Monthly Archives: October 2014

Making of: Barts Square project by The Boundary in collaboration with Iain Banks

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Another great making of, this time from our friends from The Boundary in collaboration with Iain Banks. It was written by Henry Goss, who is the founder of The Boundary together with Peter Guthrie. The studio is based in London and specializes in high end visualizations.

Making of: Barts Square project

The Boundary + Iain Banks - Barts Square Project
Click on the image to see whole project gallery

The Boundary, working in collaboration with Iain Banks was provided a unique opportunity with the Barts Square project (click for gallery) to challenge our usual work flow and test something new. Our typical workflow involves modelling in Sketchup, exporting to 3ds max, rendering with Vray 3.0 and post production in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom.
Ever keen to embrace new technologies, both Iain Banks and The Boundary have been experimenting with Corona Renderer for some time but had not found a project suitable for testing it in a commercial ‘real world’ setting. Barts Square seems the perfect project being largely interior shots a large number of images and a good time scale allowing for experimentation.

The Boundary + Iain Banks

 

Continue reading Making of: Barts Square project by The Boundary in collaboration with Iain Banks →

Version 1.0 Sneak Peek: Interactive Rendering

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As version 1.0 for 3dsmax is behind the corner, we have decided to post a series of articles showing new functions & features which you can expect.

I have prepared a longer video showing Interactive capabilities of Corona Renderer in combination with our CoronaScatter (old version) which comes for free with the renderer.

The video shows two demo scenes. First one is the all-time favorite demo for GPU renderers – a car lit with HDRi, but I decided to do it with a little spin. The second one is a more realistic scenario which you will encounter in archviz – non-proxied vegetation which uses opacity maps, the multitexture plugin in diffuse, translucency, and bump mapping.
The car scene was kindly provided by  Ludvík Koutný, and the tree model by Juraj Talcik from TD Visual.

Videos

Corona Interactive + Scatter

 

Bonus video: turning it up to 11: Corona Interactive – extreme polycount test (5.5 Trillion polygons)

Corona Interactive Facts

  • Runs on CPU (No special HW needed)
  • Shares over 99.9% of code with standard Corona Renderer (ie. same render engine)
  • Same results as the final frame rendering (What you see is what you get )
  • Same set of features as standard Corona Renderer (geometry, proxies, motion blur, dof…)
  • All 3ds max maps and 3rd party maps are supported
  • Truly interactive (Change materials, lights, geometry while rendering, no need to restart interactive mode)
  • It is bundled for FREE!

 

Hardware Used in Demo

First video  – intel i7 4930k 3.4Ghz, 32GB RAM
Second video – intel i7 2600k – 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM

Let us know what you think.

Adam & Ondra

Discussion about Prices & Licence Politics II.

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Discussion benefits everyone

First, thanks a lot for all your responses, suggestions, opinions & messages  – good spirited and even not-that-positive ones. They both count as they show us different views. Since some points we made in the original article were not clear, there was some confusion and questions we want now to clear out.
This follow up article tries to explain some points better and answer you all questions where we know the answer (there are some questions where we ourselves do not have the answer yet, however our intentions and visions are crystal clear).

Also we have decided to change couple of things based on your suggestions. We try to be as fair and transparent as possible.

I have decided to write this blog post in Q&A fashion. Most of the questions were raised by you. Also some facts and topics we did not cover in the first article are published in this one.

Make yourself a tea or coffee and enjoy the long blog post.

Continue reading Discussion about Prices & Licence Politics II. →

Making of: Corona sample C4D interior by Thomas Vournazos

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Today, we bring you a tutorial/making-of article about the sample Corona for C4D scene written by Thomas Vournazos. Thomas is the founder and lead artist of Slahcube, a visualization studio based in Zurich.

I don’t have the patience to make super extra detailed blog posts, so I will try and make this post a bit basic and easy to follow. I’m already using Corona for some months, and although still on the start, things look promising.  This scene was actually a vray scene that I worked on some months ago for a commercial project, so I had only to work on some material conversions and some mood concepts to check how Corona would pull it through.

I almost always work with HDRIs, because it is the only way i can check easily my light  set-up. CoronaforC4D actually has a quite flexible way on dealing with HDRI. I often after some rough modeling with a white material and a fast check with some HDRIs I have. I tend to keep my whites quite low, around a 165 – 180 value in some cases at this point.

For the HDRI, i created a sky object and i attached a Corona material with an HDR texture in the emission slot. For this particular scene i used a Peter Guthrie map, the 1934. I also played with some afternoon ones but at the end i decided to stay with the 1934.
Apartment_02Bedroom_01 Continue reading Making of: Corona sample C4D interior by Thomas Vournazos →

Prices & Release Date of Corona Renderer 1.0 for 3dsmax

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Thanks to a discussion with Corona Renderer users, we have decided to adjust some of the things in this article. Please read follow-up article here.

 

Prices & Licensing

One of the most complicated topics which we have encountered yet. We are talking about this for the second time. This time we have much clearer image, but still it is a big step into the unknown. We have done our research, calculated costs of future development, compared licensing options, exchanged numerous emails, made countless hours on skype and killed couple of hours on meetings regarding this topic. You can read the results below.

Continue reading Prices & Release Date of Corona Renderer 1.0 for 3dsmax →

SOA Academy Day #5

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State Of Art Academy Day #5

State Of Art Academy Dat #5

Friendship

Friendship. That is probably the best word to describe this event. That was something what was clearly visible everywhere you looked. And I had the opportunity to experience it twice as a speaker. During Academy Day #3 as an lecturing artist and this year as “representative” of our Corona Renderer. But main part of Corona presentation was done by the creative duo from TD-Visual – Juraj Talčík & Veronika Demovičová.
Without their extensive help, expertise and superb works our Corona presentation would not be possible. So I would like to express my thanks once again here. Díky moc!

For those of you do not know what SOA Academy Day is, I will use the official line:
“A two day workshop for professionals and passionate architectural visualization artists.”
But for me it was more about meeting people, friends, “converting” virtual friends to real ones and meeting new and old Coronauts:) It was simply amazing experience as always.

Continue reading SOA Academy Day #5 →

Corona C4D A1.1 hotfix + free sample scene

Announcement, Release

Corona for C4D render by Thomas Vournazos

 

We have just released a hotfix for our Cinema4D build. It corrects some issues reported after the recently release Alpha v1, that slipped through our internal/closed beta testing.

Updated Nov 22nd 2017 – this is an old article of course, so for those of you looking to download Corona Renderer for Cinema 4D, here is some updated information, replacing the old and out-of-date links:

You can download the latest official builds, for Windows and macOS, from our download page. If you are looking for the latest possible release, that will most likely be our daily builds – simply sign up for our forums and visit the daily builds section for the latest changelogs and download information!

And now, back to the original article – of course, there are many more changes to Corona for Cinema 4D since this was published!

End Update

Major changes

  • Fixed slowdown when using multiple CPU cores and some specific shaders
  • Fixed incorrect DOF distance parsing
  • Added missing opacity channel to Corona Material
  • Fixed layer shaders in R14
  • Fixed incorrect gamma in material editor previews
  • Fixed visibility property of objects (Display tag)
  • Added icons to Corona menus, better plugin load diagnostics, and other small UI changes

Cinema4D sample scene

This is not all we have for you today. After the release of Alpha v1, we got many requests asking for a sample scene. And now we are pleased to announce, that Thomas Vournazos agreed to share one of his scenes he made during testing. Here is the download link: https://download.corona-renderer.com/c4d-a1.1-scene.zip.

Corona for C4D sample scene by Thomas Vournazos
Corona for C4D sample scene by Thomas Vournazos