If you are an architectural visualisation artist that hasn't heard of Corona then head here and download the 45-day trials immediately.
Below is a series of three images I made for an upcoming video series on Corona Render engine. As some of you know I am on the 3D Artist expert panel and I have been lucky enough to review a few versions of Corona for the magazine over the last few years. It is fast becoming my go-to render engine for commercial projects, and with the Vray and Corona merger I think it is only a matter of time before Corona is the industry standard renderer in Architectural Visualisation.
What I love about Corona is that the settings are made for artists by artists. This makes the UI so easy to use and leaves time for the artist to be creative and not spend time on how to get the settings to work how they would like.
My favourite thing about Corona is the Light Mixer. By adding a LightMix and LightSelect element you will be able to adjust your lighting in the frame buffer. The LightMix tab allows the user to toggle lights on and off, change the intensity as well as the colour of lights. The setup can then be pushed to the actual scene settings. This saves us going into 3ds Max and updating each light individually.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication and this is certainly the case with Corona. The lack of settings is actually a major plus. It means there are fewer things to go wrong, leaving the artist time to do that, be an artist. Overall Corona is a joy to work with, mainly for the simple fact it is fast and easy to use.