Chaos has announced the release of Corona 9 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D. The main new features include:
- Procedural Clouds that respond to sun colour and position. Two types of clouds can be created which can be animated for time-lapse effects.
- Corona Pattern allows the user to tile geometry on a surface much as they would using material IDs. It’s much the same as the Enmesh technology recently added to V-Ray 6.
- Chaos Scatter now includes edge trimming, a feature familiar to Forest Pack users, whereby individual elements can be clipped from the boundaries of a scatter area at render time for clean borders. It’s designed to allow for scattering larger patches of plants to minimise the number of instances that are needed to fill an area but maintain accurate edges.
- Shutter Curve options for motion blur
- Depth of field for fisheye cameras
- Out-of-core rendering for textures that can reduce the amount of memory required for large maps.
- New material override options that allow the user to preserve slicers, bump and opacity.
- Plus many more small improvements and fixes
In addition, there have been changes to licensing options for Corona. From now on two rental plans are available. Corona Solo includes both Cinema 4d and 3ds Max plugins locked to a single computer. The monthly cost is now €48, or a whole year for €322.80 (which works out to €26 per month).
The new tier is called Corona Premium and offers floating licenses of Corona plugins for Cinema 4D and 3ds Max, plus licenses of Phoenix, Chaos Player, and Chaos Scans. Corona Premium costs €59 per month or €418 for a year (working out at €34.90 per month).
Detail: Chaos website.