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V-Ray 5 beta announced
Chaos Group has announced a public beta of V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max. Many significant new features are added, including some that will be familiar to users of Corona. Perhaps most notably V-Ray now has Lightmix features, allowing the user to adjust the colour and intensity of lighting directly in the framebuffer without any need to re-render. Talking of the V-Ray Frame Buffer, it has been completely overhauled with a new look and several new features including a new layer based compositing system. You can now stack up and blend your render elements directly inside the VFB without the need of exporting to a compositing application.
Another time-saving inclusion is a new Material Library and browser with over 500 materials in a variety of categories to get users started. Another feature to make material creation easier is the inclusion of a presets drop-down directly in the V-Ray material with predefined settings for metals, glasses, water, plastic and more. To help users see their materials more accurately, V-Ray now also features much more accurate previews in the Material Editor.
The V-Ray material has gained two additional parameters. The Coat Layer parameter allows the user to add reflective coatings directly in V-Ray Material that’s much more optimised and faster to render than a blend material, plus a Sheen Layer that allows you to create soft microfiber fabrics like velvet, satin and silk. There are also new ways to randomise textures. A new VRayUVWRandomizer map is included and the VRayMultiSubTex controls has been enhanced. Finally, there’s also a Stochastic Texture Tiling option that can automatically remove texture tiling artifacts in the VRayUVWRandomizer.
Find out more and sign up to beta test the new release on the Chaos Group website.
Source: Dave
Sounds like great updates! Can’t wait to try them out
Am I the only one that thinks this should be a dot release, or what 4 should have been? 4, or Next, was released 2 years ago, May 2018, and really didn’t seem worth the increased price vs what improvements came with it (for those not using GPU). 3 was released January 2014, and had feature additions all the way until Nov 2018. :/ For those on their new subscription plans, no biggy. But for those that have to keep upgrading seats and nodes, it makes me want to look at other render engines if they are now on a 2.5 year release cycle (beta period is roughly 4-5 months according to their history).
Hello Badbullet.
YOU ARE RIGHT! THIS IS CRAZY! I upgraded last year version NEXT. Which to me it’s confusing. Why they called it NEXT. And it cost me $$$$ for all my 20 rendering nodes and one workstation. This looks like a money pit. I can do this anymore. It looks like I will stay the why I am. And start looking into other rendering engines. And now with this pandemic. Who knows what’s going to happen.
they have really slowed down and fallen behind a bit. vray GPU is still shit, even the new out of core is super beta. if redshift hadnt been ruined by selling to Maxon i think we would see more migration to that. im looking fowrd to the light mixer though but really want better handling of volumetrics – using phoenix / vdbs / env fog together requires you to use geo mode which is genuinely slow and nothing can fix it.
what they do have in their favour is a great development team and excellent customer service (try getting any help with redshift and you will see…) it is an expensive upgrade as well, would love an indie license for small and 3 person teams 🙁
Why do you think Redshift is ruined by the way? I do agree that the customer service with redshift is patchy.
I’ve never had any problems with Redshift support – they’ve been really responsive in adding stuff/fixing bugs via the forum.
Perhaps they lost a bit of focus and inertia cross-pollinating with Corona , despite keeping it a largely independent entity? Or maybe supporting multiple platforms is putting them under some strain? Chaos Group work seriously hard though, and I have a ton of respect for them.. but it does seem to be an increasingly premium product. I guess you get what you pay for though. As a side note, Vray Next was always destined to become Vray Nixed at some point.. (I’ll get my coat).
Sadly, tI fear the same. If you are on and “old school” upgrade model you are paying more and more (reminds me of the autodesk story). Sooner or later we have to consider to move to the rental model there too …..
Fully disagree with this.
With perpetual licensing model, if you don’t see any benefit in the upgrade, awesome, don’t upgrade, your Vray license is yours to keep and use, maybe in the next release you`ll find enough new features to upgrade.
With a rental model, you have nothing, so you won’t be able to choose if you want to give them your money because you are happy, or you don’t want to, because you think it’s not worth it.
For those of you that think that this version of Vray is not enough, no one is forcing you to upgrade, if you really don’t see the benefit, why would you want to upgrade?
BTW if you really want rental, Vray has a rental model available:
Vray 3dsMax
425€ / yearly – 1 GUI + 1 Render Node
70€ / monthly – 1GUI + 1 Render Node
Render Node
150€ / yearly – 1 Render Node
65€ / monthly – 1 Render Node
You really want to go rental? go ahead, I don’t see the benefit, you may see it, but you have the choice to do so.
It’s not always about new features for the reason to upgrade, but using all your latest software together, of which others have features you may need. Down saving to render is a poor solution. The bind is, if you don’t upgrade, you are left with the version of DCC that they last updated for to render with. Surprisingly, 3.7 works with 3ds Max 2021 if you install it manually, 2021 doesn’t require a recompile. That hasn’t happened in years for 3ds Max that I’m aware of, so lucky there for those that still didn’t upgrade to 4 and need some time to find a new engine. Cutting the upgrade cycle by this amount after hiking the prices is a real pompous move to customers unless they give one hell of a discount.
Also, Chaos Group doesn’t allow you to skip a version and get the upgrade price that I’m aware of. Paying 2 sets of upgrades, if the price is the same, is cheaper than buying all workstation and node licenses all over again. So if you decide not to upgrade for a version, and want to when the latest version looks great, getting back in is a massive financial hit. They have that as leverage.
Up to some point, that’s logical, how many years have passed since Vray was released? if you still are in the previous version of Vray, support for that version will decay.
Vray Next was released May 22nd, 2018, this makes 2 years, 2 years it’s a logical time frame for a user to decide to upgrade or not, and usually that wouldn’t be a problem if you own the licenses for the main package, that is 3ds max, because you can also decide to stay there.
Of course if you are forced to upgrade in Max, you may be forced to upgrade other softwares/plugins, that’s what happens when you are not in control of your software, and when you don’t decide if you want to actually upgrade or not.
With that said, you can use up to 3 versions of max back, so you still have 3 more years ahead before you are totally forced to migrate from Vray 3.7 to any new version of vray, that may justify the cost of purchasing new licenses, what’s the cost of purchasing all the licenses each 5 years?
Anyways, if that plan does not convince you, you can always go to rental, they have rental, it’s your choice, and that’s what matters the most, that you have the choice, they don’t force you over a rental scheme if you don’t want to, but you can do it if you really want to 🙂
2 seats and 15 nodes, $3310 to upgrade (if that bundle still exists) vs $7820 to buy new (don’t see a bundle price for nodes), that is the pricing for VRay 4. 4 was not worth the upgrade, 5 looks to be that it may be. That’s the whole point. VRay 3 which had 4 years of development and additions to it, it was worth the cost, even that they started charging for nodes. 4 is basically a dot upgrade to 3 with a substantial increase in pricing and a fancy NEXT name to make up for what it wasn’t. In less than 3 years time you’ll pay for two seats to get a real upgrade to get to 5. VS if you don’t upgrade to 4 first, you’ll pay quite a bit more to get 5 that actually looks to be a real full version upgrade. And if someone did pay the increased price for the Vray 4 upgrade expecting good dot updates like 3 had for about the same time, only to see this, there’s a reason to be angry. I can get by with 3, though it is aging, so more than likely we’ll just switch. Who knows how much Chaos Group will increase the costs again for 5, or if it just becomes rental only. Either way, what they are doing is not a good thing for small studios.
Agreed, had 2 ws + 20 nodes, never upgraded cause insane price, switched to corona…
Same scenario here, perpetual upgrade prices are definitely too high. Only thing that is keeping me on V-Ray is the TyFlow integration. Once Tyflow instancing works with other render engines, I’ll most likely start going in that direction.
Well that certainly showed Chaos Group, good job Chaos Group doesn’t own Corona…..no wait.
This is all nice but I hope they have sped up the ALSurface SSS shader. We all have characters which use this Shader and the render times get really astronomical.
i think so too, this is sounds more like service pack 🙂
Nice additions, even if I don’t see the use for a Mixer/compositor into the VFB.
I also think this should have been part of Vray 4.
Whish there was an indie licence price for it and only one licence for all apps.
Thas usual for aging software.. at some point all relevant features are implemented..
To be fair, although some have remarked about this being a point release, the last few point releases of the current version have been very solid, and they do upgrade frequently. So it is hard to state the true value at the moment. I have a feeling the real financial reason for this full release was to put more ammo into the real-time rendering hardware systems support and as far as production features CG cannot write what has not released yet from Nvidia and AMD. Both of these latter companies to be adding features with yet unreleased hardware that CG cannot use in a press release for upgrade hype. I Think CG’s changes here are to get ready for something they see on the horizon, the problem is users don’t buy what they cannot see yet.
A brave move by Chaos Group would be to make the change with this release to 1 licence that accesses all software (Max, Maya, Houdini etc). It would cement Chaos Group as the leading 3rd party renderer.