Update: The exporter is not being actively developed while I am busy with projects. Development should pick back up at a later date.
Corona Renderer is a new renderer developed by Ondra Karlik. It’s available as a 3DS Max plugin or as a standalone renderer. While the standalone renderer doesn’t support as many features as the Max plugin, it’s still very fast, very powerful, and can produce very high quality images using a number of different biased and unbiased rendering algorithms.
You can download Corona Standalone binaries here.
Download the Blender exporter on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ohsnapitsjoel/render_corona
https://vimeo.com/81228121
- Diffuse, specular color, translucency, opacity, reflection, anisotropy / anisotropy rotation, refraction, normal, and emission image textures
- Instances / dupligroups / object and group particle systems
- Hair particle systems export as renderable geometry
- Mesh lights
- Physically correct sun and sky (Hosek-Wilkie sky model)
- Environment texture mapping (latlong maps only)
- Physically correct depth of field
- Unbiased/consistent rendering with path tracing, bidirectional path tracing
- Biased rendering with HD Cache
- Progressive and bucket rendering modes
- Blender material conversion to Corona material
- Render passes
- Orthographic camera
- Portal materials
- Normal mapping
- Material anisotropy
- Binary .obj export
- Per-material ‘rounded corners’ rendering
- Node system including mix / fresnel / ao / ray switch shaders / texture node / offset & scaling node
- Camera, object, and deformation motion blur
- Cython compiled mesh export to reduce export times (by more than 50% compared to regular Python export)
- Download the exporter from bitbucket, from the “Downloads” section
- Extract the exporter and place it in your /scripts/addons directory.
- Enable the exporter in Blender’s User Preferences > Render category.
- In the Corona Render user preferences, set the path to the Corona Standalone directory containing Corona.exe
- Select Corona as the renderer from the render engine dropdown.
- Set the export path.
- Render. Large scenes may take a while to export and load in Corona, so be patient.
Exporter To do list:
- Camera shift
Warnings:
- Only UV-mapped image textures of formats PNG, EXR, BMP, JPEG, TGA, TIFF, GIF are supported. Other projections and texture types are not supported.
- Some non-manifold and loose geometry (vertices, edges) will break rendering. Geometry should to be clean. Check the console for errors if rendering fails; Corona will report which .obj files are giving it trouble.
Thanks to Franz Beaune and Esteban Tovagliari for the original Appleseed export code and their continued help with that, much of which was used for this exporter.