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[Max] General Discussion / Re: Render Legion and Corona Join Forces with Chaos Group
« on: 2017-08-26, 21:18:45 »
The implication was made on the blog that users of corona and vray aren't the same, so the render engines are flexible(vray) and simple to use(corona)
Does this mean, that in the future a request of a feature (existing in vray) might come from corona users, and corona devs would simply say: well, there's vray for that..? Since, you might not want to compete...?
This is the big question! I would love to know what is the adjusted vision for both products, as there is no way they will stay in the same track as before (competing with one another).
What makes sense for me is that Vray would focus more and more in the VFX and production industry, people who spend all of their time rendering and would like a lot more control and flexibility, archviz users spend very little time rendering compared to VFX and they holdback the engine, Vray has to tailor to 2 audiences with very different expertise levels. This market is also used to paying way more for software, so expect vray to become more expensive as it abandons "casual" users.
Corona on the other hand does not need to adapt to attract a single VFX user. They will probably stay where they are at and probably become simpler. I imagine corona becoming a "virtual DSLR" focused 100% on capturing reality instead of faking it in any way.
Since corona is not even feature complete for archviz (hair, voumetrics, caustics, skin...) the plans in the short and mid term will probably stay the same.
But once corona feels complete for 80% of current users, it will probably start diverging more and more from vray.
For most corona users like mayself that are escaping the complexities of other engines, this is great news. For the small number of users that want corona to become something that it's not already, you are probably out of luck.
The one super exciting thing about this is compatibility between the two, get the best of both worlds without compromise. Except paying for 2 licenses of course ...
Actually, the days when VFX rendering meant faking a lot of things are now mostly gone. It took the somewhat cumbersome VFX industry a while to adapt new, simpler, physically based approaches, but they have been enjoying it for a while. So VFX renderer does not mean complicated renderer. VFX renderer, by today's standards simply means feature complete renderer, at least when it comes to major features.
Corona is just hair, skin and volumetrics effects away from becoming a VFX renderer, and hair is already present in dailies, skin is already implemented and being polished, and last time I checked, volumetrics were still on the roadmap. I am also pretty certain that all of these 3 last major features will be implemented in Corona fashion: fast, simple and convenient to use while flexible just enough to cover vast majority of requirements.
They also mentioned on several repeated occasions that there are no plans to limit development direction of Corona in any way, so even if some more requirements for VFX work arise in the future, there's nothing standing in the way of them being implemented into Corona.