Product In-Depth: V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp

Several months ago the Chaos Group, the developer of the popular V-Ray rendering engine, contacted us to talk to us about an upcoming product for SketchUp. That product, V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp was initially going to be called version 1.6. But the update was so substantial and important that a full digit release was decided instead.

Beginnings

For those who are not quite familiar with the Chaos Group, the Bulgarian software firm sprung to the scene back in 1997 and have been a growing and powerful force in rendering realism ever since. From its beginnings as a two person outfit to today with a staff of over 100 spread across offices in the US, Europe, Japan and Korea, the Chaos Group is at the bleeding edge of still, interactive and animation rendering technologies.

V-Ray itself celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2012 and for 2013 the group has promised to revolutionize rendering precision and speed in the upcoming version 3.0.

Growing and Expanding

In our discussion Lon Grohs, vice president of business development, Chaos Group, said, “Today the Chaos Group is a growing entity…and the V-Ray brand and technology is being leveraged and utilized by more and more artists across the industry’s best 3D software suites.”

V-Ray has been a popular choice among leading 3D software packages. Today the rendering engine is a software plugin option for Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Softimage, as well as V-Ray for Rhino and V-Ray for SketchUp. In addition to V-Ray Chaos Group also sells Pdplayer, created by Asynthetic and distributed by Chaos Group, the product is an image sequencer that supports multiple layers for color correction and compositing of animation sequences. It works with QuickTime in its latest version and works on Mac OS X as well as Windows and Linux.

The company also makes a fluid simulator (fluid dynamics) named Phoenix FD for Autodesk 3ds Max. However, it is V-Ray that is the company’s chief asset as Lon Grohs futher explains the decision to put much more emphasis into SketchUp.

“We have 250 resellers worldwide–we are growing and its really exciting. But we further anticipate this new product for SketchUp to really add momentum.”

The V-Ray Argument

If you sit down with a group of 3D artists they will argue tooth and nail over why they use their tools of choice and why they feel they are the best. Yet, out of this cloud of debate a rare group of tools garner enough shared respect that even if someone chooses not to use that tool they will have much respect and interest in hearing others talk about it. V-Ray is one of those technologies.

Although the company says V-Ray is used in games and film–including “Iron Man”–Architosh readers who have heard of it will likely associate it with very high-end and ultra-realistic architectural renderings. (see image 01 above and the title graphic above–which isn’t a real photo if you can believe it?)

“We have a strong focus and pursuit on speed,” said Lon Grohs. “The core technologies we have allow artists to visualize their designs quickly and with great accuracy…and we keep pushing the boundaries of that with every version.” The company said because of their fanatical attention to detail and realism artists in pursuit of these goals gravitate to V-Ray.

Indeed, some of the imagery coming off of V-Ray engine-powered applications is truly stunning. But with V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp the company is taking a unique approach relative to that application’s particular strengths.

next page: Speed, Simplicity and Power

Speed, Simplicity and Power

With each release the company says V-Ray is getting easier and easier to learn. “We are putting a lot of attention in this area,” said Corey Rubadue, product director for Chaos Group in the US. “This really hits home with the SketchUp product because–as I am sure you know–SketchUp has the fewest buttons and parameters of any modeler out there used by professionals that I know of.”

This directive towards simplicity for V-Ray for SketchUp has made version 2.0 special and is changing the face of  V-Ray. “We have made sure that the V-Ray controls feel and work as closely as possible to the host application,” says Corey Rubadue, “this really strikes a chord with the SketchUp product and audience.”

Dome Light

V-Ray 2.0 for Sketch has three major new features. The first of these is the new Dome Light. The new Dome Light simplifies the setup of image-based lighting (IBL). HDR images are “high dynamic range” background images that are utilized as a source for lighting a scene as well as its environmental background.

With the new Dome light “if there is a sun in the image V-Ray will now treat it like a sun light source,” says Rubadue. V-Ray accomplishes this by analyzing the the exterior HDR image and finding its brightest spot. This spot is recognized as a sun light.

What happens to the SketchUp sun and sky?

That’s a good question. V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp fully coordinates and integrates itself with the SketchUp sun and sky and interprets it into its more advanced V-Ray sun and sky system.

V-Ray RT: The Power of CPU/GPU Rendering

The second most key feature in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp is the new V-Ray RT (for real-time) rendering system. This is an alternate high-performance, interactive rendering engine. At the time of our conference call with the Chaos Group the RT version was only utilizing the CPU but they somehow managed to execute the GPU side as well–a testament to the performance of its programmers back in Bulgaria.

“V-Ray RT is very important to many of our customers, like Gensler,” says Lon Grohs. “Gensler is one of our biggest customers and for a firm like them it is critical to get immediate feedback on their design options for decision making. And they can do this directly from the render frame buffer.” (see image 02 above and 05 on the next page)

V-Ray RT is built directly on the core V-Ray software core, said the company, making it completely scene, material and lighting compatible regardless of what rendering engine you decide to use. Using RT is as simple as hitting the RT button in the V-Ray interface in SketchUp.

V-Ray Proxy

V-Ray Proxies are a new feature and a valuable one for SketchUp users in particular. V-Ray proxies are a type of V-Ray mesh file that is saved to your hard drive and dynamically loaded at render time, as needed, during the scene and animation renders. This enables users to throw models with millions of polygons at SketchUp and not have the popular 32-bit application come crawling to its knees. (see image 03 below)

“Proxies become very important to managing memory of your scene,” says Corey Rubadue, “especially in a 32-bit application where there are real limits on your application’s memory.”

Corey explains further, “The proxy is a so called ‘dynamic geometry’ which means V-Ray is going to read from the file what it needs at render time.” All the trees, foliage and the grass shown in the next page (and the title graphic) contain millions of polys. Yet the SketchUp model in our presentation by the Chaos Group moved around as if it just contained the house geometry. This was impressive, especially if you have pushed SketchUp to its limits. (see image 04 for the proxy setup palette). 

next page: Other Improvements in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp

 Other Improvements in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp

While the three major features described above mark the bulk of the big changes and advancements in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp, there are many other significant changes. “We are now supporting post-processing lens effects and glares,” said Corey Rubadue. One of the better things about V-Ray for SketchUp is the use of physical cameras and physical lights (IES lights). Users can manipulate the f-stop settings in the physical camera and make lighting adjustments often quicker than going into the scene and tweaking lots of lights.

The Material Editor has been enhanced in V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp, in many ways. Both simplifications and streamlining now make it easier to perform common tasks. And BRDF materials are now in this version for SketchUp. “We brought this over from 3ds Max,” noted Rubadue. “And in this version we have faster displacement mapping. Displacement is actually a change in geometry deformation…so you get the nuances of little shadows, if you will, that you don’t get with a bump mapping effect.”

The Chaos Group has really thought deeply about the SketchUP user as a type of user distinct from many other 3D artists and designers. “A major focus of this release is on learning,” said Lon Grohs, vice president of business development. “We are producing HTML based tutorials as well as video tutorials.” There is clearly a focus on integrating the ethos of SketchUp, and not just the technologies, together with that of V-Ray.

“We want people to look at these images that come out of SketchUp with V-Ray and completely question if they were actually made with these tools together,” said Lon Grohs.

V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp includes both V-Ray RT technology with both CPU and GPU based acceleration–depending on your graphics support–and distributed rendering licenses. You get 10 slave render machine licenses so you can install just the rendering engines to available CPUs that you have around on your network. There is no limitation on cores or memory on these ten machines.

Closing Details and Thoughts 

V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp has an estimated retail price of 800.USD. As a plugin for SketchUp 2013, version 7 and version 8, this puts it in good company with many other rendering plugins for this popular modeling application. By no means is the Chaos Group alone in photorealistic rendering space for SketchUp plugins. Indeed the Chaos Group has some stiff competition from the likes of Next Limit (Maxwell), LumenRT by e-on software, Indigo Renderer and others.

Yet, the interactive renderer with RT and its proxy technology, among other features, make V-Ray for SketchUp a very comprehensive solution for those seeking a very-highend photorealistic rendering solution for SketchUp.

To acquire or learn more about the Chaos Group’s new V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp, go to their website here.