Features

This page lists many of V-Ray's advanced features.

Overview

At the heart of V-Ray is its superior image sampling and global illumination tools which facilitate photorealism and support advanced production pipelines. V-Ray has many advanced features in addition to these core features.

Listed below are only some of V-Ray's advanced features. For a full list of all V-Ray modules and options, please see the Supported Features pages.

For a comparison of the V-Ray features available in recent releases, please see the V-Ray Feature Comparison Chart.

Note: All features are subject to change without special notice.


Core Architecture

  • Multi-platform, object-oriented API

  • Fully multithreaded core

  • Unified sampling system based on Schlick sampling

  • Distributed rendering

  • Efficient shading system specifically optimized for ray-tracing

  • Modular architecture – many components of the system can be replaced with custom ones

Render output

  • Support for full HDR floating-point output

  • Multi-layer OpenEXR

  • Deep OpenEXR 2

  • Direct rendering to disk for very large output resolutions

Geometry

  • Efficient geometry handling

  • True instance rendering

  • On-demand dynamic geometry creation

  • On-demand geometry loading from disk files

  • Displacement mapping

  • Catmull-Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces

  • Extensible with custom geometric primitives through the V-Ray SDK

  • Hair rendering (3ds Max Hair&Fur, Ornatrix, HairFarm support)

  • Alembic support (meshes, curves, particles)

Image Sampling

  • Several different image sampling methods

  • Progressive rendering

  • Full-scene antialiasing

  • Support for additional render elements (diffuse, reflection, GI, etc.)

  • Advanced color (tone) mapping controls

  • Extensible with custom image samplers through the V-Ray SDK

Illumination

  • Physically accurate full global illumination solutions

  • Different GI algorithms: path tracing, irradiance cache, photon maps, light cache

  • Reusable GI solutions for accelerated rendering of walk-through animations and animations with dynamic objects

  • Physically accurate area lights

  • Efficient illumination from HDR environments

  • Procedural sun & sky models

  • Extensible with custom lights through the V-Ray SDK

Shaders

  • Physically plausible materials

  • Blurry reflections/refractions

  • Accurate highlights

  • Sub-surface scattering

  • Support for efficient material layering

  • Extensible with custom shaders through the V-Ray SDK

Camera Effects

  • Depth-of-field with bokeh effects, with support for custom bitmap-driven aperture shape

  • Accurate motion blur

  • Physical camera model

  • Extensible with custom cameras through the V-Ray SDK

Extras

  • Toon effect

  • Fur generator/raytracer

  • Extended matte/shadow capabilities

  • Support for Render-to-Texture mode of 3ds Max

  • VRaySphereFade to isolate only specific portions of the scene for compositing

  • Interactive rendering

  • Interactive GPU rendering

  • CPU and GPU-accelerated Denoiser

  • Support for openVDB, Field3D, and PhoenixFD cache files through Volume Grid (which also includes probabilistic shading)

Frame Buffer

  • V-Ray specific frame buffer with integrated color corrections and display of multiple rendering elements

  • Direct rendering to disk for extremely large images, either as OpenEXR files or as .vrimg files

  • New VFB is available in 3ds Max 2018 or later. Older 3ds Max versions only support the previous V-Ray VFB .