately published article to the blog. Tadeusz Chmiel from the “Capybara The Movie” project wrote this short summary of how Corona was used to create a movie trailer with very limited budget:

Corona was used in this project to render the main ship and space stations. All sequences were rendered with the default Corona settings; the computation took up to 3 minutes for each frame on a single CPU machine. Since the Path Tracing algoritm was used as both the primary and secondary solver, there was no need for any GI baking. All I had to do was hit “render” and enjoy the high quality output in no time. For me it is very important to reduce the technical aspects to a minimum and focus on the image, rather than wasting time on GI baking and sampling adjustments.

HDRI images from hdrlabs.com and openfootage.net were used for image based lighting and reflections, combined with Corona Sun. Scene materials were done with the standard CoronaMtl with mostly diffuse and reflection colors/maps, and bump maps. Furthermore, CoronaAO was used in combination with a difuse map to generate some dirt. With all materials set up correctly, there was no need for any additional adjustments when doing additional scenes – I only had to connect new HDRI to the enviroment slot and set the sun direction in CoronaSun properties.

All render passes were put together in Nuke. Passes such as Corona_UvwCoords, Corona_ZDepth, Corona_WorldPosition, Corona_NormalsGeometry and Corona_Mask were rendered for some reflections done in postproduction, as well as local tweaks and creating postproduction depth of field.