I'll have to tell a bit more about the project, so please be patient ;) ..
I started with the Project back in 2010 and originally it was just meant as a "test" for fragmenting and finally collapsing the whole building. The "simplicity" of the Architecture was the key reason why I chose this Cathedral but unfortunately lead to many frustration moments when I tried to make a contrasty and beautiful lighting - the cathedral is a nightmare if you want to render several shots with one lightsetup. Each and every piece of the base stone structure is modelled water tight and ready to be fragmented (which is why this was way more difficult to do than it would have been without the fragmenting idea in mind).
Anyways, after many render tests in Vray I had to admit that it was simply impossible to render animations in reasonable time and quality - not even speaking about moving objects and collapsing geometry.
The many rather little windows in this church and the "bounce-light-only"-archs on ground level made it very hard for biased methods do deliver a good quality result... and that's where corona finally comes into place ;)
I tried a lot of different renderers with the scene but none of them were able to render it in a satisfying time.
Some time last year I discovered Corona and made a few very encouraging tests which then were the reason why I made the Corona Converter Script ;-) .
And besides that... Corona is the only other renderer (compared to Vray, MR, fR) which is able to use the native max maps and is not using some shitty exporter or a custom material editor.
Some data:
each Frame rendered ~3 hours on dual Xeon e5 2620 @2.0 Ghz + 30mins for the fog stuff, all in 1080p
[edit] Just to clarify: do not render the fogtrick with the beauty render, it will take a lot of time that way. Do it in a seperate scene if you must have it ;)
my own opinion what I could have done better:
- floor material, but unfortunately Corona is not yet supporting everything I need.
- the Stone shaders (somehow they don't really look well..)
- a fresh view on the scene :D I really got blind to any problems since I'm working on it for years now
- the models are outdated, I would do some things a lot different today.
- compositing: oh my... don't get me started ;)
- AA flickering on the reflecting parts (more a technical problem though)
Anyways, hope you like it :)
P.S.: Watch in 1080p!