What’s new in Corona 12?

• Corona to Vantage scene export. Import your Corona scenes into Chaos Vantage to render test images in seconds. Create animations in Vantage and enjoy the lightning-fast speed of GPU real-time rendering. 

• Curved Decals. Easily bend labels around curved objects like bottles and spherical items without distortions.

• New Virtual Frame Buffer (VFB 2). Use the new VFB features like improved A/B image comparison, multiple LightMix setups within one render, and deferred bloom and glare calculations.

• Corona Pattern improvements. Create new and incredibly realistic materials with the help of Corona Pattern. Geometric objects can now be used to define the shape of the crop box, allowing designers to employ snapping tools and more to get the perfect pattern.

• Scatter Instance Brush (Corona for 3ds Max). Enjoy full creative control over the scattering process with a brush tool to refine procedural instances.

• Corona Sky improvements. Enhance day-to-night transitions with even lower sun angles adding an extra layer of realism.

• New Density parameter in Corona Sky. Customize your cloud density in one click.

• Corona Material Library is now available on Chaos Cosmos, which will save you time when switching between asset libraries. 

• Enjoy a more streamlined workflow with the new Cryptomatte by material. 

With this initial integration, you can export your Corona scenes in .vrscene format and open them in Vantage.

Once in Vantage, you can explore your scenes by navigating them in real-time and rendering images in seconds. This is ideal for faster scene exploration, test renders, and even final renders when full photorealism is not required. For full realism, you can switch back to Corona and render those scenes on the CPU by replicating the camera angles you discovered in Vantage.

New Virtual Frame Buffer (VFB 2) 

With Corona 12, we are introducing an improved version of the Virtual Frame Buffer (VFB) with a more intuitive UI and many new features.

With VFB 2, you can:

• Drag and drop a Corona EXR (CXR) file into the VFB itself and immediately continue editing it, even without the original scene being loaded in 3ds Max or Cinema 4D.
• Easily compare images with different resolutions and aspect ratios using the new A/B comparison option.
• Enjoy a smoother workflow by having multiple LightMix elements where each one has its own settings. This allows you to save different lighting setups (e.g., night and day) in one image instead of having separate configuration files for each LightMix setup. You get more information in one file and keep things tidier. 
• Speed up the iteration process and save valuable processing time by choosing to defer the calculation of bloom and glare until the end of the render.
• Use new Gamma, Lift, and Gain parameters for tone mapping.
• Enjoy a more polished look and a snappier performance of the UI. 
• And more!

VFB 2 also brings history management improvements and other smaller enhancements that make it more intuitive and easy to navigate.

Corona Pattern improvements 

With the new Corona Pattern improvements, you can now use a geometric object as a helper to define the crop box, letting you use vertex editing and snapping tools to easily cut out the pattern geometry without any resulting glitches, holes, seams, etc. Also, in Corona for 3ds Max (and as soon as we can for Cinema 4D), you can create materials that were previously impossible. You get the flexibility of choosing whether the maps follow the base object UV, the pattern object UV, or both. 

For example, if you are working on a blanket or other textile material, you can have one bump map for wrinkles mapped across the entire base UV of the blanket while the individual pattern segments repeat a diffuse pattern. Or you can repeat the color by pattern and mix it with an overall color across the base object, such as an image of a blanket mixed with various colored fibers.

Additionally, in both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, you can now define the visibility of the pattern using a shader to create holes or gaps in the applied pattern, automatically generate caps over holes created by the slicing of the Pattern Crop Box, and more easily see the direction that the pattern will be applied thanks to a normal direction indicator on the Crop Box which shows the direction that will face “outward” when applied to the base object.

With the help of Corona Pattern, you can achieve much more realistic results with just a few simple clicks.

Corona Sky improvements

Fading in from day to night has never been better. The improved Corona Sky supports even lower angles for sun below the horizon (down to -12 degrees, compared to the previous -4.2 degrees), which makes day/night animations and still images more realistic and immersive. 

Corona Sky also now includes a Density parameter — lower it to make your clouds thin and wispy all the way down to invisible, or raise it to make them dense and thunderously heavy. 

Smaller improvements in Corona 12 

Cryptomatte sees a couple of improvements, allowing you to set up Cryptomatte by material, and additionally the Cryptomatte render element now works correctly in Distributed Rendering (3ds Max) and Team Render (Cinema 4D), and when using Resume Render.

Material conversions have been improved, in particular the conversion from VRayMaterial to the Corona Physical material (especially for metals and materials with colored reflections), and this change also influences imports from Chaos Cosmos. In Cinema 4D, the Scene Converter has also been improved to convert between Corona and C4D bitmaps, and now supports conversion of V-Ray lights.

The Corona Material library is now also available on Chaos Cosmos which can save you time when switching between the two asset libraries.

Corona now available on Chaos.com 

We have some important news regarding the former Corona website, which has now moved over to Chaos.com. This provides a new centralized location for the community to access information about Corona and the other Chaos products. 

You can now find the latest versions of Corona, blog articles, customer stories, Corona Benchmark, and more on Chaos.com. We hope you like the new design of the Corona web pages!

Here are a few pages you may want to bookmark:

• Corona homepage
• What’s new in Corona
• Corona Benchmark
• Download Corona
• Corona Community Forum
• The Chaos Blog (featuring all Chaos products, including Corona)

Additional smaller improvements

Scatter

(Cinema 4D)

• Added option to enable edge trimming via checkbox (removing the need to modify individual materials used on scattered objects).
• Added spline UI for additional control of Look At in Chaos Scatter.

(3ds Max)

• Improved performance of surface scattering when using a density map.
• Introduced on-demand mesh optimization/simplification (controlled by the polygon limit) to ease the viewport load in full mesh preview mode.
• Extended the UI, so translate, rotate, scale and density control maps could be disabled/enabled more easily.
• Introduced hit-testing optimization, which overcomes a very noticeable lag on hovering/selecting scatter with many visible instances.
• Improved viewport draw performance in Full and Box preview modes.
  • Introduced adaptive previz for these two modes, which improves the responsiveness in case of frequent viewport redraws and large number of instances.

Lister

(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)

• Lister – added option to reorder tabs by mouse dragging.

(Cinema 4D)

• Lister now shows instance count also for Chaos Scatter and Cinema 4D Cloner and Array.
• Lister dialog numeric widgets now use the same step size as standard C4D UI.
• Removed instance count column in scatter lister tab as it was confused with scatter instance count.

Material Editor (Cinema 4D)

• Added option to select connected nodes (incoming and/or outgoing). Incoming nodes can also be selected by Alt + left click.
• When a new material/shader is added, all newly added nodes are selected.
• Added option to Solo nodes, which uses self-illumination.
• Flattened plugins submenu when creating a shader.
• Avoid node stacking in the UI when adding multiple bitmaps via drag&drop.

Standalone Export (Cinema 4D)

• Fixed incorrect custom gamma when exporting C4D bitmap to Standalone.
• Export to Standalone now supports:
  • C4D filter shader
  • Checkerboard
  • Normal direction
  • Fresnel
  • Gradient
  • Falloff
  • Fusion
  • Layer

General

(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)

• Improved performance of Corona renderer with bucket rendering on high-core count machines.
• Improved rendering speed up to 25% on DUAL CPUs.
• Added accurate sampling mode for environment maps that is slower but delivers more accurate results, especially for large environment maps.
• Optimized cloud generation.
• Added the ability to zoom and navigate in the curve editor.
• Added the option to apply a LUT in linear color space instead of a gamma-mapped one.
• Added the option to have the Corona Curvature map unaffected by Bump.
• Added option to distinguish media based on their material (e.g., two intersecting objects with the same material will be now considered as a single volume). This is automatically active for new scenes.
• A warning is shown when old sky data is installed on the system and Sun elevation is set below 4.2 degrees.
• Added warning about deprecating Corona Material Library and moving it to Cosmos.
• Added 3 toggleable locks to the tilemap UI, which constrain tile size & offset & shrinking.
• Added option to generate tiles bump in Tile shader.
• Added the Alpha interaction option in Scanned material.

(Cinema 4D)

• Added rotation parameter in Corona bitmap.
• Added tooltips in Corona Sun.
• Bump UI in Physical material is now enabled by default for new materials.
• Extended the maximum shutter speed in Corona camera to 10’000.
• Extended the maximum time limit of render from 24 hours to 240 hours.
• The Legacy options in the Development/Experimental section in render settings were organized into a single section.
• Fixed problem with “Save selected objects as…” resetting materials and not saving connected sub-materials in C4D 2024.
• Removed “Ignore missing tiles” option in Corona Bitmap as it was only used for error reporting; instead, the number of loaded tiles is now directly included in the image description.

(3ds Max)

• Significantly improved speed of loading of Corona and Scatter plugins.
• Considerably sped up saving in 3ds Max (up to 10 times in some scenes), when the scene contains Corona Bitmaps.
• Added “Additional outputs” to MultiMap.
• Added possibility to use batch loading together with additional inputs of MultiMap.
• Viewport display of camera’s focal plane was enabled in the camera view and parameters to enable it and change its opacity were added.
• Added option to select objects in the scene that will be included in/excluded from environment illumination.
• Added rollout in CoronaCamera to define Environment Overrides.
• Added the option to override the environment map in Corona Camera.
• Corona VFB now displays the rendered image with the correct display/view transform when OCIO color management is used.
• Added information about Corona EXR color space in the history item tooltip.
• Corona Bitmap will now use the Color space selected in the Open file dialog.
• Added message box with confirmation of deletion of animation keys/layers in SceneCleaner Power Tool.
• Added glossiness mapping for clear-coat in CoronaScannedMtl.

Bug fixes in Corona 12

Scatter

(Cinema 4D)

• Reduced UI freezing when using distribution shader in Chaos Scatter distributing over high amount of triangles.
• Fixed usage of animated Corona proxy in Chaos Scatter.
• Fixed several issues in Chaos Scatter where instances would not generate for a long time.
• Fixed incorrectly handled animation tracks for some spline widgets used in Corona/Scatter (e.g., Scatter altitude, Corona Color Correct shader).
• Fixed usage of Corona Proxy as distribution target of Chaos Scatter.
• Fixed issue with Corona Proxy scale not being taken into account when used with edge trimming.

(3ds Max)

• Fixed issue where some scenes with Chaos Scatter might load for an infinitely long time.
• Fixed issue where some instances were occasionally placed outside of very-fine meshes when using the UV-distribution scattering.
• Fixed issue with missing icons in Max 2025.
• Fixed issue where some instances were occasionally placed outside of very-fine meshes when using the UV-distribution scattering.
• Fixed issue when an outdated persistent config file is found. The issue is handled instead of showing an error/warning message.
• Fixed issue where the method of export may introduce small floating point errors in the geometry data (a fix primarily targeted for the V-Ray cloud export).
• Fixed an inaccurate calculation in the instance collision detection process when specifying the surface random distribution by a map and using a rest pose time-frame.
• Fixed incorrect edge trimming for instances of hierarchical/group models.

General

(3ds Max and Cinema 4D)

• Fixed issue where sky with clouds was dimmer compared to sky without clouds. Old scenes will be loaded with the Sky object in legacy mode for backward compatibility.
• Fixed issue where using shutter curve could lead to crash in very rare occasions.

(Cinema 4D)

• Fixed issue with Pattern modifier handles showing size clamped to zero when dragging handles in negative axis direction.
• Fixed issue with visibility, masks propagation and Material ID not working for Scanned material.
• Fixed usage of assets from Scene database in Corona Bitmap, Corona Proxy and Scanned material.
• Fixed issue with all Scanned materials having the same color in ID pass.
• Fixed copying of sub-materials when copying Layered material between documents in newer C4D versions.
• Fixed issue with Volume material rendering slower than equivalent Physical material.
• Fixed issue with VDBs sometimes not rendering via Team Render.
• Fixed handling of Takes in Select shader and Select material.
• Fixed rendering of cached Pyro simulation via Team Render.
• Fixed IR updates when modifying fields.
• Fixed incorrect defaults for dome mapping parameters.
• Fixed issue where changing tone mapping after rendering has finished would reset the color profile of an image in the Picture viewer.
• Improved detection of low memory on macOS (showing RAM usage warning).
• Fixed issue with texture paths in XREF objects not resolving correctly.
• Fixed several issues regarding crop/placement set in pixel space (e.g., when changing bitmap path to one with different resolution).
• Fixed maximum value for randomization options in Tile shader.

(3ds Max)

• Fixed “Apply denoising to this element” checkbox not affecting Optix denoiser.
• Fixed a bug with the nodes group replacement in ObjectReplacer.
• Fixed an issue where importing Cosmos materials with child materials did not work.
• Fixed animated proxy conversion from V-Ray to Corona creating corrupted frames.
• Fixed LUT not working when the path is relative and the scene is saved on another drive.
• Fixed a crash when parsing RailClone objects.
• Fix of wrong tile width/height during lock when one of them is zero.
• Fixed a typo in Tile map tooltips.
• Fixed rare NAN caused by an error in VFB.
• Fixed rare NAN in Caustic solver.
• CoronaNormal map uses fixed gamma = 2.2 in OCIO mode for gamma correction (enabled by “Add gamma to input”).
• Metalness setting in the converter is now respected when converting V-Ray and Autodesk Physical materials.
• Fixed rare crash occurring during material renaming in lister.