Price Increase

[CharlyRT]

Although I don't like price increases, if good things come with them I'd be ok with it.

But, other than the tilesMap, which is saving me tons of time and it's something that Autodesk should've done a LONG time ago...

You could try BerconMaps, this plugin has been for far long, Bercon Tiles has more options than CoronaTiles and could be use with BerconGradients for displacements and have interesting ressults

[CharlyRT]

Insightful read.
A suggestion, if I may: Arnold. You are already getting it with 3dsMax subscription. CPU focused like Corona. Similar speed. Much more features. Just give it a try, dip a toe.

Wow I didnt imagine that Arnold was similar in terms on Speed, what about memory?
Does it "swallows" like Corona?

[James Vella]

Wow I didnt imagine that Arnold was similar in terms on Speed, what about memory?
Does it "swallows" like Corona?

Well Arnold has CPU and GPU, not sure but please share if you test it yourself :)

[JoeS]

I agree with most of the statement's. Corona has grown slowly stale in terms of development since chaos purchased it, Not surprised due to vray being the flag ship engine. Most of the updates have been hand me downs from vray, and scatter is not a feature I use since I have forest pack. The added bloatware ie scans, phoenix, cosmos etc could have been left out and kept the price down. Also tiles being a major feature of release eleven is really underwhelming since I use substance designer which is way faster and more advanced for tiles, bricks anything really.

On another not I have had an absolutely terrible experience with chaos support and am still going through a major issue that has been months.

Gone are the days a Corona update was super exciting to be apart of.

 

[triget]

The price would be acceptable if they added a GPU and Toon Shader. I keep watching the development of Corona and Cycles. Unfortunately, I choose Cycles more and more often. The speed of the GPU beats the speed of Corona.... Quality is not always as important as time.

They only make minor changes and change the version number.

[James Vella]

Wow I didnt imagine that Arnold was similar in terms on Speed, what about memory?

After a few tests I did over the weekend, 'speed' is certainly not how I would describe Arnold lol. Difference is night and day compared to Corona, Even rendering a simple box/teapot scene with GI on was terribly slow in Arnold both CPU/GPU. Painful to say the least.

[lupaz]

I regret my words in this post below in 2021 when complaining about the same this thread is complaining about.

Vray costs $700/year for the whole ecosystem.
Corona costs $360/year for a fraction of the services and development.

I don't get it.

I don't use scatter, cosmos, corona materias, scans or anything else other than core Corona. If the price increases were for the "ecosystem", I don't think it's justified for most of professional archviz artists.

[piotrus3333]

Wow I didnt imagine that Arnold was similar in terms on Speed, what about memory?

After a few tests I did over the weekend, 'speed' is certainly not how I would describe Arnold lol. Difference is night and day compared to Corona, Even rendering a simple box/teapot scene with GI on was terribly slow in Arnold both CPU/GPU. Painful to say the least.

It is quite hard to compare them. Very different engines. Corona might be faster with simple interior stills but get more complex scene, add animation and from the point where cached GI is no longer an option Arnold will show its strength. Memory wise its much more efficient.
There is also GPU option if you can make do with less features (less features make for much simpler render setup though).

[James Vella]

It is quite hard to compare them. Very different engines. Corona might be faster with simple interior stills but get more complex scene, add animation and from the point where cached GI is no longer an option Arnold will show its strength. Memory wise its much more efficient.
There is also GPU option if you can make do with less features (less features make for much simpler render setup though).

Yeah I figure since its used in some quite big film productions. However since we are referring mostly to Archviz related stuff,I found it quite slow for a few test scenes. I did some basic scenes with some boxes/teapots/lighitng techniques. Downloaded a bunch of test scenes from the Arnold archive, as well as converting some Vray/Corona scenes. The conversion was actually much better than I expected however even with GPU in Arnold (I checked the limitations and adjusted accordingly) its just not even close to on par with Vray GPU.

I think its a great option since its included with 3dsmax and has quite powerful features, conversion techniques, compatibility with osl, physical, pbr, exporting/importing all pretty neat stuff but if you work in a crunch time archiz studio then without the pipeline setup for it I would say it suits hobby artists and studios setup for Arnold more-so. Otherwise the renders that I see coming out of Arnold do look absolutely amazing.

[Artisticpixel]

I regret my words in this post below in 2021 when complaining about the same this thread is complaining about.

Vray costs $700/year for the whole ecosystem.
Corona costs $360/year for a fraction of the services and development.

I don't get it.

I don't use scatter, cosmos, corona materias, scans or anything else other than core Corona. If the price increases were for the "ecosystem", I don't think it's justified for most of professional archviz artists.

Agree, it seems like they are just adding gimmicks to upsell

[dj_buckley]

I wouldn't say they're gimmicks.  They're good features if you need them.  The problem is a lot of us don't want or need them and didn't ask for them, but now we're forced to pay for them whether we like it or not.

[ONO]

It is clearly obvious what is going on here first corona gets bought by chaos group then every amazing thing of corona gets stripped off and added into vray and lastly the implementation of ideas and development of corona gets slowed down or virtually non existent until Majority of the user base of corona can't take it any longer but to move over to Vray then Corona gets Killed off. The price increases are just to speed thing along smh.

[ONO]

Because at this point Vray gets developed faster and less buggier and any supposedly new feature coming to corona already exists a year or two earlier in Vray. So the question remains why pay for Corona when Vray is the Main focus of Chaos Group while still paying the same amount for lesser features.

[TomG]

It is clearly obvious what is going on here first corona gets bought by chaos group then every amazing thing of corona gets stripped off and added into vray and lastly the implementation of ideas and development of corona gets slowed down or virtually non existent until Majority of the user base of corona can't take it any longer but to move over to Vray then Corona gets Killed off. The price increases are just to speed thing along smh.

This is not what is happening - there is no slowing of Corona development, we have the same number of people in development, so that is progressing at the same speed as always, in that we are putting just as much work into every release as we always have. There are no plans for this to change. Just wanted to share that fact to avoid unnecessary speculation taking root.

[ONO]

It is clearly obvious what is going on here first corona gets bought by chaos group then every amazing thing of corona gets stripped off and added into vray and lastly the implementation of ideas and development of corona gets slowed down or virtually non existent until Majority of the user base of corona can't take it any longer but to move over to Vray then Corona gets Killed off. The price increases are just to speed thing along smh.

This is not what is happening - there is no slowing of Corona development, we have the same number of people in development, so that is progressing at the same speed as always, in that we are putting just as much work into every release as we always have. There are no plans for this to change. Just wanted to share that fact to avoid unnecessary speculation taking root.

You say this but time will tell