These days, most people are overwhelmed by the amount of new and renewed rendering engines out there. The trend tends to be especially true for 3D Studio users. Leading the features trend is speedy Raytracing and Global Illumination. Even Renderman can no longer ignore it, and is now offering Global Illumination and Raytracing. But there is one package that might have passed you by. Vray, from Chaotic Dimension, a result of the combined forces of Chaos Software and Dimension dESIGN Animation Group, appeared as a public beta late last year. It quickly grew to a very sophisticated package and was released in mid March.

Vray is the brainchild of Vladimir Koylazov (Vlado) and Peter Mitev, they are the core developers of Vray. Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Chaos Software is part of Chaotic Dimension, which is a production studio that has been around since 1997. Chaotic Dimension offers excellent technical support on Vray by being extremely attentive to the users thought their very active web forum. Since Vray's release in mid March, several updates have been posted on their site, addressing issues posted by the users. They are also very responsive to suggestions and wish lists.

So what makes Vray different from the other packages? Not much. It just seems to do everything that everyone is trying to do, while at the same time doing it faster, cleaner, and at a very reasonable price. To architects with a budget, with tight deadlines, that don't want to learn complicated software, this is an attractive deal.

Vray operates as a plugin to 3D studio. Inside 3D studio it acts as an external rendering engine. What this means is that it completely bypasses 3D Studio's rendering engine. The drawback to an external rendering engine is that it may be incompatible with certain plugins or features of 3D Studio. However, there are few reports of incompatibilities that I could find. I have tried using it on Archvision's RPCreader, Cebas Scalpel, and various free plugins available without any problems. I have even tried it with various aspects of Cebas finalRender.

The default raytracer inside of 3D Studio can give you a great image, including a defocused look. Unfortunately, very few of us have the time to wait for the result. In Vray, the raytracer alone is worth the price. The developers of Vray claim that their product may be the fastest raytracer available in MAX. Once you have tried it, you would have to agree. Reflections, refractions, defocused reflections and refractions, raytraced shadows, even soft raytraced shadows, are rendered fast, anti-aliased, and, according to the developers, more accurately than 3D Studio. This means that you don't have to sacrifice quality for speed. Don't think twice about making your glass look the way glass should look. Just how fast is it? Remember when you finally graduated from a 56k modem to a cable modem? Small websites came up faster, but the real difference came when you tried to download a 50 Meg file. The same is true when Vray, the more your throw at it, the better it performs. In 3D Studio, you would never think of rendering a field of a hundred or more glass vases. With Vray, it cuts through them like butter.

			100 glasses, with raytraced reflections, refractions, and shadows, fully anti-aliased, 640x480, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, 4mins 39 secs. Click to enlarge

Following suite with its raytracing engine, Global Illumination is also fast. Vray uses irradiance mapping to achieve Global Illumination. This is similar to packages like Brazil r/s, Mental Ray, and finalRender. As with all Global Illumination packages, there is a learning process that one needs to follow. Compared to most, I find that Vray's interface and process is the simplest and most elegant. As with most rendering engines that use Global Illumination, you have issues animating objects or even cameras. Vray offered simple solutions for some of these issues, such as different methods of adding to and saving the photon map. More solutions will soon be available in release 1.1, a free update to be released in the near future.

	A quick interior study using GI, originally 2000x1500, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, 15mins 26 secs. Click to enlarge	High polygon city with GI, 3 million+ polygons, originally 3000x2000, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, 2+ hours. Click to enlarge	High polygon towers with GI, 7 million+ polygons, originally 3000x2000, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, 3+ hours. Click to enlarge

		High polygon train with GI, originally 3600x2000, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, approx. 1.5 hours. Click to enlarge

Vray offers many more features beyond Global Illumination and Raytracing. It offers two different types of motion blur. According to the developers, few rendering engines offer a built in motion blur, and none offer an analytical motion blur solution for 3D Studio. These are 3D motion blurs that look very realistic. It is a great alternative to the 3D motion blurs of 3D studio. The main reason is both quality and speed. The problem is it does not offer a built in quick and dirty approach of 2D motion blur. If you still want 2D motion, in Vray it is still possible to use the built in 3D Studio motion blur as a rendering effect. This is basically the same as Image Motion Blur. While the Image Motion Blur option of 3D studio doesn't always look good under certain types of movement, for fast linear camera's, and other simple movement used by architects, Vray's motion blur maybe overkill and can double or triple your rendering time. Using Image Motion Blur in 3D studio only adds a few seconds in most cases. Unfortunately, since Image Motion Blur is part of the 3D Studio rendering engine, it is not supported in Vray. However, if you want high quality 3D motion blur that is done quicker then most, Vray's analytical motion blur is a great feature.

			Shattering ball, fully raytraced image, with GI lighting using HDRI, analytical motion blur, 720x480, Dual P4 1.7Ghz, 30 mins a frame. DIVX AVI (2.2MB) MPEG (522K) Click to enlarge

One other great feature of Vray is that it is one of the few rendering engine to offer distributed rendering. This is actually a simple concept that is hard to implement. With bucket rendering, the rendering engine sends out a bucket per processor on your computer. With distributed rendering, Vray can add more processors (and more buckets) by using other computers over the network. With a maximum of 10 computers, you could theoretically have 40 processors rendering a single image using 10 quad-processors computers. More likely you may have access to 10 dual processor machines, which would give you 20 processors. For architects that render large stills, this is a great feature. Since your stills could be rendered up to 10 times faster. This is true per license of Vray, so by purchasing another license of Vray you would be able to add another 10 computers to the group. Distributed rendering is still at its infant stage in Vray. Currently Global Illumination is only supported in the not so speedy brute force method. Many updates to the distributed rendering feature, including a new manager are promised for release 1.1.

Some of the other features include, fast caustics, focal blur, new cameras types including fish-eye and spherical, the use of High Dynamic Range Imagery (better known as HDRI), Sub-Surface Light Scattering, and more. They also offer different anti-aliasing methods that are used in combination with 3D studio filtering methods.

	Glass study using GI and caustics. Click to enlarge		High polygon motorcycles, with defocused reflections and GI, originally 3000x2000, dual P4 1.7, approx 2 hours. Click to enlarge

An important aspect of Vray is that they offer an internal adaptive approach to reduce excess sampling when calculating a combination of glossy reflections, motion blur, anti-aliasing etc… While this is mostly invisible to the user, it results in must faster rendering times.

Currently Vray is offering two versions of their software: Basic and Advanced, both of which are currently on sale. Vray Basic, priced at $299, is available now for $209. Vray Advanced, priced at $799, is currently available for $559. Chaotic Dimension is also working on a free version of Vray that will give users the accelerated raytracer. If you would like description of the differences in the packages, check out http://www.vrayrender.com/home/. Vray is currently only available over the web and with a credit card. When you purchase Vray, you will be given access to the Vray page, which allows you to download the program and its documentation. An official reseller, printed documentation, and CD will be available soon, and will be delivered to all of its current users.

Things to look forward to in the new 1.1 version, available soon, and free to current users, are: Analytical Displacement Map that guarantees extremely high (limited only by the resolution of the map) level of detail without mesh generation, Global Photon Mapping that generates a photon map for the whole scene rather than just the view, Distributed rendering manager, support for VIZ 4, along with the obvious bug fixes.

They are also working on trying to release a version for Maya.

			A sneak peak at the upcoming displacement map. Click to enlarge

All in all, Vray is an extremely promising package. By focusing a great deal of their attention on speed, while making sure that quality was high and the interface was simple, users can easily adopt it into their production. Global Illumination and raytracing is no longer a luxury, but will be part of your everyday process. At its current price, it is the most competitive package I've seen.

For more information on Vray go to http://www.vrayrender.com