Chaos has released V-Ray 5 for Unreal, a new update to its production rendering plugin designed to import V-Ray scenes, bake lighting and render ray-traced images and animation in Unreal Engine.
The V-Ray 5 feature set benefits most in this release from new levels of control over light baking, augmenting production presets with the ability to completely customise the rendering settings.
Users can now fine tune global illumination, sampling and noise levels, so they’re always optimized for the project at hand.
There’s also the ability to render high-quality lightmaps faster by distributing rendering across multiple machines or using all available CPUs and Nvidia GPU hardware. A direct link to Chaos Cloud has also been established for on-demand rendering and the creation of up to 100 lightmaps at once.
“V-Ray for Unreal has become really popular with artists who need the highest quality light baking for their real-time virtual production and advanced visualization projects,” said Phillip Miller, vice president of product management at Chaos.
“V-Ray 5 for Unreal makes that process even easier, opening up custom control over those bakes, while simultaneously cutting render times whenever they leverage network rendering or Chaos Cloud.”
A redesigned Frame Buffer with post-processing controls built-in has been added for this release. Designers can now make colour corrections, combine render elements and add finishing touches without the use of a third-party image editing application, making it even easier to get the perfect look straight from the renderer.
Other New Features Include:
Coat Layer – A new Coat layer has been added to the V-Ray Material for more realistic representations of reflective coatings like coated metal and lacquered wood.
Improved Pivot Points – When you import objects into V-Ray for Unreal, their pivot points will now remain unchanged.
Selective Export to V-Ray Scene – Artists can now select a group of objects in their UE scene and export them as a V-Ray scene file and transfer assets to other V-Ray applications.
Intel Open Image Denoise – For users without an Nvidia graphics card, the Intel Open Image Denoise can use your CPU(s) to reduce noise during interactive rendering.
Blue Noise Sampling – Delivers cleaner images with the same amount of samples, which is especially useful when rendering motion blur and depth of field effects.
Initial Out-of-Core Support – V-Ray 5 adds initial support for the rendering of large scenes that exceed GPU memory.
V-Ray 5 for Unreal is available now with licensing available at $219 annually or $80 monthly. It can also be accessed as part of the V-Ray Collection, an annual plan that gives users access to 15 Chaos products and services for $699/year. A student-based V-Ray Collection is also available for $149/year.
