Chaos Group has announced the release of V-Ray for Unreal, enabling users to import V-Ray scenes from 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino and SketchUp into the Unreal Editor. The tool offers two workflows, either render directly inside Unreal using V-Ray and your original materials, or use the automatic conversion of lights and materials to view in real time.
Also possible is V-Ray Light Baking that enables users to bake V-Ray lights (including IES) directly into Unreal with GPU acceleration. According to Chaos Group, “unlike other light baking implementations, V-Ray Light Baking maintains V-Ray accuracy, ensuring a lifelike, physically based result for real-time experiences and VR.”
As you would expect, V-Ray for Unreal includes many of the features found in the DCC counterparts, including:
- The ability to render Unreal scenes with physically accurate, ray-traced lighting.
- The ability to render realistic bounced light using V-Ray’s Brute Force and proprietary Light Cache global illumination algorithms.
- The ability to render sequences from Unreal’s Sequencer to create ray-traced animated cinematics. Deforming objects can also be rendered using V-Ray Proxy objects.
- The ability to use GPU+CPU Rendering CPUs, NVIDIA GPUs, or a combination of both.
- Compatibility with Unreal’s native foliage system for rendering large environments and landscapes. (Support for animated foliage is promised soon)
- Support for V-Ray Proxies.
- The ability to create Render Elements for compositing.
- Distributed Rendering
V-Ray for Unreal is compatible with V-Ray for 3DS Max, Maya, Rhino and SketchUp. At the time of release, it supports Unreal 4.19 – 4.20 with support for 4.21 coming soon. Rental pricing costs $80 per month or $470 per year. A student edition is also available for $99 per year.
Find out more on Chaos Group’s website.
