V-Ray 2.40.01 is out

Chaos Group has released a new update to its renderer, adding the ability to render hair created with Hair Farm 2.0 and V-Ray Proxy support for Alembic .abc files. There are also several new features and optimizations within V-Ray RT, such as support for instancing and for Forest Pro instancing. Changes include:

New features:

• VRayHairFarmMod: Added support for rendering Hair Farm 2.0 with V-Ray; requires Hair Farm 2.0
• VRayProxy: Support for Alembic .abc files
• V-Ray RT: Support for instancing
• V-Ray RT: Support for Forest Pro instancing; requires Forest Pro 4
• V-Ray RT CPU: Faster update when adjusting VRayLights
• V-Ray RT GPU: CUDA speed optimizations and optimizations for GK110 cards
• V-Ray RT GPU: Support for the ColorCorrection texture
• V-Ray RT GPU: Support for the Mix texture

Modified features:

• VRayFur: Added “Level Of Detail” option to reduce geometry along the distance from the camera
• VRayLight: Added “targeted” option for rectangle VRayLights
• MultiMatte: Added include/exclude object lists for different color channels to the MultiMatte render element
• VRayProxy: Fixed issue that was slowing down multi-core rendering for VRayProxy objects
• VRayHDRI: Optimized multi-core rendering for OpenEXR textures
• VRayMtlGLSL: Added ability to save and load compiled shaders
• VRayMtlGLSL: Added cubemap texture support
• VRayMtlGLSL: Added viewport color parameter
• VRayMtlGLSL: Added vr_brdf_light builtin BRDF support
• V-Ray: Added option to the VRayExtraTex render element to avoid auto-renaming the element when the texture is changed
• V-Ray: Default memory limit for dynamic geometry changed to 4000 MB for x64 versions
• V-Ray: Optimized unnecessary velocity calculations when no velocity channel is needed
• V-Ray: V-Ray components now register in the respective menus across different language 3DS Max builds
• V-Ray RT CPU: Added support for VRayHairMtl
• V-Ray RT CPU: Added support for VRayFur
• V-Ray scene converter: Added mr_Sun/mr_Sky lights in export to VRaySun/VRaySky respectively
• V-Ray scene exporter: Added subdivided geometry export
• VRayEdgesTex: Improved the round corners algorithm
• VRayAmbientLight: Made some of the parameters animated
• VRayHDRI: Added “Color space” section and moved the “Gamma” option there
• VRayIESLight: Added an option to override the IES shape
• VRayIESLight: Made selecting both the light and it’s target when clicking on the line between them
• VRayLight: Added a preview of the “directionality” parameter of VRayLights in the viewports
• VRayLight/VRayIESLight: Added textured lighting in Nitrous viewport, for Dome light enabled by an environment variable VRAY_DOME_VIEWPORT=1
• VRayMtl: Made “Fog color” mappable
• VRayMtl: Made reflections to affect the alpha of matte objects
• VRayProxy: Support for flipping of Z/Y axis
• VRayProxy: Support for visibility lists for .vrmesh and .abc files
• VRaySphereFade: Added support for box and cylinder gizmos
• ply2vrmesh: Added option to specify the name of the velocity attribute (-velocityAttrName)
• ply2vrmesh: Added support for .hclassic and .bhclassic files produced by Houdini 12
• ply2vrmesh: Added support for color sets from .bgeo files
• ply2vrmesh: Added support for exporting the face and vertex normals in .geo and .bgeo files

GPU instancing with V-Ray RT GPU 2.4 and Forest Pro 4

Animation rendered with V-Ray RT GPU 2.4 and Forest Pro 4

For this service pack, it is recommended to use the V-Ray RT CUDA engine on Nvidia GPUs. The OpenCL engine performance will be much lower.

This update is free for V-Ray 2.0 customers. More on Chaos Group’s website.