V-Ray for Maya is one of the latest developments by Chaos Group. Developed to meet the needs of the most demanding VFX & Film studios around the world, the rendering engine delivers uncompromised stability, interactivity, ease of use and unprecedented speed.
Now, V-Ray for Maya enables the rendering of even larger scenes with greater complexity and artists can rely on a faster rendering process.
The comprehensive list of features provided by V-Ray for Maya includes CarPaint Material, V-Ray Light Select Render Element, PText texture, true 3D Motion Blur, Sun & Sky procedural lighting system, Physical camera for matching live footage, and many others.
V-Ray for Maya became a renderer of choice of numerous renowned studios such as Method Studio, Zoic Studio, Lux VFX, The LAB NYC and many others. For less than two years since its official release V-Ray has been used as a major rendering tool in the latest award winning films and productions.
Latest V-Ray 2.0 for Maya update
Released February 6, 2012, the V-Ray 2.0 for Maya update offers new hair and fur capabilities, V-Ray RT GPU enhancements, and tighter Maya integration. The update is free for V-Ray 2.0 for Maya users.
New hair and fur capabilities
A new VRayHairMtl shader to render hair and fur with unprecedented control, quality, and speed
Extra attributes to apply materials to Maya’s native hair
V-Ray RT GPU Enhancements
V-Ray RT GPU now supports texture-mapped rectangle and mesh lights, simple light portals, and the VRayBlendMtl
Additional Improvements
Optimised memory usage and multithreaded performance for dynamic geometry
Optimised Irradiance Map and Light Cache to reduce flickering when using time dependent option of the DMC sampler
New Flakes material
Improved support for Maya standard shading nodes
Installation and Deployment Improvements
New Mac OS GUI installer for VLRService and V-Ray for Maya
Installation options for Windows and Linux users include: executable installation or archive file for easier deployment
Key Features
Shading
Support for efficient material layering - quickly
render complex materials using the V-Ray Blend material
Fast Sub-surface scattering shader - V-Ray FastSSS2 material uses a pre-pass to create fast and accurate subsurface scattering effects with support for both single and multiple scattering
VRayCarPaintMtl - create stunning car paint shaders complete with base, flake and coat layers
Support for the Substance textures in Maya 2011.5 and Maya 2012 - use the new V-Ray 2.0 with the
Substance textures in Maya 2011.5 and Maya 2012 to create a wide range of procedural shaders for your projects
VRayToon shader - add an amazing cartoon-like feeling to your renderings
Support for dispersion in refractions for VRayMtl -this option uses the new capabilities for wavelength-dependent raytracing of the V-Ray core and allows you to create stunning close- ups of refractive objects with caustics that dazzle the eye
Automatic support for both Mari and Mudbox style tiled textures - V-Ray 2.0 can automatically load the correct texture bitmaps depending on the UV tiles of the rendered object
Support for rendering of Maya fluids - the new V-Ray 2.0 recognizes and renders Maya fluids directly, with full support for GI and light scattering inside the volume Ptex textures - with V-Ray 2.0 you can stop worrying about UV coordinates and use Ptex textures
Lights
Physically accurate lights - create realistic illumination using physically based lights, including IES lights and true area lights with support for texture mapping
Efficient illumination from HDR environments - create accurate IBL solutions with sharp shadows at a fraction of the usual render time
Camera
Lens distortion through Nuke displacement maps - the VRayPhysicalCamera can use displacement maps from Nuke to completely match the distortion of your real camera
Support for the Maya stereo camera in batch render mode - render your stereoscopic animations with V-Ray 2.0 and Maya batch render mode
Option to turn off camera motion blur - V-Ray 2.0 gives you a separate control to enable or disable the motion blur coming from the movement of the camera
Shutter efficiency for motion blur - render more realistic motion blur with manual control over the camera shutter efficiency
Render output
Support for additional render elements - have full control in compositing by separating the render into render elements
Output of multi-channel scanline OpenEXR files with data-window - removes the need to manually convert the multichannel OpenEXR files produced by V-Ray to scanline-based OpenEXR files for efficient processing by compositing applications
VrayLightSelect Render Element - extract the contribution of each light to the scene and compose all the lights back together and change their intensity in real time in any compositing software
Ultimate resolution of any issues caused by Distributed Rendering - the new VRayDRBucket render element enables you to identify which render slave rendered each bucket
Effects
Depth of field with bokeh effects - create fast and accurate physically based depth of field effects using the V-Ray Physical camera
Accurate motion blur - efficient and accurate physically based true 3D motion blur effects using the V-Ray Physical camera
SCENE TRANSLATOR
Python callback for access to and modification of the translated V-Ray scene before rendering - this powerful feature allows you to directly modify the V-Ray scene before rendering to fit V-Ray seamlessly into your production pipeline
Support for .vrscene output for rendering with V-Ray Standalone
Optimisations
Dynamic loading of tiled OpenEXR - load tiled OpenEXRs on the fly with the help of the new and improved VRayHDRI texture
On-demand geometry loading from the disk - use V-Ray Proxy to render millions of polygons at maximum memory efficiency by storing the geometry on the hard drive
Displacement mapping - precisely control the displacement on a per object basis with the V-Ray Displacement Extra Attributes
Faster rendering of dynamic geometry (displacement, fur, proxies, hair etc) - new internal optimizations have led to even faster rendering of dynamic geometry like displacement, proxies, fur and hair, etc
Faster rendering of subdivision surfaces, VRayFur and Maya hair - the new improved core of V-Ray 2.0 can render VRayFur, Maya hair and render-time subdivision surfaces much faster
Tools
The ply2vrmesh tool can convert RealFlow .bin files to .vrmesh files - with the new version of the ply2mesh tool V-Ray 2.0 users can render very large RealFlow simulations as VRayProxy objects with significantly improved memory efficiency
Extended irradiance map viewer tool - allows the incremental merge of irradiance map files to avoid redundant information; preview of light cache files; manual deletion of unwanted samples, and usage of OpenGL display lists for more interactivity
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