Sneak peek: Chaos Group’s R&D work on V-Ray’s VRayMtl
Chaos Group CTO Vlado Koylazov has posted two new videos on his YouTube channel showing off R&D work on VRayMtl, the standard material in V-Ray, the firm’s production renderer.
At least some of the functionality – improved translucency when rendering skin or similar materials – is expected to be available in the next update to V-Ray 5.
More intense translucency effects with simpler control parameters
The video embedded at the top of the story shows experiments on integrating VRayScatterVolume, V-Ray’s brute force unbiased subsurface scattering system, as the translucency component of VRayMtl.
The rendered results – which show quite striking translucency effects – are compared to VRayALSurfaceMtl, V-Ray’s representation of alSurface, Anders Langlands’ old Arnold ubershader.
The implementation should also simplify the control parameters for translucency: the new controls are shown right at the end of the video.
According to Koylazov, “with some luck”, it will be implemented in the next public update to the software – for the 3ds Max and Maya editions, V-Ray 5 Update 1, if Chaos Group sticks to its usual schedule.
The functionality will “eventually” be available when rendering on the GPU as well as the CPU.
Better previews of VRayMtl in the 3ds Max viewport
3ds Max users can also expect a much more accurate representation of VRayMtl in the 3ds Max viewport: the video above compares the viewport preview to rendered output in the V-Ray frame buffer.
This time, there’s no indication of when the functionality will be available publicly, although again, it seems likely to form part of an update to V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max.
Pricing and system requirements
V-Ray is available for a range of common DCC applications, including 3ds Max 2016+ and Maya 2017+.
For the current stable releases, V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max and V-Ray 5 for Maya, a perpetual workstation licence plus one render node costs $1,180. Rental costs $80/month or $470/year.