V-Ray

Designed to accurately render scenes modeled in 3-D software, the V-Ray plugin extends artist creativity and versatility by providing a superior set of tools capable of simulating lighting, reflections, shading and texturing, thereby creating a realistic final render worthy of a professional studio.

The highly configurable V-Ray software extension acts as an alternate rendering engine for a number of the popular 3-D modeling software suites, overcoming the limitations of their built-in rendering tools. The Bulgarian software designers, Chaos Group, have currently taken the software to version 3.0, and in that period they've fine-tuned the production quality application, adding dozens of features focused on producing ever more realistic scenes full of objects, lighted interiors, and fantastical creatures.

The initial modeling of a scene takes time and great skill, but it's still essentially a mathematical gathering of wireframe shapes. It takes the power of a rendering engine to process the scene, adding the path of lighting based on the location of a virtual sun or artificial illumination. Designers can then watch their 3-D scene come to life, see the lights reflect and refract from the colored textures of the objects. V-Ray is a premiere solution for this 3-D rendering workflow, allowing users to streamline their efforts and make finite adjustments to work in real-time. For example, rendering is a lengthy, processor intensive task, but the V-Ray preview window solves this issue by showing the designer a near-production glimpse of the work so that changes can be made without wasting time waiting for the final outcome.

Configuration options and popular features include different visualization options and texturing choices. A designer can add hair or fur to the scene, configuring the size, color and shape of the strands. Ray traced lighting is implemented through the V-Ray RT module, while several options are also available for dome lighting and layered illumination. Each individual layer can be outputted to another graphics package and isolated for further artistic changes. The goal is to turn light and shadow into easily editable elements within the 3-D scene, allowing the designer to easily configure scene factors such as ambient occlusion, light scattering effects, refraction indexes, and substance texture settings. And, thanks to the latest version of V-Ray, all of these settings can be changed without requiring a degree in physics. Simply click on the type of lighting required and hit the render button, or get under the hood of the software for hundreds of configurable image sampling adjustments.