Wednesday, March 2nd, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Chaos Group releases V-Ray 3.3 for Maya

Chaos Group has released V-Ray 3.3 for Maya, the latest update to the Maya version of its industry-standard renderer, finally bringing the feature set in line with the 3ds Max edition of the software.

“V-Ray for 3ds Max and Maya are now at the same level,” said Chaos Group CTO Vlado Koylazov.

Hundreds of new features, speed boosts of 20-50% on ‘typical scenes’
Chaos Group describes the 3.3 release as “our biggest update yet: the equivalent of two service packs in one”.

Like V-Ray 3.3 for 3ds Max, released late last year, V-Ray 3.3 for Maya boosts performance across the board – by “20-50% on most scenes”.

The update also implements Chaos Group’s Variance-based Adaptive Sampler, intended to make noise removal in images less dependent on material or lighting settings, and to improve sampling of alpha channels.

In addition, GPU support has been added for rendering hair – the image on our homepage shows support for Alembic hair within V-Ray RT GPU – subsurface scattering, displacements, tiled textures, and light cache GI.

As usual, Chaos Group has provided a nice concise summary list of the new features, reproduced in full below.

New features in V-Ray 3.3 for Maya

  • Ray Traced Rounded Corners
    Generate smooth edges between different objects at render time with no extra modeling
  • Blended Triplanar Mapping Texture
    Quickly apply seamless textures without UVs
  • Stochastic Flakes Material
    Create ultra-realistic materials with sparkle effects like snow, sand, and car paints
  • V-Ray Falloff Texture
    Add falloff and Fresnel effects based on viewing direction
  • New Sky Model and Aerial Perspective
    Simulate more natural looking skies with the new Hosek sky model, and add realistic atmospheric depth with the aerial perspective volume shader
  • V-Ray Clipper with Render-Time Booleans
    Create sections and cutaways using any mesh objects

Updated features

  • Faster Volume Rendering
    Faster volume rendering with probabilistic sampling
    Supports OpenVDB caches from Houdini 15 and FumeFX
    Preview volume grid objects in the Maya viewport
  • Improved Global Illumination
    More robust reflective GI caustics for better light propagation, and more natural illumination of interior scenes
  • Look Development
    Now supports look development nodes introduced in Maya 2016 Extension 1
  • OpenSubdiv 3.0
    Now supports the latest version of OpenSubdiv
    Up to 2X faster performance when calculating the subdivided meshes
    Added support for color sets
  • XGen
    Cache XGen collections to V-Ray scene files for better performance
    Added support for displacement, subdivision, and custom attributes through VRayUserColor texture
    Added support for frame animation from archive
  • User Interface
    Optimized user interface and default render settings

Pricing and availability
V-Ray 3.3 for Maya is available for Maya 2013+, running on 64-bit Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. A workstation licence costs $1,040; render nodes, which also work with other versions of V-Ray, now start at $350.

The update is free to registered users.

Read more about the new features in V-Ray 3.3 for Maya on the product website