Iray for 3ds Max is a plug-in renderer developed by Lightworks that creates physically accurate renderings by tracing light paths. Iray’s interactivity and scalability provides immediate visual feedback during scene development.
The NVIDIA® Iray® for 3ds Max plug-in is now available as an annual subscription for $295 USD or a 90-day trial, so physically based lights and materials can easily be modified.
Also available for the first time is the NVIDIA vMaterials Catalog, a collection of curated and verified physically based materials, built with NVIDIA Material Definition Language. All vMaterials can be shared with other MDL-compatible tools to save time in an easy-to-use workflow.
Iray for Autodesk 3ds Max features
Rendering
- Utilizes all supported GPUs and CPUs within the machine, with user control of resources
- Physically based path-trace rendering within 3ds Max’s ActiveShade window provides accurate preview of final results while adjusting scenes
- Super-fast Iray Interactive ray tracing within 3ds Max’s ActiveShade window provides immediate feedback on object transforms and lighting edits
- Optimized sampling for accurate caustics and highly indirect lighting
- Motion Blur using 3ds Max camera multi-pass
- Simultaneous render element generation with negligible speed impact
- Custom Light Path Expressions for tremendous flexibility in post production editing
- Depth of Field quickly responds upon adjustment (using 3ds Max camera multi-pass)
- Matte shadow and reflection support for compositing flexibility
- Backplate Images supported independent of lighting
- Lighting simulation mode to evaluate the Lux/Foot-candles at any visible point
- Noise Reduction by enabling Firefly Filter
Lighting
- Interactive updates (in ActiveShade) upon adjusting light parameters and position
- Image based lighting for fast, convincing environments
- Supports 3ds Max standard and photometric lights
- New Iray photometric light type, IES profile support
- Real-world units of lighting attributes for accurate simulation
- Lighting from emissive (self illuminated) materials & geometry
- Physical sun and sky system
- No slow down from adding additional light sources
Materials
- Interactive updates (in ActiveShade) upon adjusting scene materials
- Physically based materials using an intuitive layering approach leveraging the NVIDIA Material Definition Language (MDL)
- Up to 16 layers per material for substantial flexibility
- Extensive material flexibility, including subsurface scattering, thin film, gem, etc.
- Work directly within 3ds Max material editing interfaces such as the
- Compact and Slate editors
- MDL material saving for building custom, shareable material libraries
- MDL import and export for sharing materials between different Iray applications or MDL compliant renderers (e.g., mental ray)
- Supports up to 4 UV mapping channels per material layer
- Conversion of native Arch & Design materials and mental ray photometrics lights and enviornments
- Supports native 3ds Max Maps and custom MDL procedurals (always GPU accelerated)
- Material measurements from supported devices
- Complex layering parameters including Decals, Coating, and Surface
- Extensive verified material library to confidently represent real-world results
Workflow
- Continual feedback with progressive rendering of final results after scene adjustments
- Effortless switching between fast ray tracing and accurate path tracing
- Interactive tone mapping for quickly achieving desired exposure, white balance, and contrast adjustments
- Full animation support of all material and light parameters
- MaxScript scripting support
- Iray Server support for efficient, scalable offline rendering
- Interactive Iray Server support for streaming from an external machine
- Quadro VCA support for remote interactive rendering with linear scalability
System requirements
- software—Autodesk 3ds Max 2016
- operating system—64-bit Windows
- hardware—Iray For 3ds Max functions on any system certified to operate Autodesk 3ds Max. Rendering speed is increased with faster CPUs, more CPU cores, and especially with NVIDIA GPUs. Most NVIDIA products from the past 5 years (using the Fermi, Kepler, or Maxwell architecture) are supported. Iray for 3ds Max scales very efficiently across all processors within the system and provides control over which processors are used.
Get a tour of the new 3ds Max plug-in to see how easy it is to create or modify physically based lights and materials to craft stunning visualizations.
01 – An introduction to the NVIDIA Iray for ads Max rendering plug-in.
Iray for 3ds Max licenses can be purchased as either a Floating or Node locked local license at $295 per node. The License is a term license expiring on December 1st 2017 including a 1 year subscription to updates and bug fix releases.
For sales and pricing inquiries please contact NVIDIA Sales if purchasing 50 licenses or more.