It would also be great to introduce metalness workflow to be able to reproduce more physically accurate metals without clamping the fresnel as explained in vlado's post :
https://www.chaosgroup.com/blog/understanding-metalness
https://github.com/vkoylazov/metalness?fbclid=IwAR07XIVw3uhInGyymMCbsXU_4ET3w0WojJBXWMvUwZPSX7hgk8yE_zkU5Gs
Metalness is planned for next version as part of new principled shader, was requested 100 times, and looks like we'll get it :- ).
But this is strictly workflow, you're not required to clamp any Fresnel at all even right now. 999 leaves Fresnel disabled 99perc. (for 100perc. you have to map the value into fresnel texture slot), and then you place your metallic albedo into front slot of fallof in reflective slot. Metalness will take 3 steps into one, but visual result will not change from what we have right now.
In Corona, if I want sharp detail using bump maps, I tend to reduce the blurring, but many times this causes a lot of noise and it's basically unusable. So in my experience I always need to have blurring, which is not ideal.
Yeah, I would highly suggest avoiding <1 blurring in Corona, it will eventually lead to some sort of visual artifact at arbitrary combination of resolution & glancing angle when you least expect it. It will give you the result you want in one moment and that produce total artifact in slightly changed angle/resolution.
To make CoronaBitmap more useful, a totally different algorithm should have been introduced as high-quality alternative.
But to be fair to Corona, Corona produces superior and
correct result from normal map, something F-Storm still doesn't. In fact, it took a ton of convincing and time for the F-Storm dev to even support normal map, as he didn't even understood why they would be preferable. So this is tie.
But yeah, microgeometry support in shader would be impeccable stuff !