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Table of Contents

This page lists many of V-Ray's advanced features.

 

Overview

At the heart of V-Ray is its superior image sampling and global illumination tools which facilitate photorealism and support advanced production pipelines. V-Ray has many advanced features in addition to these core features.

Listed below are only some of V-Ray's advanced features. For a full list of all V-Ray modules and options, please see the Supported Features pages.

For a comparison of the V-Ray features available in recent releases, please see the V-Ray Feature Comparison Chart.

Note: All features are subject to change without special notice.


Core Architecture

  • Multi-platform, object-oriented API
  • Fully multithreaded core
  • Unified sampling system based on Schlick sampling
  • Distributed rendering
  • Efficient shading system specifically optimized for ray-tracing
  • Modular architecture – many components of the system can be replaced with custom ones

 

Render output

  • Support for full HDR floating-point output
  • Multi-layer OpenEXR
  • Deep OpenEXR 2
  • Direct rendering to disk for very large output resolutions

 

Geometry

  • Efficient geometry handling
  • True instance rendering
  • On-demand dynamic geometry creation
  • On-demand geometry loading from disk files
  • Displacement mapping
  • Catmull-Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces
  • Extensible with custom geometric primitives through the V-Ray SDK
  • Hair rendering (3ds Max Hair&Fur, Ornatrix, HairFarm support)
  • Alembic support (meshes, curves, particles)

 

Image Sampling

  • Several different image sampling methods
  • Progressive rendering
  • Full-scene antialiasing
  • Support for additional render elements (diffuse, reflection, GI, etc.)
  • Advanced color (tone) mapping controls
  • Extensible with custom image samplers through the V-Ray SDK

 

Illumination

  • Physically accurate full global illumination solutions
  • Different GI algorithms: path tracing, irradiance cache, photon maps, light cache
  • Reusable GI solutions for accelerated rendering of walk-through animations and animations with dynamic objects
  • Physically accurate area lights
  • Efficient illumination from HDR environments
  • Procedural sun & sky models
  • Extensible with custom lights through the V-Ray SDK

 

Shaders

  • Physically plausible materials
  • Blurry reflections/refractions
  • Accurate highlights
  • Sub-surface scattering
  • Support for efficient material layering
  • Extensible with custom shaders through the V-Ray SDK

 

Camera Effects

  • Depth-of-field with bokeh effects, with support for custom bitmap-driven aperture shape
  • Accurate motion blur
  • Physical camera model
  • Extensible with custom cameras through the V-Ray SDK

 

Extras

  • Toon effect
  • Fur generator/raytracer
  • Extended matte/shadow capabilities
  • Support for Render-to-Texture mode of 3ds Max
  • VRaySphereFade to isolate only specific portions of the scene for compositing
  • Interactive rendering
  • Interactive GPU rendering
  • CPU and GPU-accelerated Denoiser
  • Support for openVDB, Field3D, and PhoenixFD cache files through Volume Grid (which also includes probabilistic shading)

 

Frame Buffer

  • V-Ray specific frame buffer with integrated color corrections and display of multiple rendering elements
  • Direct rendering to disk for extremely large images, either as OpenEXR files or as .vrimg files
  • New VFB is available in 3ds Max 2018 or later. Older 3ds Max versions only support the previous V-Ray VFB.