Corona PRG Clear Sky Model
Corona Renderer 7 for 3ds Max makes updates to the Corona Physical Material and Corona Sky, with improved effects that increase realism in 3D scenes, and achieves faster render speeds.
Corona’s Physical Material now has 35 new presets for glass, metal and fabric, with a new Oren-Nayar diffuse model. These changes make it possible to set up initial hyper-realistic scenes in a few minutes. From there, the Physical Material comes with various features for greater control over looks. These include Sheen parameters for creating photoreal fabrics, and Clearcoat lacquer.
Corona Physical Material
Materials are now defined as either Metal or Non-metal to make sure that only the correct, industry standard parameters are available for each material type. As Roughness instead of Glossiness is now the default, users switch to Glossiness and Specular when needed. Controlling the look of a metal can now be done by adjusting the Edge Colour and then fine tuning the end result by eye, or by using Complex IOR (index of refraction) for physically correct scenes.
Clearcoat and Sheen
Clearcoat in the Physical Material has an absorption layer that affects the colour of Diffuse Reflection and other aspects of the base layer in a realistic way. Achieving the same effect with the earlier legacy Material needed several layers that could be hard to control. Clearcoat also has an independent bump map, allowing you to create rough surfaces with a smooth, rippled or other clear coating over the top.
'The Dream House' Hossein Yadollahpour
The Material Sheen effects take into account the look the fibres of a fabric give surfaces. Instead of trying to manage individual fibres across the surface, users can adjust the new Sheen parameters, which make fabrics render faster and easier to control.
Rough glass now produces more realistic reflections and refractions – even when using the same values, the new glass may look different and more correct. Thin glass with roughness, like frosted glass, can now blur refraction as well as reflection, and also correctly simulates bouncing within the thin glass.
'Ice King' Fabricio Pinho
Sky Model
Artists using the Sky Model can more accurately depict a digital sun and weather from hills, a skyscraper or at sea level in Corona Renderer 7. The new Altitude Parameter applies real-world data to calculate what the sky will look like from a user-defined height.
For sweeping landscape shots or high aerial city views, a new Volume Effect – or aerial perspective – affects objects placed in the distance, where they naturally take on more of the sky colour. Users can control the strength of the effect through a single value. Previously, such effects were only possible using the Corona Global Volume material, but were more complex to set up and could impact render times.
Render Speed
'Audi' Edgar Barbero Mera
Corona Renderer 7 render times generally are up to 50 percent shorter. This acceleration extends to data or scene opening, as files may now open faster due to the background loading of Corona Bitmaps and proxies. The speed improvements are especially evident in scenes that mainly use the new optimised features like transparency processing, denoising and calculating passes in 32 x 32 pixel blocks.
To maintain compatibility with pre-existing scenes, the previous Material will still be available as an option called Corona Legacy Material. Corona Renderer 7 is available now for 3ds Max 2014 to 2022 (64-bit). corona-renderer.com
