We have tested for you: Corona 1.6, even more speed and new features

Review of Corona, a few weeks after the release of version 1.6.

Speed, still and always…

Corona is already famous for being one of the fastest CPU renderer. Yet developers anounce perfomances improved up to 200% for scenes which use a HDRI direct lighting. This, added to “glare effects” treatment and LUTs upload optimization, which is always appreciated in post treatment phases.

A standalone for the post treatment of your renderings

One of the new features is the Corona Image Editor that enables upload of the “Corona EXR” files so as to adjust both intensity and colour of light sources (LightMix) but also post effect treatment (bloom, glare, vignetting, LUTs…) and denoising without having to restart the rendering.

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Developments and adjustments

Here are a few new features and improvements that we particularly like:

  • New possibilities of the Corona Scatter such as the non-random distribution of our objects or along a curve.
  • “Triplanar” mapping to avoid UV unfolding, always very time-consuming when preparing a scene. 

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  • The improvement of “rounded edges” to avoid wasting ages on our models’ edges. 
  • “Bloom and glare” is now fully compatible with VR 360 renderings. 
  • Correction of the defect known as the “terminator artefact” which highlighted polygones on low poly objects with a bump.
  • The “zoom sampling focus” of interactive rendering which calculates only the visible zone when zooming on a specific part of the scene. 

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https://blog.ranchcomputing.fr//assets/2017/05/corona16_5.jpg” alt=”” width=”4607″ height=”2597

A redesigned rendering network

Better sharing of assets with slave machines -adaptivity setting is now supported by distributed rendering.

Next step:VFX

Version 1.7 is expected for September with new features like a skin shader, hair rendering and heterogenous media for smoke and explosions for instance (OpenVDB, FumeFX, Phoenix FD support).

Video presentation of release 1.6