I've been on a nearly 4 month FStorm vacation and liked the results it gave me. Haven't been paying attention to Corona during the time and have a lot of catching up to do, so first I wanted to ask if this discussion has been picked up by the devs?
Yes please write some comparisons. I wanted to look into it too but the lawsuit surrounding it has put me off testing it in a production environment
I've been testing out F-Storm on a few product shots and have to say it's really amazing. I don't know what they are doing but the way bitmaps are handled is really something - textures appear to come out much sharper (and not artificial "sharpen tool" sharper). For example at grazing angles and in fine reflection/glossy maps, textures are much clearer
More on topic: The tone mapping in F-Storm is godly. It's as close to DSLR like as you can get from any render engine I've used. Everything just looks so "real" and photographically punchy - it's actually quite a task to produce a badly tone mapped image in FStorm.
Now if only Corona could copy FStorms tone mapping 1:1 (and FStorms geopattern) that would be insane. Corona has too many great features and great ease of use so it will still be my daily driver (until 32gb+ GPU's start coming out...).
I have a single GTX 1080. Do you reckon I could handle small interior shots?
I've mostly been using it for product shots and animations with heavy DOF/motion blur and for those applications it's working out faster than Corona by a long shot. But I'm not willing to risk it on a complex commercial interior scene. My setup: 12 core Xeon with dual Titan X's (maxwell). I have to say that the prospect of being able to scale performance linearly with add on GPU's is really nice/cost effective.
For example, you'd have to go with either a multi core Xeon system + render nodes (and all of the costs associated with a new system) or a single threadripper v2. Or with FStorm you could simply stick in as many GPU's as you want into your existing low cost system.
The only issue here is GPU memory limitation, but this will soon be a thing of the past with either out of core rendering/next gen GPU's with 32gb+ RAM. FStorm also seems to be insanely memory efficient and even has a bitmap compression algorithm that further cuts RAM usage. Corona had better keep up as I can easily see FStorm overtaking in the future once it irons out a few kinks/adds more compatibility. Crazy to think that it's just one Russian guy who made it!
Personally I would have like to have seen a Corona/FStorm merger rather than with Vray. The new tech FStorm brings to the table is insane.
The stuff that Johannes Lindqvist/Illusive images put out is what made me stray from Corona somewhat, but as mentioned before there are a lot of lacking features that I use in almost all projects (multi-light, material map compatibility, Corona scatter e.t.c).