Hi Everyone! I'm a little late to the Corona party, but boy am I excite now that I'm here!
I remember seeing a little about Corona... maybe a year or so ago, but it has somehow flown completely under my radar since then. Now that I've found it, and gotten to try it out, I can't believe what a fantastic render engine it truly is!
I've probably used or tested nearly every engine out there over the last 15-20 years, from Accurender to Mitsuba to Thea. Like most here I typically use Vray as my main production tools. However, I've been desperately trying to move away from 3dsMax/Vray for many years now, always hoping to get to that next level of realism/quality, along with a more stable, simplified workflow. Probably starting with the first Maxwell beta, then as one of the first Fryrender testers, and most currently with Thea (which I actually do like... and still have a lot of hope for), but sadly they all have their various shortcomings and technical issues that keeps me stuck with Vray.
That said, I'm really excite to say that Corona might just be "The One"! It's like the very best of Vray and Thea (and maybe a little Indigo) got together and had a love child, and it was named Corona!!
To Keymaster (Ondra, right?) congratulations on all your hard work! It will no doubt pay off for you greatly in the long run! You clearly seem to understand what us rendering artists truly need. So, thank you for producing a terrific piece of software!!
I've been doing a lot of technical testing of Corona V5 over the last couple weeks and so far it's handled nearly everything I've thrown at it!! And I've been try hard to break it too, but it seems to be rock solid! Plus it's fast as hell and has many of the favorite features from Vray that I still can't get in Thea/Maxwell! (like edge beveling, AO/Dirt, handling xref/forestpack without issue).
I haven't really had time to fully finish anything yet, but here's a comparison test I did with an older Vray project converted to Corona. Big thanks to DeadClown for providing his vray converter, it really work awesome and made converting this scene so easy!! The grass was Vrayfur and the plants Vrayproxies, so wasn't able to convert those and not enough time to replace them yet.
Anyhow, the Corona image really looks fantastic! While subtle, it really shows that next level of quality/realism I've been looking for!
Corona Version
Vray Original
