Chaos Group announces V-Ray 1.5 RC3 for immediate download

Chaos Group announces V-Ray 1.5 release candidate #3 (1.50.RC3) for immediate download

FREE UPGRADE: 32bit versions for max60, max70, max80, max90
FREE UPGRADE: 64bit versions for max90
are available for immediate download

Build 1.50.RC3 (18 Oct 2006)
==============================

New features:
(*) Support for 3dsmax R9 32- and 64-bit versions.
(*) The V-Ray shading SDK is now a part of the V-Ray installation.
(*) Added “Guess vertical shift” button to the VRayPhysicalCamera.
(*) Added “Distortion type” for the VRayPhysicalCamera. The “Cubic” distortion type is used in programs like SynthEyes or Boujou and allows exact camera matching with these programs.
(*) Added an option “Invisible” for the VRaySun to avoid speckles on mirror surfaces.

Modified features:
(*) The DOF planes of the VRayPhysicalCamera match more closely the actual DOF effect.
(*) The V-Ray presets file name can now be changed from the default.
(*) Better memory management for large HDR maps in VRayHDRI.
(*) VRayLightMtl has an option to use an opacity map.
(*) The V-Ray converter script now supports the standard 3dsmax Blend, Shellac, DoubleSided and Architectural materials and converts them to the respective V-Ray counterparts.
(*) VRayMtl now can show the diffuse texture map in the viewport.
(*) The V-Ray license server is registered in “Automatic” service mode instead of “Manual”.

Known issues:
(*) “Affect shadows” and “Affect alpha” options do not work for VRayMtl’s inside a Multi/subobject material. This will be fixed as soon as possible.

Bug fixes:
(*) Hiding a VRayPhysicalCamera immediately after its creation did not hide the target.
(*) When cloning a V-Ray material or texture, any custom attributes were not copied to the clone.
(*) Particle Flow material IDs were not taken into consideration.
(*) VRayFur crashed when the source object did not contain a mesh.
(*) V-Ray could crash when saving a preset if the presets file could not be opened for writing.
(*) Some problems when creating a VRayLight with Dome type were fixed.
(*) Fixed a potential crash with the viewport display of the VRaySun.
(*) Using the light cache with crop/blowup rendering could cause a crash.
(*) The “%camera” keyword for the frame stamp did not work in the V-Ray VFB.
(*) The VRayLight in dome mode blocked shadows from VRaySun passing through transparent objects.
(*) In ppt mode the alpha channel for transparent objects was not correct.
(*) V-Ray now fills in all nodeID/mtlID/velocity render elements rather than only the first one.
(*) Replaced the ‘·’ character for automatically generated UIs with regular ‘.’ since ‘·’ may be a special character on some versions of Windows (e.g. Japanese).
(*) The sub-materials of VRayBlendMtl did not show up in Track View; VRayBlendMtl did not allow wiring of the sub-materials.
(*) If a standard 3dsmax skylight object is present in the scene, V-Ray will print a warning and ignore it, rather than crash.
(*) VRayLanczosFilter produced black images with Fixed or Adaptive QMC at 1/1 image samplers.
(*) The renderer did not list environment maps and the override material as subanims.
(*) The irradiance map viewer would crash when merging maps from the command line.
(*) The dome light did not list its dome texture map as sub-anim for Track View.
(*) Crop rendering did not work in the V-Ray VFB.
(*) If the VFB resolution was different from the 3dsmax one, crop and region rendering rendered a wrong part of the image.
(*) Rendering will be aborted if an error occurs while writing a .vrimg file.
(*) vrimg2exr failed if -dataWindow option is specified and the image is empty.
(*) In some intermediate RC3 builds, V-Ray could take a render license when network rendering.
(*) Creating an un-targeted VRayPhysicalCamera and moving it crashed 3dsmax.
(*) The “Split render channels” option for the V-Ray VFB did not set the pixel aspect ratio for the resulting images.
(*) Renamed the “VRayShadow” render element to “VRayShadows” as the name clashed in MaxScript with the VRayShadow shadow type.
(*) Added an option “Invisible” to the VRaySun to avoid the bright speckles that may happen on reflective surfaces if a single hits the sun.
(*) Export to a .vrmesh file did not take edited normals into account.
(*) “Affect shadows” and “Affect alpha” options of a VRayMtl did not work if it was inside a VRayBlendMtl.
(*) A Falloff map in Shadow/Light mode caused some render elements (e.g. Diffuse filter) to be rendered incorrectly.
(*) If a render slave is used in DR mode and it does backburner rendering at the same time, the backburner 3dsmax crashed.
(*) The VRaySun “Size multiplier” produced wrong results when set to 0.0 or a very low value.
(*) RPC objects did not render correctly with the VRayPhysicalCamera.
(*) VRayWireColor element produced wrong results with transparent objects.
(*) VRayLight in Dome mode produced wrong results with matte/shadow objects.
(*) VRayLight in Dome mode could produce jagged results when visible and mapped with high-resolution HDR maps.
(*) Some of the new materials (VRay2SidedMtl, VRayBlendMtl etc) did not work properly when used as Override materials.
(*) VRayLightMtl did not work with VRayBlendMtl and VRay2SidedMtl.
(*) Using the frame stamp with “Full width” option off and “Center” or “Right” justify could lead to crashes.

EXELLENT!

Is this the version that will ship or are we still waiting for that? I’ve been holding out on the 1.5 download as long as I can but if it won’t ship anytime soon, I may have to break down and jump in.

Some additional notes:

(*) There may be a delay between clicking on the download link and the actual start of the download. The delay may be 10 or more seconds - this is normal.

(*) The WIBU dongle drivers for 64-bit Windows are a beta version which is newer than the “official” drivers from the WIBU download page (the latter cause restarts and blue screens). The beta drivers are not supported by WIBU-SYSTEMS.

(*) The installation allows you to choose between a hardware lock (dongle) license, and the old software license. You don’t need any patches to make it work with your existing software license - just choose the appropriate license type during installation.

(*) NFR/educational versions are ready and uploaded, but the download links are not yet updated; this will happen shortly.

(*) The “Affect alpha” and “Affect shadows” options for VRayMtl will not work if it is inside a Multi/sub material. Unfortunately this bug was not caught until after the builds were already uploaded. This will be corrected as soon as possible. Because of this (obviously) there will be at least one more RC.

(*) It looks like 3dsmax 9 ignores the “Multithreading” option in DR mode and always uses 1 thread on the render slaves. Until we find a way around this, use the “renderers.current.system_numThreads” MaxScript property to force V-Ray to use a given number of threads for rendering.

Best regards,
Vlado

the pursuit of perfection

Vlado: Any idea if the problem I was having here (http://www.chaosgroup.com/forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=138231&highlight=#138231) has been fixed. I know it seemed like a rather elusive crash, hard to pin down the reason so I can understand if it still shows up. Other than that, thanks for the new build!

I really hope so, but since I could not reproduce the crashes, I can’t really say. I hope it may have been one of the other bugs manifesting itself in this strange way.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thank you, thank you, thank you for fixing the rpc bug. It works like a charm.

Now of course I wouldn’t stick one of these ugly rpc cars this close to the camera, but it’s going to come in handy filling up a parking lot in the distance. :lol:

I hope so too - I’ve missed the Vray frame buffer. For the time being I’ll turn back on the VRay FB and see if I get any crashes. Either way, I’ll try to post a follow up in my thread above. Thanks.

server seems to be overwhelmed right now…cant download few minutes go by then it says the document contains no data.

it says latest builds with hardware dongles. for those of us without dongles do we still need to copy the cgauth.dll file supplied awhile back?
-joe

just saw vlados additional notes…guess the cgauth.dll thing is not needed.

Hehe, yes. You may have to wait a while until your download is assembled.

it says latest builds with hardware dongles. for those of us without dongles do we still need to copy the cgauth.dll file supplied awhile back?The installation allows you to choose between a dongle and software license. No need to copy anything else.

Best regards,
Vlado

ok…i’m stupid…where is the link to download the upgrade…all i can find is an older version for download (not 1.50.RC3)
mh

just wondering what happened to the viz4/max5 version of 1.5, still waiting with fingers crossed

This is great! Can’t wait to grab it.

Are there any plans to make make a build where objects with the fast SSS material can be excluded from lights?

- Geoff

I’ll probably have to email this privately to you, which I can do if you drop me an email to vlado@chaosgroup.com (apologies if you have done so already).

Best regards,
Vlado

What is stopping you from excluding them now through the light’s include/exclude dialog?

Best regards,
Vlado

(*) VRayMtl now can show the diffuse texture map in the viewport.
I’m confused (again ), couldn’t it do this before?

You had to click the “Show map” button for the individual maps; the button was greyed out for VRayMtl itself. However, seeing as how this crashes in max9, there is obviously more work to it.

Best regards,
Vlado

You can tell a light to exclude the object but when you render the image it doesn’t work.

Does this build include support for command-line installations?