Official Release

Date – Mar. 8, 2017

Download – Build 3.40.01

 

Installation & Licensing

  • New streamlined installer combining installations for SketchUp 2015, 2016 and 2017
  • The license can now be activated or released in a floating license environment
  • New License Server introduces flexible licensing for all Chaos Group products, without the need for any physical devices to be plugged into your machine


User Interface

  • V-Ray Asset Editor - Manage settings, materials, lights and geometry in a single window

  • Updated V-Ray for SketchUp toolbar - Quick access to common features, and the V-Ray Asset Editor

  • GPU Device Selection tool added to the V-Ray Tools menu - Select which graphic card/s should be used for GPU accelerated rendering

  • Added Render, Render with V-Ray Interactive, Export V-Ray Scene File and Show VFB buttons to the Asset Editor

  • Improved V-Ray context menu in the host application, which allows shortcut key-binding through SketchUp

  • Implemented buttons for switching between basic and advanced parameters for various setting sections

  • Improved and re-organized light list and advanced light parameters editor

  • Improved and re-organized geometry list and advanced geometry parameters editor

  • Improved and re-organized Quick/Basic Rendering Settings section

  • Improved and re-organized Advanced Rendering Settings section

  • Implemented Save and Load V-Ray Settings from file buttons. Added Revert to default Render Settings button

  • Added easy to use interface for switching between Interactive, Progressive, and GPU based rendering

  • Improved Quality slider and quality preset values

  • Improved Camera Controls - Toggle between simple and advanced camera parameters

  • Added exposure value(EV) control

  • Added white balance control

  • Added a defocus slider and input value field - Change the defocus amount without altering camera exposure

  • Implemented Vertical Tilt control commonly used for perspective compensations

  • Improved Render Output roll-out interface

  • Improved render elements selection

  • Implemented Get View Aspect function in the UI - Automatically get the exact screen aspect ratio

  • Implemented Show Safe Frames function in the UI - See the exact render frame, and easily set camera positions

  • Improved Environment roll-out interface

  • Added easily accessible toggles for commonly used effects such as Material Override, GI, Caustics, and AA Filtering

  • Exposed Material Override functionality for easy access - Enable or disable the effect with a toggle

  • Exposed V-Ray Swarm functionality for easy access - Toggle the network resources usage, and change usage percentage with a slider

  • Added a V-Ray Swarm manager - Monitor network rendering jobs

  • Improved Material Library and Library UI

  • Implemented drag and drop functionality when adding a material from the library to the scene assets list

  • Added seven new Material Swatch Previews: Generic, Fabric, Floor, Ground, Subsurface Scattering, Wall and Wall Close-up

  • Implemented Purge unused materials function and a button

  • Improved material layer management, ordering, and naming

  • Improved tool-tips - Easily accessible, detailed information about the use and application of parameters and buttons


Improved Speed and Quality

  • A large number of render speed/performance optimizations were introduced
  • Implemented multi-threaded scene parsing
  • The Intel® Embree library is now integrated into V-Ray and boosts performance when rendering both static and dynamic geometry
  • Improved rendering performance for dynamic meshes, instances, V-Ray Fur and V-Ray Proxy objects
  • Implemented Variance Base Adaptive Sampler (VBAS) - It improves and balances the sampling adaptation in dark or bright areas of the image

V-Ray Swarm

  • Implemented V-Ray Swarm (previously Distributed Rendering)
  • Implemented the Swarm Manager - A web interface that lists all the machines used for rendering. It gives access to status and additional information about the distributed rendering process
  • Added Cap CPU Utilization toggle - Limit the utilization of the local machine CPU (to a maximum of one thread). Continue using your computer without noticeable slowdown, while the other Swarm nodes are rendering the image

 

Additional Improvements

  • Implemented a new Progressive Image Sampler - Render with the production engine in progressive mode
  • Implemented V-Ray Swarm (previously Distributed Rendering)
  • Implemented V-Ray Scene exporter (exports .vrscene files)
  • Implemented Probabilistic Lights optimization control
  • Added Max Ray Intensity optimization control
  • Implemented global minimum Shading Rate control
  • Implemented Dynamic Bucket Splitting - Dynamically decrease the bucket size in the final rendering stages
  • Light leak prevention added and enabled for the Light Cache (GI engine)
  • Created the Wipe Scene tool - Clean a model from the 3D Warehouse, or clear all V-Ray related data from a scene and start from scratch

 

Materials General

  • Implemented Material Presets system and Quick Setting interface
  • Drag and drop materials from the OS file browser and into the V-Ray Asset Editor
  • Drag and rearrange material layers for easy shader creation and management
  • Implemented ready-made V-Ray Material Library - Choose from more than 500 materials, organized in categories
  • Microfacet GTR / GGX BRDF added to the V-Ray Material options - With fine highlight control, this is ideal for shading metal and other reflective surfaces
  • Thumbnails are automatically saved when saving a material file ( .vrmat). Materials can then be visually identified in the OS file browser
  • Added the option to display any texture from a shading tree in the SketchUp viewport. The same texture can be used for SketchUp size modifications
  • Implemented texture helper to give full control over geometry UVs when using procedural V-Ray specific textures


New or improved materials

  • Improved Generic material (VRayMtl)
  • Added V-Ray Subsurface Scattering material
  • Added V-Ray Car Paint material
  • Added V-Ray Stochastic Flakes
  • Added V-Ray Override Material
  • Added V-Ray Bump Material
  • Added V-Ray Hair Material
  • Improved V-Ray Blend material
  • Improved Two-sided material


New or improved textures

  • Improved procedural textures UI, parameter arrangement and default values
  • Added ability to copy-paste or drag & drop texture maps and color values between different input slots
  • Added V-Ray Curvature map
  • Added V-Ray Edges Tex - Create wireframe rendering and a rounded corners effect
  • Added V-Ray MultiSubTex
  • Added V-Ray TriPlanar texture
  • Added Angle Blend
  • Added V-Ray Composite map
  • Added Tiles texture - Create procedural tile and brick patterns with random variations in color
  • Improved V-Ray Dirt
  • Improved Falloff
  • Improved Fresnel
  • Improved Noise

 

V-Ray Interactive Rendering

  • Improved performance and stability

  • Added support for the V-Ray Clipper objects and SketchUp section planes (treated as clippers)

  • Added support for the V-Ray Material anisotropy effect

  • Added support for V-Ray Fur

  • Added support for the V-Ray Infinite Plane

  • Added support for textured IOR of the V-Ray Material

 

V-Ray GPU Acceleration

  • The CUDA engine supports and is optimized for Fermi-, Kepler-, Maxwell- and Pascal- based NVIDIA cards
  • Added support for Light Cache GI and Irradiance Map loaded from file
  • Improved support for big number of material effects and procedural textures
  • Implemented Coherent Tracing, which improves rendering performance
  • Implemented QMC sampling, which improves rendering performance
  • Added support for displacement
  • Added support for anisotropic highlights and reflections
  • Added support for V-Ray Fur
  • Added support for layered material transparency


V-Ray Stereoscopic Rendering

  • Implemented One-Click VR Cubemap and VR Spherical Panorama stereo rendering. This is a hard-coded way of rendering dual camera stereoscopic images for use with preferred VR headsets

 

V-Ray Proxy

  • Added support for Alembic 1.5 ( .abc) files

 

Environmental Effects

  • Implemented Aerial Perspective atmospheric effect

  • Added support for the SketchUp viewport fog, using the Aerial Perspective effect

 

V-Ray Sun & Sky System

  • Added a new sky model - Hosek et al
  • Added ground color parameter - Ground Albedo
  • Added Blend Angle and Horizon Offset parameters

 

V-Ray Mesh Light

  • Implemented V-Ray Mesh Light - convert any geometry to a light source

  • All the Mesh Lights in the scene can be found in the Lights list for easy access and control

  • The V-Ray Mesh Light automatically becomes a component and can be copied as component in the SketchUp scene

 

Rectangle Light

  • Improved rendering performance with area lights
  • Implemented Shape parameter that lets you change the light shape to Ellipse
  • When creating a rectangle light one can set the direction by holding down the Shift key

 

Spot Light

  • When creating a Spot Light one can set the direction by holding down the Shift key. Cone size and Penumbra Angle can be controlled as well

  • Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections for the Spot Light

 

Sphere Light

  • Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections


V-Ray Dome Light

  • Implemented a function to control the Dome Light orientation by rotating the scene gizmo

 

Light Intensity Tool

  • Implemented Light Intensity Tool for adjusting light intensity in the viewport of SketchUp. Click-dragging up or down over a light will change its intensity

 

V-Ray Clipper

  • Implemented V-Ray Clipper

  • Added support for native SketchUp Section Planes, handled and displayed in the interface as a V-Ray Clipper

  • Added support for nested/grouped Section Planes and Clipper meshes

  • Added ability to clip with custom meshes

  • Added support for Section Plane visibility. Layer visibility can also be used

 

V-Ray Fur

  • Implemented V-Ray Fur

  • A SketchUp component will be created with the fur object

  • The V-Ray Fur can use the material of the base geometry, component or group

 

V-Ray Render Elements

  • Added Extra Texture render element. This produces an element with a single texture applied to all objects in the scene. The input texture can be a bitmap or a procedural texture such as V-Ray Dirt or V-Ray Curvature.

  • Added a Z-Depth render element, which provides information about object distance from the camera in the current view. Objects between the furthest and nearest points are rendered in varying shades of gray.

  • Added V-Ray Denoiser (as a render element). The V-Ray Denoiser takes an existing render and applies a denoising operation to it after the image is completely rendered. The denoising operation detects areas with noise and smooths them out

  • Added Object ID render element. The IDs can be determined based on groups and components

 

V-Ray Frame Buffer

  • Added the option to automatically save each render in the history (enabled from the VFB history options dialog)

  • The 1-9 keyboard keys can be used to switch between recent images saved in the VFB history

  • Added new color correction controls - Contrast & Highlight Burn, HSL, Color Balance, White balance, and Background image

  • Implemented Save and Load color correction functions

  • Added the ability Apply color corrections when saving to file

  • Added the ability to load arbitrary image file formats in the V-Ray VFB for post-processing

  • Deleting an image from the VFB history now sends it to the Recycle Bin

  • The History and Color Corrections toolbars can be docked to the VFB

  • Added ability to save multi-channel Open EXR and V-Ray Image files directly from VFB

  • Support for Open Color IO color corrections

  • Added an option for loading image files as VFB background or foreground layers

  • LUT ( .cube) files can be generated and saved based on color corrections set in the VFB > Lens effects can be applied directly in the VFB