UNREAL ENGINE 5 vs CORONA which is better for Architectural Rendering?

Can the Unreal Engine 5 provide quality comparable to Corona Render or Vray under equal conditions and on same hardware? To answer this question, I made the same scene in 3Ds Max with Corona and Unreal Engine 5.1.
I will also compare Lumen and Ray Tracing reflection to get the best result.

00:00 Introduction
00:24 3DsMax Corona scene
02:13 Unreal Engine scene
02:06 UE Lumen scene settings
04:03 Rendering 3Ds Max Corona
04:05 My PC hardware specifications
05:08 Rendering UE Lumen
06:20 Corona vs UE Lumen
09:09 Corona vs UE Ray Tracing reflections
09:43 My opinion

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Complite scene (Project source files) UE 5.1:

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Music:
@Sappheiros - Reaching Out

[joesayle]

I have been in the archviz industry for 20 plus years and as cool as realtime is the comparison is not a very good representation of a paid project. Most projects require more complex environments with 100's of assets and more complex shader setups. Also if you first put the scene together in Max and then export to unreal your doubling up on work. It would be interesting to see how it would handle a low rise residential project with full landscaping and high end interiors.

[TwinLoki]

The huge advantage of UE is that you can see the result in realtime not waiting until the image smoothes out. Thanx for the comparison!

[Emi_Vibes]

the pathtracing in UE5 can get more details than the Lumen default viewport, but take much more time to render (with high details) and for the reflections with lumen, under render features there's an option to change the default reflection method to RayTraced

[ybratley]

Thanks for this, I've been using Corona for a while and recently did an animation with Unreal 5 and was surprised how good it looks and how much faster it is.

[NazzarenoGiannelliCG]

The amount of extra work required to correctly bring a project from Max to Unreal is vastly compensated by the amount of content you can then output from Unreal...plus the possibility to create interactive experiences for your clients.

[cosahthabang]

Can we appreciate the work he put on this video, this must be the most satisfying comparison ever watched on YouTube

[Jacolath]

I Agree with Joe below. I also have 20+ years experience and the time difference of setting up complex scenes in UE vs Max or even just porting from Max to UE and then setting up is much more than the few minutes/hours you are going to save on rendering - scene set up is days compared to rendering which is minutes. Furthermore there is a marked difference for me in the overall lighting quality. The soft gradients and details in the shadows is what describes 3d objects and the space to the viewer and also what gives a more photorealistic look - which is where the extra resource overhead is going when rendering with corona - ie. more light bouncing around etc. The UE renders just look brighter and more colorful in some instances but this will take 10 seconds to achieve in photoshop - cant see how some people says it looks better. The UE renders look far more artificial in my opinion in terms of lighting, and in the case of this example is relying very heavily on the quality of the models and textures of the assets being used. If it was a space with plane bare walls and generic or custom made textures (which is mostly the case in Arch Viz) then the difference would be more noticeable because there would be more reliance on lighting and high quality GI define shapes. I suppose it depends on your application. If you are not interested in the highest quality and flexibility and your clients cant tell the difference then maybe UE is the answer. I would be more interested if we could use the engine straight inside Max somehow 😅

[imedhamdi]

please can you make a full tutrial from A to Z for beginner and slow tutorial for full architecture project!! it gonna help us really please!!

[peterjoslyn]

If you consider how far Unreal Engine has come even in the last year, the things you point out here such as reflections will soon be rendered in real time and be perfect. UE is an amazing tool, for game creation, but now for renders in and of themselves. The only thing I don't use UE for is modelling etc.

[AyushBakshi]

Thanks for creating the scene this close for both tools. Must be time taking. Great work

[HotRatsAndTheStooges]

Great video. I definitely highly preferred the quality of the reflections in the glass on Ccorona, but with some tweaking I'm certain UE5 could look even better than the corona results. Excellent video and presentation, thank you for sharing :)

[fraijilouay]

how does this channel have only 4.9 k subs..man this is one of the most interesting channels for learning all about the architecture

[lasaraz]

what was the time for both? the final render time is not the only time for that kind of comparison!

[niiranen]

I use both Corona and UE5 but I am not doing ArchViz. This was a very interesting video to me, thank you! In the middle of the video I was thinking I would like to see the sources and good you have put them available too. Big thanks!

[sergiostockfleth]

Fantastic comparison! For exterior I would say that UE5 looks better than Corona. Super interested in you making a video of an interior scene with both engines as well😊 Keep up the good work👍

[dcosta]

…and on top of the breathtaking timing let’s not forget Unreal gives you real time experience! You got to love it

[tanyaabichaker]

One the best videos I've seen since I started learning ue5

I love how detailed the explanation is. It helps in many other purposes

[ExacoMvm]

Imo the workflow of UE5 is so slow that the realtime speed of it isn't really worth it e.g. you setup fairly complex exterior city scene in UE5 in 10 days and render instantly, meanwhile you can setup same scene in 3D Package in like 3 days and render in like 1 hour so you basically save 7 days of time using old 3D package workflow and get better result in that "imaginary" scenario since 3D Packages does everything better and way more efficient such as shading workflow, lighting, object/material outliner systems, animation, UI/UX, loading/processing times, etc. for example think about shading a car procedurally in UE5 vs Corona to get it photoreal using just few essential bitmaps, I could do whole car in Corona in like 1-2 hours, meanwhile it would take probably like 1-2 hours just to make basic glass or carpaint material in UE5.
However huge advantage of UE5 would be for animations and likely (V)RAM usage, I guess you can throw a lot more textures in UE5 compared to Corona, etc and ofc there's Nanite.

[rrriiigggaaa]

you must try the RTX GPU, it's massive increase for lumen renders, or you can run path tracing for physical right lightning inside UE5

[inspiredbylife]

Great comparison. Thank you so much for making this video!!!