Wednesday, October 25th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Render Legion ships Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max


Originally posted on 26 September 2017. Scroll down for news of the official release.

Render Legion has released Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max, the latest update to its production renderer, as a feature-locked release candidate.

The RC1 build adds new dedicated hair and skin shaders, a new dedicated camera, a collection of over 300 ready-to-use materials, and improves render speed “up to eight times”.

New V-Ray DMC sampler helps scenes render up to 8x faster
The first version of Corona to ship after Render Legion was acquired by Chaos Group earlier this summer, Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max also marks the first integration of its new owner’s own technology.

V-Ray’s DMC sampler is now integrated into Corona, and – along with a new adaptive direct light algorithm – is one of several cumulative changes credited with improving render speed.

According to Render Legion, rendering is now “in some scenes up to eight times faster”.

New dedicated Corona camera, skin and hair shaders
The update also introduces a new native Corona camera, and new skin and hair shaders, the latter also compatible with 3ds Max’s Hair and Fur system and hair generated by the plugins Ornatrix and Hair Farm.

The base CoronaMtl material itself gets a new subsurface scattering mode and support for Dispersion.

The release also introduces the Corona MatLib, a collection of over 300 ready-to-use materials that can be downloaded alongside the renderer itself.

Other changes: new texture mapping tools, UI updated for Hi-DPI displays
Other new features include a UVW Randomizer for randomising the placement of texture maps on instanced objects within a scene, and a Bump Converter utility for converting any map into a bump map.

The UI has also been updated to display properly on Hi-DPI monitors.



Updated 26 October 2017: Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max is now officially shipping.

Render Legion’s blog post announcing the release goes into more detail on the features listed above, including some more precise figures for the performance boosts.

The post also has some demo images of the new hair and skin shaders in action – in particular, there’s a very nice photorealistic image of Daniel Craig, shown in part above, created by Luc Bégin.

Pricing and availability
Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max is available for 64-bit 3ds Max 2012+, running on Windows 7 and above.

Users have a choice between a perpetual ‘Box’ licence, which costs €449 (around $530), and a ‘Fair SaaS’ rental model, which costs between €24.99 and €44.99 a month ($30-53). You can find more details here.

Read a full list of new features in Corona Renderer 1.7 for 3ds Max on Render Legion’s blog