This page gives some details about issues and/or limitations Chaos Group is aware of within V-Ray for Maya.
Overview
Chaos has identified a few areas where V-Ray has issues and limitations. Information on these issues and limitations is included here as a convenience.
Known Issues
IPR Issues
- Changing the current frame while IPR is running will not update IPR when the new Animation Evaluation modes are used (Parallel and Serial). IPR can only be updated on frame change when the DG mode is used. This can be changed in Maya's Settings/Preferences > Preferences > Settings > Animation > Evaluation > Evaluation mode.
User Interface Issues
- Sometimes V-Ray for Maya may fail to load automatically when Maya is launched. In this case, V-Ray must be loaded manually from the Plugin Manager. This is most commonly caused after Maya has exited unexpectedly (after a crash or when forcefully killed) in which case Maya fails to write its preferences and configuration properly. For additional help on this process, please see the V-Ray Configuration page.
- Creating a new scene in Maya when Maya Software is the default renderer can result in an error on Windows and macOS, which can be safely ignored. On Linux, it can cause the Common tab to appear empty, in which case switching to another tab and then back to the Common tab should resolve the problem. This should be resolved with Maya 2018 and later, but older versions of Maya may exhibit this behavior.
- Manually unloading and then re-loading the V-Ray for Maya plugin may cause Maya to crash.
- The Outliner in Maya 2019 may not show sets, including V-Ray sets such as VRayDisplacement, VRayObjectProperties, Light Select render elements, etc. We recommend updating your Maya version as soon as an update is available from Autodesk. As a workaround, applying a filter in the Outliner and then removing it will force a refresh and the sets will appear.
Renderer Issues
- IPR/OpenCL is not compiled properly on Apple OS X.
- OSL is not supported for Maya 2016 Extension 2 (Maya 2016.5) or Maya 2017 on Apple OS X.
- IPR may print "no lights in the scene" warnings in some cases (most commonly when rendering hair), however those warnings can be safely ignored.
- Instancing V-Ray lights with the particle instancer is currently not supported.
Viewport 2.0 Issues
- V-Ray lights cannot be represented in Viewport 2.0 with DirectX, but shaders are supported starting with V-Ray 3.6. It is recommended to use OpenGL in Windows > Settings/Preferences > Preferences > Display > Viewport 2.0.
- In Maya 2016 Extension 2 (Maya 2016.5) on Linux and macOS, the OpenGL Legacy mode doesn't work properly.
- In Maya 2016 Extension 2 (Maya 2016.5), the V-Ray lights have no viewport representations (this is currently under development).
- Further support for the OpenGL Core profile(s) is under development.
- In Maya 2017, support for V-Ray lights in Viewport 2.0 is disabled on purpose, because a bug in Maya causes a significant underperformance. This means that in Maya 2017, V-Ray lights will not illuminate Viewport 2.0, but the Legacy Default Viewport will still work as before.
- Instanced V-Ray lights can lead to a dramatic slowdown in Maya's Viewport 2.0 when there's many light instances. For scenes with a lot of instanced V-Ray lights, the Legacy Default Viewport will provide better performance.
- In Maya 2024, the Default lighting has an increased intensity. This leads to V-Ray materials appearing brighter when lit with the Default lighting. You can reduce the intensity of the lighting manually or use V-Ray Lights to achieve a more natural look.
Hypershade Issues in Maya 2016 and newer
The Hypershade's Work Area in Maya 2016 and newer provides a custom attribute view of the graphed node, which is one of the four available view modes of a node (the other three being; hide all, show connected, and show all ). The custom view relies on .xml templates to specify what attributes to show for each node. A bug in Maya prevents aliased attributes to show up in the default custom view. For this reason, the following node attributes are only available in the show all view mode:
Diffuse color of VRayMtl.
Base color of VRayCarPaintMtl.
Light color of V-Ray lights.
Temperature of V-Ray lights.
Intensity multiplier of V-Ray lights.
Maya 2016 Extension 2 - MASH
- Instancing V-Ray lights with MASH is currently not supported.
- Instancing V-Ray Proxy objects with MASH is currently not supported.
VFB
- The V-Ray VFB is not registered as a panel in Maya 2017 and 2018, which prevents it from being dockable. This may be resolved in the near future.
Current Limitations
Temporary Limitations
The following features are not currently working as intended, but are planned to be fully implemented in a future release:
- Motion blur for NURBS surfaces when they are dynamic geometry.
- Rendering of orthographic views in IPR rendering mode is incorrect.
- The MDL Material in Maya 2015 on macOS.
- In some rare cases, Adaptive Lights might produce artifacts when used with V-Ray GPU within Distributed Rendering.
Technical Limitations
These are limitations, which due to the architecture of the V-Ray rendering system, cannot be implemented.
- Materials cannot be used as textures (e.g. as an input to a texture or to another material). Although this can be implemented in principle, it may have unexpected results on the rendering, or lead to various issues. V-Ray will print warnings, however, for example in cases where a shader is found as an input connection where a texture was expected.
- The Light Info and Surf. Luminance shading nodes cannot be supported. Although these can be implemented in principle, they may have unexpected results and lead to various issues.
- The Universal macOS V-Ray build for Maya 2024 is double in size compared to other builds. The reason for this is it contains two builds for each processor architecture under macOS - ARM and Intel. The Universal build for Maya 2024 currently doesn't support MDL shaders and Chaos Collaboration. Note that Chaos Cosmos is loaded in a separate browser window.
- Motion Blur is not rendered in IPR.