Chaos V-Ray for 3ds Max

Overview

What this release is

V-Ray is a renderer that lives inside 3ds Max rather than a program of its own. Once installed it becomes the render engine the scene uses, adding its own camera, lights, and materials to the ones Max provides, and everything from the material editor to the render setup dialogue routes through it. For architectural visualisation and product rendering it is close to a default rather than a choice.

The reason it holds that position is the quality of the light simulation. It solves how light bounces around a scene physically, so surfaces pick up colour from what is near them, glass and metal behave the way they should, and an interior lit only by what comes through the windows resolves into a believable image without the artist faking the fill. That accuracy is what separates a render that reads as real from one that does not.

The package carries both engines. The CPU renderer is the reliable workhorse that produces the same result on any hardware, and the GPU renderer trades some feature coverage for a large speed increase on a capable graphics card, which makes look development fast enough to iterate in near real time. The interactive mode updates the image as the scene is adjusted, so lighting decisions are made by looking rather than waiting for a full render.

This build installs into the 3ds Max versions present on the machine, includes the full material library and the frame buffer with its built-in colour correction and denoiser, and applies the licensing step before the host is opened so the render carries no watermark.

Feature set

What you get

Changes in this build

What changed

• Faster GPU rendering on interior scenes with many light sources
• Improved denoiser detail retention on fine geometry
• Updated the material library with current architectural surfaces
• Better handling of very large scenes in the CPU engine
• Fixed the frame buffer colour correction not applying on batch renders

Installation

How to install it

1. Close 3ds Max before running the installer.
2. Disable real time protection and extract the archive to a short path.
3. Run the installer as administrator and let it detect the installed 3ds Max versions.
4. Apply the included licensing step before opening the host application.
5. Open 3ds Max, set V-Ray as the render engine, and confirm the render carries no watermark.

Hardware

System requirements

Package

Release information

Questions

Before you start