What’s in development
Welcome to the behind-the-scenes look at what is in development for Corona!
Here we will take a look at features that are already in progress, and longer term plans. Don’t forget to check our 3ds Max Roadmap and Cinema 4D Roadmap for more detailed plans and timescales.
Please remember that everything here is our plans, and since they are only plans it is possible some of these features may not appear in a particular version, or even may not appear at all.
Corona 10 plans
Corona 9 is out now, and as we planned it included Procedural Clouds, Corona Pattern, Chaos Scans, and more. It is early days yet, but we wanted to share our thoughts on what is planned for Corona 10 and beyond.
Corona Material Library to migrate into Chaos Cosmos
Going forward we’ll integrate the materials from the Corona Material Library into Cosmos and remove the Corona Material Library. This means you won’t have to search two places to find the material you are looking for.
It will also remove the need for you to download 5 GB of materials all at once when you install Corona. Instead you will be able to find, choose, and download only the materials you need when you need them. This also opens up the possibility for us to add higher resolution textures.
Parsing Improvements
We’ll be looking into making improvements in scene parsing for situations such as animations, scatters, and heavy scenes.
Workflow Utilities
One of our core beliefs is that your time is more valuable than your computer’s time, and that is why we will be working on workflow utilities which will make your life easier. Ideas include improved listers, power tools, and other utilities.
Chaos Cloud compatibility
Turn your machine into a supercomputer! Chaos Cloud handles everything for you automatically, from licensing and uploading your scenes to launching virtual machines, and removes the need to worry about feature compatibility, missing texture maps, and other problems that can come with remote rendering solutions. We’ll be starting work on making this available right inside Corona itself and will keep you updated on progress and what (if anything) will be implemented at the release of Corona 10.
Work happening under the hood
We carried out some of the planned under-the-hood improvements in Corona 9 but did pause to add new features. That leaves us with some ongoing plans to continue to work on the code of Corona in order to lay the groundwork for future improvements and new features.
Longer term plans
Our focus for the future is to deliver the highest in realism and rendering quality, allowing for unlimited details in your scenes, with creative tools that allow rapidly creating scenes that live up to those aims while keeping render times acceptable. We see Corona as being the ultimate quality CPU renderer in the future, and we’ll be focusing all our development efforts on that which means there are no plans to develop it for GPU.
To accompany that, we’ll be continuing to develop integration into the wider Chaos ecosystem in a way that allows us (and you!) to benefit from anything useful that other teams in the company create. The aim will be to open new workflows across and between applications, professions, etc. where this will compliment the strengths of each.
New Corona Benchmark
The Benchmark has proven incredibly useful to users when they are considering updating their machines (or just out of curiosity to see how their machine rates), and to CPU review sites and YouTube channels.
However, it has become rather out of date, in particular the scene is just not complex enough and renders too quickly to allow for a more finely-tuned comparison of modern CPUs, as well as being based on a much older version of Corona.
We’ll be setting to work on creating a new Benchmark, which will use the latest version of Corona itself and which will feature a scene that is more challenging so that you can clearly see the differences between current generation CPUs.
Chaos Scatter grows more powerful
We’re not done adding more power to Scatter. Future plans include:
- The addition of even more Presets for common uses such as trees, lawns, etc.
- The ability to edit individual instances in the Cinema 4D version of Chaos Scatter, so you can move or even delete that annoying tree that doesn’t look quite right
- Various optimizations for performance and ease of use
PRG Sky model expands its capabilities
We are looking into the possibility of adding a night sky mode to the PRG Sky, and also to the possibility of geolocation, which would make the Corona Sky more flexible than ever.
Research
We are cooperating with researchers from Charles University, Intel, and of course our own internal research teams, all while reading the latest research articles out in the wild, to see what we can incorporate in order to keep innovating and pushing Corona forward to be ever-better with each release.
