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Review: V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max is shipping! Blizzard senior environment modeler, Toni Bratincevic, takes an in-depth look at the new features and improvements to see if it's a worthwhile investment for artists

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max is shipping! Blizzard senior environment modeler, Toni Bratincevic, takes an in-depth look at the new features and improvements to see if it's a worthwhile investment for artists

Product: V-Ray3.0 for 3ds Max

Company: Chaos Group

Website: www.chaosgroup.com

Star Rating: 5 / 5

V-Ray is one of the most innovative, fastest and most stable raytracers today. It has become a synonym for quality and was responsible for popularizing and pushing what once was a slow and not production-ready algorithm (raytracing) into the most popular way of delivering high-quality renders today.

"One of the most important new features is the introduction of the new progressive render engine"

Although version 2.4 was everything one could wish for, the release of version 3.0 just continues on the trajectory of delivering upgrades to one of the best raytracing engines. While introducing some new fea-tures, V-Ray 3.0 also delivers simplified workflow and focuses on optimizing and improving its own raytracing core.

One of the most important new features is the introduction of the new progressive render engine. Users now have an ability to choose between old image samplers (DMC, Adaptive Subdivision, Fixed) which were all based on bucket rendering, and new progressive render which refines complete image until it reaches certain time or quality limit.

While very similar to V-Ray RT, users were limited to bruteforce global illumination, which can sometimes lead to slow render times, while with the new progressive render users can have a choice of (for example) using Irradiance cache and Light cache as global illumination engines delivering much faster results, while still having the ability of seeing the whole image refining as it is rendering.

In addition to this, raytracing speed has also been improved, especially in cases where bruteforce global illumination is used. Optimizations were done on the V-Ray raytracing core with additional choices to use the embree raytracer, which can speed up rendering with specific scenes even further.

As in any production pipeline, re-rendering and tweaking shaders, textures and lighting requires constant re-rendering, sometimes even 100 times before getting satisfying results. In the old V-Ray, users usually used a rectangular selection over the rendered image to set borders for re-rendering, but in V-Ray 3.0, with the introduction of image masks, this workflow becomes much more efficient.

As a mask, users can decide to use selected objects, layers, textures or define custom objects in-clude/exclude list. Assuming that you have already done a test render of the whole scene, by selecting one object in your viewport and setting Render Mask to Selected, clicking render again will tell V-Ray to only re-render the area of the image covered by the selected object, while leaving old render intact.

Support for Alembic file format, OSL shaders, Deep images and Open EXR 2.0 are very important steps for popularizing V-Ray in high-end movie work, too. Deep images store information for all individual image samples taken during rendering, including their depth values. It allows for more accurate post-processing effects like DOF and motion blur, without getting artifacts specific to old image formats.

With support for OSL shaders, users were given flexibility to extend V-Ray shading horizons, making it even more powerful and a good choice for high-end production where it is common practice to write specialized shaders.

"The user interface has been simplified for new users as well. There is a choice now of Basic, Advanced and Expert UI"

In combination with the Alembic format, new VRMat functionality will help close connectivity gaps be-tween 3D apps, too. V-Ray VRMat materials defined in 3ds Max can be exported and merged into Maya without any additional scripts or apps. In time, this will open up the possibility to create a library of materi-als that are application-independent and can be imported into any available V-Ray platform.

The user interface has been simplified for new users as well. There is a choice now of Basic, Advanced and Expert UI, which allows users with different levels of experience to modify and simplify UI based on their needs. In Basic UI, only important options are exposed to user which for artists new to V-Ray can be a big plus in dealing with complexity of new render engine.

Hair rendering is one of the most complex situations to solve when using raytracing render engines since it includes many thin strands of hair, requiring many samples to get satisfying and noise free results. With old image sampling methods, like V-Ray Adaptive subdivision sampler, resolving noise in hair could have led to very long render times.

To solve these problems, the Adaptive DMC sampler was a much better and faster choice, and with hair shading optimizations and faster raytracing in V-Ray 3.0, hair rendering speed is noticeably improved, sometimes delivering renders 3 times faster than the 2.4 version.

In V-Ray 2.4, the subsurface shader was limited to a screen space density estimation of subsurface samples, which sometimes led to unstable subsurface solutions manifesting as flickering. V-Ray 3.0, however, addresses these issues and lets users decide between 3 different ways of calculating subsurface effect.

The old method is still there, but 2 new methods have been introduced. The first one is a fully-raytraced SSS effect, which produces the best result you can get but takes longer to render. Since it is bruteforce, there is no prepass and the solution can't be saved for reuse, but this bruteforce method is becoming extremely popular even in high-end production because of very predictable results.

The object method is based on a fixed number of samples and is not camera-view dependent as the prepass method is, which means as objects moves away from the camera it will keep the same number of samples, and therefore reducing flickering in many situations.

Managing data when using V-Ray distributed rendering can sometimes lead to unexpected results and problems like missing textures, unresolved paths and so on, but with V-Ray 3.0 these issues are completely resolved by allowing nodes in the distributed rendering network to collect all the data needed for rendering locally. In local networks with relatively slow speeds, this can lead to some speed improvements because some files are copied and stored locally instead on the network.

Users interested in V-Ray RT will also get interesting improvements like support for instancing, motion blur, and render elements on GPU. As the number of supported features in V-Ray RT expands, RT is becoming a viable solution, even for final frame rendering.

Although there are a lot of new features in V-Ray 3.0, most of them are evolutionary steps over the 2.4 version, which was already a great render engine. The new version is not only focused on advanced users with features like Deep images, OSL and so on, but also cares about new users by simplifying the user interface and allowing them to adapt to the new render engine very fast.

As expected, Chaos Group has done an amazing job again, but it's up to users in the end to decide if it is an update worth upgrading to. I know for sure that the progressive image sampler alone has made my workflow much faster, efficient and more fun, and considering how many free upgrades V-Ray version 2 got from the 2.0 to 2.4 version, I am sure 3.0 will be a great investment for many of us.


Release date:
Available now!
Price: V-Ray 2.0 upgrades start at $420 US/300 EUR and the full workstation license price is $1,040 US/750 EU. As upgrade bundle prices vary, customers should contact their local reseller, Chaos Group representative, or use the upgrade calculator to see what option fits best.

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max Ray Traced SSS

V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max Ray Traced SSS

Related links:

Visit the official V-Ray 3.0 website
Learn more about V-Ray licensing
Try V-Ray 3.0 for free
Check out Chaos Group TV for free demos and videos
Visit Toni Bratincevic's website
To see more by Toni Bratincevic, check out Digital Art Masters: Volume 8
Digital Art Masters: Volume 9
and Prime - The Definitive Digital Art Collection

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