V-Ray hits lucky number 7

Chaos V-Ray 7 is now available for Houdini and Maya and includes additions to improve Gassian Splats, faster animation, and better worldbuilding features.

Chaos has been incrementally releasing V-Ray 7 for various 3D software, with the latest launch of the updated rendering tool for Maya and Houdini users. With the release comes native support for ray-traced Gaussian Splats, faster animation rendering times, and other new features that speed up worldbuilding.

V-ray image — ***V-Ray 7 with native Gaussian Splats support. (Source: Chaos)***

The added improvement for Gaussian Splats enables artists to place CG scenes within highly detailed virtual environments created from captured video, which can then be reflected and accept shadows.

A new firefly removal algorithm automatically detects and finishes unresolved pixels, known as “fireflies,” during bucket rendering, leading to faster generation of final images. The Open Image Denoiser has also been updated for further image enhancement. A new prefilter pass results in improved detail retention for sharper, cleaner images.

V-Ray GPU includes numerous improvements in V-Ray 7 for Maya and Houdini, including far faster time to first pixel, made possible by new optimizations for scattering, texture-heavy scenes, data uploads, and geometry compilations. New Caustics support enables realistic surface reflections and refractions in both production and interactive rendering, while out-of-core texturesenable detail in texture-heavy scenes, without sacrificing shading quality.

V-Ray GPU also has an enhanced algorithm for more efficient caching of bitmaps between animation frames, further speeding up the animation rendering process—sometimes by up to 50%, according to Chaos. And, V-Ray GPU can now run up to 3X faster on MacBooks with its new Metal support.

V-Ray 7 for Maya features include:

OpenPBR support
New OpenPBR-compliant layering scheme
Enhanced sheen layer while in V-Ray Material OpenPBR mode
Extended USD support
V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB) upgrades
Chaos Cosmos library Luminaires

V-Ray 7 for Houdini features include:

New Volume Shader preview
Extended MaterialX support
Easier toon shading
Chaos Cosmos access in Solaris
Copernicus procedural texturing tool support
Yeti 3D hair/fur cache support

Lighting — ***Most of the light fixtures within Chaos Cosmos are now Luminaires in V-Ray 7, making it easier to populate scenes with realistic lighting, while also rendering finals more quickly. (Source: Chaos***)

V-Ray 7 for Maya and V-Ray 7 for Houdini are available now for Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

In December, Chaos released V-Ray 7 for Sketchup and V-Ray 7 for Rhino, offering the same types of general improvements along with specific features to that software.

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