ACADEMY REWARDS V-RAY

Chaos Group’s co-founder Vlado Koylazov says winning a Sci-tech Oscar means V-ray will be better than ever

Chaos Group on winning the Scitech Oscar and the future of V-ray

I view This as an acknowledgement of my work and The work of everyone who’s worked on v-ray over The years Vlado Koylazov, co-founder of Chaos Group

Far from basking in the attention afforded to winners of the prestigious Scientific and Engineering Award, presented by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at its annual Scitech Award event on February 11, Chaos Group’s co-founder Vlado Koylazov says he’s already back to work on V-ray 3.5.

“There are many things such as speed and usability that we want to improve on with this version,” explains Vlado. “We also want to make sure that V-ray implementations in 3ds Max, Maya and Houdini are able to talk to each other,” he adds.

Vlado puts winning the Sci-tech Oscar down to V-ray’s push to make raytracing an accepted standard in the VFX industry. So how did Chaos Group turn the tide of an industry hooked on scanline rendering?

“It was a blend of several things,” says Vlado. “V-ray was fast enough to make raytracing practical, it had the right features too. In the beginning, it had most of the things you needed to render motion blur: glossy reflections, physically based shading – the things that users wanted.”

At the time, 15 years ago, physical shading wasn’t popular. “Artists felt they could lose control over the look of the scene. But we gave people new choices, to think like a photographer, and consider the scene as a 3D space with lighting and cameras,” says Vlado.

It’s fair to say V-ray changed how artists think about their renders and offered a new way to achieve photoreal results. “It was nice to know that I was right,” says Vlado.

“I view this as an acknowledgement of my work, and the work of everyone who’s worked on it over the years,” states Vlado, as he recognised his achievement and thanked his team for their efforts. The 89th Academy Awards will be held FYI in Hollywood on February 26, 2017.