Featuring full support for Houdini 19.5 and Solaris and new creativity enhancers, render boosts, better shading, and increased function in V-Ray Frame Buffer, the new release helps users create quality renders at any stage of the process.
Chaos has released V-Ray 6 for Houdini, an update to their production renderer for high-end VFX and animation. With full support for Houdini 19.5 and Solaris, V-Ray 6 creates quality renders at any stage of the process.
Houdini 19.5 hair toolset is complete, and developers continue to build up Pyro’s smoke and fire simulations and Solaris Render Region capabilities. V-Ray for Solaris has also been upgraded, with a featured Hydra delegate to help artists use the full power of SideFX’s USD-based tools. Artists can streamline layout, lighting, and look dev in a single workflow that builds real-time feedback into the Houdini viewport.
In addition, V-Ray 6 supports Houdini’s native ocean tools, offering more control and faster rendering without the need for texture baking. Artists can generate more realistic volumetric effects for clouds and smoke with new support for anisotropic scattering or easily create volumetric masks by exporting Cryptomatte elements without using the Volumetric Geometry mode.
Watch: V-Ray 6 for Houdini — Render the perfect ocean with native support for Houdini’s Ocean tools:
Watch: V-Ray 6 for Houdini — Create just the right clouds for your environment:
Watch: V-Ray 6 for Houdini — Render more realistic volumetric effects with Phase Function support:
Watch: V-Ray 6 for Houdini — Bring your environments to life with Chaos Cosmos:
Additional Features and Improvements Include:
Creativity Enhancers
- New Chaos Cosmos Assets: Popular for fast-tracking previz work, 1,500 assets have been added since its initial launch - including detailed vegetation, urban textures, and photorealistic materials.
- Procedural Clouds: Instant clouds have been added to the V-Ray Sun and Sky system, eliminating the need to settle for a static HDR or a cloudless sky. While animating, artists can customize scenes and take advantage of ray-traced lighting, ground shadows, and volumetric effects.
- V-Ray Decal with Displacement: The feature adds displacement to any surface for more realistic cracked walls, rocks, scratched and rusty surfaces, and embossed lettering. Users can also instance Decals for an advanced material bombing workflow.
- V-Ray Enmesh: Artists can create complex surfaces with a lot of detail, such as chain mail, car grilles, metal grids, panels, fences, and fabrics, using their geometry like a texture.
- Improved Dome Light: The new Finite Dome mode allows users to control the physical size of their light according to radius and height, which is especially helpful for rendering objects, such as cars, with proper size and scale in relation to image-based lighting (IBL).
Render Boosts
- Adaptive Bucket Splitting: Users will find accelerated Bucket rendering because of a new algorithm that adapts bucket size to optimize the utilization of hardware and memory.
- Light Cache in IPR: V-Ray’s Interactive Production Renderer (IPR) output is identical to the production renderer, allowing teams to make decisions in the moment.
- Performance Improvements: Updates include up to 30% faster rendering for Environment Fog, up to 2x faster rendering for the Translucent layer in the V-Ray Material and enhanced memory efficiency for scenes featuring thousands of instances.
- V-Ray Profiler: The new profiler tracks a scene’s calculation time of shaders and volumes, allowing artists to locate hot spots to optimize pipelines quickly.
Better Shading
- Thin-Film Materials: The newly added thin-film layer in V-Ray Material more easily creates iridescent materials, like soap bubbles and oil spills.
- More Accurate Reflections: With new energy compensation updates, rough metals and surfaces will look more realistic.
Do More in the V-Ray Frame Buffer
- Composition Guides: The new proportions layer allows users to compose the right camera angle more easily with the help of visual guides like the rule of thirds and the golden ratio.
- Panorama Viewer: The spherical panoramas V-Ray pioneered can now be explored and edited without needing third-party tools.
See all the new features on V-Ray 6 for Houdini’s “What’s New” page.
Source: Chaos
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
