Well, my rendering posts are starting to feel a bit spammy on Facebook, especially amid all the posts of the end of the world, Government, and climate change (so much for social media). Someone suggested I should get a blog and I thought holy hell, I have a blog... So now I'll try to post here more often and maybe someone will look at it (yes you, nerd).
Here is todays Corona Render:
Click for larger view
This image is significant because I did most of the final compositing in After Effects instead of good ol' Photoshop. It's an experiment, but I kind of like it, even if it doesn't flow naturally yet. In using Video Copilots Optical Flares for the light beams and flares and Red Giant's Magic Bullet Looks for final composition - these can all be accessed directly from AE which is really nice. I also rendered this out as 16 bit instead of my standard 8 bit images. This offers a greater range of value and lets the transitions of gradients happen much smoother - for an image like this - dark and smokey, that can mean a lot. Previously, I would get banding on the image around the halos.
Optical Flares seems to be a great way to get the right kind of light cones. I've tried all sorts of methods - mostly trying to get volumetric renders out of 3D and they all just take too long and don't quite look right (and are hard to edit without re-rendering). I usually just make them in Photoshop, but I wanted something more advanced. My hope would be to transition lights from VW through Cinema and all the way into AE where the flares and cones can be attached, but that is a ways off and I don't know if it can handle the sheer number of lights I normally use on a concert sketch. I might just create a ton of preset looks and render them out on black backgrounds to use as screened layers.
Corona is shaping up to be my go to render engine of choice. I love Octane, but Corona just keeps speaking to me. And yes, while I hate the idea of "Fan Art" usually, I was thinking of Chris Cornell, who just died yesterday, when I was making this.