Chaos Group ships V-Ray 3.1 for Maya

Chaos Group has released V-Ray 3.1 for Maya, a sizeable update to the Maya edition of its industry-standard renderer, adding over 100 new and modified features, including two new VR camera types.

New features and improvements across the board
Like V-Ray 3.2 for 3ds Max, released earlier this year, the update adds new camera types for rendering spherical images and 6×1 cubemaps, aimed at stereoscopic and VR projects.

Although that’s nominally the headline feature, the update also extends many of V-Ray’s key toolsets.

In particular, V-Ray RT GPU, the GPU-based implementation of V-Ray’s real-time render engine, now supports hair, SSS and displacement, bringing it a step closer to full production rendering as well as scene previews.

Handling of proxy objects has also been improved, and there are a number of other performance boosts.

The update also adds support for Maya 2016, including its overhauled Hypershade; and enhances support for Maya’s Bifrost fluid simulation system.

It’s one of those across-the-board updates where it’s probably easiest just to read a bullet-pointed feature list, which you can find via the link at the foot of this story.

Pricing and availability
V-Ray 3.1 for Maya is available for Maya 2012 and above, 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, start at $340.

Read a full list of the new features in V-Ray 3.1 for Maya on the product website