From an advertising background, I'm starting the development of a mini serie, in full 3d, occurring in the 50', using Corona as main renderer. The photography has to seem genuine, and taste like old emulsion and filming devices.
The goal is to maintain a render time under 20min for each frame, in HD 1920, helpfully the grain is sometime welcome, since i'm willing to simulate old film stocks, and will add more grain in post.
Now, some stills, with slight post :
From a Vray background, I was Looking for something very realistic and physically correct, I've considered both Arnold renderer on Maya and Corona (I've tested also Maxwell but it's definitely far too slow for animation, and a bunch of others : fryrender, arion, keyshot, mitsuba renderer, who is a future concurrent, I'm afraid, but nothing stable enough to be usable in production, like Corona and Arnold). Arnold is really huge, and have a vast set of advanced functions (maybe some not really needed, since they try to mimic the prehistoric RenderMan : who, in production, writes shaders by hand in our era?), but is about 2 time slower than Corona in a majority of situations. (Just try a room like the one in the Corona A4 benchmark scene with arnold, and cry, or, well, just go make a long coffee).
If you add SSS, particle support and a correct way to work with mattes, Corona can become the best renderer.
About particles, maybe you can add also a way to render them directly as pixels (one particle = one pixel + one pixel shadow for each unnocluded light), like Krakatoa renderer do, it's pretty fast even with millions of particles, and I think it's far simpler than a complete raytracer, and can be a nice additional choice for your solvers list.
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