The most wanted feature?

[philipbonum]

chiming in for +1 to Vantage

[TomG]

chiming in for +1 to Vantage

And "willing to pay the extra $600 a year on top of the Corona subscription?" - that's an important point to let us know when chiming in for Vantage :) Thanks!

[Jahred]

I also think that a gateway to Vantage will be important in the future, this software saved me for a recent video, exceptional order, very tight deadlines. It manages to digest large scenes and it's quite surprising (no less than 16GB of ram gpu that said). It's the parsing time recalculated each frame in Corona that made me change engine for lack of time.

That said, having to go through vRay, take a universal converter, check all materials and compatibilities, adapt, export vrayscene: I wouldn't have the courage to do it for every project.

I don't think Chaos will change this new pricing policy; it brings it into line with Enscape, but the latter seems more complete to me. Vantage lacks a good batch rendering system with multiple camera setups to make the system truly versatile and usable in a pro workflow, otherwise it weighs down the process and wastes human time, it saves an enormous amount of rendering time, so we turn a blind eye.

Vantage is a software that I could consider taking on a monthly basis depending on my orders but not by having to pay vRay in addition. It is currently too dependent on vRay despite their version 2 which wants us to believe the opposite, it is this tunnel which is blocking it financially for me.

To summarize, if Corona could investigate an export in "vray scene" (Chaos/Cosmos scene in the long term, to make the whole thing more universal with its own definition of materials, mesh, etc.).  This would finally make it possible to create a Chaos ecosystem that can move from one software to another using this scene export.  Opening the doors to Vantage, or even Enscape in the future. I don't realize the work, it seems less complex than rewriting the Parsing or develop hybrid capabilites for Corona, a kind of ++ converter that goes in depth.

[lollolo]

I also made a request for Vantage support, I think it would be very helpful in combination with Corona. Corona is super, but sometimes it would be handy to have something faster, for preview or animations with tight budget.
Would I be willing to pay additional for Vantage? Sure! I don't expect two render engines for the price of one.  But I'm a bit surprised how much it costs. As reference:
Corona 323
V-Ray 419
Redshift 274
Octane 240
D5 360

Vantage 599? More than any render engine above? I would have expected something between 300-400. 600 Seems overpriced.
It is the price of a very, very mature engine, with all the features you ever wanted. I don't know if this is the case... Maybe it will be in a few years?!
Would I still pay it? Maybe. Or I would switch to a cheaper engine. I don't know... What do others think?

[JoachimArt]

I agree, I think Vantage is overpriced currently ..I mean I would never swap out corona for vantage if that was the choice, so selling it for nearly twice the price is kinda crazy.. But, since I'm never going to switch to Blender and Eevee, this is the best option for "realtime" gpu rendering in max I have seen and I assume it will only get better - and eventually be able to replace a lot/most render jobs in the future. I would love for it to come as a bundle with corona rather than Phoenix, for 800 a year or something. In my opinion. But all in all I think its one of the best features Corona could add, and then just ditch the idea of a hybrid render.

And "willing to pay the extra $600 a year on top of the Corona subscription?" - that's an important point to let us know when chiming in for Vantage :) Thanks!

I would be surprised if anyone would think they can get Vantage AND corona for the price of one.

[philipbonum]

chiming in for +1 to Vantage

And "willing to pay the extra $600 a year on top of the Corona subscription?" - that's an important point to let us know when chiming in for Vantage :) Thanks!

Yes, if it reads 100% of all corona related maps and materials and works out of the box. And I might do it even if it ain't a 100%

[Ink Visual]

Same here,
We're paying for Vantage already even though we need to go through the hassle of converting everything from Corona to Vray. We do plenty of animations and Vantage is really handy to present drafts/previz stuff to clients.
We're pretty dissapointed that is has been taken off Vray Premium Subscribtion though. On the other hand this allows us to only rent it during months we actually use it.

[TomG]

Thanks to all so far for giving good, complete, honest feedback, this is all very useful! Also, do not take this as "that's the end of the feedback" - anyone else who wants to say yes they'd pay for Vantage, or no they wouldn't, I still would like to hear from you, this is proving to be a very useful discussion and it can continue for as long as someone has something to say. Thanks!

[aeviz]

chiming in for +1 to Vantage

And "willing to pay the extra $600 a year on top of the Corona subscription?" - that's an important point to let us know when chiming in for Vantage :) Thanks!

Speaking on my own behalf, absolutely. We acknowledge that it requires more coding time, potentially necessitating an expanded team. Hence, it seems logical to pay extra in this context.

[zaar]

Just chiming in here since your are talking about this. I've been thinking about making a more thought out post about my thoughts on V-Ray, Corona and Vantage.

I've been thinking about this basically since the merge. I've used v-ray since it was brand new, and when Corona got enough momentum many collegues wanted to switch. I was reluctant because I just felt I now had to great renderers on their own, but looking at them together, they we're both incomplete. What ever I did, I missed something from the other. I grow to prefer Corona for arch viz. But every now and then I get work that requires v-ray for certain reasons.

Paying for Corona + PhoenixFD and then having to buy V-ray + Phoenix (to get a floating license). I feel like I pay for Phoenix, cosmos and scans etc twice!

I want a Chaos Premium subscription that includes it all! Even Vantage. And this is probably very doable from Chaos side. But it leads to the problem of something that hsn't seem to be very doable or high on the agenda and that is cross compability. I don't want Corona UVWrandomizer and a V-ray UVWRandomizer, I want a Chaos UVWRandomizer that works everywhere. I understand that from a development point of view, this is much harder and slows things down. Not just because what ever map or function you invent, it has to work I many different places. And also the competition between the teams has been very good. First Corona UVW Randomizer was great, then the V-ray implementation was a little better, and now Corona has updated again to better. I see that it's difficult and has drawbacks. But from a customer and user perspective, I want my chaos stuff to just work with chaos stuff. And building a chaos ecosystem, I remember the CG Garage episode after the merge with Enscape, talking about how cross compability and unified ways of describing things was an important thing a head, but so far I feel I'm seeing very little of it?

I posted about this before, when I had troubles baking textures in Corona and had to switch to v-ray mid-project. If things were more compatible it would have been a non-issue. Just "get v-ray for that" and you can subscribe to it for just those months. And if that was the case you can even remove baking from Corona, and let it specialise on being the best cpu renderer for archviz.

And if this comes across as harsh or unpopular, just know that this comes from someone who cares a lot about these products and wants to keep using them.

[Juraj]

That's very much what I expected from the Merging (of Chaos) as well, but it never materialized. Now that we have most features (for me it was waiting 5 years for Scans), I don't care but it's definitely missed potential.

[Marijan]

chiming in for +1 to Vantage

And "willing to pay the extra $600 a year on top of the Corona subscription?" - that's an important point to let us know when chiming in for Vantage :) Thanks!

If we want to use Vantage now its paying extra $600 for it plus paying for Vray plus all the hassle with scene converting.
So having to spend "only" 600$ seems not so bad :)

[TomG]

Just another note of thanks for the continuing feedback, all very helpful!

[schummi]

Hey guys, not sure if this have been mentioned before, but custom resolution for a corona camera would be nice too :)
Also, please give back an ability to detach the curves editor window from the VFB, current window size requires a microscope to adjust curves

[TomG]

Yep both have been mentioned and logged :)