Chaos releases V-Ray 6 for Houdini, a new update to their production renderer for high-end VFX and animation. With full support for Houdini 19.5 and Solaris, V-Ray 6 can create feature-quality renders at any stage of the process, giving life to gripping procedural creations — from look dev to final pixel.
Houdini 19.5 not only completed the hair toolset, but continued to build up Pyro’s smoke and fire simulations, Solaris Render Region capabilities, and more. Today, artists can render them at the height of photorealism, using an Academy Award-winning renderer. V-Ray for Solaris has also been upgraded, moving to a fully featured Hydra delegate to help artists utilize the full power of SideFX’s USD-based tools. Artists can now streamline layout, lighting and look dev in a single workflow that builds real-time feedback directly into the Houdini viewport.
In addition, V-Ray 6 introduces support for Houdini’s native ocean tools, giving users more control and faster rendering speeds, without the need for texture baking. Artists can also start generating more realistic volumetric effects for clouds, smoke and more with new support for anisotropic scattering, or easily create volumetric masks by exporting Cryptomatte elements without using the Volumetric Geometry mode.
Additional Features and Improvements Include:
Creativity Enhancers
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New Chaos Cosmos Assets – In the last year, Chaos Cosmos has exploded across the VFX world for the way it fast tracks previz work. Since its initial launch, 1,500 assets have been added, including detailed vegetation, urban textures and photorealistic materials.
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Procedural Clouds – Instant clouds have been added to the V-Ray Sun and Sky system, removing the need to settle for a static HDR or a cloudless sky. Artists can now customize their scenes, taking full advantage of ray-traced lighting, ground shadows and volumetric effects as they animate.
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V-Ray Decal with Displacement – Artists can now use V-Ray Decal to add displacement to any surface for even more realistic cracked walls, rocks, scratched and rusty surfaces, embossed lettering and more. They can also easily instance their Decals for an advanced material bombing workflow.
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V-Ray Enmesh – It’s time to start repeating geometry across the surface of an object in the most memory-efficient way possible. In just a few clicks, artists can create complex surfaces with lots of detail such as chain mail, car grilles, metal grids, panels, fences, fabrics and more, using their geometry like a texture.
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Improved Dome Light – A new Finite Dome mode now allows users to control the physical size of their light, according to radius and height. This is especially helpful for rendering objects like cars with proper size and scale in relation to image-based lighting (IBL).
Render Boosts
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Adaptive Bucket Splitting – Bucket rendering is now faster than ever before thanks to a clever new algorithm that adapts bucket size for the optimal utilization of hardware and memory.
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Light Cache in IPR – The output of V-Ray’s Interactive Production Renderer (IPR) is identical to the production renderer, so teams can make better decisions in the moment.
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Performance Improvements – Updates include up to 30 per cent faster rendering for Environment Fog, up to 2x faster rendering for the Translucent layer in the V-Ray Material, and enhanced memory efficiency for scenes featuring thousands of instances.
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V-Ray Profiler – A new profiler now tracks the calculation time of shaders and volumes in a scene. Artists can now locate all the hot spots to quickly optimize pipelines for even faster speeds.
Better Shading
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Thin-Film Materials – A new thin-film layer has been added to the V-Ray Material, making it easy to create iridescent materials like soap bubbles and oil spills.
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More Accurate Reflections – With the new energy compensation updates, rough metals and surfaces will look even more realistic.
Do More in the V-Ray Frame Buffer
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Composition Guides – A new proportions layer makes it easy to compose the right camera angle with the help of visual guides like the rule-of-thirds and the golden ratio.
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Panorama Viewer – The spherical panoramas V-Ray pioneered can now be explored and edited without the need of third-party tools.
To see all the new features, explore V-Ray 6 for Houdini’s “What’s New” page.
Availability
V-Ray 6 for Houdini is available now for Houdini and Houdini Indie 19.5 and later, with support for Windows, Linux and MacOS. All V-Ray subscription plans work for all supported host applications, including Houdini, Maya, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Nuke, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp and Unreal.