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

V-Ray shaders:

V-Ray can handle and render most of the materials included inside 3ds Max including MentalRay materials with some exceptions of certain shaders. However all shaders coming with V-Ray are optimized for the V-Ray ray-tracing and the engine itself so its recommend that you use them to achieve the best results in shortest time. The shaders use a pre-pass to create fast and accurate subsurface scattering effect with support for both single and multiple scattering. Between the shaders included inside V-Ray 2.0 belongs VRayCarPaintMtl, VRayHairMtl, VRayDistanceTex texture, VRayPtex, VRayMultiSubTex, ....  All these shaders come now with a new feature accessible inside the shader settings “Dispersion“. This simple yet powerful feature allows you to create stunning close ups of refractive objects with caustics and adds realism to your glass materials. Moreover, these custom shaders can be enhancement using inbuilt procedural maps which can be placed into any map slot of these shaders. Between these procedural maps belongs VRayHDRI, VrayDirt, VrayCompTex and VrayDistanceTex. You can read a short description about all shaders and maps included in the new version below.

• VRayCarPaintMtl – allows you to create car paint shaders complete with base, flake and coat layers
• VRayHairMtl- a new shader, allowing hair and fur to be rendered with great quality, and speed
•  VRayDistanceTex texture - this procedurally generated texture is used to create a wide range of effects based on the distance between objects in the scene. The map is computed analytically without raytracing and can be used to drive other render-time effects like V-Ray fur and displacement mapping
• VRayMultiSubTex – similar to default 3ds Max, this map allows you to assign different textures based on object ID
• VRayHairInfoTex - a new texture, adding control and flexibility when using the VRayHairMtl
• VRayOrnatrixMod - a new modifier, providing the ability to render Ephere’s Ornatrix hair seamlessly in V-Ray
• VRayPtex - a new texture capable of loading Ptex files, an innovative texture format created by Walt Disney Animation Studios®, that eliminates the need to assign UVs
• VRayGLSLMtl - a new shader, providing the ability to load materials created using the meta shading language - MetaSL
• VRayGSLTex - a new map capable of loading textures created using MetaSL

V-Ray effects, lights:

V-Ray comes with a wide range of render elements, render features but also own lights and cameras. The V-Ray Lights are physically accurate and allows you to create realistic illumination using these lights including IES lights and true area lights with support for texture mapping. Talking about illumination we have to mention also the fact that V-Ray can render accurate global illumination (GI) using a combination of the provided global illumination methods. V-Ray 2.0 comes with enhancements to V-Ray Lights, which now allows you to control the light direction and dispersion. With these settings you can easily transform a light plane to a spot light. Also new render elements were added, VRayLightSelect allows you to save separate render passes of specific lights or groups in your scene with the option to control the multiplier on the pass. A huge improvement was made to the VRayEnvironmentFog, before you could apply this render feature only to a single gizmo to a scene, now you have the option to assign it to multiple gizmos. A new render effect called VRayLensEffects was added, this new feature allows you to create highly realistic bloom and glare effects. By this you can separately control all parameters including the size, shape and so on.

V-Ray RT:

The computing power of the current workstations raised in the last few years exponentially. Not only were the new generation CPUs released on the market but also new powerful GPUs. This fact opened a new way for renderers, Real-Time rendering. V-Ray comes by default with V-Ray RT which allows you as a default max shader to render your scene inside your view using GPU or CPU acceleration. This is of course a real advantage because you can adjust and fine tune your lights and materials before you actually hit the render button. The GPU acceleration is faster than CPU but it depends on the used graphic card – more memory is in this case better. Still the V-Ray RT is not only limited to nVidia CUDA technology and this means that you can use any graphic card you have. However certain shaders will not work in this configuration.  

Conclusion

V-Ray 2.0 stands for his name and fulfilled all exceptions which the community had before releasing this new major update. It’s no doubt that V-Ray belongs between the best and most used render engine in the CG industry and as a first choice of many 3D artists. The rich feature set which the solution can give you is absolutely amazing and it’s really true that with V-Ray 2.0 you get not only a render engine but a complete rendering solution. The complexity of V-Ray is known and you will understand this at the moment you will open the web-manual for it. You shouldn’t expect any miracles before you really get in touch with V-Ray. V-Ray its build also on the feedbacks of many 3D artists and as by many other software’s you need some experience to be able to handle the features and possibilities V-Ray can give you. V-Ray 2.0 has lots of more “pros” than “cons” and by my review I found actually just one, the need of a powerful GPU for the V-Ray RT. It’s not the fastest renderer but also not the slowest. All of the features and possibilities I mentioned above making from V-Ray really a great piece of software.

Comparing V-Ray 2.0 to KeyShot 3.x and Arion 2.0.x

Before I do the final conclusion and compare the final image from V-Ray 2.0 to KeyShot 3.x and Arion 2.0.x I would like to mention something. V-Ray is a complete render solution mostly used for architectural visualization offering a lot of features. None of both compared renderers have so long development behind them as V-Ray. Moreover, all of these renders are in conctant development even in the time I was writing this review. For example Arion is now presenting his new version of Arion 2.0.4 with highly optimized new sampling method and KeyShot on the other hand presented a while ago the new interactive KeyShotVR for web presentation. Absolutelyy compare these three applications is nearly impossible because all three were made for a different purpose and have different advantages. Still, the final result of render quality and render time should be in every renderer optimized for the best performance.

V-Ray 2.0 vs Arion 1.6.x vs KeyShot 3.3 vs MentalRay

Highly quality renders in short time? This declares Chaos Group by the product description of V-Ray. So let’s take a look if it’s really true. To be able to test the quality and render speed of V-Ray I decided to compare it to KeyShot 3.3, Arion 2.0.3 and MentalRay. The tests were pointed on these three main factors; render speed, render quality and the real time (RT) renderer. As the object for comparison I choose the “Iron Man helmet” from one of our tutorials consisting from four different materials;  two metal materials with texture based look, a shader for the eyes and a black shader for the inside of the helmet. 

The testing PC had the following specifications:

• CPU – i7 2600K 3,5 GHz
• RAM - 16 GB
• GPU – GTX560 TI 2GB DDR5
• Windows 7 x64
• 3ds Max 2012 x64

The overall scene was built from the “Iron Man helmet” and a plane (a ramp) on which was in all three applications applied a neutral material consisting just from a diffuse colour which wasn’t taking or generating reflections. In all applications were used an hdri map for environment and reflections. The render set-ups and comparing conditions are listed in the tables bellow.

So, let’s take a look on the results. Next to the final render I did also two more to see how the quality and time will change with changing the settings lower or somewhere higher. The final renders which I used for comparison together with the rest of the outputs are in the gallery bellow. The “final” tag indicates that this picture was used for the comparison and the “low” or “high” tag was used to point out if the setting was higher than the final render or lower. The images are sorted from lowest render time to the highest where the render time is embedded also in to the image.

Conclusion

V-Ray is indeed a must have add-on for 3ds Max and the features which he offers together with the render quality are great. The comparison showed that V-Ray is not the fastest renderer but also not the slowest, but the output quality he can give you is simple great. The render options together with the wide range of shaders gives you an absolute control about the render and all parameters which could affect the final image. Comparing this to Arion or KeyShot can be this feature an advantage but also a disadvantage because a fast and not difficult renderers are for many people the first choice. I know that all four renderers are only as good as the user which is using them and you can get great images from all four.  Still, I don’t see a fair way how to say the final conclusion about who is the winner of this comparison so I will let you to decide this.