Today is a big day for visualization. We are excited to welcome Ondra, Adam, Jaroslav and the entire Render Legion team to Chaos Group! Corona is fast, it’s easy to use, and renders beautifully. From the beginning, our mission has been to help all artists and designers visualize anything they can imagine, and to push the boundaries of what rendering can do. Render Legion shares this same vision and together we believe that great visualization benefits us all.
The first thing you should know is both Corona and V-Ray are here to stay. Both products will continue to be developed independently by the same teams that you’ve come to trust, with the same level of innovation that you’ve come to expect. Now we can share ideas, research and technology to make both renderers as powerful as possible.
One advantage of being an independent company is you get to choose your own path. What’s exciting about Render Legion is they come from that same mindset, which makes it easy for us to work towards the same vision. Together, we’ll continue our commitment to the industry and to our communities.
I feel a bit bummed out by this. First I thought, aha cool more money for development, but then i also thought what everyone else thought over at the corona forums: the two packages are just way too similar and it does not make any business sense to have two very similar and competing packages under the same roof. Corona was taking many of Vrays customers because of its ease of use and cheaper price point, its not a surprise that chaos group decided to invest. They mention that they can now easily share features…but to me that sounds awfully similar to a purchase by another big 3D company…
It seems inevitable that Corona will be merged into Vray at some point even though they say otherwise. Which is really too bad, I love Corona, its easy of use, speed (incredibly fast for a CPU render), denoiser, and most of all the quality of light is hard to beat, it just has this different quality to it. The blender plugin was also progressing in a nice way…
I also agree that the idea of providing two fully-featured render engines sounded odd from a business perspective. Inevitably, Corona may eventually fade out of existence or see major changes to cater to a different market (such as cuts to anything dealing with animation and Vfx).
I have no real opinion on this since I have no involvement with anything dealing with the engine (rather just noting the possible route that would make sense business-wise). I also wonder if this is the start of consolidation in the render engine market (there’s a lot of solutions out there, and most of them do not have a large userbase like Vray and Arnold do).
