This page provides information on V-Ray SDK.
Overview
The V-Ray SDK is included with the installation of V-Ray for 3ds Max and allows the creation of V-Ray compatible materials, textures, lights, atmospheric effects, cameras, and custom geometric primitives. In addition, the V-Ray SDK includes the source code for some of the additional V-Ray plugins - for example, the VRayDomeCamera plugin.
Installation
The V-Ray SDK is installed with the "Workstation" installation type and is normally installed in the folder "C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\3ds Max NNNN" where NNNN is the version of 3ds Max (2014, 2013, etc).
Folder Structure
The V-Ray SDK includes the following folders:
\docs – Includes general information about the V-Ray architecture as well as a help file vrayclasses.chm with documentation of the various classes in the SDK. The vrayclasses.chm file is automatically generated from the header files included with the SDK.
\include – Contains the header files for the V-Ray SDK needed for compiling 3ds Max plugins that use the V-Ray SDK.
\lib – Contains the library files needed for linking plugins that use the V-Ray SDK.
\samples – Includes the source code for some of the plugins that ship with V-Ray (f.e. the VRayDomeCamera plugin), as well as some additional samples (f.e. VRayBlinnMtl)
Compiling the Samples
The project files for the samples are in .dsp file format and will need to be converted for newer versions of Visual Studio. We hope to provide up-to-date Visual Studio projects in future versions of V-Ray.
To build the samples for 3ds Max 2013 and later, follow these steps.
- Open the respective Visual Studio version that you need for the particular 3ds Max version (Visual Studio 2010 for 3ds Max 2013 and 3ds Max 2014, Visual Studio 2012 for 3ds Max 2015);
- Click File > Open > Project/solution... and select the .dsp file for the project that you want to compile;
- Visual Studio will ask whether you want to upgrade the project; click OK and let Visual Studio do the conversion;
- Right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer and select Properties;
- Click on the "Configuration Manager..." button;
- Click on the "Active solution configuration" drop-down and select <New...>
- Type a name for the new configuration, i.e. "max 2013 release";
Set the "Copy settings from" drop-down to the "Max Release Official" configuration.
It is important to base the new configuration on the "Max Release Official" one; other configurations will not compile properly.
- Make sure the check-box "Create new project configurations" is enabled;
- Click OK to create the new configuration.
- Click on the "Active solution platform" drop-down and select <New...>
- Select the "x64" platform;
- In the "Copy settings from" drop-down, select "Win32"
- Make sure that "Create new project platforms" option is selected;
- Click OK to add the new platform;
- In the "General" section of the configuration properties, set the "Character Set" property to "Use Unicode Character Set" (for 3ds Max 2012 and earlier, leave this to "Use Multi-Byte Character Set");
- In the C/C++ section of the configuration, in the "Addition Include Directories" property, replace the occurrences of k:\3dsmax\maxsdk2013 with the path to your installation of the 3ds Max SDK.
- In the Linker section of the configuration, in the "Additional Library Directories" property, replace k:\3dsmax\max2014\Lib\x64 with the path to the library files from your installation of the 3ds Max SDK.
You should now be able to build the project successfully.