Square Enix © Goodbye Kansas

 

Date – March 10, 2014

Download – No longer available

 

New Features

  • New progressive image sampler

  • Extensive optimizations for render speed, especially when using brute force GI

  • The Intel Embree 2.0 library is now integrated into the V-Ray core for static and motion-blurred geometry

  • Support for OpenSubdiv subdivision of meshes

  • New streamlined installer

  • Visibility sets for reflections/refractions in the V-Ray object properties
  • VRayVRmatMtl material for rendering .vrmat/.vismat/.vrscene files; VRmat converter to convert any material to .vrmat file
  • VRayMtlGLSL/VRayTexGLSL for direct rendering of GLSL shaders with V-Ray extensions
  • Option to cache geometry plugins and bitmaps between re-renders to reduce the scene export time

  • VRaySoftBox texture for creating studio lighting

  • VRaySwitchMtl which is able to swtich materials based on a texture input

  • VRayRaySwitch texture which switches the texture based on the ray type similar to the VRay material override

  • VRayCurvature texture which computes the curvature of the underlying mesh

  • VRayTemperature texture that sets a color based on Kelvin temperature

  • VRaySkinMtl material for rendering skin

  • VRayMtlRenderStats material that can override the per shape render stats; similar to VRay object properties

  • VRayNURBSTesselation node to controll the tesselation of multiple surfaces at once

  • Glossiness render element render element able to caclulate reflection and refraction glossiness

  • "Custom color" render element to calculate color render elements with arbitrary alias

  • Phoenix FD shader is now integrated and can render Maya fluids, OpenVDB and Field3D files

  • VRayVolumeGrid node for rendering grid based volumetric formats using the Phoenix FD shader

  • Initial support for XGen with Maya 2014.5 (via vrscene exporter module, archive and hair render types only)

  • VRayLensEffects render effect for producing realistic glow and glare

V-Ray RT

  • VRay RT can be now started as Maya Viewport renderer

V-Ray RT CPU

  • Support for VRayDirt, VRayFastSSS2, VRaySkinMtl materials

V-Ray RT GPU

  • Support for most render elements

VFB

  • Ability to write deep images (OpenEXR 2/vrst/vrsm)

  • Support for OpenColorIO color correction

  • New color corrections - contrast, HSL, color balance

VRayMesh

  • Support for the Alembic file format - meshes, hair and particles

VRayPhysicalCamera

  •  Support for bitmap aperture and optical vignetting

VRayFastSSS2

  • Option for geometry-based sampling for the illumination map

  • Raytraced mode for multiple scattering

Distributed Rendering Settings

  • Options to automatically transfer and cache missing assets to the DR servers

Texture Baking

  • Support for baking to a vertex color set

  • Support for baking to PTex

vRayMetaball

  • A new geometric object to create isosurface from particle systems

Lens analyzer

  • Ability to analyze distortion in arbitrary images


Modified Features

  • Camera 2D pan/zoom feature support

  • Support for mapped light radius for point/spot/direct lights

  • Option to use different texture filtering of GI samples (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc)

  • Option to abort rendering on missing asset (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc)

  • Option whether to take the up axis from the Maya preferences, or to specify it explicitly (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc)

  • Option to ignore shadow and light linking (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global)

  • Option to disable self-illumination (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global)

  • Option to prevent inversion of normal bump in tangent space on flipped UVs (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global

  • Option "Max ray intensity" to help deal with fireflies in glossy reflections (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global)

  • Correct "raw" render elements for easier compositing (needs the regular and the filter elements to be present too)

  • Ability to enable/disable several render elements at once

  • Option to write the main RGB render element in a sub-folder when "Separate folders" is enabled

  • Ability to abort the rendering using the vrend MEL command

  • When maximum transparency level is reached, return environment color rather than black

  • Mappable "frame offset" parameter for File nodes

  • Default jpeg quality is now 100 in the image options

  • Automatically create folders that are used in paths for saving images and vrscenes

  • Improved UI for nodes created by the "Create from V-Ray plugin" menu.

  • Support for single channel TIFF and TEX files

  • Hash ID metadata in TIFF and OpenEXR file textures to recognize identical bitmaps

  • Updated the OpenEXR library to OpenEXR 2

  • Improved motion blur raycast accelerator for fast rotating objects

VRayPtex

  • Updated the Ptex library to the latest version

  • Rewritten the Ptex library texture cache for better multithreading on many-core machines

  • Support for vector displacement with ptex textures

Texture Baking

  • Support for displacement

  • Support for subdivision surfaces

  • Support for UDIM texture baking

  • Adjustable bucket size

VFB

  • Ability to switch between the most recent images in the history using the 1-9 key

  • Ability to switch between render elements in the VFB using PageUp and PageDown

  • The history thumbnails in the VFB now have sRGB color correction if the sRGB setting is enabled

  • Added MEL command to control the VFB UI functionality

  • Disable loading images from the history while RT is running

  • Added a button to stop the current rendering

  • Added a button to reset the VFB settings (from the Render Settings)

  • Ability to dock the V-Ray VFB window

  • Ability to load arbitrary file formats in the VFB;

  • A color correction rollouts can now be hidden or expanded by clicking on their title

  • Option to automatically save each render in the history (enabled from the VFB history options dialog)

  • Option for dynamic bucket splitting towards the end of the image

  • Option to auto scale the buckets, if the user have set "Test resolution" or renders in a region

V-Ray RT

  • Support for rendering animations/sequences

  • Added an option to progressively increase the rays per pixel

  • Added an option to disable the initial image undersampling

  • Support for interactive adjustment of V-Ray user attributes

  • Optimized scene transfer to the render servers

  • Improved refresh rate and responsiveness

  • Support for chaning layers

  • "Auto-start local slave" option is now removed, "Use Local Machine" should be used instead

  • Stop RT rendering when changing the scene to leave as much system resources as possible for Maya

V-Ray RT CPU

  • Internally uses the production renderer core running in progressive mode

V-Ray RT GPU

  • Use different GPU code depending on the features used in the scene

  • Faster loading of textures

  • Reduced noise on VRayBlendMtl materials

VRayPhysicalCamera

  • Added an "auto guess vert. shift" option to keep the vertical shift when moving the camera

VRayMtl

  • Added "Compensate Exposure" option for the self-illumination

  • Added "Affect channels" option for the reflections in VRayMtl

VRayMtl / VRayBumpMtl

  • The bump amount now works with normal maps also

VRayFastSSS2

  • Ability to save/load illumination maps for VRayFastSSS2 material

VRayHairMtl3

  • Faster rendering of transparent materials

  • "Simplify for GI" is now on by default

VRayMtlWrapper and VRayObjectProperties

  • Added "Use irradiace map" option similar to VRayMtl

VRayLightRect

  • Option to preview the texture in the viewport

  • Option for directional distribution of the rectangle light

  • Added manipulator (with the 't' key) for the light target

VRayLightDome

  • Option to multiply the color by the texture

VRayIESLight

  • Optimized rendering speed
  • Added manipulator (with the 't' key) for the light target

VRaySun

  • Added a filter color for the light

  • Support for animated intensity

VRayHairSampler

  • Added a "Random by strand" output

VRayFur

  • Implement curl parameter;

  • Support for animated gravity vector

  • Added "Level Of Detail" option to reduce geometry along the distance from the camera

VRayMesh

  • Ability to bring in only parts of proxy files based on object IDs or object names

  • Ability to store the V-Ray user attributes when creating a proxies

  • Ability to specify a custom preview mesh when creating proxies and from the VRayMesh node itself

  • Option the VRayMesh node to act as a "placeholder" without loading the actual file except for rendering

  • Extra V-Ray attributes to the place3dTexture node for choosing a UV set name for proxies

VRayPlaceEnvTex

  • Added an option for ground environment projection

  • Support for motion blurred Horizontal and Verticle rotation

VRaySky

  • Added possibility to override the VRaySun settings

Import from .vrscene

  • Support for BRDFVRayMtl, Mtl2Sided, BRDFSSS2Complex, BRDFCarPaint, BRDFHair3, MtlWrapper, MtlOverride
  • Support for lights and geometry

Distributed Rendering settings

  • Option to exclude the local machine from DR rendering

  • Option to disable DR in batch mode

  • Ability to limit the DR servers

  • Added field "Server alias/description" for the DR servers dialog

GI

  • Autocreate folders for irradiance map auto-save output

  • Recognize %d and %0nd format when saving and loading irradiance maps, light caches, photon maps and caustics maps

  • Ability to use tags in file names of GI maps

  • Optimized the loading of irradiance map files over the network

Extra Tex render element

  • Extra Tex render element: Ability to include/exclude objects

Matte Shadow render element

  • Added "Consider for AA" option

Object ID render element

  • Option to store the values as integers when saving exr image files

Scripting

  • Extend addSceneContent/appendSceneContent to work with environment vars and wildcards

  • Ability to export cameras with the Python Scene Access API

  • Help messages for the vray MEL command

Subdivision / Displacement

  • True Catmull-Clark subdivision mode for quad meshes

  • The default subdivision level is now set to 4

  • Support for object-space vector displacement

  • Optimized memory usage of subdivision surfaces

  • Option to cache the normals for displaced surfaces

Batch

  • Support for the "Each frame in separate file" option

Hair

  • Added options for dynamic view-dependent hair tesselation

  • Option to use a global hair tree for faster rendering with many hair systems

samplerInfo

  • Added Bump Normal, Ray Depth, Path Length, Surface Material ID, Object ID and Parent Object ID outputs

ply2vrmesh

  • Added option to specify the name of the velocity attribute

  • Added support for material IDs in .obj files

  • Support for .hclassic and .bhclassic files produced by Houdini 12

  • Support for exporting the face and vertex normals in .geo and .bgeo files

  • Support for converting multiple uv sets from .get/.bgeo files

  • Convert RealFlow bin file using the correct coordinate system

  • Support for converting alembic files to vrmesh

  • Added .prt(krakatoa) to .vrmesh convert option

vrimg2exr

  • Added an option to truncate channel names to 32 symbols

  • -Info switch to print information about render time, scene name and comments, if present

  • Increase the default buffer size to 100 MB to speed up conversions

imapviewer

  • Reduced the number of messages that are printed to the standard output


Bug Fixes

  • TexSampler is exported in the main .vrscene rather than the textures one

  • VRay Extra Attributes are not dimmed properly in some cases

  • VRayBlendMtl doesn't do clamping on the amount textures;

  • VRayBlendMtl should propagate the "Use irradiance map" option from the base material;

  • VRayBumpMtl not working with VRayMtlSelect render element

  • Material override doesn't work with VRayHair2, VRayHair3, VrayBumpMtl

  • VRayPTex does not work properly when it is inside a switch texture

  • VRayStereoscopic: Linux builds generate wrong .vrst shademaps

  • Problem exporting custom nodes with more than one 3darray parameter

  • The "Use 3d mapping" parameter for the custom texture nodes must be off by default

  • VRayPlaceEnvTex is not created for the dome light when the attribute editor is closed

  • Instancers and light linking are not exported properly when using plugin name prefix

  • Bitmaps are loaded even when Maps option is disabled

  • Crash with 2D displacement when "Static displacement" is turned on

  • Clamped displacemend with layered texture and negative values

  • Maya Camera Film Offset parameter doesn't update during rendering animation

  • User attributes with multiple underscores are not exported properly

  • User attributes of the form vrayUserColor_ are exported multiple times for the red/green/blue child attributes

  • "cameraAperture" is always written as 36 in the OpenEXR meta attributes

  • Incorrect calculation of normal vectors for motion blurred subdivision surfaces

  • ExtraTex render elements with filtering disabled produce odd results on transparent objects

  • LightSelect render element doesn't work correctly through reflections with Ward and Phong BRDFs

  • Multimatte render element with all IDs set to the same number renders as blue instead of white

  • Velocity render element: Lights do not contribute any velocity information

  • Render elements names cannot be changed from the Render Settings dialog

  • Undo delete render elements is not updated in the Render Settings dialog

  • Fixed rare crashes with tiled textures and dynamic geometry when the dynamic memory limit was reached

  • Layer Overrides for the AA filter size don't work

  • Wrong image file name when "images" name in Maya Project Window is empty

  • Issue with animated visibility of the vray lights

  • SGI files are read without alpha channel

  • Wrong render results of mipmapped TEX file format in the last mip-map level

VFB

  • Do not show if the scene was saved without opening the VFB first

  • Fixed crash with curve color correction when there were NaN pixels in the image

V-Ray RT

  • Crash with "Keep bitmaps between renders"

  • Crash when changing shaders connected to PTex textures

  • Crash when changing properties of VRayObjectProperties node applied to mesh with contruction history applied to it

  • RT ignores the Cast Shadows toggle of VRayFur

  • RT doesn't detect changes to global camera FOV override

  • CarPaintMtl uses much more RAM in RT than in production

  • When changing the Material ID attribute, RT GPU is not refreshing

  • RT ignores displacement control attributes applied to the VRayDisplacement node

  • RT fails update correctly, when the creation of a light is undone

  • RT does not react to changes in the camera environment color

  • Modifying a material assigned to an object and a face causes the object to disappear

  • Crash with RT after clearing script editor history

  • Crash with bump map connected to VRayFastSSS2

  • RT doesn't detect changes to specular and diffuse contributions for standard lights

  • Stereo mode did not work correctly

V-Ray RT GPU

  • The "Camera Scale" attribute is ignored

  • The standalone crashes when trying to render a 16000x16000 texture on the GPU

  • Fixed issues with Multi/Sub-object materials on dynamic geometry (instances)

  • Wrong environment overrides in GPU when swapping or disconnecting textures

  • RT/GPU is not refreshing when changing the Material ID attribute

VRayMtl

  • VRay Extra Attributes are not dimmed properly in some cases

  • The "Fix dark edges" option has no effect

  • Dispersion uses the full subdivisions for GI rays increasing the render time

  • Wrong color in the refraction filter render element when the diffuse is black

VRayFur

  • Error with projected textures

VRayStereoscopic

  • Linux builds generate wrong .vrst shademaps

VRayMesh

  • 'Show whole mesh' doesn't reconstruct the colour sets

  • Importing vrmesh file containing lots of material ids makes the attribute editor slow

  • Caches from previous frames must be cleared in batch mode

  • Proxy is not renderable if created with velocity interval start/end is 0/0

  • Deleting history on proxies erases the VRayMesh nodes

  • The proxy import/create command doesn't execute correctly in Maya non-GUI mode

VRayLightSphere

  • Scaling doesn't affect Intensity and Radius parameters

VRayVertexColor

  • "Set Name" for "Type" works only when VrayVertexColor has connection with the material of the object

Texture Baking

  • Region rendering must be disabled in texture baking mode

VRayPhysicalCamera

  • Gizmo scaling reflects on the brightness of the output

  • The camera should not lock "Fit Resolution Gate" parameter of the Maya camera when "Specify FOV" is "From Maya camera"

VRayFastSSS2

  • Fixed the greenish tint; controlled with a"legacy mode" option

  • Artifacts at very small scene scales

Distributed Rendering

  • V-Ray steps one frame forward when velocity render element or motion blur is used in DR

nParicles

  • Randomly missing particles in specific scene when motion blur is off

Batch

  • V-Ray log message level setting is not respected in maya batch render

Hair

  • Artifacts with very thin strands

  • Strands with width less than 0.001 don't render correctly

samplerInfo

  •  The normals outputs are not correct for rays that don't hit anything

Spot Light

  • Barn doors are rendered flipped

Viewport 2.0

  • Incorrect gamma with VRay materials