Tuesday, October 26th, 2021 Posted by Jim Thacker

Chaos ships V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Update 2


Chaos has released V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Update 2, the latest update to the production renderer, adding a new V-Ray Decal system for projecting textures onto surfaces in a 3D scene without the need for UV work.

Other changes include initial USD support, a new Blur/Sharpen layer in the V-Ray Frame Buffer, and the option to instance lights in a scene using V-Ray Instancer.



V-Ray Decal projects textures onto surfaces without the need for extra UV work
The main new features in Update 2 is V-Ray Decal, a new system for projecting textures onto surfaces in a scene without the need to set up or modify UVs for a mesh.

Users can control where the decal texture appears in the scene by using a viewport gizmo to adjust its position, size and angle; and can selectively exclude scene objects from the texture projection.

Decals can be layered over one another, with overlap controlled by parameters in the VRayDecal object.

Initial support for importing and previewing assets in USD format
The release also adds initial support for the Universal Scene Description framework, USD support having been first added to the Maya and Houdini editions of the renderer earlier this year.

Artist can load USD files in 3ds Max via Autodesk’s new import plugin, and render them in V-Ray.

The initial implementation is more basic than that in V-Ray for Maya, lacking support for animated meshes and the UsdPreviewSurface material, so it’s currently suited to previewing static meshes in the viewport.

You can find a list of features currently supported in the online documentation.

New options for manipulating images in the frame buffer and instancing lights
Updates to existing features include a new Sharpen/Blur layer in the built-in compositing system added to the V-Ray Frame Buffer in V-Ray 5 itself and support for batch image processing.

In addition, it is now possible to use particle-based instancing system VRayInstancer to distribute lights in a scene, as well as geometry objects.

V-Ray GPU, V-Ray’s GPU-accelerated render engine, gets support for sparse volumes using NanoVDB, Nvidia’s simplified representation of OpenVDB volumes for GPU computation.

Other changes include new options when lighting environment fog, assigning material overrides, and using the VRayDirt texture map: you can find more details via the links at the foot of this story.

Updates to Chaos Cloud, Chaos Cosmos and the live link to Chaos Vantage
Outside the core software, the live link to Chaos Vantage, Chaos’s new software for exploring large V-Ray scenes in real time, now supports rendering of animations.

Cloud rendering service Chaos Cloud gets initial support for key 3ds Max plugins anima and SiNi Software’s Scatter, and handling of displacement is “now consistent with V-Ray for 3ds Max”.

In addition, over 200 materials have been added to the Chaos Cosmos online library.

Pricing and system requirements
V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Update 2 is available for 3ds Max 2016+, running on Windows 8.1+. A perpetual workstation licence and one render node costs $1,180. Rental costs $80/month or $470/year.


Read an overview of the new features in V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Update 2 on Chaos Group’s website

Read a full list of new features in V-Ray 5 in the online release notes