Chaos Group ships V-Ray Next for Maya Update 2
Chaos Group has released V-Ray Next for Maya Update 2, the latest update to the Maya edition of the renderer, adding support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing on Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards.
The update also adds a new hashmap-based light cache, procedural dust and scratches as a lens effect, Bercon noise, deep EXR output, and support for the V-Ray distance texture when rendering with V-Ray GPU.
Use the RT cores in current Nvidia RTX GPUs to speed up renders
As with last week’s V-Ray Next for 3ds Max Update 3, one major feature of the update is support for RTX acceleration when rendering on the GPU.
V-Ray Next can now make use of the dedicated RT ray tracing cores in Nvidia’s GeForce RTX, Titan RTX and Quadro RTX GPUs to speed up renders.
The new RTX engine is implemented as an alternative to the existing CUDA engine, and can be selected manually when rendering on an RTX card.
According to Chaos Group’s blog post on RTX acceleration, the speed boost from switching to the new engine varies considerably between scenes, but the average figure is “about 40%”.
The implementation is still a work in progress, so you can’t currently render in hybrid mode – that is, using both CPU and GPU – although Chaos Group says that this is a “temporary situation”.
Other changes: new light cache, support for VRayDistanceTex, deep EXR output
V-Ray Next for Maya Update 2 also introduces a couple of GPU rendering features rolled out in the 3ds Max edition of the renderer earlier this year.
One much-requested change is support for the V-Ray distance texture, VRayDistanceTex.
The update also introduces the new hashmap-based light cache, a simpler, “more GPU-friendly” implementation of the light cache that reduces flicker when rendering animation.
Other changes include support for the procedural Bercon Noise Texture, for procedural dust and scratches as a lens effect, and for edge and vertex creases when using V-Ray Subdivision.
As with the 3ds Max edition, V-Ray Next for Maya can also now export deep EXR files.
Pricing and system requirements
V-Ray Next for Maya is available for Maya 2016+ running on Windows 7+ and RHEL/CentOS 6.5+ Linux and Maya 2016.5+ running on Mac OS X 10.9.5+. 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 2 in the online changelog