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V-Ray for Houdini — Key features

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Rendering

High-performance ray tracing

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

Volume rendering

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

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.

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V-Ray for Solaris

Collaborate more efficiently with our fully-featured V-Ray Hydra delegate. With V-Ray 6, we've added support for the latest Solaris lookdev, layout, and lighting features in Houdini 19.5.

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Render-ready content

Bring your scenes to life with Chaos Cosmos, our free library of high-quality V-Ray content. With a collection of high-resolution materials, beautiful HDR environments, and render-ready 3D models such as plants, trees, bushes, and more, Chaos Cosmos is a great resource for your next project.

Learn more about Chaos Cosmos >

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Ocean rendering

Create the perfect-looking ocean waves with native support for Houdini’s ocean tools. With more control than ever before, you can render Houdini’s Oceans faster, and without the need for texture baking.

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ACEScg Color Management

For color-accurate workflows, ACEScg has become the new standard for professional production. When ACEScg is enabled, V-Ray automatically converts the colors of textures, light temperatures, sun and sky, etc. to the correct color space.

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.

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.

V-Ray Profiler

Get reports on the time spent calculating shaders and volumes in your scenes. Locate all hot spots in your scene and optimize pipelines for even faster rendering. Pair V-Ray Profiler with the Memory Tracker, and you now have everything you need to monitor and optimize your projects.

Lighting

© Daniel Kho
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.

Light Instances

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

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Procedural clouds

Create just the right clouds for your environment without spending hours browsing through HDRI libraries. V-Ray Sun and Sky’s new procedural clouds system lets you achieve the perfect look and animate your clouds for impressive timelapses in a simple and memory-efficient way.

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Finite Dome Light mode

Elevate your HDRI environment renders with the new, more flexible ground projection capabilities of the V-Ray Dome Light. Set the scale of your light, and have full control over blend settings with the new Finite Dome mode.

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Atmospheric light contribution control

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

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New Sun and Sky Model

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

Materials

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.

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Thin Film layer

Create realistic soap bubbles, oil spills, and more with the new Thin Film option in the V-Ray Material.

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.

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.

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.

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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. Add displacement for even more realistic results.

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V-Ray Enmesh

Repeat geometry across the surface of an object in the most memory-efficient way possible. In just a few clicks, you can create complex surfaces with lots of detail like intricate chain mail, car grilles, metal grids, panels, fences, fabrics, and so much more, as if geometry was a texture.

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.

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.

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