Chaos V-Ray 6 for Maya & Houdini, Update 2

Chaos has updated V-Ray for Maya and Houdini with better connectivity and collaboration for more creativity and smoother work continuity.

What’s new in V-Ray 6 for Maya, Update 2?

Redefining creative connectivity and collaboration.

Ensure work continuity and smooth collaboration with MaterialX support and extended USD compatibility, allowing effortless asset transfer between departments, studios, and tools. Enjoy even more creative freedom with an unprecedented level of control. Elevate environmental effects and scatters thanks to new, more advanced options. Plus, more granular creative controls for every detail, from camera effects to lights, shadows, and surface details, powered-up V-Ray GPU rendering, and much more.

MaterialX support

Complete your USD workflow with support for MaterialX, enabling seamless shader exchange across teams and tools. Create and render MaterialX (MtlX) shaders, or translate existing V-Ray Materials to MtlX. And with initial LookDevX support, you can work with MtlX shading graphs and preview changes with IPR.

Extended USD support

V-Ray now supports the latest official version of MayaUSD 0.26.0. The updated USD translator layer ensures full parity with Houdini and introduces enhancements for smoother workflows. Plus, you can now render your USD scenes with our Chaos Cloud rendering service.

Even greater scattering control.

Explore Chaos Scatter’s new customization options, giving you greater flexibility than ever before.

Include and exclude lists
Carve a path through a grass field, create a sidewalk in a flower garden, and achieve many more effects with the assistance of Chaos Scatter’s new Include and Exclude lists. Effortlessly dictate where objects scatter by utilizing curves or meshes, eliminating the need for custom maps.

Light instancing
Unlock countless creative options with the addition of Lights to the Chaos Scatter instantiable objects list. Easily populate your scene with enchanting fireflies, craft star-filled galaxies, light up concert halls, add light fixtures — and bring your lightbulb moments to life.

Group instancing
Create complex environments faster while keeping even your most complex scenes organized and easy to work with. Group instancing allows you to scatter collections of objects as one, rather than an individual objects list.

Edge Trimming
Easily create clean-cut edges for scattered objects. No more grass on the edge of the curb or pebbles spilling over on the walkway. Objects will now stay within defined boundaries, resulting in a cleaner, more natural look — with a bonus performance boost.

Add an artistic touch to your world.

Every detail counts, whether it’s camera effects, lights and shadows, or surface details. Discover new options for finer creative control.

Shadow Selects
Enjoy finer control over your compositing workflow with Shadow Selects. Choose your lights, then effortlessly adjust the lightness, darkness, or tint of the shadows they cast.

V-Ray Decal Cylindrical Projection
Easily add stickers, labels, and surface imperfections to bottles, jars, cups, cans, rockets, tanks, fire hydrants, or any other cylinder-like object. Match the Decal’s projection to the curve of the object’s surface in just a few clicks.

Light Directionality Strength
Illuminate your scenes with complete artistic control. The new Directionality Strength option provides precise control over the spread of a light’s directional intensity, allowing you to add that final touch of magic to your lighting setup.

Chromatic aberration
Want to create a distinctive and creative aesthetic for your scene? Now you can quickly add the chromatic aberration post-effect right from the V-Ray Frame Buffer without firing up a third-party application.

Power up your GPU rendering.

With new features, faster and more memory-efficient rendering V-Ray GPU is better than ever.

V-Ray Enmesh
Effortlessly tile 3D geometry patterns across objects and create surfaces with lots of detail in no time. Enmesh is perfect for crafting chainmail, woven fabric, pebbled pathways, fences, and more. Plus, it uses much less memory compared to manual displacement or copying.

Faster animation rendering
Render image sequences up to four times faster with V-Ray GPU. V-Ray now caches bitmaps between animation frames, eliminating the need for reloads and leading to a substantial increase in rendering speed.

System Memory for Textures
Eliminate GPU memory limitations with just the click of a button. Render worry-free with detailed, high-resolution textures thanks to the addition of the Use System Memory for Textures option.

And more.

Enhanced volumetric rendering
Now you can render within objects containing volumetrics in their shading group without the hassle of creating gizmos or other complicated setups. Rendering scenes with volumetric effects has never been easier.

Viewport enhancements
Experience an even better viewport representation with added benefits for the Blend material and greater memory efficiency for Alembic proxies.

What’s new in V-Ray 6 for Houdini, Update 2?

Next-level creative collaboration and connectivity.

Ensure work continuity and smooth collaboration with MaterialX support in V-Ray for Solaris and an even more powerful V-Ray Hydra Delegate. Experience seamless asset transfer between departments, studios, and digital content creation tools. Elevate your creative control and iteration speed with grooming and shading enhancements, and much more.

MaterialX support in V-Ray for Solaris

Complete your USD workflow with newly introduced support for MaterialX (MtlX) in V-Ray for Solaris. Now, you can create and render all standard MtlX shading nodes, including the Standard Surface material, ensuring a seamless exchange of shaders across teams and tools.

Houdini 20.0 compatibility

V-Ray now supports the latest Houdini version, so you can benefit from the many important features that it introduces. Render Hydra Ocean and Feather procedurals, or add light textures or shading networks through Light Filters to achieve the desired effect.

Enhanced V-Ray Hydra Delegate

Now you can do even more in V-Ray for Solaris thanks to an enhanced V-Ray Hydra Delegate. We’ve added support for V-Ray Environment Fog and V-Ray Toon. Light Path Expressions have also been powered up with chaining and multiple light tags. Plus, we now support V-Ray post-translate scripts for more advanced pipelines.

More creative control, faster iterations.

This update streamlines grooming and shading, providing more artistic control and faster iterations.

Enhanced V-Ray Fur
Apply V-Ray Fur to Alembic files, utilizing procedurally generated fur for detailed grooms. Leverage asset caching to speed up interactive rendering, getting your iterations as close to real-time as possible. V-Ray Fur now supports displacement and motion blur, simplifying the creation of realistic peach fuzz.

Material Overrides for Volumes
V-Ray now enables material overrides for volumetric effects, allowing you to swiftly and universally replace or modify materials within your scene. With this feature, you can make consistent changes across the entire scene, test and iterate more efficiently, and more.

Creativity accelerated.

Discover new options for finer creative control, a simpler installation process, and more.

Light Directionality Strength
Illuminate your scenes with complete artistic control over the spread of a light’s directional intensity. Add that final touch of magic to your lighting setup.

Chromatic aberration
Create a distinctive and creative aesthetic for your scene with the chromatic aberration post-effect right from the V-Ray Frame Buffer.

User interface enhancements
Streamline asset creation by consolidating complex shading networks in the V-Ray Material Builder. Gain control over Tri-Planar texture projection with the new Cubic projection option. Plus, better bump map scaling at higher resolutions, improved Light Mix output grouping, and more.

Unified V-Ray installer
We’ve simplified the installation process by introducing a single V-Ray build compatible with all major Houdini versions released by SideFX. This saves you time searching for the correct build when a new version is released.