according to this atricle, vray renders to rpf format.
http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/stories\_cs/cs\_detail/armstrong\_white/
When did this occur?
mh
Hi Mike,
AFAIK you’ve always had the option to save your renders as RPFs. It’s just another image file format like jpg or exr.
Dan
According to that article it was available atleast as far back as 2003-2004 
remember back then you had to enable the same channels both in the rpf save settings and the system rollout of V-Ray?
i must have gone into the twilight zone…i could have sworn i had a forum conversation about rendering to rpf and bringing the files into combustion but vray didn’t render to rpf format. Oh well. never mind.
mh
And before combustion and RPF, there was paint+effects and RLAs.
Quite a similar pipelining, in fact.
I remember seeing stuff done with this method at Adesk official launch seminars for max 2.5…
V-Ray has always supported the .rpf/.rla formats through the 3ds Max frame buffer.
Best regards,
Vlado