Date – June 30, 2016
Download – Build 3.0
New UI – V-Ray "Dashboard"
A completely rebuilt UI that provides users with quick access tabs to Material Tab, Light Tab, and Settings Tab that will control quality options, cameras, and rendering.
Material Control Panel
- Materials now provide an easy way to browse, select, create and apply materials to object in the scene. The materials quick settings give the user a way to easily choose a type of material and customize it based on their needs.
Light Control Panel
- The Lights tab provide Rhino users with a light lister and light editor.
Settings Control Panel
- The Settings tab allows the user to efficiently edit the quality of the scene easily and efficiently when making design decisions. The quality options tab will have both a quick setting function that will give the user a way to easily choose the right settings for their scenes and an advanced tab to allow them to alter all the necessary controls to get the best results possible.
- Quality Control – The Quality options will provide users with a clear way to Choose what kind of render they are making and a render quality for their scene. (See Geometry section for more information.)
- Rendering Control – The Render tools will provide users with access to the Render types (RT, Production, and in SketchUp and Rhino’s case, the Batch render tool) as well as the frame buffer. (See Geometry section for more information.)
- Camera Control– A camera list now provides the user with control over basic exposure settings as well as advanced camera settings like f-Stop, Shutter Speed, and Film Speed (ISO)
Existing V-Ray for Rhino Toolbar Updates
The new toolbar will act in the same fashion as the existing toolbar with an updated look and feel.
New tools Available in a welcome new format:
Rendering and options Button Bar
- V-Ray “Dashboard” button (The term Dashboard is used to refer to the V-Ray New UI, the name is subject to change)
- Open Framebuffer
- Standard Production Render Button
- Real-time Production render Button
- Pause Render Button
- Pick Focal Distance Button
V-Ray Lights Button Bar
- V-Ray Light Button - Plane, Sphere, Spot, IES, Point, and Dome Lights, as well as a Light intensity tool.
- Mesh Lights will be created in-scene with a right click on the geometry intended to be a light.
- V-Ray Special Objects Button Bar:
- Add Infinite Plane Button
- Export Proxy
- Import Proxy
- Volume Fog Button – Adds a simple volume within the scene that acts as a bounding box for V-Ray Volumetric Fog. This bounding box allows - 3.1 feature
- Fur Button – Fur will be in essence apply V-Ray Fur to a scene and be controlled in the Geometry section of the UI. Click the Auto Grass button in the Toolbar, choose the surface and apply the V-Ray Fur. It will then be visible at render time. (See Geometry section for more information.)
Materials
Materials Control Panel
- Materials now provide an easy way to browse, select, create and apply materials to object in the scene. The materials quick settings give the user a way to easily choose a type of material and customize it based on their needs.
3.0 Material Library Browser
- Material Library - In the left panel of the Material UI, V-Ray will provide the user with a tree of materials in the material library (Glass, Metal, Stone, Brick, etc…). This will be a filterable, searchable, easily navigable collection of pre-made content users can load into their scene on the fly.
3.0 Material Creation and Quick Controls Panel
- Quick Controls - The center portion of the V-Ray “Dashboard” will provide the user with the rendered material preview as well as the Quick Controls. The quick controls will allow the user to create quick, manageable changes between material type presets (Metal, Plastic, Glass, etc.).
- Custom Advanced Materials – In the center panel you’ll also have the ability to see the list of all scene materials, create completely custom materials and edit those materials via the full advanced editor on the right panel. The Advanced editor provides users with the ability to more easily edit custom materials using the legacy tools and options.
3.0 Supported Materials
- V-Ray Scanned Material support
- GGX Shader support
- V-Ray SSS2 Material support
- V-Ray Blend Material support
- V-Ray Car Paint Material support
Existing 2.0 Supported Materials
- V-Ray Materials – a new compact and optimized material that includes diffuse, reflection, and refraction parameters with the ability to change the BRDF.
- Wrapper Material – can be used to specify additional properties per material. Most importantly you can now create true matte materials which show the background as opposed to the base material.
- Rhino Express Material Library – a library contains an extensive collection of ready to use and photo realistic V-Ray materials. (separate installer)
- Toon-Shader support
- Physically accurate materials
- Blurry reflections/refractions
- Accurate highlights
- Sub-surface scattering
- Support for efficient material layering
Lights
Light Control Panel
- The Lights tab will provide Rhino users with a light lister and combined light editor. This will allow for Rhino users to better control scenes with large numbers of light assets.
3.0 Supported Light Types
- Mesh Light support - allows the use of any mesh as a light.
- Plane Light support – Support for Rectangular and Disk shaped plane lights.
- Probabilistic Lighting support – Support for Probabilistic lighting in scenes with large numbers of lights.
- V-Ray Light lister in the V-Ray “Dashboard”– New tools for managing and editing multiple lights in a scene.
Existing 2.0 Supported Light Types
- IES Light support – Support for IES based Lighting
- Point Light support – Support for V-Ray Point light
- Spot Light Support – Support for V-Ray Spot Light
- Plane Light support – Support for Rectangular Plane Light
- Dome Light Support – Support for V-Ray Dome Lighting
- Sphere Light Support– create spherically shaped area light
- Lights as Components – V-Ray lights can now be part of a Rhino component, making the process of changing the design and settings of multiple lights at once much easier.
Geometry
3.0 Geometry
- Clipper-Plane Support – With support of the V-Ray Clipper plane, users now have control over in scene section planes. Users will also have the ability to select existing geometry and make that geometry a clipper object as well.
- V-Ray Auto-Grass (Fur Support) – V-Ray Auto-Grass will act as grass on selected objects. It will have baked in parameters and will be initially set up as a limited function tool with anticipation for future support.
- Note: Geometry refers to any V-Ray specific in-scene handlers needed for feature support.
V-Ray Settings: Quality, Rendering, and Cameras
3.0 Quality Options
- The Quality Options – The Quality Options will provide users with a clear easy way to Choose the type of render they are working on and the render quality for that particular scene.
Quality Slider Breakdown
- Draft: very low settings. Used to rough estimates very quickly.
- Low: Slightly better than draft
- Medium: fastest mode that can be good enough for full production renders in some models
- High: good enough for most models
- Very High (formerly production)
Custom Quality
- Global Illumination Method:
- BF + BF - Brute Force + Brute Force: Slow but very accurate
- BF + LC - Brute Force + Light Cache: Slow but accurate
- IM + LC - Irradiance Map + Light Cache: Fastest
- IM + BF - Irradiance Map + Brute Force: Fast
- Sidebar to control each method
- Shading Quality as a simple slide bar
- Antialiasing Method
- Progressive
- Bucket Rendering
- Sidebar to control quality of each method
3.0 Render Options
- Rendering - The Rendering section consists of four (4) choices (all choices will also open the frame buffer window by default).
- The first is the standard production render button. This will begin a standard production render using the selected quality.
- Next is the Real-Time or RT Render. The RT render will begin a real-time rendering showing updates and changes on the fly.
- In SketchUp and Rhino there will also be a choice to start the Batch-Render functionality. This Batch Render function allows multiple static images to be rendered through a queue with one click, effectively allowing users to export multiple images with-out having to be in front of the computer to do so.
- Finally, the V-Ray Frame Buffer will be accessible from this panel. The VFB can be opened by clicking this button and will allow users to review and make changes to the rendering through the framebuffer.
Supported Rendering Systems
- Progressive Path Tracing – incremental computation of the whole image at once. The user can stop the calculation at any time and use the intermediate results, if they are good enough. In addition, with path tracing, the user has only a few controls to worry about and it is very easy for set up.
- V-Ray RT GPU – GPU rendering allows V-Ray RT to perform the raytracing calculations on the GPUs installed in the system, rather than the CPU. Since GPUs are specifically designed for massively parallel calculations, they can speed up the rendering process by an order of magnitude. V-Ray 3.0 provides better overall support and stability for RT GPU rendering.
VR Scene Export
- Exports VR Scene file to be rendered in V-Ray standalone or V-Ray cloud.
Embree Support
- Embree is a collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels developed at Intel. The kernels are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest Intel® processors
- Use Embree - turning this option enables the Intel Embree raycaster (on by default).
- Use Embree for hair - enables the usage of embree library for hair. Embree library uses spline curves to model the hair (which differs from the classic model in V-Ray). The user may expect some minor differences between Embree hair model and V-Ray hair model. This differences become more obvious, if hair strands are larger than one pixel in the final image.
Camera Quick Controls Panel
- The Cameras tab provides the user with a clear outline of each camera and the preparers associated with the selected camera. The Camera panel has the ability to select cameras in the scene from the V-Ray UI and quickly edit them. Edit capabilities will include:
- Camera type selection
- Standard Physical Camera
- Camera for VR
- Enable or disable Stereoscopic mode
Existing V-Ray Physical Camera – (Standard Physical Camera)
- The VRayPhysicalCamera allows you to use real-world parameters to set up the virtual CG camera (e.g. f-stop, lens focal length, etc.). It also makes it easier to use light sources with real-world illumination
- Cube6x1 - (Camera for VR) variant of the box camera with the cube sides arranged in a single row. Unlike box camera, Cube6x1 does not produce an empty space in the output image.
- V-Ray Stereoscopic Camera – The V-Ray Stereoscopic helper and rig-controller are supported for creating Stereoscopic images and Stereoscopic Cube Maps for VR headset export.
- Camera exposure value Slider
- 15 - Exterior - Day - Clear
- 14 - Exterior - Day - hazy (default}
- 13 - Exterior - Day - cloudy sky
- 12 - Exterior - Day - dark cloudy sky
- 11 - Interior - Well Lit
- 10 - Exterior - Night -Well Lit
- 9 - Interior - Gallery
- 8 - Interior - Office
- 7 - Interior - Home
- 6 - Interior - Low Light
- 5 - Interior - Home - Low Light
- 4 - Interior - Extremely Low light
- 3 - Exterior - Night - Low light
- 2 - Exterior - Night - Dim Lighting
- 1 - Extremely low light
- Custom Exposure
- Opens Exposure settings for F-Stop, Shutter Speed, Film Speed (ISO)
- Resolution Size
- Presets: a collection of presets based on an array of standard resolutions
- Custom: enter your own values for width and height in pixels
- Get View Aspect Ratio
- Custom Aspect Ratio
- Lock Aspect Ratio
- Show safe-frames in scene
- Choose Output Location