V-Ray 7 for Houdini, Update 1 - now available!

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hello!

V-Ray 7 for Houdini, Update 1 is out!

Some useful links:

• Download
• Release Notes

This release brings Chaos Scans materials - a library of materials scanned from the real world, to Chaos Cosmos. You can now make use of more than 3,000 physically based materials such as metal, rubber, wood, fabric, foil, stone, and more! Preview, import and render them for quick set up and realistic results.

We've further improved volumetric rendering workflows with support for native Houdini volumes, both in legacy /out context and Solaris.

V-Ray specific workflows such as the V-Ray Decal and V-Ray Aerial Perspective are now available in Solaris, too.

General Solaris/USD cross-DCC interoperability has been addressed with a plethora of bug fixes and usability improvements, both for USD itself, and MaterialX.

Finally, a simple Chaos Cloud implementation for Solaris is now available that we hope to further build upon in the future.

Happy rendering!

[Gosho.Genchev]

New Features

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V-Ray

• Add a cylindrical camera type with manual vertical FOV control.

Volumes

• Support for indexing VDB fields by index instead of name.
• Support for "live" volume data with the new Volume Shader in "vanilla" Houdini and Solaris.
• Support for motion blur with undersampled velocity with the new volume shader.
• Add Solaris export for velocity channel for motion blur with the new volume shader.

Houdini

• Add support for 20.5.522.
• Add support for 20.5.550.
• Add support for 20.5.584.

Houdini 20.5

• Add support for OCIO version 2.3.

Solaris

• Add support for Sun Geographic Position.
• Add support for EXR metadata from Husk.
• Add support for Aerial Perspective.
• Add support for half-float buffers.
• Add Chaos Cloud support for Solaris.
• Add support for V-Ray Decal.
• Rename Beauty to rgba in the V-Ray Standard Render Vars LOP.

MaterialX

• Added support for View Direction VOP.
• Add support for choosing an EXR layer to load for textures.

USD

• Render settings primitive support.
• Add V-Ray 7 for USD nightly builds.

Modified Features

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V-Ray

• Add environment variable override for the resumable rendering sidecar file location on disk.
• Ignore Motion Blur Interval Center and Duration for Velocity AOV.
• Port overscan setup from V-Ray for Maya for 'vanilla' Houdini.

Cosmos

• Expand cosmos asset file paths by default to simplify farm rendering setup.
• Imported materials will now use the V-Ray Image File VOP to reduce node clutter.

MaterialX

• Optimize node graph texture plugin sampling.
• Fix and provide manual implementations for the rest of the non-nodegraph MaterialX nodes.

UI

• Add a checkbox to flip 180 degrees for the V-Ray Gaussian Splats GUI.
• Rename Layered Texture "None" mode to "Normal".
• Disable "Self Illumination Affects GI" and set Opacity Source to "Colored" for the V-Ray Material default settings.