SOFIA, BULGARIA — Chaos Group (chaosgroup.com) has released V-Ray 3.5 for 3DS Max, a free update to the CPU and GPU renderer. The new version adds nine major features and a number of performance improvements.
To solve the long-time challenge of rendering scenes with many lights, Chaos Group's R&D team has written a new adaptive lights algorithm that drastically speeds up render times. After extensive testing on architectural interiors and large environments with hundreds or even thousands of lights, benchmarking results show that adaptive lights can be up to seven times faster, depending on the scene. Now artists can work with a virtually unlimited amount of light sources, rendering scenes that were previously impossible.
Interactive production rendering provides fully interactive production rendering with immediate feedback. A new, physically-accurate reflection model adds more realism to any scene. Resumable rendering gives users the ability to stop and continue rendering at any point, preserving work and saving time. This supports both progressive and bucket rendering.
Live VR rendering allows for render directly to Oculus Rift or HTC Vive with full GPU acceleration. Users can visualize changes within the headset as they are made in 3DS Max.
V-Ray Scene node – Import and render complete scene files created in any V-Ray application. V-Ray scenes are render-ready assets and contain all geometry, lights, materials and textures. Interactive lens effects include GPU-accelerated glare and bloom effects that can be enabled and adjusted while rendering. This is compatible with V-Ray Denoiser.
A new general-purpose shader by Anders Langlands includes built-in SSS controls which is popular for skin. And Nvidia’s universal material format is now supported by V-Ray, allowing designers to apply MDL materials authored in programs like Substance Designer to their assets and scenes.
V-Ray GPU will also now support: iToo Software Forest Color textures, cached irradiance maps, aerial perspective, V-Ray Clipper, directional area lights, procedural bump, stochastic flakes, matte/shadow catcher, render mask and low GPU thread priority.
V-Ray 3.5 for 3DS Max is a free update for all V-Ray 3.x customers. A full-featured 30-day trial is also available.