Thursday, March 30th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Chaos Group releases V-Ray 3.5 for Maya


Chaos Group has released V-Ray 3.5 for Maya, the latest update to the Maya edition of its production renderer, adding support for adaptive lights, resumable rendering, and improving look dev workflow.

The release also adds support for key features of Maya 2017, including XGen Interactive Groom Splines.

Improved sampling and GPU rendering, new option to pause and resume renders
Two key additions to V-Ray 3.5 for Maya, adaptive lights – an optimised method of sampling scenes with very large numbers of lights – and resumable rendering, made their debut in V-Ray 3.5 for 3ds Max in February.

You can find more details in our original stories (the one on adaptive lights is here, while resumable rendering is covered in this round-up of new features), so we won’t cover them in detail here.

As with the 3ds Max release, the update also extends V-Ray’s GPU rendering capabilities, adding a new intelligent mip-mapping system and support for previously CPU-only features like VRayClipper.

You can read a full list of updates to GPU rendering in the online changelog.

The V-Ray implementation of alSurface, Anders Langlands’ industry-standard Arnold ubershader, previously available as a free add-on, has also now been integrated into the core software.



Improvements to interactive look dev workflow in V-Ray IPR
However, some of the changes are more specific to the Maya version, including the updates to look development workflow via the Virtual Frame Buffer and V-Ray IPR, V-Ray’s interactive render preview.

Changes include the options to select objects or materials, or to set the focal point for the render, by clicking directly in the VPR window.

There is also a new Render Mask: Isolate select mode for isolating a single object in the scene.

Overall performance has also been improved: Chaos Group claims that V-Ray IPR now “starts instantly, updates faster and uses less memory”, and that changes to materials in the Hypershade update immediately.

Support for new XGen features from Maya 2017
The release also adds support for new features of Maya 2017, including XGen’s Interactive Groom Splines, which enable users to groom hair and fur setups in real time.

V-Ray 3.5 for Maya also now supports AOV setups in Render Setup templates.

Pricing and availability
V-Ray 3.5 for Maya is available for 64-bit Maya 2014 and above, running on Windows 7+, RHEL, CentOS or Fedora Linux, and Mac OS X 10.7 and above. You can find full system requirements here.

New licences start at $1,040 for one floating user licence and one floating render node licence. You can see more pricing options here. The update is free to existing users.


Read an overview of the new features in V-Ray for Maya on Chaos Group’s website

Read a full list of new features in V-Ray 3.5 for Maya in the online changelog