Custom Light Decay

Chaos V-Ray 6 now includes update 1, a joint release for Maya and Cinema 4D that adds new functionality for artists working in film, TV, streaming and design. The new tools help insert millions of objects into imagery, and fine-tune and control the behaviour of scene lighting, producing photorealistic scenes much faster. 

Chaos Scatter can now be used to quickly place large numbers of objects into scenes, creating a realistically randomised or patterned result in a few steps. Typical applications include distributing elements for forests, grass and crowds, but Chaos Scatter’s new capabilities can be applied to most environments, natural or man-made.

Using Custom Light Decay, an artist can determine exactly how light should behave based on the source distance, altering a light’s intensity, hotspots and spread or length of rays. This change will support art-directed effects that diverge from physical constraints.

Chaos Scatter

In terms of speed, optimisations for static mesh and hair can now take artists to first rendered pixel much faster. Dense, editable meshes often slow a scene down, but using non-editable static meshes wherever possible can help by removing the overhead associated with editing and minimising the file size.

Further time savings are possible with the updated V-Ray Profiler (new to V-Ray for Cinema 4D), which can now reveal more aspects of the render process for users to address and tweak. New measurements include the time it takes to export a scene, compile geometry and displacement, load bitmaps and so on, so artists can anticipate difficulties and keep pipelines running smoothly.

Saving Time and Memory Usage, Improving Looks

In the lookdev and preview stages, V-Ray 6 users can take advantage of NVIDIA’s new AI Denoiser. Using GPU-accelerated artificial intelligence markedly shortens the time needed to render a high fidelity image that is visually noiseless.

V-Ray Frame Buffer post-processing control

More post-processing control is now available, directly from the V-Ray Frame Buffer. With a new masking option for post-render effects, artists can decide which objects to apply lens effects to, which ones to blur, sharpen or even denoise, without having to re-render.

A new Compressed Textures Mode helps to render texture-heavy scenes with V-Ray GPU in a more memory-efficient way. Chaos estimates users can save about half of their GPU memory, on average, while adding further detail and preserving shading quality.

In the V-Ray Clipper Mesh Mode, users can render complex cutaways and sections using a mesh object, with V-Ray GPU. Theprocess is simpler than relying on Boolean operators, and allows you ton animate the clipper to achieve complex effects with a few clicks.

Bump to Glossiness is a new node that automatically generates the correct glossiness for normal-mapped surfaces at different distances from camera. In particular, this features helps prevent characters’ skin from looking too shiny.

Compressed textures mode

Cloud density, patterns and new final touches with contrails can be used to improve the look of procedural skies.

Exclusive Tools

The features described above apply to both Maya and Cinema 4D, but each software will also have tools specific to each application. 

Artists using V-Ray 6 for Maya will receive support for the latest versions of MayaUSD, as well as Beauty and masking render elements, and V-Ray Object Properties. Also, emissive materials can now be included in Light Selects or fine-tuned in Light Mix, directly in the V-Ray Frame Buffer. Update 1 also includes support for both Maya 2024 and Apple Silicon processors. 

Toon Material and Toon Object in Cinema 4D

In V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D, the V-Ray Toon Material now has a range of stylistic options, from cel shading to 2D cartoon effects. A V-Ray Toon object gives more creative control by allowing users to customise their outlines. After creating a V-Ray Toon object, you can select the geometry you want to apply that effect to, and then achieve different toon styles by adding a series of Toon objects with varying outline styles and shades.

Support for native MoGraph Color Shaders introduces the ability to randomly assign colours to objects or particles and use effectors to colourise based on different criteria. Custom user attributes can be used to control materials, textures and other parameters at once, making it easier to manage multiple objects or particle systems within a scene.

For product visualisations and surface details, update 1 brings cylindrical and bump upgrades to V-Ray Decal. Stickers, labels and various surface imperfections can be applied to bottles, jars, cups, cans, pipes, tanks, batteries or other cylindrical object – while matching the Decal’s projection to the curve of the object’s surface in a few steps.

C4D artists can also blend surface and decal bumps to improve realism when working with stickers, labels, embossed logos or lettering on products. This kind of additive bump is also useful for effects such as spray or paint on a cracked wall, corroded metal or other bumpy surfaces.

V-Ray 6, update 1 for Maya and V-Ray 6, update 1 for Cinema 4D are both available now.   www.chaos.com/vray