V-Ray 3.3 for Maya is here, and it’s fast

Like V-Ray for 3ds Max, 3.3 for Maya has the new Variance-based Adaptive Sampling. This means faster set-up and less adjustments since lights and materials are evaluated automatically. And these are just a few of the many new features.

“V-Ray for 3ds Max and Maya are now at the same level,” said Chaos Group CTO Vlado Koylazov.

The update also implements Chaos Group’s Variance-based Adaptive Sampler, intended to make noise removal in images less dependent on material or lighting settings, and to improve sampling of alpha channels.

In addition, GPU support has been added for rendering hair - there is a support for Alembic hair within V-Ray RT GPU – subsurface scattering, displacements, tiled textures, and light cache GI.

New features in V-Ray 3.3 for Maya

• Ray Traced Rounded Corners
• Generate smooth edges between different objects at render time with no extra modeling
• Blended Triplanar Mapping Texture
• Quickly apply seamless textures without UVs
• Stochastic Flakes Material
• Create ultra-realistic materials with sparkle effects like snow, sand, and car paints
• V-Ray Falloff Texture
• Add falloff and Fresnel effects based on viewing direction
• New Sky Model and Aerial Perspective
• Simulate more natural looking skies with the new Hosek sky model, and add realistic atmospheric depth with the aerial perspective volume shader
• V-Ray Clipper with Render-Time Booleans
• Create sections and cutaways using any mesh objects

Updated features

• Faster Volume Rendering
• Faster volume rendering with probabilistic sampling
• Supports OpenVDB caches from Houdini 15 and FumeFX
• Preview volume grid objects in the Maya viewport
• Improved Global Illumination
• More robust reflective GI caustics for better light propagation, and more natural illumination of interior scenes
• Look Development
• Now supports look development nodes introduced in Maya 2016 Extension 1
• OpenSubdiv 3.0
• Now supports the latest version of OpenSubdiv
• Up to 2X faster performance when calculating the subdivided meshes
• Added support for color sets
• XGen
• Cache XGen collections to V-Ray scene files for better performance
• Added support for displacement, subdivision, and custom attributes through VRayUserColor texture
• Added support for frame animation from archive
• User Interface
• Optimized user interface and default render settings

Pricing and availability

• V-Ray 3.1 for Maya is available for Maya 2013+, running on 64-bit Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. A workstation licence costs $1,040; render nodes, which also work with other versions of V-Ray, now start at $350.

The update is free to registered users.