Why V-Ray is up there with the best renderers

Recently, V-Ray has become notorious for its speed, relative ease of use and most importantly its great results, making it a favourite with those in architectural and product visualisation industries. As there are now quite a few renderers available, I thought it would be good to give a quick overview of why V-Ray is a good option, and what kind of people should be looking into it.

V-Ray now comes available as a plug-in for a range of CGI/VFX applications including 3ds Max, Maya, CINEMA 4D, SketchUp and there's also now even a beta version out for Softimage. I first encountered it within Maya just over a year ago, and was instantly impressed by how easy it was to achieve high-quality results compared to the mental ray renderer that comes included. That's not to say mental ray isn't a great renderer, it can just be a little complicated at times.

V-Ray RT

If you get the Maya and 3ds Max versions of V-Ray, you'll find they also include V-Ray RT - a separate render engine that can be accelerated on GPUs. V-Ray RT was designed as a preview renderer to give very fast (if not realtime) previews when setting up lighting or materials, and it does make your renders look incredibly close to the V-Ray production renderer. While RT doesn't support some of the bells and whistles found in the production renderer, it's extremely fast and can give interactive, near photorealistic results when running on the right GPUs. If you don't need the added functions of V-Ray, but would benefit from the speed, RT can also handily be used as a final renderer and can even support use on a render farm.

Who is V-Ray for?

Traditionally, V-Ray has been used in the architectural and product design industries because of its fast results and ease of use, but I'm also increasingly seeing it being used for VFX in film and TV. This is down to the fact that it's an extremely capable renderer which supports advanced features like caustics, light scattering and physically accurate lights and cameras. Although it's easy to set up out of the box, there are also many advanced settings which allow artists to optimise their render times. These kind of features are essential in the deadline-driven VFX industries. For anyone needing high-quality photorealistic results, the images the V-Ray render engine is capable of producing means it can compete with the best renderers available.

For more information on rendering with V-Ray and V-Ray RT, call us on 03332 409 306 or email CAD@Jigsaw24.com. To receive more CAD news and updates you can follow us on Twitter (@Jigsaw_CAD) and 'Like' our Facebook page.