Renderer

Global Illumination

• Support for motion blur on Particle Flow systems with both translational and rotational motion blur.
• True instance rendering for motion blur with Dynamic default geometry for drastic reduction of memory requirements when 3d motion blur is used.
• New Reinhard color mapping mode.
• Sub-pixel and per-pixel color mapping modes.
• More inteligent ray sampling to reduce noise when combining multiple blurry effects (e.g. area light illumination seen in glossy reflections etc).
• Full floating-point output support in 3dsmax 8 and higher.
• Support for unlimited number of render channels.
• "Overbright" or invalid colors produced by shaders are much less likely to affect render quality.
• Fully compatible with Autodesk® VIZ®.

• Detail enhancement for the irradiance map. This works similar to an integrated ambient occlusion pass, but is more physically correct, rather than just producing a "dirty" effect, since it calculates correct light bouncing.
• Adaptive path tracing mode for the light cache can concentrate samples in important areas to reduce noise in difficult situations (e.g. GI caustics) .

• The 3dsmax Render Elements interface is now supported by V-Ray. The old G-Buffer settings have been removed. V-Ray supports nearly 30 render elements including z-depth, render ID, material ID, velocity, reflections, specular, diffuse etc.
• VRayMtlSelect render element allows the user to extract a given material to a separate render element. This can be either a top-level V-Ray material, or a sub-material of VRayBlendMtl.
• VRayWireColor render element allows the user to create masks with specified colors.
• Color mapping per render element. Color mapping can be turned on or off on a per-element basis.
• Render elements are fully supported in distributed rendering mode.

• VRayBlendMtl material allows the layering of several different V-Ray materials. This is a lot faster than the regular 3dsmax Blend/Shellac/Composite materials and generates correct V-Ray render elements. The different layers of a VRayBlendMtl can be extracted to different render elements through the VRayMtlSelect render element.
• VRay2SidedMtl material allows the simulation of thin translucent surfaces like paper, cloth etc.
• VRayFastSSS material for simulating the sub-surface scattering in materials like human skin. Works best if layered with a regular diffuse/specular VRayMtl through VRayMtlBlend.
• VRayOverrideMtl material allows the user to specify different materials for reflections/refractions/GI.

• VRayDirt texture for simulating dirt or ambient occlusion.
• VRaySky environment texture works either with VRaySun or regular direct lights to simulate the natural sky illumination of the Sun. For best results, use with the V-Ray physical camera.
• VRayCompTex texture for combining textures in additional ways not available in 3dsmax (e.g. difference, division etc).
• VRayColor texture for specifying precise floating-point RGB color values.

• VRaySky light for simulating the natural illumination of the Sun. Works in conjunction with the VRaySky texture. For best results, use with the V-Ray physical camera.

• VRayPhysicalCamera simulates an actual photographic camera with real-world settings.
• VRayDomeCamera can be used to render images to be projected on hemispheric dome screens.

• V-Ray has its own texture baking elements, which must be used instead of the standard 3dsmax ones.
• Color mapping can be applied on a per-element basis.

• Enhanced stability, user interface improvements.
• sRGB option for display in 2.2 gamma space.
• Support for pixel aspect ratio different than 1.0.

• Direct export of V-Ray proxy meshes from MaxScript without a GUI dialog.

• Allows the implementation of V-Ray specific materials, lights, atmospheric effects, geometric primitives, cameras etc.
• Allows the replacement of nearly every aspect of the render engine (raycast acceleration, GI solutions, image samplers etc).
• The V-Ray SDK is supported on the following platforms: Microsoft® Windows® NT4/2000/XP/Vista 32-bit and 64-bit, Linux, OSX 10.

• V-Ray is already running natively under 64-bit operating systems.
• A 64-bit version for Autodesk® 3dsmax® will be available together with or shortly after the official release of 3dsmax® 9.

VRay Light

VRayFur

• Support for IBL (image-based lighting) - VRayLight in "dome" mode can be mapped with a HDR image with optimized importance sampling for both diffuse and specular lighting.
• The dome light can be made spherical or hemi-spherical.
• Accurate light emission units (lumens, watts etc). For best results, use this feature with the V-Ray physical camera.
• Separate "affect diffuse" and "affect specular" options.

• Added mapping for many parameters - fur direction, density etc.
• Optimized performance.

• Support for including/excluding objects from the toon effect.

• Better displacement for meshes with large triangles.

• Improved stability.
• Render elements and G-Buffer channels are now supported in DR mode.
• Animation is supported in DR mode.
• Support for X-Ref'd scenes.

• Based on a hardware lock for convenient transportation of the V-Ray licenses.
• Floating license system for distributing the available licenses in the local area network.

Software Architecture

Geometry

• Object-oriented API
• Fully multithreaded
• Unified quasi-Monte Carlo sampling system
• Distributed rendering
• Efficient shading system specifically optimized for ray-tracing

• Efficient geometry handling
• On-demand geometry creation
• On-demand geometry loading from disk files
• Displacement mapping
• Catmull-Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces
• Extensible with custom geometric primitives through the V-Ray SDK

• Different sampling methods.
• Full-scene antialiasing.
• Progressive path tracing.
• Support for additional render elements (diffuse, reflection, GI etc).

• Physically accurate full global illumination solutions
• Different GI algorithms: path tracing, irradiance cache, photon maps, light cache.
• Reusable GI solutins for accelerated rendering of walk-through animations.
• Physically accurate area lights.
• Extensible with custom lights through the V-Ray SDK.

• Advanced material
• Blurry reflections/refractions
• Accurate hilights
• Sub-surface scattering
• Extensible with custom shaders through the V-Ray SDK

• Depth-of-field with bokeh effects
• Accurate motion blur
• Extensible with custom cameras through the V-Ray SDK

• Toon effect
• Fur generator
• Extended matte/shadow capabilities
• Support for Render-to-Texture mode of 3dsmax

• V-Ray specific frame buffer with integrated color corrections and display of multiple rendering elements.
• Direct rendering to disk for extremely large images. Rendered images can be converted to OpenEXR files or imported back into 3dsmax.