The opinion of a guy:
Let me tell you my honest opinion, after that anyone can kill me if he/she wants to.
First of all, I love to work in Corona and I respect you guys. I worked at a software development company for a longer time 120 years ago I know a little bit how things go.
I use Corona every day in the office. Almost a year ago, fortunately I was able to persuade my boss to switch to Corona from Vray.
I was a subscriber as well for a long time, much more than a year as far as I remember.
But how the development goes it makes me a dissapointed. Lets see what happened in Corona 2 one by one with all my respect.
- Advanced camera/bokeh effects - Nice, thats what we like to see, it adds to the overall quality, unfortunately our clients atm don't really want to pay for closeup DOF shots, but its a nice feature. I don't really use it, but thumbs up.
- Corona toolbar - Cool, it should have arrived no later than in Corona 1.3
- Memory optimization - Adds nothing to the overall quality, not a new feature, it helps people who have less RAM.
- Heterogenous media - Long avaited feature, I know, but in archviz (main platform I think most of the guys here from that field) in 99% of the projects good for nothing.
- Vray compatibility - Nice to have that but overall its good for nothing, not an important thing to have. We have a nice converter, I never use Vray stuff in my Corona scene I always convert them from Vray before I merge. Probably it was a "request" from Chaos Group so we can understand that. But again, nothing new, doesn't speed up your render, adds nothing to the overall quality.
- Corona Material Library Update 2 - see as above. (not a new feature, adds nothing to the overall quality or speed. (OK, not completely true but if you are not a newbie you know how to create nice shaders).
- Bugfixes - Always nice to have those.
- Displacement optimization - Cool.
For me, that was the point, after Corona 2 has been released when I cancelled my personal subscription because the reasons I've mentioned above.
Now you guys have released Corona 3 and the main new feature is the denoiser what is a generic thing (I mean it's the implementation of nVidia's technology, it's a common thing these days, if you have it cool, if you don't it's a shame), the rest (according to quality or speed) nothing too special. Autombump is nice anyways.
A like to work with the real time denoiser in the office so I have decided to renew my personal subscription as well but for me, thats the only real advantage of Corona 3, the other things, like the new multimap feature or the another Corona lister are nice to have but with a little bit of more work or with 3rd party thingies you were able to do those before Corona 3 as well.
I can only hope we can see something really cool in Corona 4 what finally would add some real thing to the overall quality. (like PBR thingies, caustics, tonemapping, or things like Geopattern)
I would love to hear some response from you.
Peace and I love everybody.