V-Ray 5 released

Chaos Group has released V-Ray 5, the latest version of its render engine for 3ds Max. Headline features include a completely re-written VFB that adds layer-based compositing tools and light mixing to allow users to control the colour and intensity of lights with the need to re-render. Other features include:

• V-Ray Sun has an improved sky model
• A new V-Ray asset browser with over 500 material presets divided into several categories. 
• New material preview in the Material Editor. 
• Coat and Sheen layers have been added to the V-Ray material.
• VRayMaterial and VRayHairNextMtl materials have gained presets.
• A new car paint material with more precise flakes filtering and reduced memory usage.
• VRayUVWRandomizer that is to be used with VRayBitmaps (formerly VRayHDRI)and VRayTriplanarTex mapping source input with stochastic tiling support.
• VRayMultiSubTex now has randomised hue, saturation and gamma variance options and new Random by Face material ID/Object ID/Element modes.
• VRayCompTex has new blending modes: Color Shift, Color Tint, Blend Alpha Straight, Blend Alpha Premultiplied.
• Support for rendering in ACEScg colour space with an option to recognize the texture colour space from the file name.
• VRayTriplanarTex now has the ability to be used as Mapping source for VRayBitmap.
• VRayPointCloudColor is a new map that supports PointCloud Color Channel.
• VRayLightSelect supports environment lighting.
• Light Path Expressions allow the user to output any lighting information into its own render element
• Blue Noise Sampling for better looking sampling with fewer samples
• Selective exporting to vrscenes
• Filmic Tone Mapping layer in VFB
• Add light path expressions support through mode of VRayLightSelect.
• Add RGB primaries override for VRayBitmap option in the Color management.
• Support for Environment and Self Illumination contribution for VRayLightSelect in V-Ray GPU.
• VRayNormalMapnow has a map rotation parameter.
• The VRayPhysicalCamera now has an EV parameter.
• VRayProxy now supports common particle interface (IParticleObjExt) for Alembic that can be used with VRayInstancer and Phoenix FD. Use particles generated in other DCCs for your instancing in V-Ray for 3ds Max
• VRayVolumeGrid gains a velocity streamline preview.
• The V-Ray scene converter now has an option to convert Physical Material to VRayMtl.
• Improve precision when rendering large scenes.
• MikkTSpace support for tangent normal maps.
• V-Ray AppSDK Python binding is now included with the installation.
• V-Ray Asset Browser.
• V-Ray GPU improvements.
  • Initial our of core support
  • Support for 2D displacement.
  • Rendering of Phoenix FD Particle Shader in Fog mode.
  • Added support for OSL shaders.
  • Added support for Cellular map.
  • Added support for BerconTiles and Bercon Wood maps.
  • Implemented a per-device GPU memory tracker.
  • Resumable rendering with progressive sampling.

Find out more Chaos Group’s website and watch a trailer on YouTube.