Chaos Group Releases New V-Ray for Epic’s Unreal

Earlier this month Chaos Group released V-Ray for Unreal, the fastest way for architecture, automotive, and visual effects users to create immersive experiences from their V-Ray content.

V-Ray for Unreal

The new V-Ray for Unreal enables users to bring their scenes from 3ds max, Maya, Rhino, and SketchUp directly into the Unreal Editor with minimal effort and ease. Importantly, the new V-Ray for Unreal won’t require users to learn a new workflow. Once inside, users will have the full power of the V-Ray Next technology and be capable of creating accurate ray-traced visuals directly from the Unreal Engine.

With this new solution, users will go about creating their V-Ray scenes in their V-Ray solutions of choice (see above) and then V-Ray for Unreal will import every part of the scene file into the Unreal Editor. V-Ray lights and materials are automatically converted into their real-time equivalents inside of Unreal and an intelligent connection to the originals ensures high-fidelity stills and animations at render time.

01 – Chaos Group has released the new V-Ray for Unreal, adding the world’s most popular rendering technology to the leading game engine.

The official launch will introduce V-Ray Light Baking, a powerful feature that lets users bake V-Ray lights (including IES) directly into Unreal with full GPU acceleration. Unlike other light baking implementations, V-Ray Light Baking maintains V-Ray accuracy, ensuring a lifelike, physically based result for real-time experiences and VR.

New Pipeline for CAD Users

V-Ray for Unreal will also introduce a new pipeline for CAD designers, who want to utilize the power of V-Ray rendering in their designs.

“By combining Datasmith and V-Ray for Unreal, industrial designers can easily add the accuracy of photorealistic ray tracing to their interactive designs without requiring V-Ray in their CAD tool. V-Ray for Unreal Engine unlocks new workflows that will fundamentally change how people visualize and experience their designs,” said Ken Pimentel, senior product manager at Epic Games. “Now, all designers can benefit from both real-time interactivity and production-proven ray tracing within the Unreal Editor.”

Other features include:

• Accurate Lighting – Render your Unreal scenes with physically accurate, ray-traced lighting that matches your designs.

• Global Illumination – Render realistic bounced light using V-Ray’s Brute Force and proprietary Light Cache global illumination.

• Rendering Animation – Render sequences from Unreal’s Sequencer to create V-Ray-quality, ray-traced animated cinematics. Deforming objects can also be rendered using V-Ray Proxy objects.

• GPU+CPU Rendering – Render on all your hardware, with support for CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, or a combination of both.

• Unreal Foliage Support – Compatible with Unreal’s native foliage system for rendering large environments and landscapes. Support for animated foliage coming soon.

• V-Ray Proxy Support – Load high-resolution assets at render time using memory-efficient V-Ray Proxy objects.

• Render Elements – Supports a wide range of render elements for better artistic and technical control in compositing.

• Distributed Rendering – Leverage the power of multiple machines to speed up rendering and light baking.

V-Ray for Unreal offers users powerful new capabilities by combining the leading ray-tracing rendering engine to the power of Unreal’s game engine. Learn more here.

Pricing and Availability

V-Ray for Unreal is available now and compatible with V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino and SketchUp. V-Ray for Unreal currently supports 4.19 – 4.20 with support for 4.21 coming soon. V-Ray for Unreal will be rapidly updated to keep pace with the Unreal Engine, so it will be sold through a subscription that always keeps the user up-to-date. The monthly rate will be $80, while the annual rate will be $470. Chaos Group also offers a flat annual rate ($99) for students, educators, and universities. Visit the website for a free starter’s guide.