Chaos Corona

Be an artist, not a technician!

Stunning photorealistic renders for architectural visualisation, straight out of the box.

An architectural 3D exterior render of a sleek, modern concrete villa built on a rocky lakeshore, surrounded by forests and mountains.

4 June 2026 - News

Chaos Corona 15: More AI, more detail and a faster workflow!

Why choose Chaos Corona

Corona is built to be picked up fast. Most users get to grips with the basics on day one and are completely hooked by day two. The default settings just work, the interface stays out of your way, and you can start producing great-looking renders almost immediately, no thick manuals, no technical background required.

Corona consistently delivers physically accurate results that look right, every single time. Advanced caustics, industry-standard PBR materials and built-in post-processing tools mean you can get the most out of any project, whether that’s an interior, an exterior or a highly complex scene.

Corona ships with over 13,000 render-ready assets, 3,000 ultra-realistic scanned materials and a wide selection of HDR skies. Need to fill a scene with vegetation or scattered objects? Chaos Scatter handles that in seconds. Build a complete, detailed scene without hunting down external content

Corona comes equipped with a set of AI tools that genuinely speed up your workflow. The Material Generator turns a photo of any surface into a seamless, render-ready PBR material automatically. The AI Enhancer sharpens the realism of supporting elements like plants and people. And with the AI Upscaler, you can scale up your render output 2x or 4x with a single click.

Features

Rendering: effortless photorealism

CPU rendering
	Corona delivers predictable, physically accurate results without cutting corners on quality. It supports both biased and unbiased rendering, including a 4K cache. Realistic lighting and materials work straight out of the box.
GPU rendering with Vantage
	Render images and animations significantly faster using the Corona to Vantage Live Link. Use Vantage to explore your scene as an interactive real-time render while you tweak lighting, reposition objects or swap out materials — all powered by GPU speed.
LightMix
	LightMix lets you adjust the intensity and colour of your lights directly in the frame buffer. Create, save and reload multiple lighting scenarios, all from a single render.
Corona Caustics
$A sunny, photorealistic 3D exterior render of a modern swimming pool overlooking a wide river. The extremely realistic light refractions (caustics) on the pool floor and reflections on the white wall demonstrate the advanced water rendering capabilities of Chaos Corona.$	Enable the Fast Caustics Solver to add caustics to your scene with minimal effort. Reflective caustics are calculated automatically across all materials, while refractive caustics can be switched on per material. Volumetric caustics are supported as well.
Extensive post-processing inside the VFB
	Handle your post-processing directly inside the Corona Virtual Frame Buffer and skip the round-trip to external software. All tools are accessible before, during and after rendering, and your settings can be saved and reused across any scene.
Stills and animations
	Corona handles both still images and animations with ease. Take a look at the user showreel to see what’s possible.
Default settings that work
	Corona keeps its interface clean and uncluttered, free of unnecessary parameters. The default render settings are the right choice in most situations, so you’ll rarely need to change a thing.
Compatibility
	Chaos Corona works alongside a wide range of third-party plugins, so any tools already part of your workflow will continue to function — both during interactive rendering and in the final render.
Resumable rendering
	Pause a render in the Virtual Frame Buffer and pick it back up whenever you’re ready. It’s a simple feature that keeps your workflow flexible without throwing away any render time.
Autosave
	Turn on autosave and Corona will write your render progress to an .exr file every few minutes. If your render or machine crashes, your most recent progress is always safe.
Built-in help
	Tooltips are available for virtually every parameter in the interface, appearing automatically when you hover over a control. An auto-generated online GUI reference is also available for when your DCC application isn’t open.
Gaussian Splats support
	Place buildings in context and render complex 3D environments with accurate reflections and refractions. Populate your scenes with detailed, memory-efficient splats captured from real-world environments or objects, giving you smoother surfaces, richer volumetric detail and a more convincing sense of depth.

AI Enhancer
	Improve the appearance of people and vegetation effortlessly, without affecting the architecture or furniture. The advanced controls let you fine-tune the look of figures and refine vegetation for precision and consistency.
AI Material Generator
	Create materials in seconds using the AI Material Generator in Chaos Cosmos. Upload a photo of any surface and it’s automatically converted into a render-ready PBR material with all the necessary maps — just a few clicks.
AI Upscaler
	Turn low-resolution renders into sharp, presentation-ready images and save hours of render time in the process. The AI Upscaler, part of Chaos Cloud Collaboration, doesn’t just increase resolution — it also sharpens textures and details for a more polished result.
Enable and disable AI features
	For studios and professionals with strict policies around AI, it’s now possible to disable tools such as the Image Enhancer and Material Generator.

Chaos Scatter
	With Chaos Scatter you can place trees, grass, shrubs and rocks into your scene with ease. Restrict tree placement on steep slopes and clear roads using splines. Chaos Scatter offers extensive controls for precise results.
Corona Pattern
	Tile real geometry across a surface just as easily as tiling a texture. Corona Pattern delivers far more realism than alpha, bump and displacement maps, and uses less memory to boot.
Corona Decal
	Road markings, cracks in concrete, stains and dust on glass; these kinds of details add realism to a scene, and with Corona Decal they’re straightforward to achieve. Corona Decal is simple to set up, stackable, fully supports displacement and can affect specific channels and multiple objects.
Corona Slicer
	Corona Slicer is a material you can apply to any object, causing it to non-destructively cut away geometry at render time. The slicer object can be animated, and everything works without the inconsistencies of boolean operations in the host software.
Corona Lister
	Quickly find and manage the key settings for lights, displacement, proxies, cameras and scatters through Corona Lister and Scatter Lister.
3ds Max UI remains available during rendering
	Ever started a render, minimised 3ds Max, and then found you couldn’t bring it back up until the render was done? With Corona, that’s a thing of the past — the 3ds Max interface stays fully accessible throughout the entire render.

Corona Physical Material
	Corona Physical Material is a versatile and realistic material type designed specifically to accurately simulate real-world surfaces. It’s straightforward to use and supports advanced properties such as clear coat layers, sheen and anisotropy, letting you create everything from simple surfaces to complex layered textures.
Material preview
	The material preview uses the same render engine as the final render. The standard 3ds Max or Cinema 4D preview has been replaced by a custom Corona scene, giving you a true what-you-see-is-what-you-get material editor.
Displacement
	Chaos Corona’s 2.5D Displacement enables detailed and accurate displacement while keeping parsing and memory performance optimised. You control how displacement is handled when using a Layered Material, choosing between Blend All Layers, Only from base or Add all layers.
Atmospheric and volumetric effects
	Choose between a simple, fast-rendering volume effect in the Corona Sky for atmospheric haze, or use a volumetric material for more control and more complex results.
Corona Tile Map
	Create stunning bathrooms, kitchens, walls and floors using procedural tiles with Corona Tile Map. Use bitmaps or procedural maps for tile colours, and repeat, randomise or tessellate an image across the tiles as needed.
Fabric Material
	The procedural Fabric Material lets you create a wide range of detailed fabrics without external bitmaps or complex node setups. It comes with presets to help you get started quickly.
A wide choice of maps
	Chaos Corona includes a broad range of useful maps you’ll quickly find hard to live without, including Ambient Occlusion, Mapping Randomization, Multimap, Triplanar Mapping, Edge Map/Shader and more.
Corona Converter
	Convert your entire scene to the Corona Physical Material with a single click — whether that’s from another renderer like V-Ray or from older Corona materials such as the Legacy Material.
Toon Shading
	Want a break from photorealism? Create a stylised, non-photorealistic look using Corona’s Toon and Outline materials. Cartoon-style renders are useful in the early design phase, or as a deliberate artistic choice at any stage of a project.

Corona Sun and Sky system
	Chaos Corona offers multiple options for generating realistic procedural skies, with linked Sun and Sky objects and materials. The sun can also be positioned below the horizon, producing realistic results for sunrise and twilight scenes.
Night sky
	Bring the magic of night-time to your renders with realistic moonlight, stars and even the Milky Way. Go for full physical accuracy by setting location, date and time, or take an artistic approach and position the celestial bodies manually.
Interactive LightMix
	With interactive LightMix you can adjust light colour and intensity during or after rendering with a single click. Set up scenes with multiple suns, procedural skies and environment maps, and render different times of day and sun angles from a single render.
Efficient lighting of complex scenes
	Corona handles scenes with many lights without breaking a sweat or adding render time. There’s no need to optimise your scene around the lighting setup.
No sampling parameters
	There are no sampling parameters to dial in through trial and error. Lights simply behave the way you’d expect them to.

Photorealistic camera
	The Corona camera behaves like a modern real-world camera and can be configured using simple exposure stops or full controls for shutter speed, aperture and more. Round it out with advanced camera effects such as Motion Blur and Bloom & Glare.
Lens effects
	With Lens Effects you can shape the final image using lens scratches, dust and peripheral distortions. Colour, intensity and colour shift are all adjustable, giving you as much realism or creativity as the shot calls for.
Bloom & Glare
	Bloom and glare are optical effects that occur in real life due to imperfections in camera lenses and sensors. Use them to add another layer of realism to your renders.
Virtual Reality
	Using a Corona camera, you can export images in spherical or cubemap format, ready for use in a wide range of VR applications. Stereoscopic and panoramic renders are compatible with virtually all VR software.

Denoising
	Use denoising to reduce the number of passes needed for a noise-free image and cut render time by 50 to 70% (based on user feedback). Denoising also removes fireflies (hot pixels) from an image and can be used exclusively for that purpose if preferred.
Interactive rendering
	Corona’s fully featured Interactive Rendering gives you most of the benefits of exploring your scenes in real time. Adjust materials, lights and geometry and watch the interactive render respond almost immediately. It runs entirely on the CPU and has no dependency on your graphics card.
Real-time rendering with Vantage
	Pair Corona with Vantage to explore and render your scenes in real time via Live Link. Vantage makes it quick to test camera angles, lighting and scene composition. Once you’ve found the shot, switch back to Corona for maximum photorealism.
Distributed rendering
	Rendering across multiple machines is straightforward with Corona. It has its own distributed rendering system, compatible with the native solutions in both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

Render elements
	For post-processing in video or image editing software, Corona provides extensive Render Elements (3ds Max) and Multipasses (Cinema 4D), including Virtual Beauty, matte passes, scene lighting separation, depth information and more.
Cryptomatte support
	Corona Cryptomatte is a render element that makes it easy to create colour masks of complex scenes containing hundreds of objects. It automatically generates render channels stored in a multichannel OpenEXR file, without the need to set up dozens or hundreds of individual masking elements.
Smart Masks
	Creating masks in Chaos Corona is simple. Generate monochrome and RGB masks by specifying an Object ID, Material ID or a direct object selection in the scene. Combine different selections as a union or intersection.

Chaos Vantage
	Chaos Vantage is a high-quality visualisation environment that lets 3D artists quickly explore and present their work in a fully ray-traced setting. The integration between Corona and Vantage gives users the flexibility to move between CPU and GPU render workflows.
Chaos Cloud
	Chaos Cloud is a cloud-based collaboration platform for streamlined communication, sharing and presenting architectural visualisation projects. Work together during design reviews and generate immersive, interactive virtual tours — no external app required.
Chaos Anima
	Chaos Anima is a powerful tool for crowd and character animation, complete with a library of 3D/4D characters, designed to add realistic human movement to architectural visualisations and urban planning projects. It features a unique intelligent traffic simulation system.
Chaos Veras
	Chaos Veras is Chaos’s AI-driven visualisation tool that generates photorealistic renders from your existing 3D model in no time. As a plugin, Veras works seamlessly with SketchUp, Revit, Rhino, Archicad and more. Turn a simple sketch into a polished presentation with just a few prompts, no technical detours required.
Chaos Cosmos
	Chaos Cosmos is a comprehensive 3D content library built specifically for Corona. It offers a wide range of high-quality, ready-to-use 3D assets including furniture, people, vegetation, vehicles and more. The assets are optimised for rendering and easy to import, saving you considerable time when building detailed and realistic environments.
Chaos Scans
	Chaos Scans is a library of carefully scanned materials based on real-world samples, accurately capturing texture, reflectivity and other physical properties. It includes an extensive collection of fabrics, metals, plastics, wood and more, all easily integrated into 3D projects via Cosmos.

A photorealistic 3D render of a cozy autumn backyard patio, generated with Chaos Corona. The focal point is a blazing fire pit on a paved stone patio covered in fallen leaves, surrounded by wooden chairs, a guitar, and pumpkins. The lushly planted garden features detailed vegetation, a small rock waterfall, and tall trees, with majestic mountains in the background.

System Requirements

windows

3Dconnexion SpaceMouse & CadMouse

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Software

Operating System Windows 10 or newer – 64-bit
Host Software Autodesk 3ds Max 2016 or newer
Maxon Cinema 4D R17 or newer

Recommended Hardware Requirements

Processor CPU with SSE 4.2 support (applies to virtually all modern processors)
RAM Minimum 32 GB, recommended 64 GB or more
TCP/IP Only IPv4 is supported. IPv6 is currently not supported
Graphics Card For viewport: any GPU. For optional NVIDIA AI Denoiser: NVIDIA GPU with Maxwell architecture or newer, with the latest driver. For optional Intel AI Denoiser: NVIDIA GPU with Volta architecture or newer. For NVIDIA AI Upscaling (from Corona 12 Update 1 onwards): NVIDIA GPU required

3Dconnexion SpaceMouse & CadMouse

Unleash your full design potential with 3Dconnexion. Put both hands to work for a maximum CAD experience with intuitive control and unparalleled precision.

Find the mouse for your workflow

Software

Operating System macOS 12 (Monterey) or newer
Corona 13 and older: macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or newer
Host Software Maxon Cinema 4D R17 or newer

Recommended Hardware Requirements

Processor CPU with SSE 4.2 support, or Apple Silicon (M-series)
RAM Minimum 32 GB, recommended 64 GB or more
TCP/IP Only IPv4 is supported. IPv6 is currently not supported
Graphics Card For viewport: any GPU. For optional NVIDIA AI Denoiser: NVIDIA GPU with Maxwell architecture or newer, with the latest driver. For optional Intel AI Denoiser: NVIDIA GPU with Volta architecture or newer

Please note!

Windows
Corona is a purely CPU-based rendering engine. A GPU is only required for smooth viewport performance and for the optional AI Denoiser and AI Upscaler. Distributed rendering requires Autodesk Backburner, available free of charge from Autodesk.

Using macOS? Corona for macOS is only available through Cinema 4D. Autodesk 3ds Max is not supported on macOS.

Prices

Chaos Corona is available for commercial use in the following licence types (excl. 21% VAT).

Corona Solo

€ 375 per year

Node-locked license
Per month: € 57.65
Per 3 years: € 1,125.00
Corona Rendering engine
Chaos Veras AI rendering
Cloud Collaboration
100 Chaos Credits
Temporary 3000 extra Chaos Credits

Find a reseller

Corona Premium

€ 490.80 per year

Floating license
Per month: € 71.90
Per 3 years: € 1,446.90
Corona Rendering engine
Chaos Veras AI rendering
Chaos Cosmos
500 Chaos Credits
Temporary 3000 extra Chaos Credits

Find a reseller

Corona Collection

€ 742.80 per year

BEST CHOICE

Node-locked license
Per 3 years – node-locked: € 2,205.90
Per 1 year – floating: € 934.80
Per 3 years – floating: € 2,804.90
Corona Rendering engine
Chaos Veras AI rendering
Chaos Cosmos
Vantage Real-time Scene Exploration
Anima Crowd and Traffic Simulation
1500 Chaos Credits
Temporary 3000 extra Chaos Credits

Find a reseller

Questions or more information?

Would you like more information about Chaos Corona? Then please contact us.

+31 (0)344 577 884 info@design8.com

Chaos Corona

Be an artist, not a technician!

Why choose Chaos Corona

Features

CPU rendering

GPU rendering with Vantage

LightMix

Corona Caustics

Extensive post-processing inside the VFB

Stills and animations

Default settings that work

Compatibility

Resumable rendering

Autosave

Built-in help

Gaussian Splats support

AI Enhancer

AI Material Generator

AI Upscaler

Enable and disable AI features

Chaos Scatter

Corona Pattern

Corona Decal

Corona Slicer

Corona Lister

3ds Max UI remains available during rendering

Corona Physical Material

Material preview

Displacement

Atmospheric and volumetric effects

Corona Tile Map

Fabric Material

A wide choice of maps

Corona Converter

Toon Shading

Corona Sun and Sky system

Night sky

Interactive LightMix

Efficient lighting of complex scenes

No sampling parameters

Photorealistic camera

Lens effects

Bloom & Glare

Virtual Reality

Denoising

Interactive rendering

Real-time rendering with Vantage

Distributed rendering

Render elements

Cryptomatte support

Smart Masks

Chaos Vantage

Chaos Cloud

Chaos Anima

Chaos Veras

Chaos Cosmos

Chaos Scans

System Requirements

Please note!

Prices

Corona Solo

Corona Premium

Corona Collection

Questions or more information?