Corona’s renderer is well known for its ease of use, speed, and flexibility, and the company has kept those vital elements in mind as they update their beloved product to version 3. Some of the new features and improvements include:
Interactive Rendering (IR) Improvements
Corona is moving toward ultimate rendering capabilities as it strives to improve the speed at which it can build render previews. Version 3 of the renderer will take advantage of a major new approach to denoising as well as a few minor fixes.
GPU Denoising
Though it requires an NVIDIA GPU to function (Kepler or above), you can now use GPU denoising to enable higher-speed render previews as you work. This is especially helpful in workflows with high detail in which you want to ensure fundamental elements of a scene work cohesively with complex light or color setups.
You can also use GPU denoising for final renders, but it comes at a cost: since its performance improvements are optimized for interactive rendering, you’ll sacrifice detail crispness and risk interference from unwanted artifacts. It remains, however, a powerful option for important work on a tight timeline.
Optimized IR Restarts
Various bug fixes and better restarts with light solver and Corona VFB are now optimized for speed so that, while interactive rendering grows and improves, it does not continue to interrupt workflows in a significant way.
Better Memory Use
Overall, Corona Renderer 3 focuses on pulling more capability out of the hardware you already have. In that same spirit, the team has made vast improvements to the performance of many of its engines in terms of memory usage.
Natively, general improvements should allow you to save as much as 2.5 GB per 8K image. Though noise patterns may change when rendering hi-res images, memory usage should be universally better. This version also improves memory usage with the new light solver to levels nearly the same as the previous light solver and brings geometry memory usage down by 16.6%.
Tools such as render-stamp variables will help you track memory usage so you can find the right settings to adjust for improvements on your specific project. Improved memory warnings will also help you find out where your bottlenecks are and adjust your process to make better use of optimized memory use within the renderer.
Light Solver Upgrades
In the same vein as Corona Renderer 3’s other improvements, optimization is the theme of the latest light solver upgrades. Squeezing every bit of speed out of Corona’s powerful new capabilities will help designers get more out of each new scene.
Among important bug fixes, the Corona team has also eliminated most pesky artifacts and undesired pixels, improved light and translucent object sampling, and (as we previously explored) made restarts significantly more efficient. With a host of crash fixes, as well, the new light solver may soon become Corona’s standard for creating the next generation of realistic lighting in your scenes.
Improved Randomization
With hyper-heightened levels of realism in 3D work, viewers are keener on what items seem out of place in a scene. Randomization will soon be key to ensuring that a viewer’s sense of realism is unaffected by unnatural elements.
Randomization by mesh element allows you to assign randomized features directly to mesh elements so that objects with repeating patterns that require subtle differentiation appear more natural. Such technology will prove useful for common applications such as randomizing the shade and surface pattern on ground stones or coloring and texturing leaves on a tree so that they appear weathered and varied.
Faster Rendering Is Here
Corona Renderer 3 also comes with countless bug fixes and performance improvements for new and existing features. UI and memory improvements should help 3D artists better and more rapidly create impressive scenes with fewer headaches.
Not working with an NVIDIA-equipped system? BOXX has you covered; check out our APEXX systems to take full advantage of all of Corona Renderer 3’s available features.]]>