Total Chaos day-by-day summary from Chaos Group

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.