V-Ray 7 by Chaos is now available for purchase and download, full of general improvements and new tools that turn the popular 3D rendering engine into a real powerhouse for large and complex projects. Now with V-Ray 7, rendering full cities is possible without building expensive rendering rigs thanks to the introduction of Gaussian splats, Chaos Scatter optimization, and improvements to VFB. Read on to learn more about the new features.
Gaussian Splats
Inserting objects into photos of real environments may soon stay in the past. With Gaussian splats it’s possible to create a 3D environment from an assortment of photos and videos of a real place. Specially trained algorithms convert this volume of data into a 3D point cloud, meaning inserting a new object into a photo or a video becomes as easy as adding one to a full-3D scene.
V-Ray 7 allows for importing and rendering of Gaussian splats without the need for external plugins. Compared to environmental maps and using HDRs as background, Gaussian splats support proper parallax effects, occlusion, depth of field, motion blur, and change depending on the point of view. Gaussian splats are much more memory-efficient compared to creating complex environments with 3D geometry.
Frame Buffer Improvements
Starting with V-Ray 6, Frame Buffer became a self-sufficient tool for post-processing of rendered images. V-Ray 7 brings new tools for a better workflow. Render regions are no longer limited to the rectangular shape and can be drawn to include only the specific area where changes are occuring. Presets for color correction are available in the VFB; there are a variety of filters to apply to an image, and each can be fine-tuned to fit the project. A new vignette layer was added for an easy customizable way to put final touches on the rendering results.
Chaos Scatter
Chaos continues improving their proprietary scattering tool, available both in V-Ray and Corona. With this release, work has been put into optimizing Chaos Scatter. Now, only the settings of the scatter are saved inside the scene, which makes the file size smaller and loading speeds lower. This saves money when using a V-Ray render farm or Chaos Cloud.
The expansive toolset now includes Instance Brush, which allows users to manually improve and add to the existing scatters and change and remove instances that are not wanted. Distribution maps are available from the internal library to add flexibility and realism to the way objects are scattered. Density styles can be changed on the go and faster than before.
Better Lighting
The new firefly removal algorithm allows for faster rendering in V-Ray 7. Both in Progressive and Bucket rendering, bright pixels will get resolved easier than before, meaning the desired noise thresholds will be reached in shorter times.
Sun & Sky got an update to correspond with the earlier updates to Corona. The behavior of the sky was improved to better reflect the change in color and brightness, depending on the position of the sun. Sunsets and sunrises can be realistically rendered, taking into account the elevation of the camera above the horizon.
Caustics in V-Ray GPU
V-Ray is working on adding features for their GPU-based renderer. This release adds a caustic solver for both production and interactive rendering. It is based on Photon Mapping and therefore works faster than the CPU-alternative with minimal dip in realism.
Out-of-core textures have been implemented. This allows the user to render scenes even with high-resolution textures without fear of running out of memory. The only limit is the amount of RAM, just like with CPU-based render engines. Optimizations were done on general performance in scatter-heavy scenes, so interactive rendering provides results faster even on less powerful graphic cards.
The full overview of all new features can be found in the official Chaos blog. You will be able to render V-Ray 7 at Megarender once we finish testing the stability of the new release. Check our Supported Software page for more info.
