The V-Ray renderer for computer graphics is widely considered a top dog in the visualization world. Now its developer, Chaos Group, has announced the much-anticipated release of V-Ray 3 for SketchUp.
The entire application has been a ground-up rewrite that took aim at the needs of design professionals using Trimble’s popular SketchUp modeler application. These types of users, like architects and urban designers, want to focus on the details of their design visions, not the details of obtuse high-end visualization software packages.
V-Ray 3 for SketchUp—What’s News
What Chaos Group has done fundamentally is dramatically simplify the process, creating a new user-interface that is “designer-friendly” and aimed to have presets for specific rendering settings that provide consistent image results.
01 – Chaos Group has announced the release of V-Ray 3 for SketchUp.
The software still works as a plugin renderer inside of SketchUp itself but provides greatly simplified dialogs and palettes. (see the video below). And speaking of SketchUp the new V-Ray 3 for Sketch supports the very latest SketchUp 2017, while the older version does not. In addition to new VR headset supports and a large 200 drag and drop material library, the key features in the latest version are:
- New UI — new user-interface features dark gray dialogs and easier to digest organization
- Materials library — over 200 ready to go, drag and drop materials will speed up projects
- V-Ray Swarm — adds distributed, powerful and scalable distributed rendering to leverage network computers
- Denoiser — automatically removes noise from images and cuts render times down by 50%
- VR — V-Ray 3 for SketchUp is ready to work with the most popular VR headsets
- Section Cuts — A new section cuts tool makes it easy to create section renders
- Aerial Perspective — quickly adds realistic atmospheric depth and haze
- Grass — these new tools enable fast realistic grass, fabrics, carpet and V-Ray Fur
V-Ray 3 for SketchUp offers twin rendering engine performance. Both CPU and GPU acceleration is possible and your computer will choose the best engine for the project. V-Ray 3 for SketchUp features V-Ray’s interactive rendering technology so that users can see results immediately upon changes to the model.
For interior renders V-Ray’s powerful global illumination algorithms generate fast and well lit results. It is possible to render scenes with both natural and artificial lighting. V-Ray 3 for SketchUp supports HDRI (high-dynamic range image), a physical sun and sky, and physical materials.
Render Elements enable separate passes for more artistic control in image-editing software, while Frame Buffer tools enable fine tune color control, exposure control and more. While the program comes with 200 textures V-Ray 3 for SketchUp supports the creation of advanced textures through procedural controls. Real-world cameras also support exposure, white balance, depth of field and more.
Finally, V-Ray Scene Export is technology that means you can share complete, ready-to-render V-Ray 3 for SketchUp files with any V-Ray 3.4 or higher application.
Availability
V-Ray 3 for SketchUp is available now and is supported on both Windows and macOS systems (10.6 or higher) and SketchUp 2015 – 2017. Pricing starts at $696.USD. To learn more read here.