Chaos Corona — Key features
Explore the key features in Corona for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
Rendering
Easy photorealism.
CPU rendering
Chaos Corona delivers predictable, reliable, and physically plausible results with no compromise in quality. It offers both biased and unbiased rendering solutions, along with a 4K cache. Realistic lighting and materials are available right out of the box.
GPU rendering with Vantage
Render images in seconds with the new Corona to Vantage scene export. Import your Corona scene into Vantage to render still images and create Vantage animations, enjoying the lightning-fast speed of GPU rendering.
LightMix
Use LightMix to adjust the intensity and color of your lights in the frame buffer, as well as create, save, and load multiple lighting scenarios from just one render.
Corona Caustics
The Fast Caustics Solver allows you to easily add caustics to your scene. Once enabled, reflective caustics are calculated automatically for all materials in the scene, and you can enable refractive caustics per material.
Extensive post–processing, inside the VFB
Save time by eliminating the need for third-party software to perform post-production work on your renders, thanks to the wide range of post-processing tools available directly inside the Corona VFB. All of these tools can be adjusted before, during, or after rendering, and settings can be saved for instant reuse in any scene.
Stills & Animations
Chaos Corona is great for animations as well as stills. Watch our 3-minute showreel showcasing just some of what our users have created using Corona.
Default settings that work
Targeted for specific markets, Corona offers the most streamlined and easy-to-use UI without clutter and unnecessary parameters. The default render settings of Corona are generally the best choice in most situations, so there is usually no need to change them.
Compatibility
Chaos Corona is compatible with a wide range of third-party plugins, allowing you to continue using any tools already integrated into your workflow during both Interactive Rendering and final rendering.
Resumable rendering
With resumable rendering, you can pause your renders in the Virtual Frame Buffer (VFB) and resume them later, enabling a highly flexible workflow.
Autosave
Enable the Autosave function to save your rendering progress every few minutes in an .exr file. If your render or computer crashes, you'll have the latest progress safely saved.
Built–in help
The UI has tooltips for most parameters, activated automatically when you hover over the controls. There is also an automatically generated online GUI manual you can consult when you do not have your DCC open.
Render-ready assets
Everything you need to build your scene.
Chaos Cosmos
Chaos Cosmos is an extensive 3D content library built for Corona. It offers a wide range of high-quality, ready-to-use 3D assets including furniture, people, vegetation, vehicles, and more. These assets are optimized for rendering and can be easily imported into scenes, saving artists significant time and effort in creating detailed and realistic environments.
Chaos Scans
Chaos Scans is a library of meticulously scanned materials derived from real-world samples, capturing their precise texture, reflectivity, and other physical properties. It offers an extensive collection of fabrics, metals, plastics, woods, and more, all of which can be easily integrated into 3D projects using Corona.
Corona Material Library
Corona Material Library provides 520+ ready-to-use materials, each with a high-quality preview. Many materials in the library do not require UV mapping as they use Triplanar mapping.
Optimized workflow
Powerful workflow tools to design faster.
Chaos Scatter
With Chaos Scatter, you can easily place trees, grass, shrubs, and rocks in your scene. You can limit tree placement on steep slopes and carve out roadways using splines. Chaos Scatter offers a wide range of controls, allowing you to achieve the precise results you’re looking for.
Corona Pattern
Tile real geometry over a surface with the same ease as tiling a texture. Corona Pattern provides far more realism than alpha, bump, and displacement maps, and it requires far less memory than those alternatives.
Corona Decal
Road markings, cracks in concrete, smudges, and dirt on glass — these details add realism to your scene, and Corona Decal makes them easy to implement. Corona Decal is simple to set up, stackable, fully supports displacement, and can affect specific channels and multiple objects.
Corona Slicer
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.
Corona Lister
Easily find and control the most important settings for Lights, Displacement, Proxies, Cameras, and Scatters using Corona Lister and Scatter Lister.
3ds Max UI remains unblocked while rendering
Ever started a render, then minimized 3ds Max to get at something else on your desktop, only to find you can’t maximize Max again until the render is done? This is a thing of the past, as rendering in Corona keeps the 3ds Max UI unblocked.
Materials
Full realism with industry-standard PBR materials.
Corona Physical Material
Corona Physical Material is a highly versatile and realistic material type, designed to simulate real-world materials accurately. It is user-friendly and supports advanced features like clear coat layers, sheen, and anisotropy, allowing you to create a wide range of materials, from simple surfaces to complex, layered textures.
Material Preview
Material previewing uses the same rendering engine as the final frame rendering. The default 3ds Max or Cinema 4D material preview scene is replaced with a custom, more representative Corona scene, so you get a genuine “What You See Is What You Get” material editor.
Displacement
Chaos Corona's 2.5D Displacement lets you achieve detailed and accurate displacement while still optimizing parsing times and memory usage. You can control how displacement is handled when using a Layered Material, choosing between Blend All Layers (default), Only from base, or Add all layers.
Atmospheric & volumetric effects
Users can choose between a simple, fast-rendering volume effect in the Corona Sky to simulate atmospheric haze, or the full control of a volumetric material for more complex results.
Corona Tile Map
Easily create stunning bathrooms, kitchens, walls, and floors with procedural tiles thanks to Corona Tile Map. You can now use bitmaps or procedural maps to define the colors of the tiles and repeat, randomize, or even tessellate an image onto the tiles, depending on your needs.
Many maps to choose from
Chaos Corona comes with many useful maps that you will soon find indispensable, such as Ambient Occlusion, Mapping randomization, Multimap, Triplanar mapping, Edge Map/Shader, and more.
Corona Converter
You can instantly convert your scene to the Corona Physical Material with the click of a button, whether that is from other renderers such as V-Ray, or from older Corona materials like the Legacy Material.
Lights & Illumination, Environment
Complete control of lighting.
Corona Sun and Sky system
Chaos Corona offers several options for generating realistic procedural skies, using Sun and Sky objects/materials which are linked and work together, including the ability to have the sun below the horizon to create realistic results for dawn and twilight results.
Interactive LightMix
Interactive LightMix in Corona lets you change light color and intensity during or after rendering with a single click. Configure scenes with multiple suns, procedural skies, and environment maps, and render different times of day and sun angles in one render.
Efficient rendering of lighting
Corona handles scenes with many lights without problems and with no penalty to render time, so that you don’t have to worry about trying to optimize your scene.
No sampling parameters
There are no sampling parameters that you would have to set by trial and error. Lights will always work as expected.
Cameras & optical effects
Explore every angle.
Photorealistic camera
The Corona camera acts like a modern real-world camera and can be controlled through simple Exposure stops, through to full shutter speed, f-stop, and other controls. These are completed with advanced controls for camera effects such as Motion Blur and Bloom & Glare.
Lens effects
Lens Effects allow you to control the end result via lens scratches, dust, and peripheral grating, and the color of the effect can be adjusted using the Color Intensity and Color Shift parameters, so you can be as realistic or as creative as you choose.
Bloom & Glare
Bloom and glare are effects that happen in real life due to the imperfections of camera lenses and sensors, so they often appear in real-life photos. Use them to increase the realism of your renders.
Virtual Reality
Using a Corona Camera, you can export images in Spherical or Cubemap format ready for viewing in a wide range of VR applications. Stereoscopic and panoramic images can be used in any VR software.
Efficiency
Enjoy speed and interactivity.
Denoising
Use denoising to reduce the number of passes needed to get a noise-free image and save between 50 to 70% rendering time (as reported by our users). Denoising removes fireflies (hot pixels) from an image, and can be used only in that mode if required.
Interactive Rendering
Our fully–featured Interactive Rendering brings you similar advantages as exploring your scenes in real-time. You can change materials, lights, and create or adjust geometry as well as see your interactive render respond almost immediately. It runs entirely on the CPU and is not limited by your graphics card.
Real-time scene exploration with Vantage
Now, you can combine Corona with Vantage and explore your scenes in real-time. Vantage allows for rapid testing of camera angles and different setups. For full realism, users can switch back to Corona and render their scenes on the CPU by replicating the camera angles they discovered in Vantage.
Distributed rendering
Rendering with multiple computers is made simple by Corona. It has its own distributed rendering system which is compatible with 3ds Max’s and Cinema 4D’s native solutions.
Render elements & more
Creative freedom and control.
Render elements
For adjusting images in video or image editing software, Corona offers many Render Elements (3ds Max) and Multipasses (Cinema 4D), including Virtual Beauty, matte passes, separation of scene illumination, depth information, and more.
Cryptomatte support
Corona Cryptomatte is a render element that will help you easily create color mattes of a complex scene with hundreds of objects. It automatically generates the render channels stored in a multichannel OpenEXR file which removes the hassle of creating dozens or hundreds of single masking elements.
Smart masks
Creating masks in Chaos Corona is an easy process. You can create monochromatic as well as RGB masks simply by specifying Object ID, Material ID, or by directly picking objects in the scene. You can combine different selections as union or intersection.
