Chaos Group Releases V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max

Expanded toolset includes photorealistic ray tracer, adding post-rendering compositing and lighting tool capabilities that makes adjustment of render elements and color corrections much easier.

LOS ANGELES -- Chaos Group has released V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max, connecting its award-winning renderer to more parts of the visualization process. Artists and designers can now composite renders, enhance materials and interactively relight images without leaving the program, extending V-Ray’s capabilities.

“The future is all-in-one,” commented Chaos Group VP of product management, Phillip Miller. “An artist doesn’t want to jump into extra applications – they want tools that excel at every part of the process. V-Ray 5 is a big step in that direction.”

Beyond Rendering:

Two of V-Ray 5’s additions, layer compositing and light mix, can be found in the new V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB), which was also redesigned for efficiency and a cleaner look.

With Light Mix, artists can interactively explore different lighting scenarios without having to re-render an image. Users can now adjust the color and intensity of any light source immediately, ensuring faster iterations when designing looks and moods.

The Layer Compositor offers a faster path to final images, helping users post-process shots in the new VFB without outside applications. Using this non-destructive workflow, artists can adjust different render elements and perform color corrections with ease.

Materials Made Easy:

V-Ray 5 adds seven features and improvements tailored to materials, including a new management system and over 500 readymade materials designed to cover most objects and spaces. New built-in presets can help dial-in everyday options like metal, glass, and plastic, as well as common hair colors, helping artists achieve photorealism much faster.

With V-Ray 5’s new randomization tools, users can add slight variations to their materials, increasing believability across a scene. VRayMultiSubTex colors can now be shifted by hue, saturation, and gamma, while a new VRayUVWRandomizer map will adjust the offset, rotation and scale of both textures and procedural materials. For repeating texture maps, artists now have Stochastic Texture Tiling, which automatically removes tiling artifacts.

Other New Features in V-Ray 5 Include:

Coat Layer – Gain extra reflections on surfaces without using blend materials.
Sheen Layer – Easily simulate fabrics like velvet, satin and silk.
Photoreal Material Previews – New view incorporates global illumination to provide an exact representation of a rendered material.
Dirt with Streaks – New controls for aging materials with procedural streaks have been added to the VRayDirtMtl.
New Car Paint Material – Provides highly realistic flakes with less memory.
New Sun and Sky System – Improves accuracy when the sun is at the horizon, including the magic hours right before sunrise and after sunset.
Camera EV Control – Adjust the exposure value of the V-Ray Physical Camera without affecting motion blur or depth of field.
V-Ray GPU Updates – Initial support for out-of-core geometry allows users to break through memory constraints when necessary. Resumable progressive rendering ensures artists never have to restart from square one.
Blue Noise Sampling – New algorithm update can make images (and noise) look cleaner through fewer samples.
V-Ray Scene Updates – Export selected objects, including pivot points, for transforms in Project Lavina.
ACEScg Color Workflows – Artists can now render in the emerging CG color space standard, accessing a wider gamut of colors.
Light Path Expressions – The behavior of light in a scene can now be used for custom render elements.
Filmic Tonemapping – HDR images can now mimic the properties of film to give images a cinematic look.