Starting with Corona - it's amazing. I love it. It is so much like Max- intuitive, right, smart, fast and beautiful. I really wish mr/ir/art picked things up from corona- like the simple and intuitive shadow catcher, or the way to set up caustics, or lights so that their body is visible directly/in reflections/refractions/and or occlude other lights... One can dream...
To ART. I'm a attaching a couple of photos that show render results with all the major render engines.
^ This is ART @ 25db with 50% noise reduction rendered in 2m 8sec.^
^ This is iRay with 200 iterations - 1m 37s.^
^This is mental ray with the special new GPU based GI that replaced photon mapping and final gathering of old - 2m 16s.^
^ Lastly, this is Corona. I let it render for 4 minutes before stopping it.^
Everything was rendered in Max 2017 on intel i7 4770k and gtx 970, except Corona which used Max 2016. Farily simple geometry and materials with a single hdri skylight and a rectangle photometric light.
I haven't used Vray, since it's too slow and I just haven't tried Octane yet. With ART here, I can't say I'm in a rush. The noise reduction filter feels like a cheat but a great one. I can't help but think that iray would have won the day if it had such a trick- but here we are.
I have been a great supporter of mental ray and its ecosystem for years. Max' nitrous viewports, quicksilver and iray all share and use same lights and materials as mental ray, making a switch between them a breeze. I'm very happy to see most of it extended to ART, a great addition to the family.
test on a simple scene
corona vs art
10 min for frame
*open image in new window for 2400px resolution
