Hey everyone! I’ve been working on this scene for quite a while and decided to try rendering it in something different than Cycles. I’ve picked Corona Renderer and you can see the results below. Actually, I’ve sinked into the work so much that it resulted in writing a complete tutorial on integrating Corona Standalone with Blender. If you’re interested in reading, just follow the link below:
I’ve tried describing things pretty solid so even non experienced Blender users should be able to follow. Some of the covered topics are: scene and illumination preparation for Corona and Blender or basic material setups ie. translucent lamp from one of the pictures. You can also download the entire scene as I’ve decided to share it with community for free. Just follow this link:
It should be working fine and allow you creating exact same pictures as I did. Some color correction was of course applied to them but you can compare it to raw renderings which can be found in the tutorial.
And a BIG thank you for this perfect tutorial (well laid out with your beautiful pictures and perfectly clean and spaced, a real pleasure to read !) on using Corona render with blender, i’ll try that out asap.
One little thing, try to avoid pure white colors for your materials (wall mat), because this will introduce too much energy into your scene, which results in >more noise >longer rendertimes >scenes that do not converge at all. Check Albedo pass for debugging.
>polygonsoul
Thank’s for letting me know with white color issue, I’ll definitely dig more into it. I didn’t actually notice the render times to be longer but as far as I know some people apply this rule to Cycles as well.
>Tartiflette, rattle-snake
Thank you guys!
>jzs
Thank you for mentioning my old Octane works, I’m actually really hungry for doing something completely new in terms of architectural visualization… Most of my works created in past 2-3 years were client based only and I’m not really happy with them. Perhaps after finishing Cycles interior tutorial I’ll finally put my hands on something more artistic
As for the shader nodes - to be honest I couldn’t get them working for some reasons on the exporter/standalone version I’ve used. Wasn’t quite sure what was the issue so that’s why they’re not covered in the tutorial. Do you know if there’s already any chance of using Texture Nodes together with Corona? I couldn’t find answers on that anywhere…
Hi, nice work lechu. I’m also waiting for a more complete featured version of Corona standalone. I hope it get some improvements once the 3ds max version is out.
Do you know if there’s already any chance of using Texture Nodes together with Corona
Not sure what you are asking for but here are the available nodes for Corona in Blender:
Do you know if there’s already any chance of using Texture Nodes together with Corona
As lenain showed these are the availebel nodes for corona currently, they are bit different from cycles shader nodes and not just because of the functions: yout won’t find it in the node editor clicking the material icon, you have to click on the little node icon and select the the adequate node tree from the rollout menu. You have to keep in mind that if you select an object, the node editor doesn’t shows the material node tree of the selected object you have to select in the node edtor the right one from the rollout. On the other hand te material preview is allways showing the material of the selected object. It’s a bit strange but you can get used to it, and sometimes it’s quite handy if you want to change the materials of a quite hidden object. All in all Joel’s exporter script is great. He made an exporter for Appleseed renderer too, which is also a cool software.
And I’m looking forward to seeing new personal project from you!!
>lenain34
I think I saw these nodes already. What I really miss are some basic color correction nodes like RGB Curves, HSV etc. They can really speed up many things not forcing you to tweak texture maps in external application.
>ShadowCamero, gumen
Thank you guys!
>jzs
I’ve tried “standard” texture node procedure but it didn’t seem to work with the exporter in my case… Maybe I’ll ask Joel directly and btw. he’s doing AMAZING job for the community!
marcoG - that looks very very well I must say. I’ll definitely redo the scene while preparing the rendering part of my Cycles tutorial as the current image was created over a year a go. At that time Cycles wasn’t even supporting RGB Curves for creating shaders so I hope to see a big improvement on the overall quality.
Would you share which GPU model you were using? Did you spend a lot of time re-lighting the scene and tweaking GI or it worked just out of the box?
What I like on Corona:
Light and materials always looks mutch more crisp and coherent than in Cycles.
In Cycles there is always something unrealistic, non-authentic left, but I cannot figure out what it is.
It’s definitily not the User like so many say
I fear that the Corona-Exporter will one day end in an unfinished / useless state like for example the Implementation of Octane into Blender.
There are so many interesting Plugins/Renderer for Blender in relation to architecture visualizations.
But they all remain in an unfinished / “for commercial production useless state”. But that’s another topic
Hi, gpu it’s Nvidia 570, i haven’t spent really much time re-lighting, all the light comes from world environment apart from the spots. Worked mostly on color management and shading walls with a bit of AO just after a couple of GI bounces to get the “light cache” feeling. With plain path tracing i would have needed tons of bounces and render time.
**Hope you don’t mind i posted a render in your finished project, just did for engine comparisons since i know you do Cycles render a lot too.
@Alain:
By doing the comparison (but i have not played with Corona with this scene), i saw quite big difference in:
GI in interiors…slow without tricks…portals would help a lot here i think. I suppose with Corona @lechu used HD cache for secondary bounces (?)
Cycles textures seem really saturated and with strong contrast compared to Vray and Corona, i had to reduce saturation in several textures
Color Mapping / Tonemapping…the most important maybe and always a fight…perhaps getting an exponential exposure control…i use one in compositor but works only in post but then you can’t see while Viewport rendering…
Cycles glass make me crazy (as always from the beginning), the picture on the right wall gets totally black behind the thin glass, bottles and glasses are dark with black spots…to solve this you need few light path tricks, transparent shaders etc…if used for windows seems it not reflects enough, it doesn’t have a frensel factor, increasing IOR get it chrome like
I made a new one with more samples and some tweaking in post above. 18 minutes IIRC
ive mailed you earlier about the model and again thanks a lot for the tutorial. Its been a while since i did the first part and been busy with the scene lately. Mainly remodeling and adjust models. Im rendering it with Thea Render which gave me a hard time reducing the noise. Thats why i redid a lot of the props in the model. Im rendering different camera’s at the moment.
My image has some post pro on it from PS. Mainly color balance and curves and some small amount of noise reduction. Also added some light flares. This versions of the image is a bit to yellow for me and ive re-rendered some parts to get rid of the noise, still need to update the image though.
EDIT
Here’s the other one with small adjustments, color balance is a bit different here
rombout - thanks for sharing your results! It’s really interesting to see how different rendering engines sometimes produce completely different results (ie. reflections on the picture frame on the right). Looking forward to seeing results from other cameras!
