Hey guys. thank you for the kind comments!.
I don't know if i could post animations but will post soon snapshots of the final shots as they were realeased. don't know about anim gifs :)
Christa. The thing about content ownership is that whatever you produce in house for film generally belongs to the Studio ( like FOX ) and they allow vfx houses to use the content for marketing and all but for us mere mortals is not so easy even if you actually did the work. but as long as you are not profiting with the images ( like selling postards :) ) its not an issue. For a professional gathering like this forum i would asumme its ok ( hence "fair use" ).
Ravalanche!
Well that's the juicy question right there. I just got my licence for 1.5 and have been very happy since. ( all the stuff i posted we used A5 and A6! ). But not a day had passed and i find myself forced to pick Arnold because there is a Client doing a sequence that involves multiple types of work like fx sims, lighting and so on. I do environments and generally doesn't matter what i use as they plug into the comp end parallel to everything but clients require sometimes a consistent solution across diferent fields. For example this case i mention has a big sim done in houdini and there is lighting work done in maya i think ( diferent freelancers, etc whatever ) and the sims in this particular case interact with the environment in a way that makes it no so easy to just comp resulting renders from difrent packages. So the client wants to see his sims and all looking awesome and consistent with other env work we have done using Corona and Pumm!. no can't do. No openVDB support and then everything goes downhill from there and i have to start using Arnold which is an amazing tool but damn is so far from ''rendering is magic'' and figure out now how to do without my lovely corona scatter and to make a simple material ..hehe, you get the idea.
I personaly dont need VDB support and all that stuff. but not having it gives to situations where you might end ditching Corona out of the pipeline even if Corona was already the best tool for the bulk of the work. So that's one.
The other big one is not having EXR 2.0 supported. Its a similar problem. Is not something you might need much in many cases ( i personally can get away old school for comping elements ) but there are cases deep data is requeried due the way a pipeline is built. and it is a powerfull tool when you are dealing not with a super good looking single image but with hundreds of shots.
I think those two can be considered basic pipeline compatibility tools.
The ones you mention are of course key things as core rendering /shading elements. Heterogeneous volumetrics absolutely. I would add a Thin layer shader into the list and maybe get some ideas from Arnold's SSS shader and they way is implemented.
And if Ondra can bring back the ReflOcl pass that would be swell :).
I think the rest are just little day to day goodies that make using the tool a pleasure or that overcomes Max own pretty much dead development like interface things and the sort. Is not missing much there really.
Zdepth pass could have separate X Y Z controls. that's handy.
Being able to lock to camera certain Corona scatter values like rotation.
A killer multi camera projection shader maybe.
Little stuff like that :)
Anyway. I do think Corona can maintain its elegance and fit much better in a vfx pipeline with very few key additions. i don't think it needs to go overboard and be like Arnold to be widely embraced in Vfx but it could easily blow out of the water some mayor tools for medium size projects, specific types of sequences, comercials, etc. by adressing those additions.
