Corona now uses an improved text rendering used in render stamp and unsupported materials
“Setup LightMix” button added to the multiple environment maps setup dialog
Added “Unpacking and installing” message to installer to notify that something is happening after NVIDIA AI denoiser or material library are downloaded
Copy to clipboard option added into CIE
Added a warning shown when there is a NaN (invalid pixel value) in the rendered image
Installer now detects when the selected unpack directory contains any files and asks the user whether to override them or cancel the action
tag was added to VFB title to show that image was rendered with IR
Caustics now respect the include/exclude list of lights
Changing render regions now resumes IR which was stopped by pass limit
Optimizations
Improved performance of caustics solver in scenes with multiple light sources
Reduced memory used by the caustics solver by up to 30%
Faster IR restarts in scenes with sun(s)
Performance optimizations - around 7% gain in tested scenes
Optimized ColorCorrectTex evaluation
Switched to the latest Embree library. This brings speed improvement (8% for instances), memory reduction (up to 2x reduced for hair, 192 bytes lower consumption per each instance), improved intersection with hair (removes some artifacts)
Rewrite of geometry processing - There are significant memory savings, 25-85% of memory used by geometry. Measured e.g. 10GB less memory usage on real scene (from 60 to 50GB)
CGEO and standalone format changes slightly. New proxies cannot be opened in older versions. New versions will open all proxies
Parsing of scenes should be faster
Bugfixes
Fixed installer reporting incomplete size (e.g. “218.9 MB / 220 MB”) after successfully downloading NVIDIA AI denoiser or material library
Fixed toggleable button wrong color
Fixed Proxy animation option “Hide out of range” hiding the proxy too early
Fixed crashes when loading malformed proxy files
Fixed crash when NVIDIA AI libraries cannot be loaded
Fixed Corona to seek Licensing Server on all network interfaces
The “Activate license…” button in System tab in Render Setup now does not need to be clicked multiple times to get the activation
The System tab in Render Setup no longer claims that there is no license when it has been acquired from Licensing server
NOTE: In case you use the pre-downloaded NvidiaAiDenoiser pack file instead of letting the installer download it itself, you need to download the new version of this file from dropbox.
Added option to disable the “startup scripts enabled” warning in the 3ds Max
Updated Intel CPU AI denoiser to version 1.0 - Fixed the denoiser adding ghosts of objects which are not visible in the scene due to lack of lighting
Lowered memory consumption for higher resolutions (2k+)
Updated NVIDIA GPU AI denoiser to the latest version - Better compatibility with other plugins also using NVIDIA CUDA and OptiX frameworks
Improved performance with Turing GPUs
Better error reporting
Requires NVIDIA GPU driver version 418.81 or later
Bloom&Glare progress bar is now shown in CIE as well
High quality image filtering is now one of the selectable filter types (used as the default one) instead of being enabled by a separate checkbox.
Bugfixes - Fixed license activation not working in some cases when running Corona on the same machine as licensing server.
Newly saved CXR contain information about camera (VR, type), so CIE can compute Bloom&Glare correctly for different camera types
Fixed crash when switching CoronaLight on/off during IR
Fixed normal maps rendering incorrectly
Fixed .conf file parsing error on opening Render Settings (or starting rendering) after certain values are saved as defaults in Render Settings (e.g. when Image Filter Type is set to Symmetric Tent by default).
Fixed not being able to load back .conf file saved from CIE in some cases (e.g. when NVIDIA or Intel AI denoisers are selected)
Corona ColorPicker now uses Corona icon in its title bar
The error message indicating that a NaN pixel was encountered in the rendered image now includes link to a helpdesk “create bug report” page.
Autosave path - added help button to explain which special tokens can be used (similar to render stamp)
Optimized geometry processing time and IR restarts in scenes with larger numbers of instances. In some extreme cases this speeds up geometry processing time by up to 30%
Changed the directory structure of installed Corona - We no longer install various DLLs into 3ds Max root folder. These are now installed into Program Files
Added new 2.5D displacement mode - Much more memory efficient than the original displacement, allowing much finer displacement (smaller screen/world size) while using less memory.
Controlled by new checkbox in performance tab of render settings
Enabled by default for new scenes, but disabled for older scenes for backwards compatibility.
Fixed crash when unhiding an object with LightMtl applied while using the old light solvers
Optimized Corona Distance Map when Corona Scatter is plugged as distance-from object. Brings up to 30% speed up in extreme cases.
Fixed readme file for the installer unpack option to reflect changes in the directory structure.
2.5D displacement - Number of primitives generated by displacement is now included in the primitive count displayed in VFB stats tab
Optimized geometry processing time - up to 3-4x faster on average, more than 20x faster in some extreme cases
Optimized rendering speed - few percent increase on average, but up to 3x faster in scenes with heavy displacement
Optimized memory usage - roughly 2x less memory on average, more than 10x less memory in some extreme cases
Fixed rendering artifacts occurring in some scenes
Fixed recomputing displacement in IR when the displaced object is moved. It’s now recomputed only when the displacement settings change, just like the old displacement.
Optimized scene parsing time for scenes with high amount of instances. More than 2x faster parsing for scenes with ~5M instances.
Fixed rendering a scene with the render engine “Simple Path Tracing” causing an instant crash
2.5D displacement - Saved 4 bytes per original pre-displacement triangle in case the whole object uses the same displacement map.
Added an error message when both 2.5D displacement and round edges map fast mode is applied to the same object. These two features are unfortunately not compatible at this moment and in this case the round edges map will fall back to using the precise mode. This will be fixed in the future.
Fixed .scn and .cxr file extension associations stopped working when the installation path to Corona Standalone or Corona Image Editor was changed from previous installation.
Fixed rare crash when rendering an isolated object
Fixed rare crash in the 2.5D displacement
Fixed IR freezing when using ProBoolean
Fixed artifacts when using dark environment map
Material library update - Fixed tiling size of normal maps in Oak Honey Floor and Oak Northland Floor materials
Added 17 new Basic Hair materials
Added 10 new Skin materials
Fixed inconsistent tiling size - Stone / Cobblestone Herringbone