V-Ray RT at SIGGRAPH
High-end rendering just got a speed boost! Chaos Group have updated their V-Ray RT renderer for 3ds Max and Maya to include GPU acceleration, drastically reducing the render times for scenes with ray-traced reflections and advanced lighting solutions.
Read more after the jump!
CGArchitect, never heard of them before but they have a nice logo
CGArchitect.com have posted up some nice videos from SIGGRAPH 2010 from Chaos Group, demonstrating V-Ray's real-time renderer, which allows users to preview all of their materials, lighting, shadows and effects in a fraction of the offline renderer.
While the V-Ray RT renderer isn't new (it's been around in CPU-only form since 2009), the nice thing about this update is that they've enabled it to harness your GPU power too, so stuff can get rendered even faster!
They're also showing off some improvements to their software renderers for 3ds Max and Maya, but we don't care so much about that stuff, do we? Mental Ray does a pretty good job out of the box, although it can be kinda fiddly...
Brute Force Rendering
Now usually, us Polycounters have more interest in real-time graphics than offline rendering, but as time goes by, these two domains are converging. Effects and techniques that used to be the preserve of high-end offline renderers just a few years ago are rapidly being optimised and hacked around to be viable real-time solutions.
Using a brute-force approach on a fast GPU (no caching, apparently!), Chaos Group demonstrate how a scene with 1 million triangles and two shadow-casting area lights takes just a few seconds to render and looks almost identical to an offline render which takes about a minute to compute. That translates to a pretty hefty time saving when you're doing lots of tweaks to get your materials and lighting looking super-nice. I don't know about you, but I hate sitting around waiting for test renders...
Replies
I do product and interior viz full-time, so I know the pains of sitting through test render after test after test after test, and THIS will really start to change everything.
Thanks for posting MoP!
haha yeah, that's the reason i decided to go for games instead of offline rendering