V-ray 3.5 for 3ds max
| | PRICE €750 (Workstation) to €2,050 (Workstation Prime) COMPANY Chaosgroup website www.chaosgroup.com
The rendering plug-in gets a high-speed update
Seemingly everybody from Allegorithmic to Chaos Group has speed on the brain this year. Looking at the results, thank goodness for that!
That’s probably why veteran renderering plug-in V-ray for 3ds Max has turned into a bit of a speed freak.
One of the oldest renderers around, V-ray keeps proving it still easily earns its stripes as an industry standard for archviz to movies. The innovation and effort put into V-ray 3.5 for 3ds Max is no exception.
Shipping with a long list of new features ranging from serious GPU and interface optimisations, adaptive lights, and new Materials to better VR functionality, it also has one smaller new feature many of us will love: That dongle is now an option, not a must.
One of 3.5’s new features is a massive Gpu-rendering overhaul, and the new functionality that goes with it, like adaptive lighting, and the port of older, CPU ones like masking, directional lighting, or the matte shadow catcher. In addition, the speed optimisation is pretty amazing: When testing it out on a fairly humble setup, everything from Evermotion to custom scenes rendered a lot faster than even 3.4. It was pretty fast on my lowend workstation with a 970 GTX with its VRAM issues – it pretty much flew on my W9100-box.
The increase in speed is due to the fact V-ray 3.5 now utilises on-demand Mip-mapping, and is channel-aware, meaning it will ignore unneeded channels in texture maps. Needless to say that the scaling of textures based on your camera angles can save you a huge amount of time and memory – in some cases it can shave it down to 3050 per cent of a scene’s earlier rendertimes, pretty much giving the “challenge accepted” nod to other GPU renderers like Redshift or Arnold.
new light settings
In addition to the GPU features and optimisations, 3.5 also presents new, faster lighting functionality in the shape of Adaptive Lighting. Building on V-ray 3.0’s probabilistic light algorithm, it calculates which lights will most likely
affect a shaded point, based on Global Illumination’s Light Cache pass. As this adaptive method is easier and faster to use, and less tweak-intensive than probabilistic settings, this drastically improves render times in scenes with a lot of V-ray lights, like nighttime cityscapes, or candle-lit interiors. Together with the new Interactive Production Renderer and the UI that goes with it – complete with on-the-fly bloom and other effect functionality, it makes rendering bokeh-heavy scenes, in particular, much faster and easier.
V-ray also doesn’t ‘lock’ your machine when rendering any more: thanks to the ability to set Low Thread Priorities or Resume Render, you can still run stuff on your computer when V-ray is rendering, now.
With new features such as Aerial Perspective, which enables you to view objects, especially landscapes, from a hazy distance; new support for Nvidia’s MDL material format; implementation of the Open Source alshader; and Forest Colour; as well as the physically accurate Glossy Fresnel functionality in the VRAYMTL, it’s hard to find fault with this release. I did experience a little hangy-ness when taking the new Forest Color for a Gpu-spin, I’m not sure if it was synchronisation or something else, but it was noticeable on both my machines.
I hope Chaosgroup will implement a payment regime similar to the Corona or Substance model at some point, so you can rent, or rent to own your V-ray licenses now the dongle isn’t required. The €750 or higher pricetag is a bit steep for small-time freelancers who do archviz ads.
However, it’s hard to hesitate recommending this awardwinning, CUDA- and Openclsupporting industry standard to anyone looking for a rendering plug-in, if you can afford it.
IT’S A Pity An APPLICATION THIS BIG, AND THIS POPULAR, Doesn’t OFFER A PAY-PER-MONTH FOR the SMALL FREELANCERS, now the Dongle IS Go