The new update enables increased customization controls and faster rendering speeds.
Rendering solutions innovator Chaos announced the release of the new V-Ray 5 for Unreal. This is an update to the production rendering plug-in, which lets users import V-Ray scenes, bake lighting, and render ray-traced images and animation in the Unreal Engine, a real-time 3D creation platform for photorealistic visuals and immersive experiences. The V-Ray 5 feature set now includes the light baking toolset, which was originally found on Unreal Engine 4. The new update will enable improved control for light baking and augmenting production presets and allow designers to customize rendering settings, including global illumination, sampling and noise levels.
Light baking controls initially offered only Preview, Medium and High-quality presets. The new custom light baking controls let users customize render settings for projects with specific design requirements, allowing for more flexibility in workflow processing.
Designers and architects using Unreal can now also render high-quality lightmaps faster by rendering them across multiple machines. They may opt to use all available CPUs and NVIDIA GPU hardware as well. Chaos has also provided direct access to the Chaos Cloud for real-time on-demand rendering. The integration of cloud technology will also enable users to create up to 100 lightmaps at once.
The main feature on the updated V-Ray 5 is its redesigned Frame Buffer, which now includes built-in post-processing controls. These tools will allow designers to make color corrections, combine render elements, and add finishing touches within the renderer itself. This eliminates the need for third-party image editing applications and lets users quickly accomplish designs under a unified platform.
Some other new features found on the new V-Ray 5 include Coat Layer, which provides improved realistic representations of reflective coatings such as coated metal and lacquered wood; Blue Noise Sampling, which offers cleaner images with the same number of samples in applications such as rendering motion blur and depth of field effects; and Selective Export to V-Ray Scene, where users can select a group of objects in the UE scene and export them as a V-Ray scene file. This feature also allows users to transfer assets to other V-Ray applications.
Chaos has also added the new Intel Open Image Denoise for designers who don’t have a NVIDIA graphics card. The Intel Open Image Denoise takes over by using an artist’s CPU to reduce noise during interactive rendering. The Pivot Points tool has also been improved. Pivot Points will now remain unchanged when importing objects into V-Ray for Unreal. Finally, a new Initial Out-of-Core Support feature provides added initial support when rendering large scenes that tend to go beyond the GPU memory.
Licensing for V-Ray 5 for Unreal is available through an annual subscription for $219 and through a monthly subscription for $80. It can also be accessed via the V-Ray Collection annual plan, which provides complete access to 15 Chaos products and services for $699. Chaos also offers an annual student plan for the V-Ray Collection.
For more information, visit the V-Ray 5 product page on the official Chaos website here.
