The V-Ray tab holds the global switches, the controls for image sampling and color mapping, the environment lighting/reflection/refraction overrides, the camera controls, and the V-Ray frame buffer settings. The Render Setup dialog is where you select V-Ray as your render engine, and where you will then find all of the main controls. To some extent, this comes down to personal taste, but not having to jump back and forward forth keeps my workflow simple, clean and quick. While the alternative approach – to use a plug-in to export to a standalone application, as Maxwell Render and fryrender do – is more flexible, I personally prefer to have my entire rendering workflow remain within a single application.
This integration is one of my favorite things about V-Ray. V-Ray-specific lights and other objects have unique icons within the viewports, enabling you to distinguish them quickly from Max’s native tools, or those of other plug-ins. V-Ray-specific maps, materials and shaders can be accessed via the Material Editor in both classic and Slate modes, and V-Ray lights, cameras and objects are all found in their respective tabs within the Create portion of the command panel. V-Ray integrates itself with 3ds Max seamlessly, with all the rendering parameters contained within Max’s Render Setup dialog. Instead, it falls right in the middle, with renderers based on the Reyes architecture like RenderMan on the faster side, and unbiased renderers like Maxwell Render and fryrender on the slower side. Speed-wise, V-Ray isn’t the fastest renderer out there, but nor is it the slowest.
#VRAY RHINO 2.0 BATCH RENDER TOOL FULL#
You can find a full list of features on the Chaos Group website. It supports raytracing and global illumination based on the Monte Carlo sampling technique, and offers quite an extensive feature set, including displacement mapping, area lights, image-based lighting and IES photometric lights several custom shaders, including car paint and subsurface scattering and a physical camera that supports depth of field and 3D motion blur. V-Ray has been a 3ds Max plug-in since its inception, and is tightly integrated into its host software. Those of you who are familiar with version 1.5 may wish to skip ahead.
#VRAY RHINO 2.0 BATCH RENDER TOOL SOFTWARE#
Before we get into the new features in version 2.0, the latest release, I want to look at the software as a whole.
However, in this review, we will focus solely on V-Ray for 3ds Max.
A Cinema 4D edition is also available from a separate developer.
The Chaos Group, V-Ray’s creator, produces versions for 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino and SketchUp. It dominates the field of architectural visualization, and has recently found its way into effects for television commercials and feature films, one of the most recent examples being the environments for Tron: Legacy, where it was used alongside mental ray and RenderMan. V-Ray has been one of the most popular third-party rendering solutions available for quite some time. Today, we are going to be looking at one particular tool used during the penultimate step in that process: rendering. However, most projects follow a standard workflow, from asset creation through to post-production. Today’s CG industry is a vast landscape of ideas, processes, and procedures, and the tools used to realise artists’ visions are almost as diverse as the artists themselves. Jason Lewis puts version 2.0 of the 3ds Max edition through its paces to assess what impact new materials, stereo tools and the V-Ray RT GPU-accelerated preview renderer will have in production Chaos Group’s plug-in renderer is already an industry standard for architectural vizualisation, and has recently made inroads into VFX.