After more than a year of beta-testing, Chaos Group has released V-Ray for Houdini.

Ingenuity Studios has been using an alpha build since 2017 to put the renderer through its paces, and V-Ray for Houdini is now the company’s primary tool for scene assembly and lighting, according to Ingenuity owner and VFX supervisor Grant Miller.

“We started using the alpha build about 30 minutes after it was released,” said Miller in a statement released by Chaos Group. “We wanted to move scene assembly into Houdini, so we’d have more control over our instances and a tighter loop on VFX and look dev. If V-Ray for Houdini could take us there, we were all in.”

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Among the projects completed by Ingenuity with the help of V-Ray for Houdini were Taylor Swift videos “Look What You Made Me Do” and “…Ready for It?”, Billie Eilish’s “Lovely,” AMC’s The Walking Dead, Fox’s The Passage, NBC’s (previously Fox’s) Brooklyn Nine Nine, Starz’ Counterpart, NBC’s Superstore and ABC’s Blackish.

Following is the V-Ray for Houdini feature list released by Chaos Group.

  • HIGH-PERFORMANCE RAY TRACING – Powerful CPU and GPU-accelerated rendering built for the demands of high-end production.
  • INTERACTIVE RENDERING – Interactive look development supported in the Houdini render view.
  • VOLUME RENDERING – Fast and accurate rendering of native Houdini volumes and OpenVDB caches.
  • MULTI-GPU PRODUCTION RENDERING – GPU bucket rendering with fast multi-GPU performance and support for Cryptomattes.
  • UNIFIED WORKFLOW FOR CUSTOM ATTRIBUTES – Control custom attributes of geometry (including splines and particles) with the User Color node.
  • TEXTURE BAKING – Bake lighting and textures for game assets and real-time environments.
  • CHAOS CLOUD RENDERING – Simple, one-click solution to submit jobs to render on the Chaos Cloud.
  • ADAPTIVE DOME LIGHT – Exceptionally fast image-based environment lighting using V-Ray Scene Intelligence.
  • ADAPTIVE LIGHTS – Unique method for ultrafast rendering of scenes with hundreds or even thousands of lights.
  • GLOBAL ILLUMINATION – Highly optimized indirect lighting with V-Ray’s proprietary Light Cache and brute force GI methods.
  • LIGHT INSTANCES – Instance lights with full control over per-instance light parameters, without affecting light link settings.
  • MATERIAL STYLESHEETS – Support for material overrides* based on groups, bundles and attributes. *VEX and per-primitive string overrides such as texture randomization are not yet supported.
  • V-RAY SCENE MATERIAL OVERRIDES – Automatically import material node hierarchies from V-Ray scene files and make changes in Houdini.
  • PHYSICAL HAIR – Create realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights using the V-Ray Physical Hair material. *Currently supports hair as SOP geometry
  • PBR MATERIALS – The standard V-Ray Material supports Metalness reflection values for PBR shader workflows.
  • ALSURFACE MATERIAL – Physically-based shader with built-in SSS controls, popular for rendering realistic skin.
  • GPU MATERIAL ASSIGNMENTS – Per-Primitive Material Assignment is now supported on the GPU, allowing artists to utilize Stylesheets and the Material SOP.
  • VRSCANS MATERIAL LIBRARY SUPPORT – 1000+ ultra-realistic physically scanned materials ready to import and render.
  • V-RAY SCENE EXCHANGE – Transfer and override the properties of V-Ray scenes from other apps like Maya and 3ds Max.
  • INSTANCING – Instance any object type (including volumes) using Packed Primitives, Instancer and “instancepath” attributes.
  • PACKED PRIMITIVES – Efficient handling of Houdini’s native packed primitives for instancing at render time.
  • ALEMBIC SUPPORT – Support for Houdini’s native Alembic layering, transformations, instancing and per-object material overrides.
  • PARTICLES – Drive shader parameters such as color, alpha and particle size through custom per-point attributes.
  • V-RAY FUR – Fast rendering of realistic fur and hair with V-Ray Fur.
  • ENVIRONMENT FOG – Quickly simulate the effects of participating media such as fog and atmospheric dust.
  • AERIAL PERSPECTIVE – Create natural-looking atmospheric depth as objects fade into the distance.
  • RENDER ELEMENTS – Render any set of lights (including wildcard selections) as separate render elements.
  • LIGHT SELECT RENDER ELEMENT – Render a wide variety of beauty, utility and matte passes for complete control in compositing.

V-Ray for Houdini is available for Houdini and Houdini Indie 16.5.473 and supports Windows, MacOS and Linux. Licenses are $80/month or $470/year.

Chaos Group V-Ray for Houdini: www.chaosgroup.com