Chaos Group ships V-Ray Next for Maya Update 1
Chaos Group has released V-Ray Next for Maya Update 1, the latest version of the renderer, adding a new system for tracking and reporting scene memory usage.
The update also adds support for curvature maps, glossy Fresnel effects and the VRayAlSurface skin material in the V-Ray GPU render engine, plus Cryptomatte support for V-Ray Proxy sub-objects.
New memory tracking system for troubleshooting scenes
The release is the first non-hotfix update to the Maya edition since V-Ray Next for Maya itself – effectively version 4.0 of the software – shipped last October.
The major addition is the new memory tracking feature, which provides detailed reports on the peak memory consumption of a scene, broken down by asset type and by individual assets.
The new functionality should help users identify rendering performance bottlenecks in complex scenes.
Updates to GPU rendering
V-Ray GPU, the new GPU rendering architecture introduced in V-Ray Next, also gets an update, gaining support for curvature maps and glossy Fresnel effects.
It also now supports VRayAlSurface, V-Ray’s implementation of the old Arnold alSurface skin shader.
Users can also pause and resume renders with the GPU bucket sampler.
In addition, the update adds support for popular ID matte generation system Cryptomatte on V-Ray Proxy sub-objects.
New lighting features and performance updates
Other changes include a new Lighting Analysis render element, which can be used to generate a false colour map showing lighting intensity values across a render.
There are also three new indirect lighting modes in the Light Select render element,
As usual, there are a number of performance improvements, with Chaos Group singling out light sampling in scenes with many light sources and IPR performance on complex scenes.
Pricing and system requirements
V-Ray Next for Maya is available for Maya 2015+ running on Windows 7+ and Linux and Maya 2016.5+ running on Mac OS X 10.11+. You can see the full system requirements here.
Prices start at $1,180 for one floating user licence and one floating render node licence. Rental starts at $80/month or $470/year.
Read a full list of new features in V-Ray Next for Maya Update 1 in the online changelog