Official Release
Date – Apr. 5, 2017
Download – Build 3.40.01
Installation & Licensing
- The license can now be activated or released in a floating license environment
- New License Server introduces flexible licensing for all Chaos Group products, without the need for any physical devices to be plugged into your machine
User Interface
- V-Ray Asset Editor - Manage settings, materials, lights and geometry in a single window
- Updated V-Ray for Rhinoceros toolbar - Quick access to common features, and the V-Ray Asset Editor
- GPU Device Selection tool added to the V-Ray Tools menu - Select which graphic card/s should be used for GPU accelerated rendering
- Added Render, Render with V-Ray Interactive, Export V-Ray Scene File and Show VFB buttons to the Asset Editor
- Improved V-Ray menu in the host application
- Implemented buttons for switching between basic and advanced parameters for various setting sections
- Improved and re-organized light list and advanced light parameters editor
- Improved and re-organized geometry list and advanced geometry parameters editor
- Improved and re-organized Quick/Basic Rendering Settings section
- Improved and re-organized Advanced Rendering Settings section
- Implemented Save and Load V-Ray Settings from file buttons. Added Revert to default Render Settings button
- Added easy to use interface for switching between Interactive, Progressive, and GPU based rendering
- Improved Quality slider and quality preset values
- Improved Camera Controls - Toggle between simple and advanced camera parameters
- Added exposure value(EV) control
- Added white balance control
- Added a defocus slider and input value field - Change the defocus amount without altering camera exposure
- Implemented Vertical Tilt control commonly used for perspective compensations
- Improved Render Output roll-out interface
- Improved render elements selection
- Implemented Get View Aspect function in the UI - Automatically get the exact screen aspect ratio
- Implemented Show Safe Frames function in the UI - See the exact render frame, and easily set camera positions
- Improved Environment roll-out interface
- Added easily accessible toggles for commonly used effects such as Material Override, GI, Caustics, and AA Filtering
- Exposed Material Override functionality for easy access - Enable or disable the effect with a toggle
- Exposed V-Ray Swarm functionality for easy access - Toggle the network resources usage, and change usage percentage with a slider
- Added a V-Ray Swarm manager - Monitor network rendering jobs
- Improved Material Library and Library UI
- Implemented drag and drop functionality when adding a material from the library to the scene assets list
- Added seven new Material Swatch Previews: Generic, Fabric, Floor, Ground, Subsurface Scattering, Wall and Wall Close-up
- Implemented Purge unused materials function and a button
- Improved material layer management, ordering and naming
- Improved tool-tips - Easily accessible, detailed information about the use and application of parameters and buttons
- Added support for Rhino RDK environment
- Added support to HDRLS through Rhino RDK environment
- Add tool to set Object IDs (manual ID and random IDs)
- Add tool to randomize the Material ID color
Improved Speed and Quality
- Many numbers of render speed/performance optimizations were introduced
- Implemented multi-threaded scene parsing
- The Intel® Embree library is now integrated into V-Ray and boosts performance when rendering both static and dynamic geometry
- Improved rendering performance for dynamic meshes, instances, V-Ray Fur and V-Ray Proxy objects
- Implemented Variance Base Adaptive Sampler (VBAS) - It improves and balances the sampling adaptation in dark or bright areas of the image
V-Ray Swarm
- Implemented V-Ray Swarm (previously Distributed Rendering). The new V-Ray Swarm is a web-based distributed rendering system. It’s a simple, yet powerful way to split your rendering across multiple computers
- Implemented the Swarm Manager - A web interface that lists all the machines used for rendering. It gives access to status and additional information about the distributed rendering process
- Added Cap CPU Utilization toggle - Limit the utilization of the local machine CPU (to a maximum of one thread). Continue using your computer without noticeable slowdown, while the other Swarm nodes are rendering the image
Additional Improvements
- Implemented a new Progressive Image Sampler - Render with the production engine in progressive mode
- Implemented V-Ray Scene exporter (exports *vrscene files)
- Implemented Probabilistic Lights optimization control
- Added Max Ray Intensity optimization control
- Implemented global minimum Shading Rate control
- Implemented Dynamic Bucket Splitting - Dynamically decrease the bucket size in the final rendering stages
- Light leak prevention added and enabled for the Light Cache (GI engine)
Materials General
- Implemented Material Presets system and Quick Settings interface
- Drag and drop materials from the OS file browser and into the V-Ray Asset Editor
- Drag and rearrange material layers for easy shader creation and management
- Implemented readymade V-Ray Material Library - Choose from more than 550 materials, organized in categories
- Microfacet GTR / GGX BRDF added to the V-Ray Material options - With fine highlight control, this is ideal for shading metal and other reflective surfaces
- Thumbnails are automatically saved when saving a material file (*vrmat). Materials can then be visually identified in the OS file browser
- Added the option to display any texture from a shading tree in the Rhino viewport.
New or improved materials
- Improved Generic material (VRayMtl)
- Added V-Ray Subsurface Scattering material
- Added V-Ray Car Paint material
- Added V-Ray Stochastic Flakes
- Added V-Ray Override Material
- Added V-Ray Bump Material
- Added V-Ray Hair Material
- Improved V-Ray Blend material
- Improved Two-sided material
New or improved textures
- Improved procedural textures UI, parameter arrangement and default values
- Added ability to copy & paste or drag & drop texture maps and color values between different input slots
- Added V-Ray Curvature map
- Added V-Ray Edges Tex - Create wireframe rendering and a rounded corners effect
- Added V-Ray MultiSubTex
- Added V-Ray TriPlanar texture
- Added Angle Blend
- Added V-Ray Composite map
- Added Tiles texture - Create procedural tile and brick patterns with random variations in color
- Improved V-Ray Dirt
- Improved Falloff
- Improved Fresnel
- Improved Noise
V-Ray Interactive Rendering
- Improved performance and stability
- Added support for many new materials (Subsurface-Scattering material, Stochastic flakes, Hair material, ...), textures and effects (Aerial Perspective)
- Added support for the V-Ray Clipper objects
- Added support for the V-Ray Material anisotropy effect
- Added support for V-Ray Fur
- Added support for the V-Ray Infinite Plane
- Added support for textured IOR of the V-Ray Material
- Improved performance and stability for interactive render in the viewport
V-Ray GPU Acceleration
- The CUDA engine supports and is optimized for Fermi-, Kepler-, Maxwell- and Pascal- based NVIDIA cards
- Added support for Light Cache GI and Irradiance Map loaded from file
- Improved support for big number of material effects and procedural textures
- Implemented Coherent Tracing, which improves rendering performance
- Implemented QMC sampling, which improves rendering performance
- Added support for displacement
- Added support for anisotropic highlights and reflections
- Added support for V-Ray Fur
- Added support for layered material transparency
V-Ray Stereoscopic Rendering
- Implemented One-Click VR Cubemap and VR Spherical Panorama stereo rendering. This is a hard-coded way of rendering dual camera stereoscopic images for use with preferred VR headsets
V-Ray Proxy
Added support for Alembic 1.5 ( .abc) files
Environmental Effects
Implemented Aerial Perspective atmospheric effect
V-Ray Sun & Sky System
- Added a new sky model - Hosek et al
- Added ground color parameter - Ground Albedo
- Added Blend Angle and Horizon Offset parameters
V-Ray Mesh Light
- Implemented V-Ray Mesh Light - convert any geometry to a light source
- Implemented a way to detached Light mesh from the geometry (right mouse click in the mesh light toolbar button)
- All the Mesh Lights in the scene can be found in the Lights list for easy access and control
Rectangle Light
- Improved rendering performance with area lights
- Implemented Shape parameter that lets you change the light shape to Ellipse
Spot Light
- Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections for the Spot Light
Sphere Light
Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections
V-Ray Dome Light
- Implemented a function to control the Dome Light orientation by rotating the scene gizmo
- Improved the use of Dome Light
V-Ray Clipper
- Implemented V-Ray Clipper
- Added support to exclude/include named object from the V-Ray Clipper
- Added support for V-Ray Clipper visibility through rhino clipper UI.
V-Ray Fur
- Implemented V-Ray Fur
- Ability to link and unlink V-Ray Fur from geometries
- Ability to apply multiples fur to the same geometry
V-Ray Render Elements
- Added Extra Texture render element. This produces an element with a single texture applied to all objects in the scene. The input texture can be a bitmap or a procedural texture such as V-Ray Dirt or V-Ray Curvature.
- Added a Z-Depth render element, which provides information about object distance from the camera in the current view. Objects between the furthest and nearest points are rendered in varying shades of gray.
- Added V-Ray Denoiser (as a render element). The V-Ray Denoiser takes an existing render and applies a denoising operation to it after the image is completely rendered. The denoising operation detects areas with noise and smooths them out
- Added Object ID render element.
V-Ray Frame Buffer
- Added the option to automatically save each render in the history (enabled from the VFB history options dialog)
- The 1-9 keyboard keys can be used to switch between recent images saved in the VFB history
- Added new color correction controls - Contrast & Highlight Burn, HSL, Color Balance, White balance, and Background image
- Implemented Save and Load color correction functions
- Added the ability to apply color corrections when saving the rendered image to file
- Added the ability to load arbitrary image file formats in the V-Ray VFB for post-processing
- Deleting an image from the VFB history now sends it to the Recycle Bin
- The History and Color Corrections toolbars can be docked to the VFB
- Added ability to save multi-channel Open EXR and V-Ray Image files directly from VFB
- Support for loading externally generated LUT and Open Color IO color corrections
- Added an option for loading image files as VFB background or foreground layers
- LUT (*cube) files can be generated and saved based on color corrections set in the VFB
- Lens effects can be applied directly in the VFB