After a year-long public beta, V-Ray for Nuke is finally ready for the masses. Chaos Group released the latest plug-in built on V-Ray's adaptive rendering core for The Foundry's widely used 3D compositing system.

Getting V-Ray ready for Nuke integration was a long process in part because V-Ray is an unconventional tool in that context. V-Ray Communications Director David Tracy told StudioDaily that one significant challenge was reworking V-Ray to fit the node-based workflow that Nuke users know and love. For example, a lot of work went into making sure V-Ray's ray-tracing environment inside Nuke matched that software's scanline render window. Close collaboration with The Foundry, plus feedback from users over the past year, made it happen.

Nuke users get access to V-ray's lighting, materials, and camera tools, including ray-traced depth-of-field and motion-blur effects, as well as 36 beauty, matte and utility render elements. The VRayProxy system allows geometry to be brought in at render time, reducing the resource load on Nuke.

Tracy said many Nuke users were unimpressed by the original announcement, wondering why they would want to use V-Ray inside a 3D compositing environment. But in practice, the advantages of being able to change lighting in a comp and see results immediately became apparent. "I can work on lighting and comp at the same time and see the results right away," said Shahin Toosi of Lipsync VFX, an early user of V-Ray for Nuke in a statement provided by Chaos Group. "There's no more waiting for a test render to come back from other departments. It's definitely a faster workflow."

A single workstation license of V-Ray for Nuke, including one floating user license and one floating render node, costs €750, or about $835. V-Ray for Nuke can render on existing V-Ray 3.0 for 3ds Max and Maya render node licenses, the company said.