V-Ray Product Launch

Last week, we attended the Chaos Group's first ever public event held in the UK, where they presented to us the newest releases of V-Ray for Maya and 3ds Max, as well as the soon to be released versions of V-Ray RT on GPUs and V-Ray RT for Maya. They also showcased their brand new fluid dynamics system, Phoenix FD, and the very powerful PDPlayer.

Although there were many questions left unanswered - such as release dates and pricing - what we did see was very exciting and even prompted rounds of applause from a room full of 3D industry types.

It is worth noting at this point that the only products currently available are V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino and Sketch-Up, and V-Ray RT (CPU) for 3ds Max.

The team at Chaos Group made it clear that V-Ray, V-Ray RT and V-Ray RT on GPU's are 3 separate products that all fit into one seamless workflow. The unique characteristic that separates V-Ray RT from its competitors is that they all use the same features, such as lights and materials and crucially, all produce exactly the same end result - they just use different methods of getting there. This small detail is incredibly important; when developing a scene, you can rely on the fact that the final render will match your test renders. Compare this to Autodesk's Quicksilver renderer and you start to appreciate the benefit V-Ray RT offers you, as your workflow and scene will remain exactly the same.

The workflow

The standard V-Ray renderer will remain the production renderer, used to generate the final image or animation. As I'm sure you are aware you specify render settings such as GI and anti-aliasing, then set the render off and then wait until it finishes. This method is ideal for a production rendering but impractical whilst doing test renders, as you don't always need the level of detail or costly special effects available with the production renderer.

Both versions of V-Ray RT can be used to work on the scene during the modelling, lighting and texturing phases and both are progressive, meaning the image gradually improves until you are satisfied with the quality. V-Ray RT is also interactive meaning that any changes you make to your scene are instantly reflected in the RT window meaning you get instant feedback on material or lighting changes, making the process much more intuitive.

The demonstrations at the event showed that V-Ray RT on GPUs will generate an image of the same quality as the CPU version, roughly 20 times quicker. In fact it almost seems like you have a final render in your viewport. At any point in the render, an image can be saved out and if you don't need any advanced effects such as motion blur, displacement maps or proxies the image is even good enough for production.

The GPU version is quite clearly the faster of the two RT engines, but there are some limitations. The scene must fit within the memory of the GPU which typically ranges from 1 - 4GB on professional GPUs, so heavy scenes may be forced to use the CPU version due to this limit. There are tools within V-Ray RT that can reduce the size of textures to fit them within the GPU's memory. However, the CPU version is still available for maximum flexibility, and is still 10-15 times faster than the V-Ray production renderer.

Although we were not given any solid dates or pricing, we left the event very excited and wondering if the render farm of the future would contain more GPUs than CPUs. Rest assured, we will be putting the GPU version of V-Ray RT through its paces as soon as we can get hold of a copy.

Follow the link to browse our selection of V-Ray software. To find out more, get in touch with us on 03332 409 309 or email 3D@Jigsaw24.com.