Chaos Group’s New V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max—7x Faster Rendering and Adaptive Lighting

Chaos Group’s leading high-end rendering software—V-Ray—got an important update in February for Autodesk 3ds Max. The new V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max offers up to 7x faster rendering performance due to impressive algorithm techniques. The update is free to current license users.

What’s Killer in New V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max

V-Ray 3.5 for Max comes with the addition of nine major features and a number of improvements related to performance. For those pressing the limits of speed, this is the fastest version yet and a must adoption, says the company.

Adaptive Lights Algorithm

To get V-Ray dramatically sped up in Max Chaos Group’s R&D team wrote a new algorithm called Adaptive Lights. Extensive testing on was then done on architectural interiors and larger environments containing hundreds or even thousands of lights. Benchmarking the results showed that Adaptive Lights can be up to 7x faster, depending on the scene.

Key Takeaway

The R&D team at Chaos Group wrote a new algorithm called Adaptive Lights that has now made it possible to render scenes in 3ds Max that were previously not possible due to extremely large numbers of lights. 

Now artists can work with virtually unlimited lights, says the company. In the past, some scenes were really not possible when light count reached extremely large numbers. The Adaptive Lights fixes this.

“We’ve been testing V-Ray’s new Adaptive Lights on the GPU, and we’re impressed by the results,” said Tomasz Wyszołmirski, studio director at Dabarti. “In one of our scenes, render times were seven times faster than before – a 54 minute render dropped to 7.5 minutes with Adaptive Lights! The difference is amazing.”

01 – Chaos Group has released in February, V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max. The latest update adds special algorithmic sauce to speed up rendering scenes with high light counts. Image: Chaos Group.

The speed up in rendering with many lights isn’t the only thing worthy of this new 3.5 updated version of V-Ray for Max. Additional top new features include:

• Interactive production rendering — Fully interactive production rendering with immediate feedback.
• Glossy fresnel — New, physically-accurate reflection model adds more realism to any scene
• Resumable rendering — Ability to stop and continue rendering at any point, preserving work and saving time. Supports both progressive and bucket rendering.
• Live VR rendering — Render directly to Oculus Rift or HTC Vive with full GPU acceleration. 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 — GPU-accelerated glare and bloom effects that can be enabled and adjusted while rendering. Compatible with V-Ray Denoiser.
• alSurface material — General-purpose shader by Anders Langlands includes built-in SSS controls; popular for skin.
• MDL materials — 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.

GPU Rendering improvements have also led to faster render times in the latest version, and an expanded feature set. In particular, memory efficiency has been dramatically improved, says the company, due to On-Demand Mip-mapping, an intelligent way to load and render textures quickly using automatic processing and the GPU.

V-Ray GPU will now support iToo software forest color textures, cached irradiance maps, aerial perspective, and a whole lot more. For more on the GPU rendering improvements readers can visit this Chaos Group blog here.

Pricing and Availability

V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max is a free update for all V-Ray 3.x customers. Login at chaosgroup.com to download. This version also marks the debut of online licensing for V-Ray for 3ds Max users, who can now choose this option instead of the traditional dongle. A full-featured 30-day trial is also available.