Thank you much guys :- ) It's only very small project but I sort of liked it, it gave me quite freedom and I always enjoy that, although with very narrow time constraints.
Really nice images! I really like Forest_Vignette1.jpg The settle DOF adds a lot of realism
In-render DOF :- ) I just set the GI/AA slightly lower (4-8) so I can get more AA passes in same time, because GI will be long clean before the DOF converged.
Makes life easier, I almost always use subtle DOF, unless it's main hero-shot, where I avoid it, most clients don't particulary like it, but it's ok, it should be informative.
And the results in interiors are far superior in terms of lightning compared to vray.
..and a less technical comment/question :) ... as far as commercial work goes: why are you choosing Corona?
render times? ...did you use batch rendering or backcburner with strips??
Maybe not the best thing to write on forum but Corona
doesn't give me much nicer images under most conditions, I can get almost identical look in Corona and Vray. My work is still my work...it's not work of Corona.
I would be lying if I say I don't get slightly upset when few (or lot...) folks write stuff like "Wow, Corona power". Like,...huh ?
But it makes my life
so much easier, that I literally don't spend a second worrying about setting up something. I don't, I create, build my scenes and render them. It's not only about saving time, but also sanity. It keeps me in better mood overall
knowing that I don't need to care about stuff that isn't important to your results. It always render and
finishes and gives you good technical condition (no artifacts, etc..) It's also so fast evolving, and it's evolving in right direction, both Ondra and Adam understand what is the correct direction to go, they don't listen blindly to few "pros" who live outside of reality (like it happens on Chaos forum sometimes). They listen, but still keep their vision, don't compromise the simplicity while not being too rigid about finding solutions to issues. They have my trust in way no other renderer can give me, I believe once it goes commercial it will evolve finely to allow basically any production.
Render times, few hours, depending how many machines were free :- ) I don't have short times, but they're still super decent for where I push it, don't optimalize, just render hi-res. Comparatively, it's far faster than brute force (or way faster than all the unbiased ones), but obviously, not as fast as fully cached (IR/Final gather/etc..). I don't care much, I also prefer to simply buy more PCs.
I use distributed directly or Backburner (with distributed managed by server), but regular, no strips. Maybe I was lucky, but I never got any issues with neither network rendering
second set is too bright imho
Personal aesthetics :- ) I have few images that are way brighter than this.
that gives a lot of triangles and corona cant shadow those cause needs an aproximation (terminator something i think it's called).
Its clearly visible in "Forest_nigth 8k".
Like I said, it was incorrect normal map, if you check the close-up, which was rendered later, there is no issue, because I changed it. Terminator is when there are not enough subdivs to smoothly show normal map, but this was issue of the normal map itself, It's tesselated enough.
(PS: who is veronica?)
My girlfriend, my business partner too :- ) We run the studio together, with two modelers at the moment.