V-Ray 3.3 for Maya Turns Up Performance and GPU Support

V-Ray 3.3 for Maya brings substantial speed increases on most scenes and better performance for geometry, textures, shading and volume rendering. It also has a new Variance-based Adaptive Sampler, VBAS, with better noise detection to create cleaner looking images. Updates to V-Ray’s core image sampler make it possible to evaluate lights and materials automatically, reducing the user’s time spent on setting up and making adjustments. The UI and default render settings have also been optimized.

A major update to V-Ray RT enables final frame production rendering on the GPU. This functionality includes optimisation of the texture memory, faster resizing and loading of textures and improved shading, and combines with existing GPU support for hair, subsurface scattering, displacements, tiled textures and light cache GI.
 
New tools in V-Ray for Maya 3.3 are ray traced rounded corners to generate smooth edges between different objects at render time with no extra modelling, and a V-Ray Clipper with render-time booleans for creating sections and cutaways using mesh objects.

For texturing, you can apply continuous textures without UVs with a Blended Triplanar Mapping texture, and use a new V-Ray Falloff texture to add falloff and Fresnel effects based on viewing direction. A Stochastic Flakes material allows you to create super realistic materials with sparkle effects such as snow, sand and car paints.

A new Hosek Sky Model has been developed that helps to simulate more natural looking skies. Realistic atmospheric depth can also be applied with the aerial perspective volume shader.

Among the updates in version 3.3, faster volume rendering can be achieved with probabilistic sampling, and you can preview volume grid objects in the Maya viewport. This speed improvement also supports OpenVDB caches from Houdini 15 and FumeFX. V-Ray for Maya now supports the latest version 3.0 of OpenSubdiv as well, with much faster performance when calculating the subdivided meshes. It also supports colour sets.

V-Ray’s look development functionality now supports the Look Development nodes introduced in Maya 2016 Extension 1. Improvements to global illumination result in more robust reflective GI caustics for better light propagation, and more natural illumination of interior scenes.

A Sci Fi Alleyway created by environment artist Devon Fay with V-Ray. 

In Xgen, users can cache XGen collections to V-Ray scene files for better performance when needed. Support has been added for displacement, subdivision and custom attributes through VRayUserColor texture, and for frame animation from the archive.

A video overview of V-Ray 3.3 for Maya can be seen here. V-Ray 3.3 for Maya is a free, downloadable update for V-Ray 3.x for Maya customers.  www.chaosgroup.com