This month the Chaos Group released a new version of the V-Ray rendering plugin for Trimble’s popular 3D modeler, SketchUp. The new V-Ray 3.6 for SketchUp offers streamed UI and faster GPU rendering, among 15 new features.
Simplifying Rendering for Architects and Designers
The very latest version of the V-Ray (3.6) plugin for SketchUp simplifies the user-interface, reports the company. All scenes can now be managed from one place using the first file manager for SketchUp. Users can set file paths, create scene archives, and keep track of assets like textures, IES files, and proxy objects.
And Chaos Group’s GPU+CPU hybrid rendering technology has now been added to V-Ray for SketchUp in this release. This tech will maximize the use of all existing hardware for Nvidia CUDA users, ensuring that designers can use any and all computing power, whenever they demand it.
Also, key in this release is the new ability to rendering in the native viewport. Users are no longer limited to the frame buffer and thus will enjoy seeing the rendering come to live directly inside the SketchUp viewport. And with the new Viewport rendering users can select and render multiple regions at once, blending between V-Ray and the SketchUp model using their ± hotkeys to control opacity.
Other Feature Improvements
- New V-Ray color picker — new color picker is simple and yet powerful, allows the user to select colors in the Screen sRGB (0-255) or Rendering (0.0 – 1.0) color space, enabling more accurate color selections.
- Better Viewport Materials — materials will now display more accurately in the SketchUp viewport.
- Adaptive Lights — For scenes with many lights, the new Adaptive Lights mode can help cut render times by up to 700%.
- Sunlight Studies — Create sunlight & shadow studies with SketchUp sun animation.
- Fog — Add depth to scenes with realistic 3D fog and light scattering effects.
- V-Ray Scene Import — Import and render V–Ray scenes (.vrscene) from other applications such as 3ds Max, Rhino, and Revit.
- Animated Proxy objects — Easily add pre-animated 3D objects like walking people and trees blowing in the wind as animated V–Ray proxies.
- Proxy Previews — Control the look of V–Ray proxies in the SketchUp viewport. Select from Whole mesh, Bounding box, Point (Origin), and a new low poly Proxy preview mode.
- New Texture Maps — Fine-tune the look of a scene with new gradient, color temperature and procedural noise texture maps.
- 2D Displacement — Quickly add surface detail without extra modeling using optimized 2D displacement. Perfect for architectural materials like brick and stone.
- Improved denoising — V–Ray
Denoiser is now easier to set up and you can refine settings even after you render. - VRscans materials — Now compatible with real world scanned materials from VRscans, a subscription service that provides access to a library of over 600+ photorealistic, drag-and-drop materials.
Learn more at the V–Ray for SketchUp product page.
Pricing and Availability
V–Ray 3.6 for SketchUp is a free update for all V–Ray 3.x for S
To take a look at V-Ray 3.6 for SketchUp watch the video below.
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