Chaos Group Releases V-Ray 5, With Initial Support For 3ds Max

Following a rather short public beta test phase, Chaos Group has released the latest version of its popular renderer: V-Ray 5. This release comes nearly two years after the release of V-Ray 4, also known as V-Ray Next. Just as with the transition from 3 to 4, the jump to V-Ray 5 brings in a slew of performance enhancements, and a huge features list to pore over.

V-Ray 5 Scene by Toni Bratincevic

According to Chaos Group, two of the most exciting additions to V-Ray 5 are Layer Compositing and Light Mix, to be used in the VFB (V-Ray Frame Buffer). Light Mix allows the user to dramatically adjust scene lighting without having to re-render, while the Compositor helps users post-process their final images without the need to launch external tools.

Many enhancements have also hit materials, with over 500 built-in, and offered with presets to help fine-tune a look. A new VRayUVWRandomizer aims to improve the authenticity of a scene by adjusting the offset, rotation, and scale of textures and materials. Chaos Group also notes that repeating texture maps can be improved with Stochastic Texture Tiling, to remove artifacts.

Some other additions to V-Ray 5 include coat layers for surface reflections, sheen layer for simulation of silk and other fabrics, dirt with streaks for aging materials, a new sun and sky system, a new car paint material, blue noise sampling for achieving a cleaner render with fewer samples, and a lot more that can be seen on the product page. Worth highlighting are improvements to the GPU engine, which adds out-of-core geometry support to help negate memory constraints with beefier scenes.

Chaos Group offers V-Ray for a variety of design solutions, but this first launch is tied to 3ds Max. The company is pricing the plugin at $1,180 for a full workstation license, or $590 for an upgrade. Term licensing is available at $470 annually, or $80 monthly.

V-Ray Collection Scene by Gonzalo Piacentino

Also launched today is “V-Ray Collection“, giving users access to every V-Ray plugin, along with Phoenix FD, Project Lavina, and 1,000+ materials in VRscans. The cost for this full package is $699/yr, but like a standalone plugin license, use of any tool in the collection will be restricted for use on one PC at a time.

We have plans to performance test V-Ray 5 in the near-future, and when we do, we’ll cover rendering to the CPU, GPU, CPU and GPU, and also to the GPU using NVIDIA OptiX. While OptiX support has existed in V-Ray for a while, it’s been one test we’ve been slow to add in, so we’re quite eager to get on testing.