Corona Renderer offers a range of powerful tools designed to streamline your workflow and accelerate your rendering process.
Extensive Post-Processing Capabilities Within the VFB
Save time and resources by minimizing or eliminating the need for third-party software to carry out post-production tasks. Corona’s VFB (Virtual Frame Buffer) provides a comprehensive suite of post-processing tools. These tools can be adjusted before, during, or after rendering, with settings saved for instant reuse in any scene.
Explore the extensive control you have over your final renders with the following effects:
- Exposure – Adjusts the overall image exposure.
- Highlight Compression – Reduces or removes burned-out areas by compressing highlights.
- White Balance – Controls the image’s white balance.
- Contrast – Fine-tunes the image contrast.
- Saturation – Manages the overall color saturation.
- Filmic highlights – Offers subtle highlight compression without sacrificing color saturation.
- Filmic shadows – Adjusts the richness and saturation of shadows.
- Vignette intensity – Applies a realistic vignette effect.
- Color tint – Modifies the overall color tint of the image.
- Curves – Enables further tone mapping refinement using custom curves and a histogram.
- LUTs – Quickly change the image’s overall look by applying pre-made LUTs (Look-Up Tables). The intensity can be controlled with the LUT Opacity. A variety of LUTs are included.
- Bloom & Glare – Bloom creates a soft glow around bright areas, while Glare generates a sharp glow with adjustable rays. The color of these effects is customizable.
- Sharpening/Blurring – This feature first blurs then sharpens the image for a more photographic look.
- Denoising – If denoising is enabled, this allows you to blend between the fully denoised image and the raw render.
Here’s a quick example of post-processing effects applied to a finished render. Keep in mind that you can apply and adjust effects before or during rendering as well:
Introducing the Corona Image Editor (CIE)
The Corona Image Editor (CIE) is a standalone tool for editing your images. Its user interface mirrors the Corona VFB, offering similar post-processing options for Corona EXRs saved from the VFB, including LightMix, full-featured denoising, tone mapping, LUTs, bloom and glare, curves, blur/sharpen, vignette, and more.
Benefits of the Corona Image Editor include:
- Lower system requirements than working with an image inside 3D software. You don’t need a scene loaded when working with your images, so you can denoise Corona renders outside of the rendering process.
- LightMix and post-processing settings are easily shared between the VFB and the CIE from any host application (such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D).
- No need to copy settings manually: CXRs from the VFB are automatically loaded with their associated settings.
- It also works with regular, non-Corona EXRs (in Float format). You can add bloom and glare, apply tone mapping settings or a LUT, etc. Denoising and LightMix are not available for such EXRs.
- It is a portable application, which works with just unpacking, no installation necessary.
- Free with a regular Corona license.
The Corona Camera
Artists have access to a realistic camera model that incorporates parameters like f-stop, shutter speed, ISO, sensor width, and advanced Bokeh effects. This allows for close matching to live footage. Additionally, you get access to all the Corona Renderer post-processing options, panorama/VR options, and the ability to set focus distance via a static or animated object in the scene.
For older scenes, the legacy CoronaCameraMod modifier is retained to ensure compatibility.
Corona Scatter: Efficient Object Distribution
Corona Renderer incorporates its own scatter system, designed to distribute millions of high-poly meshes or proxies across surfaces. A common use case is the distribution of vegetation like grass and forests.
With Corona Scatter, you can create scenes with an almost unlimited number of objects or polygons, while maintaining a low memory footprint and high performance. It includes advanced functions like distributing and scaling objects by texture map, distributing objects along splines, and collision detection.
The Corona Unified Lister
The Unified Lister currently lists all Corona Lights and Corona Scatters in a scene. This allows you to access and modify their parameters from a single convenient panel.
Future releases of Corona Renderer plan to expand the Unified Lister to be the central location for managing all Corona elements, including the Corona Cameras and Corona Proxies.
SmartProxy: The .cgeo Format
Corona uses its own proxy format, .cgeo, which is cross-platform. This means it works in 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, and Corona Renderer standalone, as well as any future platforms. Compression makes it small and fast to save, load, and upload. Proxy models are always converted to millimeters and scaled correctly when loaded into scenes with different units.
The proxy contains human-readable metadata, for example, the name of the source object and its material. This enhances pipeline compatibility.
Unblocked 3ds Max UI While Rendering
No more frustration! When rendering with Corona, the 3ds Max UI remains unblocked. You can still access other applications, check settings in Max, and maintain productivity while rendering.
Built-in Help Resources
The UI includes tooltips for most parameters, which appear when you hover over the controls. There’s also an automatically generated online GUI manual available for reference, even when 3ds Max isn’t open.
Smart Masks in Corona Render
Creating masks in Corona Renderer is straightforward. You can create monochromatic and RGB masks by specifying Object ID, Material ID, or selecting objects directly in the scene. You can also combine selections using union or intersection.
Render Elements Only: Streamlined Workflow
Avoid the frustration of a final render only to discover a missing mask! Corona allows you to render only masks and other render elements without rerendering the entire image. Simply set up the missing mask and check the “Render only masks (disable shading)” option.
Invisible to Masks Feature
The Corona Material can be set to be invisible to masks while remaining visible in the beauty pass. This is useful for creating masks for objects behind glass panels.
Resume Rendering: Flexibility and Control
At any point during the rendering process, you can save the frame buffer’s contents into a single .CXR file, including all rendering passes. Then, you can open another scene or close the application and later resume the original render from where you left off.
Autosave Function
With a single click, you can enable the Autosave function. This feature saves the rendering progress as an .exr file every few minutes. If the render or your computer crashes, you have backed up the latest progress. You can use the .exr file if the current render made enough process, or resume the rendering from it.
