Chaos has released Corona 16, which lets Gaussian splats receive illumination from the scene in both 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
Splat support in Corona has grown one release at a time. Corona 14 introduced native splat rendering, with splats showing up in reflections and refractions, and Corona 15 let splats bounce global illumination onto neighboring geometry. Neither version relit the splat itself, whose color stayed tied to the lighting baked in at capture.
Corona 16 adds an option to relight splats so they receive illumination from the scene. An archviz scene that places modeled buildings inside a captured site can now light the capture and the geometry with the same sources. Chaos has already brought splat relighting to V-Ray 7 Update 3 and to the real time ray tracer in Vantage 3.3.0. The 16.0.0 release notes do not describe how Corona computes the relighting or how it handles the color already stored in each splat.
The 3ds Max and Cinema 4D builds both gain a clipping mask for splats and support for SPZ, the compressed splat format Niantic open sourced in 2024.
Corona for 3ds Max goes further and renders native 3ds Max Gaussian Splats, the editable point object type Autodesk added in 3ds Max 2027.2, alongside its own Corona Gaussian Splats object. The 3ds Max build also adds an Exposure (EV) control next to the existing Intensity control for splats, and the Corona Gaussian Splats object now shows its crop box size after scaling. Neither change appears in the Cinema 4D notes, which add support for Cinema 4D 2027 instead.
Outside of splats, Corona 16 adds a VFB background image that post-processing does not affect, parallax displacement in the Corona Physical material, a Parallax map that fakes furnished rooms behind windows on a flat plane, and an AI assistant in beta.
Corona 16 is available now for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.
