V-Ray 2.0 review

V-Ray has been a popular third-party rendering solution already for more than 10 years and his history reach back to 2002 when the first release of V-Ray was released by Chaos Group. From that time V-Ray became a rendering solution of choice for many 3D production companies due to its capability to deliver high quality photorealistic images in short time. V-Ray is mostly connected to the field of architectural visualization but also to VFX. Back in 2011 was released V-Ray 2.0, a new major release which brought a lot of improvements and features transforming the render engine into a complete rendering solution. Combining the power of V-Ray render engine with the flexibility and speed of the interactive rendering system V-Ray RT GPU makes from V-Ray 2.0 a unique product on the market.

The developing of V-Ray 2.0 was quite long and the expectations about the engine and the new features was high, but as in the past Chaos Group released a new build which fulfilled all the exceptions. We got the opportunity to try and review V-Ray 2.0 and also compare with other render engines and solution on the market.

V-Ray 2.0 specification & features

V-Ray 2.0 overview

V-Ray absolutely integrates all of his functions and options inside 3ds Max, all rendering parameters are accessible through the „Render set-up“ dialog window. V-Ray materials and shaders are accessible inside the material editor in both Slate mode and classic mode, cameras and lights are in their respective tabs. Compared to KeyShot® where you export your scene instead of rendering directly inside 3ds Max is this nice feature of V-Ray. However I don’t want to take this feature literary as an advantage compare to other renderers because not everyone could take is the same way I do. However it gives you the possibility to do every necessary steps using only one application and removes the need of jumping from one application to another. The engine itself offers a wide range of features and supports ray tracing and global illumination (GI) methods based on the Monte Carlo sampling algorithm. Every part of V-Ray could be a separate chapter itself, so let’s take a quick look on what can V-Ray achieve together with the new features and what exactly means the term “complete render solution”.

Render settings:

The render tab allows you to set-up and to take the full control about the way how V-Ray will handle the render process. You can change almost everything which could get into your mind and so take an impressive control about the way how the renderer will act. This is of course also a bit tricky, because you can achieve renders which are not physically accurate or your render time would be not optimized and cause high render time. Between the new features included inside V-Ray 2.0 is the VRayDRBucket with which help you can easily identify any problem by distributed rendering and track down the node which cause any troubles or stopped working. The V-Ray Frame Buffer was enhancement with a more user friendly interface where the render history enables you to store the images inside the buffer and compare them with each other. 

V-Ray Frame Buffer Enhancements

• Load ICC profiles directly into the V-Ray Frame Buffer to ensure consistent colour
• Access to the V-Ray frame buffer from MaxScript
• Right-click to access a new menu with important VFB feature

Ultimate resolution of any issues caused by Distributed Rendering

• the new VRayDRBucket render element enables you to identify which render slave rendered each bucket in the final scene

Support for additional render elements

• have full control in compositing by separating the render into render elements