General concerns about Corona Renderer for Blender development

[Gustavo82]

Corona for.Blender??? It's my dream Twitter

[francesco pretelli]

I hope Corona for Blender will arrive soon !

[maru]

Hi all,

As usual, thanks for sharing your thoughts and for being so engaged. This means a lot to us.
Unfortunately, it seems there is a strong dissonance here between what the situation looks like from the perspective of users and developers.

Currently (and it’s been like this for years now), the biggest obstacle is the Blender's license:
https://www.blender.org/about/license/

We have two options how Corona for Blender could be developed:
- We (Corona Team) develop Corona for Blender plugin - in this case, we would have to make Corona Renderer fully open source. This is not going to happen.
- The community develops an open-source exporter, while we develop the commercial, non-open-source Corona Renderer software - that's what we have right now.

The previous forum thread "Why there won't be Corona for Blender / Why is Corona Blender exporter developed by community, not by us" is still valid:
https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=792.0

Here are some quotes by Ondra from that forum thread, they still apply:

It is possible to make commercial plugin for GPL software, I am not saying it is not, its just the speed and quality will be worse and implementation will be much more complicated

The licensing limitation is usually circumvented by splitting the plugin into the free and commercial part. The free part just by itself is useless, and needs the commercial part.
That being said, the blender community is willing to develop the free part, so we are happy to supply the commercial part, to have blender rendering solution in form of exporter + standalone.

Having said all of the above, IT IS NOT IMPOSSIBLE that we will have a better Blender to Corona Standalone exporter in the future.

Also, please remember that we get lots of requests for which software to add Corona to next, and we will continue to review and consider all of those.

Even visualization agency that does have many offices in UK, United States or Hungary seems wanting Corona for Blender.

Can you explain what exactly you mean by that?

[Zorian]

Thanks Maru for your effort and answering to this post.

We have an exporter to the Blender version which is currently outdated.  Can you consider of make own exporter with cooperation with Chaos group? They are currently working on exporter for Blender 2.8 and exporter made for previous versions of Blender was faster than this one made by Glen. Many of us already changed Blender to the new one, which are more stable and better optimized than previous versions and I cannot imagine going back to 2.79 when I already used 2.8 for two months.

[PetrT]

May be its more reasonable to hire someone, who can do addon and collect him money via donations from special service
First collect money and after this hire

[leandro_cs]

We have two options how Corona for Blender could be developed:
- We (Corona Team) develop Corona for Blender plugin - in this case, we would have to make Corona Renderer fully open source. This is not going to happen.
- The community develops an open-source exporter, while we develop the commercial, non-open-source Corona Renderer software - that's what we have right now.

Thanks for your reply Maru. My 2 cents on this:

We all understand that making Corona Renderer fully open source is not an option, I think everyone agree on that.
Main problem I see in the current development model is that there is just an independent developer who dedicates his free time to work in the exporter.
It is certainly an admirable and heroic initiative, but the live keeps going on and bills keep coming so the development naturally slows down.

In this scenario, it's hard for users to guess if will take weeks, months or even years to get it ready to use in production.
This uncertainty ends up pushing away many larger studios from joining/donating to this project.

My guess is that would be nice having the Blender/Corona exporter also being developed/managed officially by Corona Team.
This would bring more credibility and attention to the project, and consequently bigger players as well.

Also, would be nice to have an option for buying just the licence of the Corona Standalone (to use specifically with Blender for example).
Without having to buy the full version integrated with 3ds Max or Cinema 4D versions.

[Zorian]

IMO even exporter which is using Cycles nodes to create Corona materials should be awesome. Just like Luxrender did and It's allows you to use viewport rendering to set all the lights and composition, which in Cycles is super fast to initiate, and final render make in Corona Standalone.  Nowadays most of the materials are made using PBR so that shouldn't be really hard.

[boco]

I don't really understand why there would be not a possibility to pay a developer that would make a free exporter for a commercial renderer? It would be the same as hiring a guy who works on the c4d integration except the bridge he makes for corona would be free, that's all.


I think the corona team should consider 3 things:

1. blender is getting serious traction everywhere and will become the go-to 3D tool of the future for every new user working in 3D. Even older 3d users learn it and use it on the side untill they take the step to change completely. It's just a matter of time before the marketshare of blender (even in archviz) will become too big to ignore, so why not anticipate and make a decent exporter now?

2. there is a serious need for a realistic archviz renderer inside blender, cycles is ok but not designed for archviz at today's standards. It's quality is inbetween lumion and vray in terms of renderoutput. The only serious competitor is octane for the moment.

3. until now a lot of blender users where hobbyist and weren't ready to pay for a rendersoftware, but this is changing fast, a lot of compagnies are switching or consider switching. Those will be ready to pay a fair price if the exporter is nice and they can render with the corona-quality.

[djtartak]

You can see Redshift and Arnold almost coming around the corner for Blender users too.
But just considering how great and popular Corona is for archviz makes the whole Blender/Corona combo worthwhile.
Keeping my fingers crossed for this.
I can see so much more interest in Max-Blender switches lately (propably related to unpredictable shady licence moves by AD)
Blender's licence may be an obstacle for the devs, but at least it's predictable :)

[Omnimorphic]

We all understand that making Corona Renderer fully open source is not an option, I think everyone agree on that.
Also, would be nice to have an option for buying just the licence of the Corona Standalone (to use specifically with Blender for example).
Without having to buy the full version integrated with 3ds Max or Cinema 4D versions.

I think there would be a substantial amount of interest in this.

[Binke]

I know the corona team has made comments about the difficulties of the blender license model.

But does anyone know how Redshift is handling it? They are developing a plugin which will not follow the Octane-way of doing a custom blender build that connects to their server, , and apparently they found no issues at all with the licensing thing? I remember people were concerned it would get slower etc, but they seemed to have solved it.

Not much info out there, but there is screenshots and videos on their trello: https://trello.com/b/QASr74yB/redshift
and a video showing the alpha:

[defipodete]

Hello community and Corona developers.

Id like to add my 2 cents.
I started using 3dsmax as most of guys that started many years ago. Then after lot of frustration I bought c4d. It was great upgrade for my workflow. Then I switched to blender from curiosity. And honeslty, im staying here. For now its better almost at everything, except rendering options. I use mainly Cycles, but octane gives better results. Slowly trying with it. But if corona would get full support and usability with blender - i would pay for it without doubt. It would be great tool for archviz.

[kbbk]

Dear Corona Team,
seeing what Otoy did with Octane – provide fully integrated commercial renderer with their blender build + licencing app I (and I bet many others) don't understand why couldn't You do this as well, huh? There is a big chunk of blender community who'd love to use Corona because it's a great & fairly priced tool, but cost of 3ds or C4D is just unbearable and those are very unfortunate and only options so far.
Community developed exporter has to little people working on it, and if not integrated with live preview – people won't be interested in it.

[P3N]

I heard somewhere, that Blender's GPL licence is a restriction of the plugin development. But it's not true, because plugins it's a python library, and therefore use Python license. Also Cycles licensed under Apache, why not to inject Corona code inside Cycles and sell it as Corona-Cycles. For example ECycles, or CyclesC4D sell their products,  Cycles for Rhino also not free.

[juninholiveira]

The use of Blender for archviz here in Brazil is growing fast. More and more people are using it, including big architecture companies. There's no comparison for me. Blender is better than 3ds max in absolutely everthing. It's faster (viewport speed, modelling speed, etc) and it's free!!! That's the main point. What is missing for it to become production ready is 3 things in my opinion: Better renderers, Bigger and better asset library and better third party plugins. But there is already some really cool plugins appearing, like Scatter, to rival iToo Forest Pack for example. If VRay or Corona appear in Blender too, will be only a matter of time to more and more professional libraries start showing.

Please, hire a guy to develop the free exporter and sell the standalone commercial Corona. We need it, the industry need it. We're tired of Autodesk bulls*** and their expensive licenses.