NVIDIA Releases Iray Plugin For Autodesk’s Maya

In our in-depth look at NVIDIA’s latest Iray solutions earlier this month, we noted that a plugin for Maya would launch soon. Well, that “soon” is now, so if you’re interested in purchasing a license, you can do so right here.

Like Iray Server and Iray for 3ds Max, Iray for Maya is priced at $295 USD on an annual license.

One of the biggest features included with Iray plugins is being able to take advantage of a live renderer, allowing you to save valuable time when making tweaks to your project. Another perk is being able to render scenes on a network with Iray Server. Each server will need its own license, and where scalability is concerned, the sky is truly the limit. In the aforementioned article, an example is given of Honda in Japan, which puts to use a staggering 240 Quadro cards for super-fast real-time rendering. The benefits of a single VCA, which features 8x Quadro M6000s, can be seen in this NVIDIA performance chart:

Iray for Maya becomes the second official Iray plugin to be released, with Iray for Rhino and Iray for Revit set to come out in the future. It’s worth noting that Iray and its live rendering feature is currently available by default in Dassault’s CATIA, and it’s soon to grace Siemen’s NX.

With this launch, NVIDIA reminds us that the first edition of its vMaterials material collection is now available. To snag it, you’ll need to sign up for a free trial of an Iray product, which is probably fine as that’s where the biggest support for it will be right now. It should be noted though that any design software maker could implement support if it wanted. Chaos’ V-RAY is an example of a third-party solution that currently sits in that camp.

vMaterials revolves around NVIDIA’s MDL, or Material Definition Language. It currently includes 100 or so very accurate material profiles, with more to come soon. NVIDIA’s Cassie Thibodeau puts it well: “With vMaterials, designers no longer have to spend time sourcing and creating their own materials.”

What’s not to love about that?