Warning: this is an outdated build, use Alpha v5 insteadHi all,
I've just released the new version of Corona, Alpha v4. It contains all updates from daily builds. It is attached at the end of this forum post.
It is subject to the
Corona licence/disclaimer. The installation instructions are
here.
The changes reflect half a year worth of development, and are too numerous to list them all. Below is a list of the most significant ones. There were also lots of small bugfixes/performance improvements/tweaks
Major new features
===============================================
- New Virtual Frame Buffer, with better desing and functionality
- Optional Light portals, for speeding up rendering of scenes with small windows
- Better system of artistic control fakes (selective visibility of objects)
- New robust algorithms for rendering caustisc (toy implementation, generally not usable in production):
- Bidirectional Path tracing
- Vertex Connection and Merging,
- Light tracing,
- Progressive Photon Mapping
- Windows Vista support (again)
- Option to autosave renders during and at the end of rendering
- GUI layout for settings and texmaps reworked
Major bugfixes:
===============================================
- Fixed unpredictable blurriness of some textures
- Fixed performance scaling on multiprocessor machines
- Massively improved convergence of scenes with tens of thousands of lights
- Fixed holes in objects with displacement and/or motion blur
- Massively improved performance and decreased memory consumption when using displacement and textured light emitters
- Fixed bug causing wrong defaults to be set after scene reset
- Fixed crashes when using some texmaps
Some of the minor new features:
===============================================
- Diffuse/Reflect/... render passes now contain direct lighting
- Blowup and Crop render modes are now supported
- Material editor rendering quality spinner added
- Bucket rendering now works progressively
- Corona scatter now supports volume scattering
- Colored Bokeh effect
- Camera clipping added (via Corona camera modifier)
- Option to disable colormapping for a texture (via Corona Map Output texmap)
- "Hide edges" in Corona Edge texmap now works
- Implemented full sky model for high quality closeup renders of sunset
- VPL renderer/GI solver (fast biased solver, toy implementation)
Corona benchmark scene
===============================================
It is a standalone, no-3dsmax-needed benchmark for Corona. See here:
http://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php/topic,559Known issues
===============================================
- When opening older scenes, you need to open render settings dialog and then resave (warning windows will pop). Sometimes, it is necessary use merge to load an old scene.
- Sharp edges on diffuse surfaces of low-res geometry when using strong and small light sources, or bump mapping. FIX: tesselate the geometry further
- Using motion blur on geometry with changing topology (face count) is not supported, such objects are not rendered
- NormalBump map is not supported
- VFB is occasionally slow or displays as see-through on windows 8 + geforce 6xx. The latter can be fixed by minimizing and maximizing 3dsmax again
