Chaos Corona for 3ds Max

Overview

What this release is

The pitch for this renderer has always been the absence of knobs. Most rendering engines hand you a panel of sampling parameters that require a working knowledge of the underlying maths to tune, and getting a clean image is a matter of guessing which one is causing the noise. This one has almost none of that. Point it at a scene and it resolves, progressively, until you decide it is clean enough.

That simplicity does not cost quality. Light behaves physically, materials follow a single consistent model rather than a collection of legacy shader types, and interiors with heavy indirect bounce resolve without the light portal gymnastics other engines demand. For architectural work, where most of the difficulty is bounced daylight through a window, this is the whole argument.

The interactive renderer is the part that changes how people work. Adjust a material, move a light, or nudge the camera and the image updates in the viewport straight away, so lighting is judged by looking at the result rather than by committing to a test render and waiting. Most of the iteration happens there and the final render becomes a formality.

This package includes the full material library, the post processing stack with bloom, glare, and tone mapping applied inside the frame buffer rather than in a separate application, and the distributed rendering modules for spreading a heavy frame across several machines on a network.

Feature set

What you get

Changes in this build

What changed

• Faster resolution on interior scenes with a single small light source
• Material library extended with additional architectural surfaces
• Denoising improved on frames containing fine displacement detail
• Distributed rendering made more tolerant of a node dropping mid frame
• Fixed the tone mapping mismatch between the interactive view and the final render

Installation

How to install it

1. Install the host modelling application first, since this is a renderer plugin rather than a standalone program.
2. Close the host completely before running setup.
3. Extract the archive and run the installer as administrator, choosing the matching host version.
4. Apply the included activation step before launching the host application.
5. Set the renderer as active in the render setup dialogue, since it does not take over automatically.

Hardware

System requirements

Package

Release information

Questions

Before you start