We started using Corona Renderer for Panic! At The Disco’s new music video and it was definitely a game changer for us. There was a short deadline and 56 full CGI shots to get done, but thanks to the interactive rendering feature, our artists were able to achieve good-looking renders and complete all the work in a short period of time. The features we loved the most, besides the interactive render, are the ability to render a wide range of compositing passes, rendering speed, Embree-aided rendering, and multithreaded parsing. It is also awesome that there is virtually no need to alter default render settings, but at the same time you have the ability to adjust more advanced settings when needed.
For this project, we used Vantage for the final delivery. We were rendering animations in minutes to hours on single machines which is pretty crazy. We’re entering an age when a lone artist in his bedroom could render a whole animation project overnight; whereas before this would have only been possible in a large studio with an internal or external render farm. Another way we are using it is for clay renders during the view selection for clients, which is great because it’s blisteringly fast.
I really feel like a lot of care went into Corona's UI just making it easy to use, but the organization and layout of every control (in my opinion) is easily the best of all the renderers. It is very fast in Corona to find things and get up to speed. I also really like the roll over explanations in the tooltips – somehow the devs really know how to explain things in a simple manner!
The deadline was 5 weeks and I was alone in doing all the CG work, doing look dev, modeling, rigging, shading, lighting, animation and composition… so It was a huge challenge just to finish the film. I had zero budget to hire other artists… Another issue was that the shading and lighting and render time should be doable… Corona played a real part in this workflow. It was so fast to achieve the look I was searching for – believe me it made my life much easier and with fantastic output with very fast minutes-per-frame.
I think that with the quality it delivers in the final renders, it is an engine that is the closest to that final evolution of things being “a click of a button”, as it has already cut away the need for setting samples, portals and many other such technical settings.
