This page provides information about Corona Render Elements and their use with Chaos Phoenix.
For more information about the Render Elements visit the Corona Render Elements page.
The Volumetric Geometry Mode is not supported by Corona. This method requires V-Ray. It produces the same result as the Volumetric Mode by using procedural geometry made up from multiple transparent layers.
Particle Shader → Render as Geometry Mode is not supported by Corona. This method may be needed when rendering using V-Ray. Produces procedural geometry that contains multiple transparent layers.
List of Supported Corona Render Elements
Render Element | Corona 9, Hotfix 1 Official Release | Corona 9, Hotfix 1 Official Release | Corona 9, Hotfix 1 Official Release | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
CESSENTIAL_Direct | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | All diffusely bounced direct illumination (light that bounced exactly once in the scene before hitting camera). |
CESSENTIAL_Emission | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | All light that is emitted directly into the camera, with no bounces (i.e. directly visible lights sources/scene environment). |
CESSENTIAL_Indirect | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | All diffusely bounced indirect illumination (light that bounced at least twice in the scene before hitting camera). |
CESSENTIAL_Reflect | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | All light specularly reflected into the camera (both direct and indirect). Includes imperfect and perfectly glossy (mirror) reflections. |
| CESSENTIAL_Refract | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | All light refracted into camera (both direct and indirect). Includes imperfect and perfectly glossy (e.g. glass) refractions. |
CESSENTIAL_Translucency | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | All translucency lighting (both direct and indirect). |
| CESSENTIAL_Volumetrics | ✓ | ✓ | Fog Mode Only | All Volumetrics (scene objects using volumetric effects and the global volume material). |
| CGeometry_NormalsDotProduct | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | Outputs the angle between the surface normal and ray direction (similarly to the 3ds Max native Falloff map). White indicates surface directly facing the view; surfaces facing away from the view (grazing angles) are black. This quickly shows what the scene looks like without shading. |
| CGeometry_NormalsGeometry | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | Outputs the surface normal vectors as color values (with transformation RGB = (XYZ+[1,1,1])/2). Uses normals directly calculated from the geometry, with no bump mapping or smoothing groups. |
| CGeometry_NormalsShading | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | Outputs the surface normal vectors as color values (with transformation RGB = (XYZ+[1,1,1])/2). Uses the final shading normals from the lighting calculation, which includes the effects of bump mapping and smoothing groups. |
| CGeometry_UvwCoords | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | Outputs the surface mapping coordinates for selected channel. This can be used to check for mapping discontinuities and objects lacking mapping. |
CGeometry_Velocity | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Points and Fog Modes are not supported | Outputs the surface velocity vector as an RGB color. |
| CGeometry_WorldPosition | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | Outputs the surface world position XYZ vector directly as an RGB color. |
| CGeometry_ZDepth | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | Outputs the Z-Buffer channel, with adjustable min (white) and max (black) depths. |
| CInfo_NetworkRenderDebugging | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Shows the name of the computer where the image was rendered and the version of Corona installed on it. Useful in troubleshooting network rendering issues. |
| CInfo_RenderStamp | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Stores the render stamp only. Useful for saving rendering statistics without having to keep the render stamp visible in the actual image. |
CInfo_SamplingFocus | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Shows how Corona distributes samples in the image during rendering. Brighter colors show areas where more samples are used. Darker color shows areas where less samples are used. This element is available only if adaptivity is enabled (it is enabled by default). It updates each time adaptivity is recalculated (by default every 5 passes). |
| CInfo_TimePerSample | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Shows how much time is spent on sampling each pixel during rendering. The specific time value to show as pure white can be defined in this element's settings (by default it is 100 microseconds). Darker colors mean shorter time per sample. Higher sampling time is sometimes expected (e.g. when using complex effects such as subsurface scattering) but may also indicate that the scene could be optimized for faster rendering (e.g. simplifying a specific material). Single white spots appearing in this element are expected and are caused by the CPU working on some other tasks than rendering (other processes running in the background). |
| CMasking_Cryptomatte | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | An advanced masking element. Cryptomatte is an industry-standard, which allows to render masks based on object Names, Materials, Layers, or Names with Hierarchy, all saved into an EXR. Cryptomatte exports are able to properly handle Depth of Field and Motion Blur effects (which otherwise can cause fringing or blurring at the edges of other mask types). |
CMasking_ID | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | Assigns a random color to each pixel using one of the available modes. |
| CMasking_Mask | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Creates a custom set of rules for including/excluding each object from the mask. The available conditions are: Material GBuffer ID, Object GBuffer ID, and manual object selection. |
| CMasking_WireColor | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | Assigns colors to scene objects based on their 3ds Max viewport wire colors (object colors). |
| CShading_Albedo | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | This element shows the total percentage of incoming light that is reflected or scattered by the material in any way (diffuse, reflection, refraction, translucency). Objects displayed in red have very high albedo and very bright diffuse and/or translucency component. Such materials, when applied to major portions of the scene (walls, floors, ceilings) can cause problems: excessive render times, noise, overall bad result with washed-up look. |
CShading_Alpha | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Duplicates the built-in alpha channel, so it can be saved to a separate location. |
| CShading_Beauty | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | An additional Beauty element, which can be added multiple times to get different versions of the final image: with and without denoising, with and without bloom, with and without glare. |
CShading_BloomGlare | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | This element contains only the Corona's bloom and glare effect (against a black background). It can be used to compose and adjust bloom and glare in post production. |
| CShading_Caustics | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Shows only reflective and refractive caustics coming from the fast caustics solver. It can be used to compose and adjust caustics in post production. |
| CShading_Components | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | This versatile render element allows selecting a custom subset of lighting components. It can include diffuse, reflect, refract, and translucency lighting, in both direct and indirect (GI) variants. It can be used for basic as well as advanced image decomposition (e.g. separating lighting into direct and indirect reflections). |
| CShading_LightMix | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | This render element is required to show the interactive LightMix in the VFB. It is possible to add multiple elements of this type, however each one of them will show exactly the same LightMix setup. The results are visible in the "Rest (unassigned)" layer. |
| CShading_LightSelect | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | This render element is required to show scene lights as adjustable items of the interactive LightMix. It stores information about the specific lights included in this element's settings. Saving a LightSelect element will always save the light intensity and color as it is defined in the scene itself, without the LightMix adjustments. |
| CShading_RawComponent | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | This shows one component (diffuse, reflect, refract, translucency) color divided by the corresponding CShading_SourceColor (input texture) value. This results in a "raw" lighting, not containing the surface color/texture. |
| CShading_Shadows | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Shows the shadows (energy subtracted from the image due to shadow ray occlusion). This is the complement to the beauty element, showing white where there are black shadows. If this element is linearly added to the beauty pass, it negates the visible shadows. Note that the shadows from environment lighting are always shown, resulting in a washed-out element in typical interior renders. |
| CShading_SourceColor | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ Fog Mode is not supported | The input color of a selected component (diffuse, reflect, refract, translucency, opacity). This is the value read from the texture, clamped to obey energy conservation laws. |
| CTexmap | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | Allows the evaluation of an arbitrary texmap on all scene surfaces and environment. For example, the Ambient Occlusion element can be easily created by adding a CoronaAO texmap into this element's map slot. |