Corona Renderer for Archicad Alpha 2 released!

We are pleased to announce that Corona Renderer for Archicad Alpha 2 is released!

We’ve been developing this version of Corona Renderer for a while; Alpha 1 was just for internal testing, but Alpha 2 is now ready for you to test!

Since this is an Alpha version, it is far from feature complete, and there are very likely some bugs in the software, so please keep that in mind (especially if considering using it for any commercial projects! You are welcome to do so, but be aware that there may be crashes, instability, missing features, etc.)

If you’ve not heard of Chaos Corona before, here’s the quick guide to what it is. Corona is a high-performance (un)biased photorealistic renderer, which focuses on being:

• Easy to Use
  We put as much focus into making the software intuitive – with great results out of the box without having to change the defaults – as we do into the performance of the software itself. You can stay focused on being an artist or architect, and not have to become a technician manipulating scores of obscure parameters; we make it as close to “just press render” as it’s possible to get!
• Powerful
  Corona Renderer keeps everything physically plausible, from materials to lights, which means it gives natural, realistic lighting, delivered with great rendering performance.
• Affordable
  If you are wondering about jumping aboard now and growing to love the engine (as almost everyone who tries it does!), we can assure you that keeping things affordable is one of our main aims for Corona – so when the commercial version comes out, it won’t break the bank whether you are a hobby user, a small company, or a large firm with 10s or 100s of artists.

What's in the first release

If you’ve used, seen or read about Corona for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, these features will be familiar to you – however, if you’ve never heard of Corona Renderer before, below we give you a comprehensive introduction to how it will revolutionize your workflow!

Interactive Rendering

Interactive Rendering (IR) is a game-changer for your workflow, making sure that we make YOU faster as well as your renders (after all, your time is much more important than your machine’s!)

It’s simple to use, does a great job of preserving detail while removing noise, and as a result you can often save up to 50% to 70% off of your render time!

The Corona VFB

The Corona VFB brings together many aspects of Corona into one convenient window.

You use it for:

• Viewing Interactive Rendering and final renders,
• Adjusting all post-processing options before, during or after rendering (including during Interactive Rendering), such as all tone mapping, bloom and glare, applying a LUT, etc.,
• Saving and loading post-processing settings,
• Adjusting LightMix, and saving and loading LightMix variations,
• Viewing render elements,
• Setting the right denoising blend,
• Saving your renders (both final, and results from Interactive Rendering).

Post Processing

Corona aims to reduce or even remove the need to open up some external image editor after rendering, and lets you adjust and tweak the image right in the VFB.

Even as you are rendering, you can:

• Adjust Exposure, White Balance, Color Tint, Highlight Compression, Contrast, Saturation, Filmic Shadows/Highlights, etc.,
• Add Vignetting,
• Add Bloom and Glare,
• Apply a LUT,
• Create, adjust and save / load custom Curves.

Corona Materials and Textures

The Corona Material is a one-stop material that lets you create anything from stone to metal to glass to wood… whatever your project needs! We even have our own custom Material and Texture editors, including a range of objects you can use in the preview, plus you can rotate the preview to check how the material looks from any angle.

Corona Lights

Already in Alpha 2, we have the Corona Sun (based on sunlight in Archicad and fully configurable), and partial implementation of the Corona Light (at present, IES and other advanced features have not been implemented).

The default sky can also be disabled, or overridden with a texture so that you can use HDRI images to light your scene. Common methods for mapping textures to the environment are implemented.

Support For Native Geometry, Lights and Materials

All Archicad geometry is supported, so will render as expected without having to make any adjustments, changes or concessions. Alpha 2 also has excellent support for native Archicad lights, including non-physical “fakes” such as semi-transparent or missing shadows, no falloff, etc.

The Corona Image Editor

You can think of the Corona Image Editor (CIE) as a standalone version of the Corona VFB – save any render to the .CXR format (Corona EXR), and you can adjust that image at any time without having to re-render or open Archicad.

This includes all the post-processing settings, using LightMix, and adjusting denoising. You can also load and save post-processing settings and LightMix settings to exchange them freely in either direction between the CIE and the VFB in Archicad.

Render Elements

Sometimes you need full control of a render in post-production, which is where Render Elements come in. They let you create special separate passes so that you can adjust various components in your image (such as tweaking reflection brightness, or the strength of bounced light), and you can use them to apply special processing too (such as masking out individual objects, adding depth of field or fog, etc.)

Archicad does not natively support render elements, but Corona has a comprehensive range of them – in fact, Corona for Archicad supports the same list of render elements as any other version:

The full list of Render Elements is below:

• Basic/Direct
• Basic/Emission
• Basic/Indirect
• Basic/Reflect
• Basic/Refract
• Basic/Translucency
• Basic/Volumetrics
• Geometry/Normals dot product
• Geometry/Normals shading
• Geometry/Normals geometry
• Geometry/Primitive coords
• Geometry/Uvw coords
• Geometry/World coords
• Geometry/Z depth
• Mask/ID
• Shading/Albedo
• Shading/Alpha
• Shading/Beauty
• Shading/Bloom and glare
• Shading/Components
• Shading/LightMix
• Shading/LightSelect
• Shading/Raw component
• Shading/Shadows
• Shading/Source color
• Texture

Smaller features

• Monochrome model effect – lets you override materials in the scene with a simple “clay” material, preserving properties of some materials such as opacity, reflections, refractions etc. as necessary:

• Robust bump mapping and displacement.
• Archicad’s Sun Studies and Fly-throughs are supported; motion blur is supported in Fly-throughs.
• Help is available in-program, thanks to descriptive pop-up tooltips.
• You can choose to only render the Render Elements, greatly speeding up render time by removing the Beauty pass (ideal for those times you discover you need a particular Render Element that you didn’t create when you first rendered the scene!)