V-Ray 3 Arrives for McNeel’s Rhino Modeler—Adds V-Ray Swarm and More

Recently Chaos Group’s new V-Ray 3 arrived on Mac and Windows for the popular SketchUp modeler. Now version 3.0 arrives for McNeel’s highly touted Rhinoceros (for Windows), providing powerful and professional rendering via a plugin for McNeel’s versatile 3D modeling application.

Designed for Architects and Product Designers

V-Ray 3.0 for Rhino is primarily aimed at architects and product designers, offering interactive and highly optimized rendering workflows.  Highlights of this release include a material library of over 500 drag-and-drop materials and an intuitive interface that has been streamlined to speed up any design workflow.

“Designers want to work as fluidly as possible, without any roadblocks. They want to test ideas, swap materials and render concepts without getting hung up on the technical details,” said Corey Rubadue, VP of AEC and Design at Chaos Group. “Not only did we make V-Ray 3 for Rhino as fast as possible, we streamlined the entire user experience to let designers focus on what matters most to them – design.”

VR is a Focus

Virtual reality (VR) workflows are built into this release via a new VR camera that renders high-quality images that can be easily viewed on popular VR headsets such as Google Cardboard, Gear VR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive.

01 – Chaos Group releases V-Ray 3 for Rhino. New features galore and V-Ray Swarm tech included. (image: screenshot from YouTube promo)

For users and studios with multiple computers available, they can take advantage of distributed rendering in what the company calls V-Ray Swarm.

“The new V-Ray for Rhino takes me beyond the limits of my CAD platform and enables new levels of productivity and design possibilities,” said Dustin Brown, Senior Industrial Design Lead at Microsoft and owner of speckofdustin.com. “Studying materials with V-Ray is a joy. The addition of fur and the new material editor opens up, even more, possibilities.”

Features List

• Virtual Reality – Render virtual reality content for the most popular VR headsets (Samsung Gear VR, Google Cardboard, HTC Vive and Oculus Rift).

• V-Ray Swarm – Introducing a powerful, scalable distributed rendering system that’s simple and fast.

• Section cuts – Easily create quick cutaways and cross sections with the V-Ray Clipper.

• Aerial perspective – Quickly add realistic atmospheric depth and haze.

• Denoiser – Automatically remove noise and cut render times by up to 50%.

• Grass & fur – Create realistic grass, fabrics, and carpet with V-Ray Fur.

• Proxy objects – Add highly detailed and complex objects like grass, trees, and cars with memory-efficient proxy models.

• Render elements – Render as separate layers for more artistic control in your image-editing software.

• Frame buffer – Track your render history and fine-tune colors, exposure, and more directly in the V-Ray Frame Buffer.

• V-Ray Scene export – Share complete, ready-to-render V-Ray 3 for Rhino files with any V-Ray 3.4 or higher application.

• HDR Light Studio support – Set up great-looking studio lighting quickly. V-Ray 3 for Rhino seamlessly supports HDR Light Studio, Lightmap’s dedicated lighting application.

• Grasshopper support – Render generative design models with the new V-Ray to Grasshopper add-in.

V-Ray 3 for Rhino comes with twin-engine performance. With both CPU and GPU acceleration, users can choose which is fastest based on their particular hardware. You can also share complete ready-to-render V-Ray 3 for Rhino files with any V-Ray 3.4 or higher application.

To learn more about V-Ray 3 for Rhino go to this page.

Pricing and Availability

V-Ray 3 for Rhino is available now for Windows. Workstation licenses are $695 and are fully compatible with Rhino 5. Upgrades are also available; contact your local reseller for more information.