Corona Vs Vray
When I first started out 3D designing, I got my first modeling 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, but I was not sure which one was the best for me? After having tried out both in this blog, I will explain why I think Corona would be the best choice for a beginner.
Let’s get started.
The Price
The first thing I am going to talk about is the price, because let’s be honest it’s something we all definitely take into consideration. 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.
Corona Vs Vray 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 pre-installed 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 Vs Vray 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 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 forth 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 (Corona Vs Vray)
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. Corona Vs Vray
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 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
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I’ve been using V-Ray quite a long time before hearing of Corona. What makes Corona great is the integration within Adsk products (specifically Max), and that it’s seems quite easy to use (at first hand).
But, when it comes to fine adjustments, post-prod work and the like, Corona seems to me a bit lacking of some tools (I use).
About the material library, V-Ray have it’s own, which is easy to grab around the web, and is quite big.
The real differences are technical, V-Ray is an unbiased renderer, as Corona is not, and V-Ray offer 3 kinds of render (full CPU, full GPU, and mixed), where Corona don’t go that far (by the moment). Corona looks way simpler, but then, it lacks of some adjustments you may need.
But they both give you great rendering, with comparing calcul times, it’s just that one existe on many systems (windows, OS-X, Linux), and softwares (maya, max, Rhino3D,…), where the other is still young and can’t be used with as many systems than the other.
The price is not a good argument to make your choice, just look your production line, and which is the one you need.