Expertise in Computer Graphics

Chaos V-Ray for Houdini

Super-fast production rendering for VFX artists

The ultimate 3D rendering software for procedural effects

V-Ray® for Houdini is a production-proven CPU & GPU rendering software for high-end VFX and animation. It comes with all the tools artists need to render amazing-looking procedural effects. Seamlessly integrated in Houdini, it enables smooth scene exchange and iterations between Houdini and other DCC applications.

Emmy and Academy Award-winning ray tracing technology

V-Ray’s performance is production-proven. It’s been used by the world’s leading studios to render over 300 television series and feature films. In 2017, V-Ray received a Sci-Tech Academy Award for its contribution to photorealistic visual effects. In 2021, V-Ray was awarded with an Engineering Emmy for advancing the use of fully ray-traced rendering.

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Fast and scalable to help you meet tight deadlines

V-Ray’s adaptive ray tracing is highly optimized for superior speed and scalability. You can take full advantage of your hardware rendering on multiple CPUs, & GPUs, or both. With V-Ray’s distributed rendering, you can render a single image across multiple machines.

Smart integration for a smooth workflow

V-Ray works seamlessly with Houdini and enables smooth scene exchange with other DCC applications. ACEScg support is new in V-Ray 5, joining other industry standards like Alembic, OpenVDB, and OpenColorIO.

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Creative control to render anything imaginable

Bring your projects to life with the right tools for the job. V-Ray equips you with a complete set of lighting, shading, and rendering tools. It’s the most full-featured 3D rendering software available.

WHAT’S NEW

Take advantage of your favourite renderer right in Houdini, with all the features you are used to plus a number of important updates. V-Ray 5, update 2 includes a fully-featured V-Ray Hydra delegate for Solaris and support for Houdini 19. You can take advantage of the new V-Ray Decal to easily add stickers, labels, cracks, stains, scratches, and more to your projects. Plus, the latest hair improvements let you render blond, gray, white, and other bright hair colors more accurately.

Simplified workflow and ultimate creative control

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V-Ray for Solaris

V-Ray 5, Update 1 introduced the V-Ray Hydra delegate to Houdini. In this update, we’ve added support for AOVs, volumetric effects, and batch rendering with the Hydra delegate through Husk. We’ve also implemented many features and speed improvements.

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Houdini 19 support

Houdini 19 introduces many workflow improvements for layout and rendering that are now fully supported by V-Ray.

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V-Ray Decal

Apply decals to any surface without altering the underlying material or adding UVs. The new V-Ray Decal makes it easy to add stickers, labels, cracks, stains, scratches, and more.

Enhanced V-Ray Curvature Texture

The latest update to the V-Ray Curvature Texture adds individual controls for convex and concave areas. A new option to ignore bump maps makes the curvature masks even more accurate.

Atmospheric light contribution control

Easily adjust how much an individual light illuminates the environment fog around it with newly added lighting controls.

Hair improvements

Render blond, gray, white, and other bright hair colors more accurately with the updated V-Ray Next Hair Material.

Boosted performance in just a few steps

Enhanced ACEScg support

A simpler OCIO setup is now available in the updated UI. We’ve also added the “Auto” option for the color space transfer function, reducing the effort required when building shading networks.

VDB to AUR converter

Chaos Phoenix’s Aura files are rendered faster with V-Ray. A new node makes it easy to perform a quick conversion from VDB to Aura right in the Houdini GUI.

Alembic workflow updates

The newly added PatternID texture simplifies material assignment when working with Alembic files. Plus, we’ve sped up the export of scenes containing large numbers of Alembic files, and the rendering of Alembic files with NUMA machines.

MakeTX utility

Use the MakeTX tool to easily convert textures to “.tx” files, loaded one tile at a time at render-time. This means quicker loading of textures, less memory consumption, and faster rendering.

Multiple cameras export

You no longer need to export separate .vrscene files for every camera angle. It is now possible to store multiple cameras in a single .vrscene file, so you can save time on your heaviest scenes.

V-Ray Scene Material import and unpacking updates

Unpacking .vrscenes is much faster. We’ve updated the amount of supported shading nodes for material import through .vrscenes coming from other DCCs like Autodesk Maya, and 3ds Max.

KEY FEATURES

Rendering

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High-performance ray tracing

Powerful CPU and GPU-accelerated rendering built for the demands of high-end production.

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Volume rendering

Fast and accurate rendering of native Houdini volumes and OpenVDB caches.

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Multi-GPU production rendering

GPU bucket rendering with fast multi-GPU performance and support for Cryptomattes.

Unified Workflow for Custom Attributes

Control custom attributes of geometry (including splines and particles) with the User Color node.

Interactive Rendering

Interactive look development supported in the Houdini render view.

Debug Shading

Isolate selected textures and materials to help debug large shading networks in IPR.

Chaos Cloud rendering

Simple, one-click solution to submit jobs to render on the Chaos Cloud.

Progressive caustics

Simulate how light interacts with reflective and refractive surfaces, and add a new level of realism to your renders with Progressive Caustics. It’s easy to set up and no longer requires a prepass.

Simplified ACEScg workflow

Enable ACEScg so V-Ray 5 can automatically convert the colors of textures, light temperatures, etc. to the correct color space, without the need of additional nodes.


Lighting

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Adaptive Lights

Unique method for ultrafast rendering of scenes with hundreds or even thousands of lights.

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Global Illumination

Highly optimized indirect lighting with V-Ray’s proprietary Light Cache and brute force GI methods.

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Light Instances

Instance lights with full control over per-instance light parameters, without affecting light link settings.


Materials

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V-Ray Material Library

Efficiently browse from a library of over 500 render-ready materials including metals, glass, wood and more.

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Material Stylesheets

Support for material overrides* based on groups, bundles and attributes.

* VEX and per-primitive string overrides such as texture randomization are not yet supported.

V-Ray Scene Material Overrides

Automatically import material node hierarchies from V-Ray scene files and make changes in Houdini.

Physical Hair

Create realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights using the V-Ray Physical Hair material.

* Currently supports hair as SOP geometry.

PBR Materials

The standard V-Ray Material supports Metalness reflection values for PBR shader workflows.

Alsurface Material

Physically-based shader with built-in SSS controls, popular for rendering realistic skin.

GPU Material Assignments

Per-Primitive Material Assignment is now supported on the GPU, allowing artists to utilize Stylesheets and the Material SOP.

Chaos Scans Material Library Support

1000+ ultra-realistic physically scanned materials ready to import and render.

Coat Layer

Add reflective coatings directly in V-Ray Material so you can render faster and more efficiently.

Sheen Layer

Render soft microfiber fabrics like velvet, satin, and silk with new V-Ray Material sheen options.

New translucent materials

The V-Ray Material has been upgraded by adding new translucency controls and built-in volumetric random walk subsurface scattering.


Textures

Texture Baking

Create texture maps with all the lighting and material information for game assets and real-time environments. Multiple packed primitives, that share UV islands, can be baked without the need for further modifications.

Randomized Textures and Colors

For more realistic textures and materials, add variety and subtle imperfections with the new VRayUVWRandomizer map and improved VRayMultiSubTex controls.

Custom Attribute Texture Paths

Simpler randomization of textures with support for per-face and per-primitive string attributes.

Chaos Phoenix Foam Shader

Render realistic foam and bubbles in less time. Speed up your whitewater rendering with the Phoenix Foam Shader.

Stochastic Texture Tiling

Automatically remove texture tiling artifacts with the new Stochastic tiling option on the VRayUVWRandomizer.

Dirt and Weathering

Give surfaces a weathered look. With the improved V-Ray Dirt texture, you can add dirt to cracks and crevices, create procedural streaks, or cover an entire surface.

New Sun and Sky Model

A new Sun & Sky analytical model is more accurate and improves lighting at sunrise and sunset.

Blue-noise sampling

Blue-noise shows less noise but with the same amount of samples. As your render resolves, depth of field and motion blur will appear smoother with less samples.


Geometry

V-Ray Scene Exchange

Transfer and override the properties of V-Ray scenes from other apps like Maya and 3ds Max.

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Instancing

Instance any object type (including volumes) using Packed Primitives, Instancer and “instancepath” attributes.

Packed Primitives

Efficient handling of Houdini’s native packed primitives for instancing at render time.

Alembic Support

Support for Houdini’s native Alembic layering, transformations, instancing and per-object material overrides.

Particles

Drive shader parameters such as color, alpha and particle size through custom per-point attributes.

V-Ray Fur

Fast rendering of realistic fur and hair with V-Ray Fur.

VRscene Unpacking

Directly import assets from other DCC tools without the need to rebuild materials.

Faster Time to First Pixel

Faster geometry export for quick render startup.

Massive Instancing

Memory efficient instancing of large hierarchies of objects.


Atmospheric & volumetric effects

Environment Fog

Quickly simulate the effects of participating media such as fog and atmospheric dust.

Aerial Perspective

Create natural-looking atmospheric depth as objects fade into the distance.

Volume Instancing

Added support for instancing of volumetric effects.

Fog transparency color

Perfect for underwater scenes, now you can easily tint the transparency color of your volumetric environment fog.


Render elements

Render Elements

Render any set of lights (including wildcard selections) as separate render elements.

Light Select Render Element

Render a wide variety of beauty, utility and matte passes for complete control in compositing.

Custom AOVs

Smoother export of textures and procedural maps to custom render elements.

Light Path Expressions

For better control in compositing, construct your own render passes. Output specific light contributions with timesaving presets or by writing custom expressions.


Post-processing

Light Mix

Easily create different lighting scenarios without having to render again — save your light mix setup, send the layers to comp, and update the lights in the scene.

Layer Compositor

With the VFB’s new Layer Compositor you can fine-tune your images — combine render passes, set blending modes, and adjust colors all within V-Ray.

Masks in the V-Ray Frame Buffer

Fine-tune your images without re-rendering. Use render elements to make pixel-perfect adjustments to your rendered images.


(official website : Chaos Software EOOD)