Chaos Scatter

Adding realistic details like trees, grass, flowers, rocks, cars in a parking lot, and fallen leaves to your scene can be tedious or impossible to place by hand. With Chaos Scatter, this isn’t a problem you’ll ever have to face.

With Chaos Scatter, you can easily place trees, grass, shrubs, and rocks in your scene, limit the trees from steep slopes, and carve out the roadway with splines.

Chaos Scatter comes with a wide range of controls so you can achieve the exact results you’re looking for:

• Control and randomize scale, rotation, and translation, including limiting randomization to certain stepping values
• Slope limitation, so that your trees don’t grow on cliffs ;)

• Scatter altitude to define upper and lower limits for scattering. For example, you can set upper and lower limits for a treeline and waterline, and scatter some clouds around mountain tops to create captivating scenery.
• Use the Look At control to have scattered objects look in the same direction.

Corona Pattern

Now you can tile real geometry over a surface, with the same ease as you’d tile a texture. Not only does this give you far more realism than you’d ever obtain with alpha, bump, and displacement maps, it also requires far less memory than those alternatives.

To get a quick grasp of when this is useful, think of things such as:

• Fabrics, where those are made of knitted or woven strands
• Wire fences
• Jewelry such as chains

Of course once you get to grips with the tool, you’ll start to think of many other ways in which it can be used, raising the realism of your scenes to a whole new level.

Corona Decal

Markings on a road, cracks in concrete, smudges and dirt on glass — all of these are essential details in adding realism to your scene, and the new Corona Decal makes it easy to tackle these and more.

How does the Corona Decal improve on the old method of working with layered materials?

• Easy to set up:
  You can move, rotate and scale them using the helper object in the viewport so that you can place them exactly where you want, or scatter them where randomness is required, or even animate them where it makes sense.
• Stackable:
  It’s easy to stack decals, so your road markings can be affected by cracks in the road. This is controlled visually by how far each decal object is from the surface.
• Fully supports displacement:
  Craters, cracks, bumps, dimples, carvings, and more. With displacement, you can have the realism you are looking for when adding these features.
• Affect only chosen channels:
  Add displacement for a crack in a brick wall without affecting the Diffuse color of the wall, and more, by choosing which channels of the base material a Decal affects, and which it leaves unchanged.
• Affect multiple objects:
  One decal can affect all objects it overlaps, regardless of the materials those objects use, so that your paint splashes can affect multiple objects. An include/exclude list lets you adjust this as necessary.

Corona Slicer

Sometimes, you want to see the outside and the inside at the same time. For example, you might like to slice off the top of a house to see the layout of the rooms within, or view a car with a cut away to show the engine inside, and so on. Corona Slicer will be your go-to tool for these situations!

Corona Slicer is a material you can apply to any object, turning that object into a “slicer” that will cut away geometry non-destructively at render time. You can animate this slicer object, and it all works without the inconsistencies of any sort of boolean operations in the host software.

You can control what happens to sliced surfaces, choosing to have no capping, or to create caps which can either use the material from the sliced geometry or from the material plugged into the Slicer’s Material slot.

Pro Tip: You can use the Rayswitcher when setting up the material, to make the geometry invisible to the camera but leave it still casting shadows. One use case would be wanting to cut away the roof of a house to see the interior, but not have the interior flooded by environment lighting. You can see a material set up and comparison of the results below:

Corona Lister

Easily find and control the most important settings for Lights, Displacement, Proxies, Cameras, and Scatters using the Corona Lister and Scatter Lister. Corona 11 comes with an improved Lister feature in Cinema 4D.

SmartProxy: .cgeo

Corona comes with its own proxy format, .cgeo. The format is cross platform (you will be able to use it in 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Chaos Corona standalone, or any other future platform). It uses compression, so it is small and fast to save, load, and to upload to renderfarms. Proxy models are always converted to millimeters and properly scaled when loading into scenes that use different units.

The proxy contains human–readable metadata at the beginning of each file, for example the name of the source object and its material, making them friendly to your pipeline.

Cinema 4D does not natively support tooltips, but in Chaos Corona 7 and newer we have found a method for adding them anyway! We've started with tooltips for the Corona Materials, and if they prove popular we will expand that to other parts of the Corona UI.

• Pivot Placer - Comes in two modes: it can shift the pivot of the selected objects via modifying the offset of their axes.; and it can place the pivot of the selected object to the selected point on that object.
• Transform Randomizer - Transforms the chosen objects based on their axes and variation range. Types of transformations are translation, rotation, and scaling.
• Scene Cleaner - Cleans the scene from the options that are provided as checkboxes, such as removing animation keys or layers, clearing the Undo / Redo stack, and more.