Hi so i’m not sure if im in the right place but I was wondering if I could get some advice.
I’ve been a long time user of Corona Renderer with Blender. I believe the renders it produces are flipping amazing, especially for arch vis.
The problem is, the addon that allows Blender to work with Corona is made by 1 developer in his spare time, and although he has done a FANTASTIC job on his own, the compatibility is still rather a pain with quite a lot to fix in places. Also you need to export the whole scene to the Standalone version of Corona to render the scene. So maybe 20minutes export time for extremely large scenes to export, to then realise “oh, the HDR is the wrong way” or “that material is wrong”… so you can get my frustration.
I’ve persisted on using it for a very long time because I truly think its the leader in arch vis render quality.
Anyway, I’ve found a post created by Corona Renderer stating that they will never make an official addon for Corona with Blender because
" Because entire Blender is covered by GPL licence, it is forbidden to link anything closed-source to it (not just commercial as in “you pay for it”, but anything closed-source, which includes “it is free to use, but I won’t give you my source code”). Making Corona opensource software (OSS) is out of question for me, I need to make it commercial to be able to fund its future development. "
Now, this post was created in 2013, so I was wondering if anything has changed or if its possible at all for Corona to develop some kind of plugin that will allow them to communicate with Corona Renderer in a closed-source manner? There are a fantastic amount of paid addons that are used in Blender such as The Grove, Grass Essentials etc…
To have viewport rendering for Corona in Blender is all we need, but Corona doesn’t think they are allowed to.
Surely there is something they can do? Maybe make the addon free, but keep paying the Corona subscription as normal…?
VRay has a special Blender build which they distribute with the VRay addon. Perhaps something is different there but perhaps that is a good starting point for searching for information.
Unfortunately Vray is owned by Chaos group who also own Corona. Also under the Vray for Blender website it says
“Blender and V-Ray for Blender are free and open-source products licensed under the GNU General Public License.
To render with V-Ray in Blender you need V-Ray Standalone installed.”
So this uses the same standalone method which is troubling me with Corona. It seems that making Vray or Corona work INSIDE of Blender is the problem.
hmmm… Blender PLEASE allow Corona to make this work, it would further the Blender user-base i’m sure!
Due to Blenders GPL License, this is the only way external Renderengines (that are not open source) can work with Blender. This has been discussed over and over again and won’t change. Even if they wanted to change the license, they couldn’t because every developer that ever contributed to Blender would have to aggree to it - which is impossible considering Blenders scale.
Current status: we tried rewriting the parser so it is much more memory friendly. It did not end well (it worked but the code was too complex and unmaintainable). We will try different approach, which will include some changes to the format (making it at least partially backwards incompatible). Basically we need to simplify the format to make it easier to parse in our code. There is also big rewrite of the standalone application, to get some interactivity features. It will take lot of time, but the result will be worth it ;).
So for now, just be weary and prevent time wasting by being disciplined and well organized (take notes, have a checklist before you start final rendering…) - can & will also help you in other areas of life.
Do you know what is meant by this update they are creating? Would it allow for faster standalone export and more features?
But yeah thats kind of what I do now is do an initial test render and then draw all over it with notes about what needs to be included or changed in the final render. It works pretty well. Its just annoying when i forget something like “turn the HDR to the night scene” and then it renders the day version. haha.
I’m super excited to see where Corona gets taken with Blender.
I did see (and i’ve written in the corona forum), that Octane edited their own version of Blender to work directly with the Octane standalone version inside of Blender.
I’ve seen a few people lately creating their own versions of Blender… this looks super interesting.
Perhaps this could be the future too for Corona?