V-Ray 3 SP4 in a nutshell

While rifling through the changeLog file is a pleasure I wouldn't dream of taking away from anyone, I thought I could share a bit of insight in some of the work matured in the past six months and culminated in this release.

You have seen the results of the first iteration of the denoiser in the other post of mine (if you haven't, feel free to.), so I'll skip that.

*)The LightCache, long-term friend of V-Ray users has had a lift, and it's now able to greatly optimise the amount of calculations to be done while preserving accuracy (measurably so.).
The biggest speed-ups are expected in scenes with complex materials where we can approximate their appearance to GI rays using the light cache only without performing material calculations at all.
Of course, this is done in such a way so as to make sure the result stays the same.
Depending on scene and conditions, a free 3% minimum rendertime boost is to be expected, although we have seen it grow to as much as 25% in some specific scenario.

*)The Microfacet GTR BRDF has also been refined, and now its performance is in line with the much simpler models, while retaining all the great features which make the model so popular among users.
Even with the most extreme of asymmetric, low tail falloff values, its convergence rate, without fear of "fireflies"anymore, has been made as quick, when not quicker and more efficient in some corner cases, than the other three models available.
It can now be used as main BRDF without concern.

*)Another out-of-sight -quite literally so- feature SP4 will bring is automatic tessellation reduction for displacement, hair and fur outside of the camera frustum (or view pyramid), which allows for more detailed in-view displacements for the same memory budget.

*)Progress on UI continues, with the (tiled) textures memory budget moved to the render panel, close to the dynamic memory limit, simplifying the allocation of the dynamic budget, and control of the caching behavior.

*)The Sampler UI has been streamlined too, and only offers "Bucket" and "Progressive", while retaining the previous flexibility.

*)The VrayLight has had a makeover as well, and now has the most used controls neatly arranged into the one rollout, immediately presented and available, with the rest of the UI adapting to user choices through contxetual rollouts creation.

*)The VRayVolumeGrid has new and much improved curve controls, which you will be able to pop out of the usual UI and maximise.
The control points handling has also been improved, and the UI is able to communicate clearly a lot more data to the user, in a very usable, correlated fashion (Color and opacity gradients and curves, for example, and so on).
And these are the main new features coming with Service Pack 4 this coming week.

Feel free to check in the download section of the Chaos Group site for early birds! ;)
 

L.

*)The header image is a one minute forty seconds render, at 900 x 675 pixels, denoised in 5 seconds on CPU.