10 Chaos Corona

Realism without the headaches.

Corona is the only render engine built from the ground up with a specific focus on the needs of the archviz community. While capable and well-liked in the fields of automotive and product visualization, its UI, feature set, pricing, and ease of use are primarily driven by what architectural visualizers require.

While remaining unique with its own development team, code, and community, Corona now also benefits from being part of the Chaos platform, giving its users access to many of the industry-standard tools created by Chaos.

Corona At a Glance

Realism without the headaches.

• What it is: Intuitive, easy-to-use rendering engine optimized for designing high-quality, ultra-realistic projects that can be used for still images and animations.
  
• Who uses Corona? Architectural visualization, Automotive and product design, Television ads, and title sequences.
  
• Why Corona? Usability is Chaos Corona’s most powerful feature. Render setup is as simple as pressing “Render”.

What is the difference between Chaos’ Renderers?

Chaos V-Ray, Corona, Enscape, and Vantage are all rendering and simulation software products, but they differ in their features, industry, and user needs. Learn which renderer is right for you!

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Corona comes in 2 tiers: Solo and Premium.

Solo is for artists who want to render on a single computer. Premium is ideal for customers who want access to floating licenses so they can move from computer to computer, and also have access to Chaos® companion products such as Phoenix, Player, and Scans.

What’s new in Corona 10

Corona 10 is focused on giving users new creative options and streamlining their workflow, so that they can create whatever they imagine, faster than ever.

More powerful detailing of scenes

Easily add cracks, dirt, stickers, etching, embossing, and more thanks to individual control over the material channels (Diffuse, Displacement, Metalness, etc.) affected by a Corona Decal

Improved workflow

Easily find and adjust scatters, lights, proxies, displacement, and camera using the new Listers

Lighting and Environments

• Procedural Clouds now work when the Corona Sun uses a Direct Color for its lighting, allowing more flexible end results such as moonlight
• Brighter, more accurate Caustics when rendering to large resolutions

Materials

Chaos Scans gets easier to use with a variety of improvements, such as custom Bump and Displacement slots, support for Triplanar mapping, material previews showing the viewport, and more

Camera

• Fly cameras through smoke and clouds, or have them half-submerged in water with accurate rendering from Cameras inside volumetric materials such as those from Phoenix simulations
• Greatly improved highlight blurring when using Depth of Field

3ds Max workflow tweaks

Apply the same Triplanar, Color Correction, or Mapping Randomizer to multiple maps at once with new multi-input and output options. No longer will you have to edit multiple nodes or spend time setting up control nodes to keep different maps in sync

Chaos Corona 10 Overview

Rendering

Corona’s powerful CPU-only rendering delivers maximum realism with minimum effort from the user. Corona adaptively uses processing power where it is needed the most to optimize speed without compromising on quality.

• CPU rendering
• Resumable rendering
• Denoising
• Caustics

Lighting & illumination

Corona pioneered the most modern procedural Sky in any render engine, creating everything from dawn/dusk to full noon. A variety of other light types and support for many native 3ds Max and Cinema 4D lights give users all the options they need, while LightMix lets them adjust the color and intensity of lights before, during, and after rendering.

• Accurate lights
• Global Illumination
• Procedural sun and sky
• Adaptive light sampling
• LightMix

Cameras & optical effects

The Corona camera acts like a modern real-world camera and can be controlled through simple Exposure stops, through to full shutter speed, f-stop, and other controls. These are completed with advanced controls for camera effects such as Motion Blur and Bloom & Glare.

• Lens effects
• Photorealistic camera
• VR
• Fisheye
• Panoramic

Materials

The Corona Physical Material is built from the ground up to be physically realistic, while there is the option to use specialized shaders for skin, hair, and others. Many V-Ray materials can be rendered without conversion. Presets within the Physical Material and complete materials in the Corona Material Library, Chaos Cosmos, and Chaos Scans mean users never have to start from scratch.

• Physically based materials
• Corona Hair material
• Metalness
• Displacement
• Corona Converter
• Corona Material Library
• Chaos Cosmos
• Chaos Scans

Textures

Corona is compatible with almost all native 3ds Max and Cinema 4D shaders and has its own memory-efficient Corona Bitmap shader for loading images. A collection of utility texture maps allow textures to be layered, mixed, color corrected, and more.

• Memory-efficient textures
• Triplanar mapping
• Rounded corners
• UVW Randomizer

Geometry

Corona works with any native geometry, and also includes proxies, volume grids, scattering, patterning, slicing, etc.

• Proxy geometry
• Corona Slicer for render-time booleans
• Hair and Fur
• Scatters
• Patterns

Atmospheric & volumetric effects

Users can choose between simple and fast-rendering volume effect in the Corona Sky to simulate atmospheric haze or the full control of a volumetric material for more complex results.

• Volume rendering
• Aerial Perspective
• Crepuscular rays
• fog
• mist

Render Elements

For adjusting images in video or image editing software, Corona offers many Render Elements (3ds Max) and Multipasses (Cinema 4D), including Virtual Beauty, matte passes, separation of scene illumination, depth information, and more.

• Render Elements
• Cryptomatte
• Normals
• Depth
• Direct
• Indirect

Distributed rendering

Rendering with multiple computers at once is essential for any real production. Corona facilitates this in multiple ways – for example, it has its own distributed rendering system, and it is compatible with the Backburner and Thinkbox’s Deadline render farm management systems.

Proudly CPU based

Chaos Corona does not need any special hardware to run. It uses the CPU and you can run it on any processor from Intel or AMD released in the past decade.

Note: See the Details page for more information on the 3ds Max version and the Cinema 4D Version.