Rendering

You are just one click away from enjoying outstandingly high quality Biased and Unbiased rendering.

Hossein Yadollahpour

Chaos Corona delivers predictable, reliable, and physically plausible results with no compromises in quality. Realistic lighting and materials are yours right out of the box.

Our Forum and Gallery section provide great examples of the quality that Chaos Corona can produce. If you want to know more about the technology behind it, read on!

Caustics

The Fast Caustics Solver lets you easily add caustics to your scene. Once enabled, reflective caustics are calculated automatically for all materials in the scene, and you can then enable refractive Caustics per material.

Scene by 3darcspace Studio

For further control, you can choose to disable caustics for individual Corona Lights, set up an Include/Exclude list for objects to receive caustics, and render caustics to their own Render Element for manipulation in post processing. Caustics also respect the include/exclude lists of Corona Lights.

Extensive post–processing, inside the VFB

Save time (and money) by reducing or even removing the need to use third–party software to carry out post–production work on your renders, thanks to the extensive range of post–processing tools available directly inside the Corona VFB. All of these can be adjusted before, during or after rendering, and settings saved for instant re–use in any scene.

Tone Mapping effects

Take a look at how much control you have over your final render with the list of effects below:

ACES OT – The ACES Output Transform is a single operator with no needed parameters. Simply enable it to get great adjustment of highlights and color saturation.
Simple Exposure – Controls the overall exposure of the image.
Photographic Exposure – Checkbox that takes f-stop and shutter speed information from the camera to control the exposure
Advanced Filmic – Adjust the tone mapping via Toe Strength and Length for shadows, and Shoulder Strength, Length, and Angle for highlights
Tone Curve – Adjust the image using controls for Highlights, Lights, Darks, and Shadows
Filmic - Adjust the tone mapping via Highlight Compression for a subtle highlight compression without loss of color saturation, and Rich Shadows to control the richness/saturation of shadows in the image.
Curves – Further fine tune the tone mapping, using custom curves with histogram.
LUTs – Allows quickly changing the overall look of the image by applying one of many ready–made LUTs. The strength of the LUT effect can be controlled using the LUT Opacity so that it is not “all or nothing”. A variety of LUTs are provided along with Corona.
Reinhard – A simple tone mapping to compress HDRI to a Low Dynamic Range (maps Luminance into the range 0 to 1 displayable on a monitor or other output device)
Contrast – Adjust the contrast of the image.
Saturation – Controls the overall color saturation.
White Balance – Controls the white balance of the image.
Green-Magenta Tint – Tints the image toward green or magenta.
Color tint – Adjust the overall color tint of the image.
Vignette intensity – Applies a subtle, realistic vignette.

How the ACES OT parameter changes the look of an image.

All of these operators are presented in a customizable stack so you can re-order them any way you like, add and delete them as fits your needs, and you can even include multiple versions of the same operator. For example, you can have three LUTs saved for a project, either to apply on top of one another for a particular final look, or to easily and instantly turn them on and off to get three different looks.

You can read more about how to use the new tone mapping in our documentation for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

In addition, users can now take advantage of the color management options offered by the latest versions of 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

Corona Image Editor

The Corona Image Editor, commonly referred to as the CIE, is a standalone tool for working with your images. Its user interface is inspired by the Corona VFB, sharing its look and feel, and it offers rich and fast post–processing options for Corona EXRs saved from the VFB such as LightMix, full–featured denoising, tone mapping, bloom and glare, blur / sharpen, vignette, etc.

The benefits of the Corona Image Editor are:

The CIE has lower system requirements than working with an image inside any 3D software – it is not necessary to have a scene loaded while you are working with your images, so you can denoise Corona renders outside of the rendering process for example, reducing the memory requirements significantly.
All LightMix and post–processing settings can be easily shared between the VFB from any host application (such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D) and the CIE.
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). It is possible to add bloom and glare to them, apply your tone mapping settings or a LUT, etc. (Denoising and LightMix are not available for such EXRs because they miss the necessary “hidden” auxiliary data.)
It is a portable application, which works with just unpacking, no installation necessary.
Free with a regular Corona license.

Corona Camera

Artists can use a realistic camera model which incorporates all the common parameters, such as f–stop, shutter speed, ISO, sensor width, motion blur with adjustable shutter curve, advanced Bokeh effects, and aperture shape (blades/custom).

On top of that, you get access to all the Chaos Corona post–processing options, panorama / VR options, the ability to set focus distance via a static or animated object in the scene, a Fisheye lens projection, and more.

For older scenes, we have maintained the legacy CoronaCameraMod modifier, to ensure any existing scenes will still work as expected.

Biased and unbiased rendering

Chaos Corona offers both biased and unbiased rendering solutions.

By default, Chaos Corona uses a slightly biased solution, very close to being unbiased but considerably reducing render times. This is the recommended solution and works without you having to do any setup whatsoever. Chaos Corona will always deliver crisp, realistic results without splotches, interpolation artifacts or any other visual imperfections.

4K cache

Traditionally, you had to choose between using unbiased algorithms with no caching and accept long render times, or using biased caching algorithms and deal with splotches, missing shadows, and sensitive input parameters. Chaos Corona merges the best of both worlds – the 4K cache is significantly faster than plain path tracing, but does not suffer from artifacts, missing contact shadows, or complicated UI controls.

The 4K cache uses only partial caching, so does not try to interpolate everything. While this is slower than a fully cached solution (such as irradiance caching), it does not create artifacts, only noise that eventually goes away.

The 4K cache is an ideal solution for animation, and significantly reduces flickering even when light sources or geometry are moving. This is especially important when the cache cannot be precomputed.

Animation as well as stills

Chaos Corona is great for animations as well as stills. Below you will see a 3 minute showreel showcasing just some of what our users have created using Corona:

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Corona Renderer