Chaos Group Ships V-Ray .0 for ds Max

Today's launch of Chaos Group's V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max continues the company's goals of making speed and simplicity accessible to all artists. With significant optimizations to the ray tracing core, Brute Force GI, Progressive Path Tracing, Reflections, Refractions and more are running up to 5x faster; while the new Progressive Production Renderer brings a new era of fast set-ups and quick iterations.

When your customers come from a variety of industries like architecture, product design, games, and VFX, the feature requests can be fairly diverse, said Vlado Koylazov, Lead Developer and Chaos Group co-founder. But speed and simplicity benefit all artists, so they are at the core of 3.0's development.

Simplicity starts with V-Ray 3.0's new interface. Designed with new and experienced users in mind, three UI modes (Basic, Advanced, and Expert) can be selected to match an artists preference. The new V-Ray toolbar includes Quick Settings with dropdowns for production-ready presets for common uses like Archviz Exterior, Archviz Interior, and VFX. Settings for Quality and Shading Rate can be fine-tuned with easy-to-use sliders, making the entire process highly intuitive.

According to beta testers, the speed at which V-Ray 3.0 can produce high-res stills and animations is generating a buzz in the design community. V-Ray 3.0's new Progressive Renderer was the talk of our recent 3ds Max London User Group, said David Bullock, Partner at creative agency Hayes Davidson. Iterating in real-time should really help speed up our workflow, and we're definitely looking forward to putting it into production.

VFX artists will find that V-Ray 3.0 offers improved Subsurface Scattering (SSS) including options for object-based and ray traced illumination, faster hair rendering speeds (up to 15x), view-dependent tessellation that automatically smoothes hair curves, and a dedicated Skin Shader with layered reflections. Now with UDIM and UVTILE support, it's even easier to move MARI and Autodesk Mudbox assets into V-Ray.

Our game cinematics are usually packed with epic action scenes, huge environments, multiple characters with hair and SSS, fire, explosions, debris, all with 3D motion blur and render passes. That's a lot to work with, but V-Ray makes it easy to get the job done, said Kevin Margo, VFX Supervisor at Blur Studios. 3.0 is something to be excited about.

As an industry standard for large environments and complex scenes, V-Ray's recent use on Industrial Light & Magic's (ILM) Star Trek Into Darkness, Pacific Rim and The Lone Ranger has proven why it's become such a dependable part of the pipeline for the digital environments and matte painting team. When we started The Lone Ranger,' we changed some of the toolsets under the hood; we went strictly over to 3ds Max, using V-Ray as our renderer. That was the final piece of the puzzle. We were getting not only great render results, but great render throughput; it could handle everything we were throwing at it, said Dan Wheaton, Digital Matte Supervisor at ILM.

V-Ray 3.0 offers a number of additional workflow shortcuts, technical advances and support for open sources technologies. These include:

Render Mask - Users can define render regions using an object selection or image mask

Reflection/ Refraction Trace Sets - Provides more direct control in choosing whether reflections and refractions are visible in objects

Max Ray Intensity - Will easily fix artifacts from over-bright sources

Probabilistic Lights - Increases the speed of scenes with a high number of lights

V-Ray RT GPU - Improved with support for Render Elements

V-Ray Frame Buffer - Improved with added color correction control

Open Source Technologies

Alembic integration with support for hair and particles

Deep Data output support including OpenEXR 2.0

Ptex object-space vector displacement support

Open Shading Language (OSL) support for programmable shaders

OpenColorIO support for advanced color management

For the complete list of new features, please visit V-Ray.com, the new home for the V-Ray community.

Pricing and Availability

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max is available now. V-Ray 2.0 upgrades start at $420/ 300 and the full Workstation license price will be $1,050/ 750. As upgrade bundle prices vary, customers should contact their local reseller, Chaos Group representative, or use the new upgrade calculator to see what option fits their needs best.

About Chaos Group

Chaos Group creates physically-based rendering and simulation software for artists and designers. Founded in 1997, Chaos Group has devoted the last 16 years to helping artists advance the speed and quality of one of their most important tools. Today, Chaos Group's photorealistic rendering software, V-Ray , has become the rendering engine of choice for many high-profile companies and innovators in the visual effects and design industries. Thanks to the great work of the V-Ray community, V-Ray-created designs have become nearly inescapable for anyone with access to a TV, computer, or movie ticket.

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