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Chaos V-Ray Touches Down Under with Australia's VFX Artists
Published on Thursday, 28 June 2012
At the end of May, the Chaos Group toured Australia marking 10 years of the V-Ray rendering 
platform. VFX artists had a chance to meet Chaos team members and view recent projects
created by V-Ray users around the world.
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Chaos Group Vice President of Business Development Lon Grohs presented to groups of artists in Sydney at COFA UNSW with Storm FX, at Digistor in Sydney and Melbourne and at VisDay in Wollongong, Following their Australian visit, Lon and CTO Vlado Koylazov answered some questions about V-Ray, explaining the way their developers achieve tight integration with the software platforms 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, SketchUp and Softimage. |
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Vlado said, “Each software manufacturer provides an SDK which allows integration of third party applications such as V-Ray. Every SDK is unique with its own design and ideology, so the connection of V-Ray into each host application is handled individually. Some SDKs are extensive, providing better access to the program, while others can be quite limited. This determines how well the two applications are able to natively talk to each other, as well as the types of work-arounds and translations that must be implemented.” He also said that keeping up with annual updates and service releases requires constant effort. Subtle changes in the SDK, for example, can affect the way their code behaves, and support for software improvements such as Nitrous Viewport in 3ds Max or Viewport 2.0 in Maya can take time to develop. As a member of the Autodesk Developer Network, they are also able to access beta software for early testing. |
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Physically-based shaders and materials are important to the way V-Ray works because they use precise mathematical algorithms to calculate the interaction of light and surfaces properly, resulting in more realistic looking CG materials. “This strategy is important, because it maintains consistency for any lighting condition and behaves correctly even when using alternate rendering methods,” Vlado said. “V-Ray has implemented physically plausible materials from the beginning. This method initially seemed limiting, but actually simplifies the process." A physically based workflow also allows the use of real world scale, materials, illumination and optics inside CG environments, which means less guesswork. |
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Vlado said that over time, research into light, materials and rendering has resulted in publications such as James Kajiya’s introduction to the basic equation for rendering in 1986, and Eric Veach presenting importance sampling in 1997. “Of course, turning theory into practice is not always straightforward,” he said. “It requires experimentation to find out what works well and how to go about fine-tuning the result. “Hardware advancements provide a similar situation. For instance, the advent of multiple CPU cores means rendering algorithms need to be carefully designed to utilize the full potential of multithreading. If a calculation works well on two cores, it doesn’t mean it will automatically scale to use 32 cores. It needs to be optimized, tested and adjusted for this new scenario.” Chaos Group works with the different manufacturers, testing the software to make sure it can take advantage of forthcoming generations of hardware. |
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Because the hard work that goes into developing and completing geometry, materials, lighting and animation is finally revealed in the rendered image, it sometimes emerges as a problem, or at least a part of a project that has to be managed continuously. Nevertheless there is a creative side to rendering. Lon Grohs said, “It can have its frustrating moments, but in general it’s extremely gratifying. A lot of rendering calculations are intensive, and a project’s demands and deadlines create a constant trade-off between quality and speed. The need to produce the best quality rendering in the shortest time has guided V-Ray from the start. “But the process doesn’t quite end at rendering. Final images, masks and render passes are all sent to compositing for final artistic touches. This generally takes the image from 80 to 100 per cent but, of course, it’s different for each project. Some require more compositing, some require less. It also takes planning and foresight to render out all the necessary ingredients for a successful composite, and it’s definitely a great feeling when it all comes together in the end.” Chaos Group began in 1997 as a 3D design and animation studio in Bulgaria. V-Ray grew from requirements for the projects they were working on, initially the need to render atmospheric effects and cast realistic shadows, leading to the development of ray tracing software. The first version of V-Ray for 3ds Max appeared in 2002, introducing a way to add fast global illumination and ray tracing to workflows. Later, further tools were added for geometry, materials, lighting and other functions, and the interactive renderer V-Ray RT was released in 2009. V-Ray RT brought the ability to iterate more quickly. At Siggraph 2009, Chaos Group announced V-Ray for Maya, which has now been adopted at various VFX and film studios. Since then Phoenix FD for fire, smoke, and liquids has been released, and versions of V-Ray for Rhino and SketchUp. After the launch of V-Ray 2.0 at the end of 2010, the V-Ray 2.0 World Tour started. www.chaosgroup.com |
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