Chaos Group V-Ray for 3ds Max

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max is a comprehensive physically-based lighting, shading, and rendering toolkit built to meet the creative demands of CG artists and designers. Speed, control, and quality are key reasons so many artists and studios rely on V-Ray time and time again. V-Ray 3.0 delivers a powerful new set of features focused on artist productivity and modern CG workflows.

Enhanced Rendering
V-Ray 3.0 introduces a new Progressive Image Sampler. Fast to set up and easy to control, the Progressive Image Sampler generates fast feedback even with complex features such as Environment Fog, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur. Probabilistic Light Sampling reduces the number of lights evaluated at render time. This optimizes rendering scenes with many lights. The new version also features a VRayMetaball object for ray-traced isosurfaces based on particles; a new VRayClipper helper for creating cutaway and section renders using a simple plane; a Render Mask tool that uses an object selection, include and exclude list, or texture map to control the exact pixels to be rendered; or Distributed Rendering giving artists the ability to use multiple computers working in parallel to render a single image.

Faster Ray Tracing
V-Ray 3.0 introduces significant optimizations to the ray tracing core. This speeds up calculations for Brute Force GI, Progressive Path Tracing, Reflections, Refractions, and more. Testers have reported speed increases of up to 5x! The new V-Ray 3.0 also includes the Intel Embree raycaster, specifically designed to increase the performance of photorealistic rendering on a compatible hardware. Another rendering optimization is the dynamic bucket splitting that automatically reduces the size of render buckets to maximize the use of all CPU threads.



New Shaders and Effects
Also introduced in V-Ray 3.0 is the VraySkinMtl material. With artist-friendly controls, the VRaySkinMtl is a dedicated skin shader with built-in Subsurface Scattering and layered reflections. The Subsurface Scattering algorithm has been imroved with support for object-based and ray-traced illumination. V-Ray RT CPU also adds SSS support. Also new to V-Ray for 3ds Max is the VRmat functionality. Previously known as Vismats, VRmats are an XML-based material description for sharing V-Ray shaders across multiple applications. VRmats are currently compatible with V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max, V-Ray 2.0 for Rhino, and V-Ray 2.0 for SketchUp. Support for additional applications including Maya and Softimage is currently in development. Users can also program custom shaders using Open Shading Language (OSL) developed by Sony Picture Imageworks.