Corona 15 Makes Gaussian Splats Participate in Global Illumination

Corona 15, released by Chaos, extends Gaussian splat rendering beyond passive scene context by making splats participate in global illumination. Where Corona 14 introduced splat support for placing buildings and environments in photoreal surroundings, Corona 15 allows those splats to bounce GI light onto adjacent 3D geometry, so a captured environment contributes indirect illumination to surrounding objects rather than functioning as a static backdrop behind them. The feature ships for both Corona for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

3D assets composited against or inside a Gaussian splat environment receive physically plausible bounce lighting from the splat itself. Chaos cites high resolution drone footage as an example input, a use case that coincidentally coincides with today's partnership announcement between Niantic Spatial and Spexi.

Previously, splats were treated as non-emissive scene objects. They caught rays and contributed to reflections and refractions (both Corona 14 features), but secondary bounces that would carry the splat's color back onto neighboring geometry were not computed. The GI bounce addition closes that gap.

Corona 15 also improves Cinema 4D viewport performance for splat-heavy scenes, with faster display of assets containing millions of splats. An experimental toggle adds Diffuse, Bump, and Self Illumination from the Corona Physical Material to the C4D viewport preview, with broader material support planned. The improvement targets Cinema 4D S24 and newer, with 2025.3.3 excluded.

The broader Corona 15 release adds Veras AI ideation to all plans, a Glints layer in the Physical Material for metallic flake and granular specular, per-camera resolution storage, Cinema 4D native particle rendering, and a faster animation parsing path in 3ds Max that re-processes only changed elements between frames rather than the full scene. Radiancefields.com has previously covered Chaos's Gaussian splat rollout across V-Ray 7, Vantage 3, V-Ray for Revit, V-Ray GS relighting, and the initial splat support introduced in Corona 14.

Learn more about Corona 15 here.