Chaos Group has released a beta of V-Ray for Houdini. Features available in this first beta include:
- GPU & CPU Rendering – GPU & CPU rendering capabilities for high-speed look development and final frame rendering.
- Volume Rendering – Illumination and rendering of VDB volumes through the V-Ray Volume Grid. Support for Houdini volumes and MacOS are coming soon.
- V-Ray Scene Support – Transfer and manipulate the properties of V-Ray scenes from applications such as Maya and 3ds Max.
- Alembic Support – Full support for Alembic workflows including transformations, instancing and per object material overrides.
- Physical Hair – New Physical Hair shader renders realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights. Only hair as SOP geometry is supported currently.
- Particles – Drive shader parameters such as colour, alpha and particle size through custom, per-point attributes.
- Packed Primitives – Handling of Houdini’s native packed primitives at render time.
- Material Stylesheets – Full support for material overrides based on groups, bundles and attributes. VEX and per-primitive string overrides such as texture randomization are planned for launch.
- Instancing – Supports copying any object type (including volumes) using Packed Primitives, Instancer, and “instancepath” attribute.
- Light Instances – Instancing of lights is supported, with options for per-instance overrides of the light parameters and constant storage of light link settings.
V-Ray for Houdini is currently available for Houdini and Houdini Indie 16.5.473 and later and supports Windows, Linux and MacOS. To join the beta, visit Chaos Group’s website.
I was Vray user back in my 3d Max days does not make me a fan… even then vray was a lot of work and hard work get good results to much tweaking………….
Super happy with renderman and houdini.
Yes V-Ray had a big strength and it was the price and it made me a big fan for years. You could get almost as good result as Arnold or I guess Renderman if you spent a lot of time tweaking and cheating and it could render faster too but was longer to setup. The price was 4 times less than Arnold for a renderfarm. But now they increased the price so much that I personnaly prefer Arnold and even better: CYCLES, cause it’s free and now the original dev of Cycles is back full time on it (after having worked for some time on Arnold). Cycles will beat everything in the coming years so be sure to start learn it now!
This is not the case for a long time now; V-Ray is quite easy to set up these days.
Best regards,
Vlado
“Cycles will beat everything in the coming years” . I am sorry to say i not got years or days or even few hours . For a plat, if I can bend or twist and cheat or back stab some one for few minutes for plate i will.
Arnold and Vray if you squint your eyes for 5 mins they both can look good with not work…………
V-Ray today is quite different from what it was back then. The setup is very simple.
Best regards,
Vlado
While there may be some renderers easier to set up than V-Ray (although not by much these days, since V-Ray usability has improved significantly), using Renderman for comparison makes little sense. Renderman definitely doesn’t fall into a category of renderers simpler than V-Ray 😀
Great News. I guess it won’ t work with the PLE ?
none of the external renders work with houdini apprentice.
thats great! good to have another choice! …nowaday vray have great algorithms for analyzing your scene to setup all your sample settings….adaptive domelight etc. and also the brute force engine becomes much faster over the last years.
vray could fill the gap between redshift/octane and mantra/arnold. its much faster then mantra without having the memory limitation of gpu renderer.
This is a fantastic news. I was waiting for official Vray for Houdini from long time. New Vray Next for 3ds max is very fast and easy to use so I hope that will be the same case with Houdini release too. Good luck for Chaos Group team during development. I can’t wait to try it. Best Regards Mariusz
Great news. İt’s about time!
Just hope that Chaosgroup will introduce a new all app licence because buying one for Maya and another for Houdini makes no sense.
As a Vray user I
ve been looking for a potential replacement for a while. Development is heading in a direction that doesnt seem to work for me. We need a new engine to shake things up like Vray did to Brazil and FinalRender all those years ago. I thought it might be Corona but the Chaos buyout has probably ended that early. Maybe RedShift or FStorm ?So many years have passed and it still hurts to hear that my beloved Brazil is gone, would you please stop mentioning it? 😀
Fantastic news! After 15 years as a 3dsMax user, and almost just as many as a V-Ray user, I moved over to Houdini a year ago. I’m not missing Max, but Mantra is hard to tweak to be fast enough for home/freelance work without a farm. And while I really like Redshift, it’s not always quite there quality-wise yet. I’ve definitively been missing V-Ray as a perfect blend of the two. Now, there are two things I hope for; No manual conversion or other workarounds to render volumes and cross-licensing would be extremely beneficial!
Looking forward to dive into the Beta!
How are you finding scene management and scene setup in houdini? I have started this process myself, learning houdini forcing myself to use it for everything to get familiar with it, but it’s still hard to shake how quick max is to just move stuff around when doing lighting and shading I find.
Just get a light rig setup you like, select them all then “create subnet from selected”
save as digital asset you can have 100s light setups all different subnets and show display then or not all
do that for cameras and lights in same subnet ect , when rendering just make sure you point to the right camera from the subnet so eg Camera /obj/subnet1/cam1
The power of Houdini
Amazing news and great support of features for the first Release. Can’t wait to combine my Max scenes with crowds from Houdini. Thanks Chaosgroup.
I wish they would stop trying to shove vray into everything including your toaster and focus on catching up to redshift, octance etc. Vray next has been disappointing so far… faster dome light…. yay! Make everything you have work on the GPU with the DCC apps you have already please. I realize that is the goal of next, but at the rate they are going, we will be ditching VRay for Redshift next time we do a major upgrade. Also having to pay for VRay for every single app separately is a huge ripoff.
I wish Redshift would stop trying to shove Redshift into everything including your toaster and focus on catching up to VRay.