BCorona 2.0 lets you render Blender scenes in Corona
Developer and architectural artist Odilkhan Yakubov has released BCorona 2.0, the latest version of his unofficial plugin integrating Blender with Chaos’s Corona renderer.
The update makes BCorona compatible with Blender 4.0, and adds an experimental new feature for automatically converting shaders from Blender’s Cycles renderer to Corona.
A Blender integration plugin that works with Corona Standalone
Released in 2021, initially as a free tool, and later as a paid add-on, BCorona makes it possible to render scenes created in Blender with Corona instead of its native Cycles render engine.
Its main use case is in architectural visualization, for artists who have switched to Blender as an open-source solution for 3D modeling, but want a renderer focused on architectural work.
Rather than the commercial version of Corona, it works with Corona Standalone, the GUI-less edition of the renderer: free to download, but last updated in 2019.
Some limitations, but capable of good-quality output
As Corona Standalone isn’t intended to be used with a GUI, it doesn’t provide accurate previews of materials in viewport renders, although they should render correctly in final-quality output.
It also only supports path tracing, not the UHD Cache, Corona’s biased global illumination solver, often used to speed up renders of interior scenes.
In addition, BCorona has limitations of its own, the main ones being that it doesn’t support Blender’s popular Geometry Nodes or particle systems.
However, it’s capable of generating some nice-looking renders, as shown by the images shared in the support thread on the Blender Artists forum.
Now automatically converts Cycles shaders to Corona equivalents
To that, BCorona 2.0, the latest version of the plugin, adds an experimental new converter for converting Cycles shaders to Corona: you can see a demo of an early version here.
The update also introduces support for Blender 4.0, the current version of Blender.
System requirements and availability
BCorona 2.0 is compatible with Blender 4.0+, running in Windows only. It costs $40. Version 1.9.5 of the plugin, which supports Blender 3.x, is still available, and costs $25.
BCorona can be used with Corona Standalone 3.0, which can be downloaded for free.
Read more about BCorona on the support thread on the Blender Artists forum
Buy BCorona 2.0 from BlenderMarket
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