Industry News

Chaos Corona 8 Released!

Out with the “Old” and in with the “New.” Corona Renderer is now entirely in the brand and called Chaos Corona, with both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D versions released on the same day.

Click here to get Chaos Corona 8 now!
Image by The Craft

Introduction

I’ll mention the features I find personally exciting here, like Chaos Scatter; Caustics Include/Exclude control; Corona Decal; Corona Slicer; Corona Curvature Map; Chaos Cosmos. You can discover all else on the official Chaos Corona release post – Read the full release post.

Corona Renderer has been the most vital tool in my creative workflow. We craft visuals for clients at The Craft, and version 8 is no different from the short experience using the RC versions leading up to the official release.

So let’s start with some of the highlights of Chaos Corona 8. First, the new features video!

Table of Contents

Chaos Scatter

Trees, grass, flowers, rocks, cars in a parking lot, and fallen leaves add detail to your scene, but they can be very tedious or impossible to place by hand. This isn’t a problem thanks to Chaos Scatter, which lets you randomly place hundreds, thousands, or millions of instances in a pattern, with a wide range of controls to get the result you need.

You will now have a range of powerful new options to give you even more control over the results!

  1. Slope limitation so that your trees don’t grow on cliffs.
  2. Spline excludes/includes carving a path through your trees and scattering rocks along with it, limiting flowers to flower beds with closed splines, etc.
  3. Chaos Scatter Surface Color Texmap is a long name for something that lets you color the scatters based on the texmap of the object they are scattered on. Perfect for creating patterned rugs or variations in color on a lawn, etc.
  4. Camera Clipping limits scattering to only be inside the camera’s field of view. This improves scene parsing and lowers the amount of required memory.
  5. Preserve model Scale and/or Rotation, so you can adjust or even animate those on the source object.
  6. Presets are available in Cosmos, e.g., for grass and trees (presets include everything you need, such as the objects scattered and the Scatter itself).
  7. 3ds Max only (for now) – edit individual instances after scattering so that you can move, scale, rotate, or even delete particular scattered objects.
  8. With the new Max Polygons viewport display option, you can limit the displayed scatters by polygon count for a Full preview.
  9. Map slots for affecting translation and rotation of instances.
  10. Added Follow spline amount controlling how instances get oriented along splines during 1D spline scattering.

Caustics Include/Exclude

You can now set whether an object receives generated caustics using an Include/Exclude list. Sometimes, a more distant wall or ceiling will receive caustics, but it will be far enough that it takes longer to resolve to a clean result but even then, it would add little to the look of the image. Using this new control, you can prevent those objects from being affected by caustics, keeping your viewer’s attention (and your CPUs time) focused on the caustics that matter.

Corona Decal

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

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

  1. 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 even scatter them where randomness is required, or animate them where that makes sense.
  2. Can stack: It’s easy to stack decals, so you can have your road markings affected by cracks in the road. This is controlled visually by how far each decal object is from the surface.
  3. 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.
  4. Can 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 of an object simultaneously, such as viewing the exterior of a house with the roof cut away to see the layout of the rooms, or a car with the engine inside, and so on. Corona Slicer is 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 works without the inconsistencies of any boolean operations in the host software. You can control what happens to sliced surfaces, including the option to create caps that can use the material from the sliced geometry or the material plugged into the Slicer’s Material slot.

Corona Curvature Map

Adding wear and tear or dirt into an object’s nooks and crannies is more accessible thanks to the Curvature map.

Chaos Cosmos

It might not be such a perk for veteran ArchiViz artists. Still, Chaos Cosmos provides you with hundreds of models, materials, HDRI skies, and even presets for Chaos Scatter that you can use within 3ds Max or Cinema 4D. Without searching external websites (where you’d also end up paying a pretty penny).

" Chaos Cosmos is simply the best integration of assets for Chaos products, with features that nothing else can offer. The content in Cosmos will be 100% compatible with Corona, removing any doubt that comes with downloading assets from other sources. There’s no need to worry about cost either, as all assets are completely free, already included in your Corona license. "
Chaos
Developer of Corona

Final Comments

I’m always waiting for the Release Candidate versions before testing a new version, but with the official release out there is no point waiting, and if you never used Corona Renderer before… why? This is the best time to get going with Chaos Corona.

Get Chaos Corona 8 Now!

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