Supported Platforms
The Corona version I’ve used for this review is the 3DS Max one, but Render Legion are also developing a Cinema 4D plugin (which is free for the time being until they release it officially), a Maya plugin that is in private alpha and will be
made public soon, a Blender version and a Standalone version, both of which are free for the time being (although they
are not as advanced as the Cinema 4D / Max releases).
Conclusions
Let’s go back to our first question: does it live up to the high standards of today’s render engines?
The answer is yes, it does, and pretty well for a 1.1 release. Corona produces beautiful images and has plenty of features, a full set of render elements, a very good instancing/proxies workflow, a great collection of materials and shaders, and more. In the look/dev area it is quite advanced with the interactive renderer it offers, probably the most responsive one I’ve experienced so far. With all this Corona gives us the tools we need to migrate from other renderers easily.
A growing number of free Corona materials can be found on Render Legion’s materials repository and on the Corona Materials Library website
While its rendering performance is slower than that of V-Ray or Mental Ray for producing low quality renders (this is an un/biased render engine after all), it’s more or less on par with those two when dealing with photorealism, if not faster in some scenes, and of course there is the main advantage of nearly zero setup. You get clean animations out of the box without worrying about strange splotches, and if you need more performance you can always use its distributed render feature, so you can leverage all your workstations’ and farm’s power.
The licensing price is also an important factor when dealing with plugins. The developers have made the software affordable while maintaining the good old permanent licensing for everyone who wants it, instead of forcing people to rent the software.
It should be noted, however, that in this current version there are still some important features missing, like native hair support, a skin shader, a velocity render element for doing motion blur in post, support for heterogeneous volumetric rendering and point rendering (for particles).
Taking this into consideration, giving a final score is not easy: Corona is an awesome renderer but there are some significant features currently missing. In my opinion a score of 3.5 would be fair for character animation production or VFX work, but if we focus on architectural visualization it would deserve a 4.5, because it already delivers everything needed to achieve excellent results in Archviz. So having to settle on just one score, I’m giving it 4 stars to balance things out. In any case, investing in Corona is an excellent choice, the development team is working fast and if it’s not feature-complete today, it will be tomorrow.
