Today, we have released an exciting Corona update, designed to streamline collaboration and workflows, and address some of the core challenges artists face on a daily basis. We're talking about Corona 12 Update 1 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. In this blog post, we’ll explore what’s new in the Corona toolset, and even give you a glimpse of what could be included down the road.
What’s new in Corona 12 Update 1?
- Corona to Vantage Live Link. Take advantage of Vantage Live Link as an alternative to Interactive Rendering.
- Chaos Cloud Collaboration. Easily share images with your clients, sending them right from the VFB, then discuss changes via markup, send deliverables, set up Virtual Tours, and open the door to much more in the future.
- Faster Caustics. Caustics now look around twice as good in the same rendering time.
- Caustics Multiplier. Enjoy a quick and easy way to adjust how bright caustics are in your final render, controlling on surfaces and in volumes separately.
- Volumetric Caustics. See reflected and refracted rays generated by caustics as they pass through volume materials.
- Auto Exposure and White Balance. Have your exposure or white balance auto-adjust for a good starting point, or adapt to changing lighting during animations. White Balance has also been improved with a new algorithm for more pleasing results.
- Image Upscaling. Speed up creating test renders by around four times, and add extra responsiveness to IR.
- And much more!
Keep reading for an in-depth look at all the new features, and download the latest version to give it a try.
The focus of this update is collaboration—both between you and your clients and between your tools working seamlessly together. These enhancements are designed to get you render-ready as quickly as possible.
Tom Grimes, Product Manager, Chaos Corona
Free trials for new users
New to Corona? Take advantage of our free Corona trial and see what effortless photorealism really looks like.
If you are new to Vantage, you can also try it for free and test importing your Corona scenes, animating them, and rendering images in ray-traced real-time.
FREE WEBINAR: Real-time scene exploration and collaboration in Corona 12, update 1
Our webinar took place on Tuesday, November 26, 16:00 CET. It explored how the new Corona to Vantage Live Link enables real-time scene exploration and image rendering in seconds. Attendees discovered how to collaborate efficiently with clients and impress them with immersive virtual tours—all powered by Cloud Collaboration. We also covered other exciting new features in Update 1, including Caustics through volumes, automatic Exposure and White Balance, AI image upscaling, and more.
Corona to Vantage Live Link
Corona 12 Update 1 introduces an initial implementation of a Live Link. This is just a starting point though, with more functionality to come in future releases.
With this initial implementation, you can use Vantage as a kind of “Interactive Rendering”, which will update as you make changes in 3ds Max or Cinema 4D. You may find this detailed ray traced GPU render useful in some situations while working on your scene, providing an optional method for finding great camera angles, adjusting lighting, arranging your scene, setting up some aspects of materials, and more.
Of course, you still have all the export functionality that was introduced in Corona 12 for when that is most useful for your project.
As noted earlier, we’re not done yet and new functionality is planned for future releases. The biggest future update will be the ability to render an animation set up in your DCC using Vantage, and as another example, we’ll look into making sending Scatters to Vantage more efficient (right now, you may find updating a Scatter is slow with Live Link).
Chaos Cloud Collaboration
There’s one important part of every single project you tackle - getting draft and final renders to your clients and hearing their feedback and change requests.
Now you can send an image directly from the VFB to Chaos Cloud Collaboration, where you can share it with your client and then have a conversation together via markup and comments. This removes the need to rely on email, dropbox, google drive, etc., plus it means your client isn’t left having to use Paint or Photoshop to draw attention to certain parts of the image.
Cloud Collaboration lets you set up as many projects as you like and control how they are shared. It handles versioning of images during the project, and is also a way of conveniently delivering final renders.
Virtual Tours
Cloud Collaboration also lets you create virtual tours, easy for you to set up, and then these can be shared with your client, or even with their customers. As of this release you have to set up the hotspots manually, but this will be streamlined in the future to match V-Ray 7’s recent functionality to create virtual tours automatically.
Integrating with Cloud Collaboration also opens the door to many future advancements. One example is the AI Image Enhancer which is currently working for Enscape, and which will expand in the future to include Corona. We have other plans for how Cloud Collaboration can meet even more of your needs when working on projects too.
Faster Caustics
There are three main improvements to Caustics. First, it will now give a significantly cleaner result in the same amount of render time.
We’re not putting an exact number on the speed up, as it greatly depends on how dominant Caustics are in your scene - if the scene is almost entirely affected by caustics, you will see a greater speed up than in a scene where Caustics only play a small part.
As an approximation, Caustics themselves should be visually “about twice as good” in the same amount of render time.
Caustics Surface Multiplier
The second Caustics improvement lets you adjust the intensity of the Caustics in the Beauty pass, removing the need to use render elements and post processing to get the results you are looking for.
Please note that you must set the Surface Multiplier at render time - it cannot be adjusted in post. You can use IR to find the right value before committing to a final render.
Caustics visible through volumetric materials
The final Caustics improvement is that you now have the option to enable the visibility of reflected or refracted rays created from Caustics as they pass through a Volumetric material. The classic example would be underwater sunlight, where the refraction of the sun through the moving water surface causes an interesting play of beams of light in the volume of the water.
This can also occur in other cases, such as underwater swimming pool lights passing through steam in a heated pool or jacuzzi, or light beams reflecting off the mirrored surface of a disco / mirror ball through the dry ice in the atmosphere of a night club, or sunlight reflected off windows through an early morning mist, and more.
Just like with surface Caustics, you can control the intensity of the volume Caustics in the Beauty pass.
Few render engines offer this ability, and we look forward to seeing what you create with it!
Auto Exposure, Auto White Balance & improved White Balance
We’ve made a start on expanding the range of features available in the VFB 2.
First comes Auto Exposure, a checkbox which will let Corona choose the exposure values for you just like when using a modern camera. You can use this as a simple starting point, adding further changes via a regular Exposure control, or baking it to the tone mapping.
If “Update during animation” is checked, then the automatic exposure and/or white balance will be recalculated for each frame of an animation, helping with scenes that move from dimly to brightly lit areas.
For further control, there is also a “Strength” parameter, where 0 does not adjust the exposure at all, through to the maximum of 1 where the calculated auto exposure value takes full effect.
Auto White Balance functions in a similar way, with the same possibilities as mentioned above. There’s one extra improvement to White Balance though, as we have changed the algorithm it uses to one that gives a more natural look. For compatibility, any existing scenes will load with a “Legacy White Balance” to ensure they render the same as before. In new scenes, the new White Balance will be the default. While the difference is subtle, the results are more in line with the effects of White Balance in other popular software like Photoshop.
Image Upscaling
The new Image Upscaling takes advantage of NVIDIA upscaling, which gives you two benefits.
Its main use is for rendering quick test animations, e.g. keeping a 1920x1080 size result, but rendering around four times quicker. Do note these are intended as test animations only, since the upscaling has no temporal consistency and will usually result in noticeable flickering as seen in the example above.
The image is rendered to one quarter size (one half the width, one half the height - e.g. a 1920 x 1080 will render at 960 x 540) and then upscaling is done using the NVIDIA AI Upscaler. Since only a quarter of the number of pixels need to be rendered, this means the result is around four times faster.
The second use is when enabled for IR. This may give you more responsive results while editing (although parsing times may negate any seen refresh rate improvement during edits in some scenes), but will certainly reach a cleaned up result faster. The simpler the scene, and the larger the resolution of the IR, then the more benefits you will see.
This is ideal for setting up lighting, finding a good camera angle, laying out a scene, and so on. It is less useful if you are editing materials at a refined level, due to the loss of detail.
Please note that NVIDIA Denoising is always applied to the image when Upscaling is used, both in IR and rendering modes. Also, just like NVIDIA Denoising, this requires a compatible NVIDIA card.
Scatter Distribution Maps
Chaos Scatter now comes with some built in distribution maps that you can use, to instantly change the look of your scatters without having to have a bitmap of your own on hand.
Cosmos Updates
To round things out before we move on to the smaller features, you’ll find 750+ new assets for Corona users in the vegetation, people, materials, and furniture categories in Cosmos.
Why the name?
Most likely you will be wondering about the naming this time around, so let’s explain!
We’ve called this Corona 12 Update 1 rather than Corona 13 due to our plans to add Live Link, and to update to the Chaos installer to keep up with legal requirements for the company. We knew this alone would take some time and it wasn’t clear how many other features would be ready, so we chose to call this Update 1 just to be safe.
Looking ahead, there will likely be an Update 2 before the next numbered release, with the next number upgrade coming as Corona 13 around the middle of next year.
New Installer
With Corona taking its rightful place among the range of solutions offered by Chaos, it’s time for us to move over to the regular Chaos installer so we can keep up with all the legal requirements. Previously, when there were updates to anything like the EULA, it took Corona development time to implement those changes in our own unique installer - time we can now spend on other things in the future.
This also makes it easy for everyone to install any Chaos product, with the installation process being the same for all products, so no confusion when installing Vantage, Corona, etc.
What’s Next?
It’s too early to make promises as to what next year will look like, but we can share the things we are considering.
First, we do expect a Corona 12 Update 2 version sometime toward the end of Q1, though this will not have many (or any) new features and will be a maintenance release (part of the reason we still called this one Update 1, knowing that an Update 2 will be needed). After that release, it will be back to business as usual in terms of naming and release cycle, with Corona 13 planned for the middle of the year, and 14 toward the end of the year.
What gifts might Corona 13 and 14 bring? Well, most likely improvements to the Live Link as we refine this initial implementation and look into adding rendering animations from your DCC in Vantage. We also want to investigate the possibility of developing a Toon / NPR shader, as this is one of the most requested items on our Ideas Portal.
We’re listening to feedback from you on some new items that debuted in V-Ray 7, such as Gaussian Splats, to see how much interest there is in those coming to Corona.
We’ve heard whispers about AI image enhancement and PBR material generation. Imagine this happening in the cloud—digital assistants upscaling a preview or generating material options in seconds without bogging down your machine. Although still in development, these would be exciting additions.
Corona is now on Chaos.com
Just a quick reminder that since Corona 12 released, all things Corona can now be found on Chaos.com. You can access the latest versions, Corona Benchmark, blog articles, customer stories, and more on Chaos.com.
As a reminder from our last release, a few pages you may wish to bookmark include:
- Corona homepage
- What’s new in Corona
- Corona Benchmark
- Download Corona
- Corona Community Forum
- The Chaos Blog (featuring all Chaos products, including Corona)
Additional smaller improvements in Corona 12 Update 1
General
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Added Max Photon Repeat parameter into advanced settings that influences noise of caustics.
(3ds Max)
- Added support for ForestPack Ivy Generator.
- Added a decal arrow pointing in the Decal projection direction. The arrow will scale with the size of the Decal object.
- Added Depth of Field range indicator for 3ds Max Viewport, when Corona Camera is selected.
- Added a”‘Lock Aspect Ratio” button to CoronaBitmap.
- Added a “Fit to bitmap” button to CoronaBitmap, available when the Lock Aspect Ratio is not active.
(Cinema 4D)
- Scene conversion improvements:
- Added conversion of V-Ray Standard material.
- Added possibility to convert V-Ray and Cinema render settings to Corona render settings.
- Added option to save CXR file directly in Save tab in render settings. This should work in batch rendering or when rendering takes.
- Added Film Offset X, Film Offset Y and Focus Distance to Camera Listers.
Vantage
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Added basic support for exporting Triplanar shader.
- When exporting to Vantage, Corona exports to a running Vantage application if there is one, instead of starting a new one. When Vantage is not installed, an error is shown to the user.
VFB
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- VFB 2: Added a Separate IR button instead of the dropdown menu option.
- VFB 2: Place new history items at the top of history instead of at the bottom.
- VFB 2: Added the option to load multiple CXRs into VFB history at once.
- VFB 2: The correct render stamp is shown when loading or comparing images.
- VFB 2: Camera Tone mapping override is now correctly displayed in VFB when editing CXR and returning back to VFB.
(3ds Max)
- Added option to system settings to disable overwrite confirmation dialog when using history autosave.
- History autosave now also saves animations.
(Cinema 4D)
- CXR files can now be drag&dropped directly into VFB2 to load in history tab (was already possible in 3ds Max).
Installation Changes
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Updated licensing server to 6.2 and Cosmos to newest version.
- Removed the Corona Material Library component from Corona installer. If you do not have it installed already, a download button will be shown on opening the Corona Material Library from inside 3ds Max or Cinema 4D.
- Command line arguments were changed. You can use -auto instead of -acceptEulaAndInstall. For more command line arguments use -help.
- Added new Legal Agreements dialog, which is shown only after "--auto" installation (when the eula/privacy policy is not shown).
- Note: The new installer requires SSE 4.2, released in 2008 for Intel and 2011 for AMD, so any machine newer than 13 years old should be unaffected. This would be around one tenth of one percent of users at our estimate, and some of those may be using an older Corona version anyway since Corona itself needs SSE 4.1 already.
(Cinema 4D)
- Similar-looking installer is now used both on Windows and macOS.
- Size of macOS installer was reduced to half of its original size. Note that the macOS installer is still twice as big as Windows one as it contains version for both Intel CPUs and Apple Silicon.
Bug Fixes in Corona 12 Update 1
Crash Fixes
(3ds Max)
- Fixed issue where showing VRayMtl in material editor without VRay installed leads to crash when Corona is active renderer.
(Cinema 4D)
- Fixed crash in some scenes when CPU limit was set to non-default values.
- Fixed crash when exporting some specific configurations of the native Cinema 4D Layered shader into Chaos Vantage.
- Fixed crash when exiting Cinema 4D when the Node Material Editor is open.
General
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Fixed issues with decal/media and heterogeneous media when material-based medium resolving is used.
- Fixed computing of curves operator histogram - histogram now updates during rendering and is computed from an edited item as well, not always from the main render.
- Fixed Bloom&Glare missing when saving multiple elements with B&G.
- Fixed incorrect order of render elements in case the “Rest” render element was not the last one.
(3ds Max)
- Small behavior fixes of the button used to select the node for fitting PatternMod crop box.
- Fixed issue where animated texmaps would in some cases render without animation.
- Fixed Memory Report dialog preventing render from completing, it is closed automatically for render to finish.
- Fixed changing of "Locked IR resolution" when rendering with docked interactive.
- Fixed animated camera unexpectedly changing position when switching target on and off.
- Fixed issue where camera name in Tone Mapping disappears after editing history item and rendering again.
- Fixed issue where fitting decal and then changing the size with locked aspect ratio would result in incorrect decal aspect ratio.
- Fixed issue where Cosmos lights were imported with wrong units.
- Fixed issue where some OSL maps (e.g. those using user-defined attributes) were not working properly.
- LUT path is no longer converted from local to UNC after arbitrary UI operations.
- Paths to assets used in Corona Material Library downloaded from Cosmos are no longer converted from mapped drives to UNC paths.
- Fixed issue where debug.log file is created in 3ds Max project folder.
- Fixed 3ds Max hotkeys being wrongly reenabled after clicking from Cosmos to another Corona spinbox.
(Cinema 4D)
- Performance fixes for UI freezes on some high-core CPUs.
- Fixed updates of rigged geometry in IR (and so also in Live Link).
- Fix of some Cosmos lights having incorrect rotation after import.
- Fixed some minor memory leaks.
- Solo node shows correct state after scene load.
VFB Fixes
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Fixed issue where clicking on Save in VFB would not save the currently displayed image, but the rendered image instead.
- Show image comparison splitter at the center even when zoomed in + draw also overlay A/B when zoomed in.
(3ds Max)
- Fixed not being able to maximize the VFB while IR was running as it re-adjusted its size.
- Responsiveness has been improved when using the docked VFB.
Caustics Fixes
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Interactive rendering restarts are now faster when using Caustics solver.
- Fixed issue where caustics did not work correctly with Slicers.
- Fixed issues in Caustics solver when Camera physical size is enabled - specifically incorrectly shaded caustics and shadows cast by the camera box.
(3ds Max)
- Fixed issue where caustics did not work correctly with Phoenix Foam.
Scatter Fixes
(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)
- Scatter is now uninstalled with Corona, but only if V-Ray of corresponding version is not found.
(3ds Max)
- Fixed issue when a selection of non-defined map channel could affect scatter distribution.
- Fixed issues with value precision sensitivity of scattering in some scenarios and improved consistency of scattering results across various scatter integrations.
OCIO Fixes
(3ds Max)
- Fixed issue where OCIO would convert everything to black when alpha is NAN.
- Fixed issue where saving values over 1 to PNG/JPG with OCIO would give incorrect results.
- OCIO config path from the environment variable "OCIO" is used only when the respective mode is selected in Color Management settings.
Try Corona 12, update 1
If you’re an existing Corona user, download Corona 12 here, and please share your feedback, questions, and results in the Corona Forum. We’d love to know what you think, and we’re even more excited to see what you create!
For those not yet using this easy-to-use renderer that’s capable of producing incredibly realistic results, try it out for free.
Thanks to everyone who tested the Corona 12, update 1 release candidates and shared their feedback. We appreciate your support and hope you enjoy using the latest version!
