Chaos Corona

Overview

Chaos Corona 9 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D adds many powerful tools to allow artists to create their 3D worlds faster and with more detail than ever. 

Key features in Corona 9 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D

Procedural Clouds
The Corona Sky was great but was always a clear sky. HDRIs can be great, but you’d need a unique HDRI for different levels of cloud cover or different times of day, and they were static (or if animated, needed a huge number of large files that took up a ton of space on your hard drive).

The new Procedural Clouds solve all these issues, letting you tweak the amount of cloud cover, the shape of the clouds, their position in the scene, and animate them with ease. You even get to add and animate aeroplane trails (contrails) across your sky!

Due to how they are calculated and rendered, they have minimal effect on render times compared to full volumetric solutions. They can even be previewed in the viewport, so you can adjust the settings without having to render or even use IR.

The Procedural Clouds respond to the position of the Sun, so you can have evening and dawn just as easily as you can have full noon. You can search for the look you like with the random Seed option, and all of the parameters can be animated so that clouds can move, cloud coverage can grow or reduce, and so on. You can also choose whether the clouds cast shadows into your scene or not.

Corona Pattern
Now you can tile real geometry over a surface, with the same ease as you’d tile a texture. Not only does this give you far more realism than you’d ever obtain with opacity, bump, and displacement maps, it also requires far less memory than those alternatives.

To get a quick grasp of when this is useful, think of things such as:

• Fabrics, where those are made of knitted or woven strands
• Wire fences, fireguards
• Jewelry such as chains
• And much more!

To simplify working with Corona Pattern, you can have the height of the geometry scale automatically and naturally with the tiling so that the height reduces as the geometry is scaled more frequently, or you can choose to disable this and set a manual height if required.

Edge Trimming
This has been the single most requested feature for Chaos Scatter. We’re happy to let you know that it is now included in this latest update to Scatter. A prime example is letting you control the edges of lawns and other grass areas.

The effect relies on the way the geometry being scattered is set up. If you are scattering individual grass blades (unlikely, as this would be very inefficient!) then you will already have good edging. The Edge Trimming will help when you are scattering “clumps” of individual grass blades, by hiding the individual blades which would be out of bounds.

To set it up, you simply add a Scatter Edge Trimming shader (Cinema 4D) / ChaosScatterEdgeTrimming map (3ds Max) into the opacity slot of all materials being used on the objects being scattered. This methodology and result is similar to that used by other scattering tools for Corona 9, but in the future we want to simplify the process, e.g. by using a single checkbox.

Out of Core Rendering for Textiles
This option reduces the amount of memory required for texture maps loaded via Corona Bitmap. Testing done in-house and by a few archviz studios have seen savings of between 5 and 70%, depending on how heavy the scene is, how big the textures in use are, and other factors.

This is disabled by default in Corona 9, and you will have to activate it to take advantage of it.

Corona will automatically allocate the space needed on the hard drives when the option is enabled. Manually overriding the settings is also possible if desired, under the System settings. When using OOC Textures, Corona will automatically clear the cache on loading a new scene or on closing the host application.

The Out of Core texture rendering makes a difference when the texture has a higher resolution than what is needed based on its placement in the scene.

For the full list of features visit here.

Manufacturer: Chaos

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