Chaos Group announced the release of a new update for V-Ray 3.x for Maya updating it to version 3.3. The update is free of charge for all registered customers and it’s ready for download. The updated version brings significant increase in performance and Chaos Group claims a noticeable major speed boost – 20-50% faster on most scenes. This is of course great enhancement to V-Ray and i believe that most of the users are taking this enhancement with joy. Next to the performance boost, V-Ray brings new features and enhancement old features like a New image sampler, Automatic sampling of lights & materials, GPU production rendering, V-Ray scene file node and more. A short list about the new features with a small description is below. Check also the video about the V-Ray RT GPU improvements.
Renderers
OTOY Inc., a cloud graphic company, announced a massive upgrade across its entire product line with the announcement of OctaneRender 3 (production-ready GPU renderer), OctaneVR, OctaneRender Cloud services, and the open source ORBX media file format for HTML5, VR and AR platforms designed to provide artists with the most versatile suite of rendering technologies possible. OTOY’s Academy Award®-winning technology can be seen in the work of the leading visual effects studios, artists, animators, designers, architects, and engineers, giving the user unprecedented creative freedom, great levels of realism, and new ways in content creation and distribution powered by the cloud. OTOY also announced extended support for third-party applications through plugins,enabling seamless GPU-based, unbiased rendering in the most popular 2D and 3D graphics applications. Between the new supported third-party applications should belong Adobe Photoshop and also Pixologic’s Zbrush.
Luxion, a leading developer of advanced rendering and lighting technology and maker of KeyShot®, announced the release of KeyShot 4.2 with new features and updates to existing tools that simplify the rendering and animation process. KeyShot® is the first real time ray tracing and global illumination program used in various filed of computer graphics including VFX and visualisations. KeyShot is an entirely CPU based standalone 3D rendering and animation system for 3D data. It has been designed to take the complexity out of rendering realistic images. Luxion by this updated focused on the areas of rendering, usability, control, integration and animation while adding more flexibility to the creation of product visuals. With major new features such as LiveLinking, physical lighting, focused caustics and procedural materials introduced within KeyShot 4, KeyShot 4.2 brings faster rendering, better selection and more control over hardware and 3D data import allowing users to work faster and more efficiently with their models inside of KeyShot without jeopardizing the final quality of their images, animations and KeyShotVR interactive visuals. Many of the updates in KeyShot 4.2 aim directly at improving the user experience of the software and the visual development workflow.
Art And Animation studio released the final version of their GPU based renderer FurryBall 4. FurryBall is a unique real-time GPU based renderer with advanced rendering techniques which can be directly implemented into Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max featuring network rendering, standalone renderer and multi GPU support. GPU based render engines are the future of rendering and comparing to CPU based renderers consume less power and are faster. FurryBall uniquely combines raytracing with rasterisation and can be used like UNBIASED renderer for realistic results and also like BIASED renderer for fast cartoon like rendering, previz and animations. FurryBall 4 has OptiX™ Physically-based full global illumination and supports unbiased and as well biased techniques. From this moment FurryBall not only offers high quality rendering but a complex studio solution. The new version is featuring Multi-GPU support where only nVidia GPUs are supported for unbiased rendering and AMD/ATI/INTEL GPUs can be used for biased rendering. Also, various new FurryBall materials, Maya materials and rendering options where added to expand the possibilities of this fabulous renderer. Comparing to FurryBall 3, a new approach for the trial version was started.
Chaos Group has announced the beta program for V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max - the most complete lighting, shading and rendering toolkit on the market. V-Ray for 3ds Max is the core development of Chaos Group, which allows users to quickly and easily create realistic images while giving them full control over the 3D production process. V-Ray is a complete rendering solution used widely by the biggest VFX studios, 3D Artists and architects around the world. Between the most noticeable improvements below the speed, most users will notice as ray tracing calculations are running up to 5 times faster. Also, a new simplified „UI“ user interface design is introduced which provides quick access to common controls and settings. With all the Production Presets and Quick Settings right up front, users can fine tune quality and speed from the start of their design process, helping them to be more efficient and improve their workflow.