When I first started out 3D designing, I got my first modelling software which was 3DsMax and then I needed a professional realistic renderer. The two most popular ones that I came across were Corona and V-ray. In today’s blog, I will explain why I think Corona would be the best choice for a beginner.
Price
The first thing I am going to talk about is the price. I am going to be discussing the educational price and the normal price. So first, the normal monthly price for V-ray is $80, which is roughly €70 and for Corona it is €25. The educational license for V-ray is $99 per year and for Corona it is €25 per year. So as you can see Corona is significantly cheaper, which is very beneficial when you are first starting out and you are already having to invest in computer parts, software and a renderer.
Post Production
Similarly to V-ray, Corona has post production settings but from my experience Corona’s adjustment features are much more user-friendly and have a lot more functionality off the bat. For example, Corona has something called ‘Bloom’ and ‘Glare’, which creates realistic visible rays from light sources like a sun. Also, it comes preinstalled with a ‘LUTs’, which are just colour grading filters that you can put over your renders. V-ray does have an option for LUTs, but you have to find and download them yourself.
Material Library
Another great benefit of choosing Corona is that it has its own material library, which gives you the opportunity to practice applying materials without having to spend hours learning how to create them yourself – which is very difficult as a beginner. There are many different categories of materials such as glass, wood, stone, etc. These all can be applied with a single drag and drop.
Lighting
Corona also has a very unique feature called ‘Light-Mix’. This makes it incredibly easy to control the lighting in your scene whilst rendering, without having to go back and fourth to change the lighting and render again. This saves you so much time and allows beginners to really experiment and learn how to apply lighting in different scenes to match the mood and feel that you are going for.
Settings
As a beginner, render settings can seem quite intimidating as there are many tabs and menus to adjust. Luckily for Corona users, there are very little changes that you have to make to start seeing great renders. Corona also has many extra convenient tools such as the ‘Corona Converter’ that can change an entire V-ray scene, with V-ray lights, materials and skies to Corona ones. Another tool that I always use and find very helpful, is creating a Corona camera from my active viewport. Instead of creating and adjusting it manually, which can take a while to get it perfect.
The quality and speed of Corona in my opinion is just as good as V-ray and maybe even better. You can also read some of the articles that are linked below to learn what Corona does with their software to achieve such great results.
If you are a beginner considering trying out Corona and you found this information useful, there is a 45 day free trial below where you can download it and try it out for yourself!
Corona 45 Day Trial: https://corona-renderer.com/download
Hopefully you found this blog helpful! If you would like to see a more in depth video, it will be linked below.
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