In June 2009, Chaos Group announced the release of V-Ray RT, the realtime interactive renderer for Autodesk’s 3ds Max.

Created with the busy and demanding 3D artist in mind, the standalone ray tracing technology has been designed to improve and quicken the artist’s workflow at the texturing and lightening stage by allowing the user to see the immediate effect on the scene after any alteration.

This could be as simple as changing a light or material parameter or introducing new objects. V-Ray RT follows the user’s actions while working on the scene - automatically and progressively generating a photorealistic preview, which allows the artist to zoom and pan the camera without the need to wait for the frame buffer to re-render.

V-Ray RT is an ActiveShade renderer in 3ds Max, separate from the production V-Ray renderer. V-Ray RT does not introduce new plug-ins other than the interactive renderer itself. Instead, you can use existing 3ds Max and V-Ray materials, textures, lights, cameras and so on.

V-Ray RT consists of two major components

• V-Ray RT interactive renderer in 3ds Max;
• One or more V-Ray RT render servers.

V-Ray RT performs the actual rendering outside of 3ds Max itself, with the help of the V-Ray RT render server(s), which can run either locally on the same machine, or on other machine(s) in the local network. The renderer plug-in in 3ds Max only relays the scene changes to the render servers and displays the final result.

V-Ray RT supports many features, a few of which are listed below;

• Create/delete objects (geometry, lights, cameras, etc.)
• Modify object parameters
• Move/rotate/scale objects
• Apply/remove/edit object modifiers
• Hide/unhide objects
• Apply materials on objects
• Modify material properties like textures, colors etc
• Modify light properties (like position, color, etc.)
• Animation of cameras, objects, lights and materials (scrubbing the time slider)
• Render settings change
• Camera/view orientation change
• Modify camera/view parameters
• Environment change (color, texture etc)

A full list of features can be found here.

For more information, call our experts on 03332 409 309 or email 3D@jigsaw24.com.