Hi there
Last week I've finally chosen to give Corona a try since I've heard many good things about it. I'm coming from V-Ray and I have to admit, that working with Corona is very straightforward and satisfying. Everything works with the click of a button, no crappy default settings, fast and solid distributed rendering..
And I think for an Alpha Stage, Corona still has many features that I use on a daily basis with V-Ray.
This is a scene I've created the last days, first set up with V-Ray, but then converted for a test ride with Corona. As you see the scene has very little direct lighting and I really had my troubles getting it to render in V-Ray with an adequate quality without letting the rendertime explode. I find IR & LC is barely usable in such scenes since it creates easily visible splotches. With BR there was still very much noise to clean up by the AA engine which let the rendertime explode. That made me decide to switch to Corona.
I can say that rendertimes are around 2x faster with Corona which made me drop my chin. I think it handles indirect illumination very well. The materials are easy to set up if you're coming from V-Ray, I like the constantly active Fresnel formula and I even think, the BRDF is closer to reality than Phong/Ward of V-Ray 2.4 (although this experience could have gotten misjudged by my excitement).
But at one point I was a little confused. Our Dual Xeon render slave handled the rendering process very badly. It was half as fast as our Hexacore Slaves. Is there a reason for that?
3ds Max for Scene creation
Corona for Rendering
Nuke for Post
