Update V-Ray Next is now released and available to download, Chaos Group has also released a video on Youtube showcasing the latest features.
Chaos Group announced at the Total Chaos event in Sofia, Bulgaria last Friday that V-Ray next for 3DS Max will be released this week. A number of the new features had been previewed during the beta process including the following highlights:
- Speed improvements to overall base-line rendering performance of up to 25%.
- A new Adaptive Dome Light that that’s up to 7x faster and removes the need to set up skylight portals in windows and openings.
- Automatic exposure and white balance have been added to the V-Ray physical camera in addition to a simplified UI.
- A new GPU rendering architecture that promises to double the speed of production rendering.
- GPU accerated support for Environment fog, volumetric effects, and VRScans materials.
- A new Physical Hair material based on a paper by Disney Research that makes look dev simpler with sliders to control glossiness, softness, randomness, melanin controls change colour and hair dye settings to tint hair with any colour.
- NVIDIA Al Denoiser.
- The ability to denoise render elements.
- Lighting analysis tools to analyze and measure the light levels in a scene using heat maps and data overlays.
- Supports for Alembic 1.7 including layering.
- A new V-Ray Switch to change between multiple materials applied to an object.
- V-Ray Plugin and Texture that enables the user to load any texture or material from any version of V-Ray into 3DS Max, including procedural textures and PBR materials for Unity and Unreal.
A new workstation license of V-Ray Next will cost $1,180. Upgrades to existing licenses will cost $580. Annual rentals are also available for $470. To find out more about V-Ray Next, visit Chaos Group’s website.
Starting to get a bit pricey – the upgrade is more than a new seat of Redshift + 1 year maintenance.
Yeah I thought that too – I was expecting about half the price for the upgrade.
If you count the features added to V-Ray 3 in the 3.1 to 3.6 point releases though, the upgrade is very easily worth the price …. IMHO
I don’t know – I barely use VRay these days – when I do it’s because the stock scene is set up for it, or it’s PhoenixFD.
Kind of used to the speed of Redshift these days, and the timescales I work to as an indie, it makes more sense.
Reshift still has a long way to go even to match VRay 3.6 features.
Speed is not everything.
Depends what you use it for. For some people it is. You can’t make blanket statements about what’s right for everyone.
For me, speed is much more important than features.
I dont think huh said any blanket statements.
Its true, and a fact, vray 3.6 has way much more features than Redshift. Its logical, has been in development for much more years. What you say its also true, redshift is faster. But one thing doesnt invalidate the other.
Some people will need basically speed and they dont care so much about advanced features…sure Redshift will be better option for them. Some needs specific features, and will not care so much about speed, then vray is a good choice as well.
I’d say “Speed is not everything” is a blanket statement.
For some people it may well be.
I’d also point out the C4D Vray version seemed to be in a bit of a legal mess, whereas on the RS side it’s much better.
Which is good if you want to shift between apps.
For the record I have 3.6, and I rarely use it.
I’ll probably upgrade to Next/4 when I’m a bit more flush.
But in my case it’s become more of something to keep in reserve.
Then, you can use Scanline!
Have done, it can still come in useful.
It’s currently horses for courses with Redshift/Vray. At that price point personally I’ll wait and see how things mature before upgrading.
Great update, good work!! Waiting for the maya version.
I’m curious to see how the GPU version compares to Redshift now in terms of speed.
It’s true that it become expensive, especially as an indie.
But keep in mind, if that has not changed, with Vray you get free update for long time with each major versions, not just one year. For exemple Vray 3.0 was released 3.5 years ago with free update since then.
The thing is there is separate licence for each app, so you need one for Maya, one for Max. It would be great if all app were included.
I did some quick tests with vray gpu and redshift, Vray gpu is pretty good as well.
As always, Vray is an amazing piece of software, and Chaosgroup delivers awesome updates for Vray, even for me, that I don´t use it, I think it´s an incredible piece of software, what amaze me the most is the speed they reached with their new adaptive Dome Light, awesome 🙂
Cheers!
Was, pretty excited about this new version but I don’t really agree with their upgrade pricing ($1,340 to upgrade a license + 5 render nodes) or the fact that I would eventually have to purchase Vray all over again to use it with Houdini as there are no cross-grades available.
I definitely prefer Redshift’s more flexible approach on licensing.
“Vray 3.0 was released 3.5 years ago with free update since then.”
For 3.5 years, you would pay $1350 per lic for Redshift. It doesn’t even have render node lic. So, you would pay 1350 x 6 for 6 lics.
I’m not sure your figures are correct.
RS $500 includes 1 year of maintenance updates.
1 year of additional maintenance is $250
So to get to 4 years of support it would still be $1250 (1 year of initial maintenance included in price + 3 extensions, and you would still have 6 months left to run)
And the licences are full workstation licences, so it’s pretty hard to make a like for like comparison. You’re getting more capability whether you want it or not.
Caveat that I don’t know if RS prices have risen/dropped over the past few years, and we don’t know if prices will change, or if they offer render only licences.
I’ll have to agree somewhat, while the V-Ray workstation pricing doesn’t bother me, the render node pricing for both new licenses and upgrades is starting to get ridiculous.
Render node pricing is indeed a bit ridiculous. This time last year you could buy new render nodes for just a bit more than what you now have to pay for an upgrade.
The price increase isn
t the only issue, its the push to gpu rendering which adds on extra cost for the hardware to take advantage of it. For a small studio it gets very expensive very quickly. We won`t be purchasing in the near future and if our licenses are perpetual(I think so?) we may never upgrade.it would be nice if Vray Gpu was a separate product at a cheaper price too compete with redshift
i tried redshift but it does not updated deforming meshes in the ipr without pushing the update button which is pretty sad for a world class renderer , only octane and vray can do this so far in realtime in 3dmax but that was a few month ago maybe theres a new redshift update that fixes this
I just tried it on the latest version – an animated noise modifier does update automatically on a sphere.
Particles don’t though, even through a mesher compound object, so I think it’s more a problem of changing topology than deforming meshes, at least in the current version of 2.5.72
do skinned meshes work?
Only tried it on a simple cylinder with bones and skin, but yes.