It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Chaos Group, makers of the V-Ray rendering system. First, at Maxon Supermeet 2018 in Frankfurt, Germany, earlier this month, the company said it had acquired V-Ray for Cinema 4D from LAUBlab and released the second beta version of Corona for Cinema 4D.
V-Ray for Cinema 4D had been developed independently by LAUBlab until the acquisition; Chaos Group said it plans to continue development and build more V-Ray technology into the product. Meanwhile, Corona Renderer has been part of the Chaos Group portfolio since it acquired Render Legion late last year. At the same time, Chaos Group said Corona has been gaining traction with design visualization specialists in need of fast and fluid interactive rendering and material editing.
Daniel Sian created these “vintage robots” using V-Ray for Maxon Cinema 4D
Daniel Sian
V-Ray for Unreal
And yesterday, Chaos Group released V-Ray for Unreal, defining a simple workflow for bringing V-Ray scenes from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya, Rhino and SketchUp into Unreal Editor. V-Ray for Unreal works with versions up to 4.20; support for the newly released v4.21 is “coming soon,” Chaos Group said.
V-Ray for Unreal imports V-Ray scenes into Unreal Editor, converting lights and materials to real-time equivalents and keeping a connection to the original elements to maintain quality when scenes are rendered. A new GPU-accelerated Light Baking feature bakes V-Ray lights into Unreal.
“V-Ray for Unreal Engine unlocks new workflows that will fundamentally change how people visualize and experience their designs,” said Epic Games Senior Product Manager Ken Pimentel in a prepared statement. “Now, all designers can benefit from both real-time interactivity and production-proven ray tracing within the Unreal Editor.”
V-Ray for Unreal is being demoed next week in the Epic Games booth (A443) at Autodesk University in Las Vegas, the company said.
A subscription to V-Ray for Unreal will run $80/month or $470/year, Chaos Group said, with a discounted annual rate of $99 for educational use.
