V-Ray Next is around the corner!

We gathered informations about upcoming V-ray 4 release, codenamed "Next". It's mostly sneak peeks, but it gives some idea what to expect. And judging from level of excitation in Chaos Group abnd their followers camp, it's gonna be something huge!

First - why "Next"? As Emanuelle Lecchi from Chaos Group writes in his LinkedIn note: "it's still the first beta of version four (4.02.01, to be precise), but we felt the need to mark a change which can hardly be expressed by a growing number."

Next is a landmark: the ageing code base, brought about by long-gone needs, needed a lift, and it's precisely what Next aims to achieve. In the years past ChaosGroup dedicated a great deal of resources researching technologies to best meet users' needs, but that work was often frustrated by limitations stemming from old compromises which had to be made years before, in turn making implementations a lot more difficult than they should have been. Next unshackles the ChaosGroup programmers from all that luggage by virtue of a comprehensive cleanup and refactoring with the best tech they deem available for the given task. - Emanuell Lecchi, Chaos Group on LinkedIn Blog.

Here’s a peek at some of the new features in V-Ray Next, Beta 1 for 3ds Max, and many more are on the way.

• V-Ray GPU - Fast GPU production rendering with faster, cleaner lighting — now supports environment fog and VRscans.
• New Adaptive Dome Light - Faster, cleaner image-based lighting, removing the need for skylight portals.
• New Auto exposure and white balance - Fast, automatic scene analysis determines correct exposure and white balance for your image.
• V-Ray Physical Camera - Back by popular demand, the V-Ray Physical Camera has been updated with a simpler UI and support for the new auto exposure and white balance settings.
• New Hair Shader - New more realistic VRayHairMtl2 hair shader with melanin color controls, better highlights and more natural light distribution.
• New Switch material - Easily switch between several materials applied to any object with the new VRaySwitchMtl, great for rendering material options, adding random variations or creating render passes.
• New V-Ray plugin material and texture - Load any texture or material that’s available in V-Ray Standalone and render it in V-Ray for 3ds Max using the new V-RayPluginTex or VRayPluginMtl.
• Denoise render elements - Denoise any render element, not just the beauty pass, for better control in compositing.
• New V-Ray SDK - Updated rendering architecture that takes full advantage of modern hardware, including optimized vector calculations using SSE 4.2 and customized Intel® Embree ray tracing library 2.13.

And it's just the beginning, the most exciting is what comes next:

...we have been listening, and we have been working to bring you a much improved overall experience, starting from the things you will spend most of your time with: your tools to light and shade, their UIs and behaviours, the VFB, IPR and ancillary tech, a much easier portability across DCCs - Emanuelle Lecchi.

Beta is open to V-Ray 3.x for 3ds Max customers. See more on V-Ray page.