This weekend saw Chaos Group’s Total Chaos conference take place in Sofia, Bulgaria. For those that weren’t able to attend Chaos group has published a number of short posts summarising each days events including some details from the keynote during which they revealed a new initiative called Chaos Research which aims to experiment and collaborate with the academic community to explore “new ideas and create the rendering technology of the future”.
Corona’s developer Ondřej Karlík previewed what he described as one of the areas ignored by most renderers – physically based caustic effects – and demoed a new algorithm to be included in the next release. He also showed progress on their new Scattering tool announced last year. For V-Ray users, Vlado revealed some of the performance improvements coming soon to V-Ray including improved performance in scenes with lots of lights, updates to the light cache algorithm to reduce flickering, a new toon shader for Maya, and a new memory tracking system that lets users see resource usage and analyse large scenes. Also announced with a (sort of) appetising meatball animation was the official release of V-Ray for Houdini.
Finally, Phil Miller joined Vlado to introduce a new demo of Project Lavina, the experimental real-time version of the V-Ray engine.
Last year several recordings of the presentation were released throughout the year. We will share them as they become available. Until then, you can read the recaps on Chaos Group’s blog: Master Classes | Key Note | Day 1 | Day 2.
Is there much performance improvements, for normal little scenes that don’t use more than 5-10 lights, from 3.7 to NEXT? Seems like all of the real speed improvements have been mostly for scenes that use a lot of lights for awhile now. We still have a CPU based farm, so GPU doesn’t do much for us at the moment.
I guess without trying it I really can’t make any concrete judgements; but just from what I’m seeing, there isn’t anything that would make me want to spend what they want for nodes on upgrading right now. Feels like a huge increase in cost that we had from 2.x to 3.x. Maybe if Project Lavina will be part of NEXT when done? Or am I completely wrong and NEXT is worth the upgrade?
It’s really depends on your kind of work. But for me it was great step forward upgrading from 3.6 to Next.
Ipr super cool speed improvements, environment fog speed, Gpu rendering being more rebust, adaptive dome light for much faster interior rendering, faster and more user friendly lens effects… Those that I use almost in every project..there are other little features like drag and drop proxies/vdb.. Etc in viewport, save and weight for LUT and others.. I would recommend downloading the trial and test it to see of it will be good for you… Also chech the full changelog here (make sure to check all the updates)
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VRAY4MAX/V-Ray+Next