The wait is nearly over! The first official pre-release of version 1.5 of the V-Ray renderer will be revealed at SIGGRAPH 2006 in Boston, USA.
Since this version requires a hardware lock (dongle) in order to run, V-Ray users will have to fill in a dongle request form. In order to do this, please log in to the support section on our site:
http://www.chaosgroup.com/support/
and follow the link to the dongle request form.
Those of you who are attending the SIGGRAPH exhibition in Boston will be able to get their dongles directly from us by specifying this in the dongle request form (fill in “SIGGRAPH” as the shipping address). We will begin shipping the dongles to all other users shortly after the SIGGRAPH conference is over.
We welcome you to SIGGRAPH booth #1014 (VisMasters and Chaos Group) where you can see V-Ray 1.5 in action, get your requested (free) dongle, learn additional information about Aura as well as see an overview of a new product that is about to be released - a sequence player.
We would also like to invite you to the V-Ray users meeting to be held as part of the VisMasters Design Visualization Conference on August 4th, 2006. For more details, please visit
V-Ray 1.5 builds on the existing foundation of the V-Ray rendering engine, extends its capabilities and adds many new features:
(*) Full render elements support inside 3dsmax with nearly 30 render elements available;
(*) Physically based sun and sky for simulating the natural daylight illumination of the Earth;
(*) Physically based camera model with real-world parameters (exposure, distortion etc);
(*) New material types (VRayBlendMtl for layering materials in an efficient manner, VRay2SidedMtl for simulating thin translucent surfaces, VRayFastSSS for simulating subsurface scattering in translucent materials like humnan skin, and more);
(*) Detail enhancement for the irradiance map - a blend between the irradiance map and QMC GI to bring the best of both worlds;
(*) Adaptive path tracing;
(*) VRayDirt texture map for simulating dirt or ambient occlusion;
(*) Improved distributed rendering;
(*) Improved V-Ray virtual frame buffer;
(*) Multi-platform SDK for extended virtually any part of the rendering engine;
(*) and much more…
