V-Ray 2.0 for Maya: Chaos Group unleashes new renderer!

Last week Autodesk released new versions of their major software titles and introduced a series of suites, bundling several of their programs needed for specific workflows, which come in three versions: Standard, Premium and Ultimate. Now Chaosgroup has announced the public beta for their new compatible V-Ray renderer, making the long awaited V-Ray 2.0 for Maya 2012 finally available at the end of this month! Autodesk released six unique suites:

· Building Design (with Revit Architecture)

· Entertainment Creation (with either Maya or 3ds Max)

· Factory Design (AutoCAD Architecture and Inventor)

· General Design (AutoCAD)

· Plant Design (AutoCAD/Plant 3D)

· Product Design (with Autodesk Inventor)

Above: The Factory Design Suite comes with AutoCAD Architecture, Inventor and 3ds Max Design.
Maya comes standard with it's integrated Mental Ray renderer, but many artists prefer using ChaosGroup's V-Ray to render out their 3D images and scenes. Mental Ray is a quality renderer, used for feature films as The Matrix Trilogy, Star Wars II (AOTC) and The Hulk, so what's the difference? The discussion has been long and hard between FX artists.The overall opinion is, that if you know what you're doing, Mental Ray is excellent. But others disagree: V-ray is faster, more powerfull and excellent for rendering fur and hair.

Mental Ray (or M-ray as some call it) was developed by Mental Images in Berlin, the company founded in 1986 by computer scientist Rolf Herken which,since December 2007 has become a subsidiary of Nvidia.

V-Ray was developed by Vladimir Koylazov and Peter Mitev (left). They started their company Chaos Group and established a CG production studio for design and animation in 1997 in Sofia, Bulgaria.

They created their V-Ray render engine in 2002 which they provide through their daughter company Chaos software.

 In June 2009 they introduced and released V-ray RT, the first interactive renderer (for 3ds Max) and also created the Pdplayer - the production orientated image sequence player and viewer for the CG Industry.

Although V-Ray 2.0 was already released for 3ds Max 2011, it will not work with the new releases by Autodesk. An upgrade is in the works and will be ready by the end of this month, along with the new V-Ray 2.0 for Maya 2012, which will have interactive rendering on CPU and GPU, Python callback for access to and modification of the translated V-ray scene before rendering and support for the newest substance textures.

Check out the beta program for all the new feats Chaos has in store for you or read up on how VFX artist Scott Metzger used V-Ray for the 'Halo Reach' spot here which won Method studios the VES Award last Februari in LA!