V-Ray and Softimage Overview

As a built-in rendering plugin for Autodesk® Softimage®, V-Ray supports most of the standard geometry primitives as well as some of the basic shaders inside Softimage. V-Ray for Softimage can use the standard Softimage shaders, materials, lights etc. except for those node types that require mental ray - specific features.

Note that the list below is not exhaustive.

Geometry Types

The following geometry types are supported:

  • Polygonal surfaces
  • NURBS surfaces are partially supported. These are tessellated internally by V-Ray and can be used with simple materials, but do not support procedural texturing, exporting to proxies, UVW texture mapping. We recommend that polygon meshes are used instead of NURBS surfaces wherever possible.
  • Subdivided surfaces
  • Point clouds - all particle render types are supported, except for blobs. Per-particle sprites are not supported. 
  • Instances
  • Softimage hair
  • Softimage particle strands
  • V-Ray proxy
  • Polygonizer surfaces (partial support)

All geometry types support motion blur.

Materials

The following material types are supported:

  • Lambert
  • Blinn
  • Phong
  • Constant
  • VRay Material
  • VRay2Sided
  • VRayLightMtl
  • VRayBlendMtl
  • VRayOverrideMtl
  • VRayFastSSS2
  • VRay Hair Material
  • VRayCarPaintMtl
  • VRayMtlWrapper
  • VRaySimbiontMtl
  • VRaySkinMtl

For native Softimage materials, the supported parameters are:

  • Diffuse color/texture
  • Reflection color/texture
  • Glossiness control
  • Bump mapping
  • Transparency

V-Ray supports rendering emFluid 5 grids through the V-Ray emFluid Volume Shader.

Bump and normal mapping

There are multiple ways you can achieve bump and normal mapping with V-Ray in Softimage. V-Ray supports bump and normal mapping on the V-Ray Material through a dedicated bump port. This is the recommended approach, since it allows you to choose specific bump/normal types.

V-Ray also supports bump mapping for individual built-in textures in the shader tree and "Bump" and "Bump Generator" textures connected to the root material's bump port.

Normal mapping is supported through the V-Ray Material's dedicated port (recommended), but you can achieve normal mapping also by connecting your normal maps directly to the root material's bump port. Note: normal maps connected directly to the root material will be treated as tangent space normal maps.

2D and 3D Textures

The following texture types are supported:

  • Image
  • Invert
  • Fractal
  • Scalar Image
  • Bumpmap Generator
  • Checker Board
  • Wood
  • Cell
  • Rock
  • Vein
  • Snow
  • Flagstone
  • Ripple
  • Fabric
  • Gradient
  • Mix 2 colors
  • Mix 8 colors
  • RGBA Split
  • RGBA Combine
  • Gradient Mixer
  • Environment
  • VRay Environment Image
  • VRayEnv
  • VRaySky
  • Color To Scalars
  • Color To Scalar
  • Scalar To Color
  • Color Attribute
  • Integer Attribute
  • Scalar Attribute
  • Color Math Basic
  • Color Average
  • Color Math Curve
  • Color Math Exponent
  • Color Correction
  • Color to Alpha
  • Color to Vector
  • Color Multi Switch
  • Color Switch
  • Color Balance
  • Color Map Lookup
  • Environment Shader
  • Scalar Math Basic
  • Scalar Math Curve
  • Scalar Math Exponent
  • Scalar Invert
  • Scalar Map Lookup
  • Surface Incidence
  • Change Range Shader
  • Intensity
  • HLS Adjust
  • RGBA Keyer
  • Slide Projector
  • VRayDirt Texture
  • VRay PTex
  • VRay Edges Texture
  • VRay Hair Sampler
  • VRay Sampler Info Texture
  • VRay Fresnel Texture
  • Noise Maya

Pass Shaders

The following pass shaders are supported:

  • VRay Environment Fog
  • VRay Volume Fog
  • VRay Volume Scatter Fog
  • VRay Sphere Fade
  • VRay Toon

Bitmap Formats

The following bitmap file types are supported:

  • JPG
  • PNG
  • TGA
  • BMP
  • HDR
  • EXR
  • SGI
  • PIC
  • TIFF

Lights

The following light types are supported:

  • Point light;
  • Spot light;
  • Disc light;
  • Cylinder light;
  • Infinite light.

VRay Sun & Sky

The VRaySun and VRaySky are special features which are provided by the V-Ray renderer. Developed to work together, the VRaySun and VRaySky reproduce the real-life Sun and Sky environment of the Earth. Both are coded so that they change their appearance depending on the direction of the VRaySun.

The V-Ray Sun and Sky are based largely on the SIGGRAPH'99 paper "A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight" by A. J. Preetham, Peter Shirley, Brian Smits.

VRaySky can be added as an environmental pass shader.

Animation

V-Ray supports all animated geometry deformation types and most animated color parameters on ICE clouds and on individual objects.

Texture baking

V-Ray supports baking into textures, ptex and vertex colors. For more information see V-Ray Render Map Property.