Chaos V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max

There is no way that I’m going to be able to fit all the features in V-Ray 3.0. Is it enough to say that, out of the box, it’s easier to get started with basic, advanced and expert modes, showing the appropriate dials for the appropriate user? Or quick settings to get to the optimal settings for your scene and reduce the sliders to just what you need? Or that it seems to be running about 30 percent to 40 percent faster? Probably not. Even though, for me, that would be reason enough to upgrade. So, here we go with the V-Ray 3.0 laundry list.

V-Ray has a progressive setting, which is like V-Ray RT on Adderall. It kicks up RT functionality by adhering to the path tracing of the production renderer so that all the features — like volume, SSS and irradiance — can be used to quickly and more accurately iterate lighting so that you reach your goals faster.

The frame buffer has new tools for controlling color, but most importantly the ability to load in color profiles like ColorIO, icc and 3D LUTs to accurately represent how the image will look with the production LUTs applied. Again, it provides you with tools to get your renders just that much closer to final before it goes to comp.

Render masks allow you to render just certain objects, along with the appropriate alphas, without having to change states or matte settings.

The hair shader is optimized, and sub-surface scattering can use ray-tracing, eliminating pre-pass calculations while increasing detail.

A Max Ray Intensity dial is hidden within the advanced and expert modes, which aides in eliminating sparkles that happen in the render when using extremely bright light sources that are frequently found in HDR images. This is huge. Huge!

And now VRMats, previously named Vismats, are usable as universal shaders that can be ported back and forth between V-Ray for different host systems. Shaders are available on the Chaos site, but can then be customized, and exported out as new shaders to be used in Max, Maya, C4D, Rhino and SketchUp.

Everything here is absolutely worth upgrading to 3.0. The only downside? It’s not available for Maya … yet.