It’s been quite a month for rendering software this last quarter, first Chaos Group and Render Legion (Corona) merged in August. Rumours abound but we are not at liberty to make comments on the whys and the then what..? We do know that there are users who were with Corona because they didn’t want to be on Vray. I’ll just highlight two telling comments,

“When I first heard this news, I admit that I was worried.  I don’t trust very large and dominant CG companies with small, innovative, up-and-coming companies.  Still, i’ll have to wait and see.  I quite like Corona.  I’m not sure exactly how VRay could benefit from their technology, since they have stuff that does a similar thing already.  Then there’s the new fR which is (finally) coming out soon.  Perhaps they are worried about the intensifying competition from all sides?” (Telemachus, the expert from forums.cgsociety.org)

And here’s another comment on CGArchitect.org forum by senior member . ‘C G’, “Competition is good and has certainly proven to benefit the community in this case. As Corona gained a solid foothold with some great innovation and awesome value for money, Vray suddenly had to lift their game and started an upgrade sequence that provided a benefit to their customers in turn. ….”

Only time will tell. It is too early to say and too many factors that has not come into full play.  BTW, thanks to Telemachus for mentioning yours truly, cebas finalRender – finally or not, we are still small and innovative, and most of all independent and free. We stand by our Trademark. Yes, we took precious time and we apologize to our users, but the technological horizon is like surfing the eye of a cyclops wave! Cebas had to surf well and make sure we served something that will stay afloat for a long, long time. So, we now have trueHybrid finalRender in the race.

Foretelling the future of rendering, on November 19, one year after relaunch, NVIDIA announces the demise of Mental Ray. Cebas knew about it in the news. It was not as dramatic a reaction as that for the Corona takeover. We sense that some users are still grappling with the changes – some are angry about NVIDIA’s decision to end Mental Ray. As a software developer,  we at cebas know very well, and understand the decision behind why Mental Ray is no longer an option.

We came to a similar conclusion when we looked at old finalRender – we also decided to ‘kill’ it, to make room for something better and more innovative. We had to accept that CPU rendering – the old way is dead and cannot deliver the future.

Looking back in 2001, when we first introduced finalRender at stage-0, cebas was the company, if you recall and if you were in the business then, that we actually started the rendering revolution in the industry. We gave the market its first affordable GI rendering solution for 3ds Max and the only one that worked inside of the 3ds Max Scanline renderer. See https://www.turbosquid.com/Index.cfm/View/FSBNCG

Then came our finalRender Stage-1 Release 1 – a fully integrated rendering system for 3ds Max – again, it was unmatched by any one at the time. The technology and methods we created back then offers still the most advanced you can get out there. It is still the flag-bearer, the Reference renderer for many developers out there – who copied and modified every single feature we had invented back then.

To be forthright, NVIDIA even poached our engineer who was responsible for GI engine development back then. I guess they had to get serious with Mental Ray or they would lose the battle on the rendering field. But the lip of the cyclops wave was too thick 🙂