Chaos Group Announces V-Ray 3.0 for Maya Beta


Although V-Ray is already popular in film, commercial and episodic television work, Chaos Group has released an upgrade- V-Ray 3.0 for Maya. Enhancements included a new Progressive Rendering Engine, support for several open source technologies, and up to 5x faster ray tracing and rendering performance.

“On Ender’s Game we hooked massive Houdini swarm simulations up to V-Ray Proxies and rendered the most geometry we’ve ever attempted at Digital Domain,” said Linghao Li, Technical Director at Digital Domain. “In one shot alone there were 333,443 ships on screen. 27 billion polygons rendered out for Deep Compositing and V-Ray handled it no problem.”

V-Ray 3.0 introduces a powerful new path-tracing engine (Progressive Image Sampler) that provides artists with instant feedback during the look development process. Essentially Ray 3.0 is faster allowing drastic changes in all physically-based lighting, shading and rendering. When developing character or creatures, the speed can be seen 15x faster hair rendering, improved Ray-Traced Subsurface Scattering (SSS), and a new VRaySkinMtl with built-in SSS and layered reflections. It even now supports MARI’s UDIM and Autodesk Mudbox’s UVTILE formats for users to incorporate textures from their favorite programs.

“We rely on V-Ray every day to help us craft big projects like ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Warm Bodies’ and ‘Noah,’” said Dmitry Vinnik, CG/Technical Supervisor at LOOK Effects. “Faster ray tracing and hair rendering is exactly what we need to turn around big shots before a deadline.”

01 – Vray 3.0 for 3ds Max and Maya now out. Both support dozens of new features.

V-Ray 3.0 has become even more versatile by adding support for common open source formats like OpenSubdiv, Alembic 1.5, Deep Images and OpenEXR 2.0, OpenColorIO, and in the near future, programmable shaders with Open Shading Language [OSL].

Blake Sweeney, DFX Supervisor at Method Studios says, “The built-in shaders and render elements give us solutions for almost every situation imaginable. For the rare corner case that requires something extra, Chaos Group collaborates and brainstorms with us to find a solution, and it’s generally included in updates almost immediately. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Chaos Group invites all V-Ray users participating in the beta to send in their thoughts on what would make for the best final product. For the complete list of new features and upgrades.

V-Ray 3.0 for Maya Public beta is available now for all V-Ray users- here.