--- title: "3.0 beta 1" canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VMAYA/111739088/3.0%20beta%201" format: markdown --- **Date** – March 10, 2014   ## **New Features** --- - New progressive image sampler - Extensive optimizations for render speed, especially when using brute force GI - The Intel Embree 2.0 library is now integrated into the V-Ray core for static and motion-blurred geometry - Support for OpenSubdiv subdivision of meshes - New streamlined installer - Visibility sets for reflections/refractions in the V-Ray object properties - VRayVRmatMtl material for rendering .vrmat/.vismat/.vrscene files; VRmat converter to convert any material to .vrmat file - VRayMtlGLSL/VRayTexGLSL for direct rendering of GLSL shaders with V-Ray extensions - Option to cache geometry plugins and bitmaps between re-renders to reduce the scene export time - VRaySoftBox texture for creating studio lighting - VRaySwitchMtl which is able to swtich materials based on a texture input - VRayRaySwitch texture which switches the texture based on the ray type similar to the VRay material override - VRayCurvature texture which computes the curvature of the underlying mesh - VRayTemperature texture that sets a color based on Kelvin temperature - VRaySkinMtl material for rendering skin - VRayMtlRenderStats material that can override the per shape render stats; similar to VRay object properties - VRayNURBSTesselation node to controll the tesselation of multiple surfaces at once - Glossiness render element render element able to caclulate reflection and refraction glossiness - "Custom color" render element to calculate color render elements with arbitrary alias - Phoenix FD shader is now integrated and can render Maya fluids, OpenVDB and Field3D files - VRayVolumeGrid node for rendering grid based volumetric formats using the Phoenix FD shader - Initial support for XGen with Maya 2014.5 (via vrscene exporter module, archive and hair render types only) - VRayLensEffects render effect for producing realistic glow and glare ### V-Ray RT - VRay RT can be now started as Maya Viewport renderer ### V-Ray RT CPU - Support for VRayDirt, VRayFastSSS2, VRaySkinMtl materials ### V-Ray RT GPU - Support for most render elements ### VFB - Ability to write deep images (OpenEXR 2/vrst/vrsm) - Support for OpenColorIO color correction - New color corrections - contrast, HSL, color balance ### VRayMesh - Support for the Alembic file format - meshes, hair and particles ### VRayPhysicalCamera - Support for bitmap aperture and optical vignetting ### VRayFastSSS2 - Option for geometry-based sampling for the illumination map - Raytraced mode for multiple scattering ### Distributed Rendering Settings - Options to automatically transfer and cache missing assets to the DR servers ### **Texture Baking** - Support for baking to a vertex color set - Support for baking to PTex ### vRayMetaball - A new geometric object to create isosurface from particle systems ### Lens analyzer - Ability to analyze distortion in arbitrary images ## **Modified Features** --- - Camera 2D pan/zoom feature support - Support for mapped light radius for point/spot/direct lights - Option to use different texture filtering of GI samples (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc) - Option to abort rendering on missing asset (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc) - Option whether to take the up axis from the Maya preferences, or to specify it explicitly (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Misc) - Option to ignore shadow and light linking (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global) - Option to disable self-illumination (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global) - Option to prevent inversion of normal bump in tangent space on flipped UVs (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global - Option "Max ray intensity" to help deal with fireflies in glossy reflections (in the Rendering Settings/VRay/Global) - Correct "raw" render elements for easier compositing (needs the regular and the filter elements to be present too) - Ability to enable/disable several render elements at once - Option to write the main RGB render element in a sub-folder when "Separate folders" is enabled - Ability to abort the rendering using the vrend MEL command - When maximum transparency level is reached, return environment color rather than black - Mappable "frame offset" parameter for File nodes - Default jpeg quality is now 100 in the image options - Automatically create folders that are used in paths for saving images and vrscenes - Improved UI for nodes created by the "Create from V-Ray plugin" menu. - Support for single channel TIFF and TEX files - Hash ID metadata in TIFF and OpenEXR file textures to recognize identical bitmaps - Updated the OpenEXR library to OpenEXR 2 - Improved motion blur raycast accelerator for fast rotating objects ### VRayPtex - Updated the Ptex library to the latest version - Rewritten the Ptex library texture cache for better multithreading on many-core machines - Support for vector displacement with ptex textures ### Texture Baking - Support for displacement - Support for subdivision surfaces - Support for UDIM texture baking - Adjustable bucket size ### VFB - Ability to switch between the most recent images in the history using the 1-9 key - Ability to switch between render elements in the VFB using PageUp and PageDown - The history thumbnails in the VFB now have sRGB color correction if the sRGB setting is enabled - Added MEL command to control the VFB UI functionality - Disable loading images from the history while RT is running - Added a button to stop the current rendering - Added a button to reset the VFB settings (from the Render Settings) - Ability to dock the V-Ray VFB window - Ability to load arbitrary file formats in the VFB; - A color correction rollouts can now be hidden or expanded by clicking on their title - Option to automatically save each render in the history (enabled from the VFB history options dialog) - Option for dynamic bucket splitting towards the end of the image - Option to auto scale the buckets, if the user have set "Test resolution" or renders in a region ### V-Ray RT - Support for rendering animations/sequences - Added an option to progressively increase the rays per pixel - Added an option to disable the initial image undersampling - Support for interactive adjustment of V-Ray user attributes - Optimized scene transfer to the render servers - Improved refresh rate and responsiveness - Support for chaning layers - "Auto-start local slave" option is now removed, "Use Local Machine" should be used instead - Stop RT rendering when changing the scene to leave as much system resources as possible for Maya ### V-Ray RT CPU - Internally uses the production renderer core running in progressive mode ### V-Ray RT GPU - Use different GPU code depending on the features used in the scene - Faster loading of textures - Reduced noise on VRayBlendMtl materials ### VRayPhysicalCamera - Added an "auto guess vert. shift" option to keep the vertical shift when moving the camera ### VRayMtl - Added "Compensate Exposure" option for the self-illumination - Added "Affect channels" option for the reflections in VRayMtl ### VRayMtl / VRayBumpMtl - The bump amount now works with normal maps also ### VRayFastSSS2 - Ability to save/load illumination maps for VRayFastSSS2 material ### VRayHairMtl3 - Faster rendering of transparent materials - "Simplify for GI" is now on by default ### VRayMtlWrapper and VRayObjectProperties - Added "Use irradiace map" option similar to VRayMtl ### VRayLightRect - Option to preview the texture in the viewport - Option for directional distribution of the rectangle light - Added manipulator (with the 't' key) for the light target ### VRayLightDome - Option to multiply the color by the texture ### VRayIESLight - Optimized rendering speed - Added manipulator (with the 't' key) for the light target ### VRaySun - Added a filter color for the light - Support for animated intensity ### VRayHairSampler - Added a "Random by strand" output ### VRayFur - Implement curl parameter; - Support for animated gravity vector - Added "Level Of Detail" option to reduce geometry along the distance from the camera ### VRayMesh - Ability to bring in only parts of proxy files based on object IDs or object names - Ability to store the V-Ray user attributes when creating a proxies - Ability to specify a custom preview mesh when creating proxies and from the VRayMesh node itself - Option the VRayMesh node to act as a "placeholder" without loading the actual file except for rendering - Extra V-Ray attributes to the place3dTexture node for choosing a UV set name for proxies ### VRayPlaceEnvTex - Added an option for ground environment projection - Support for motion blurred Horizontal and Verticle rotation ### VRaySky - Added possibility to override the VRaySun settings ### Import from .vrscene - Support for BRDFVRayMtl, Mtl2Sided, BRDFSSS2Complex, BRDFCarPaint, BRDFHair3, MtlWrapper, MtlOverride - Support for lights and geometry ### Distributed Rendering settings - Option to exclude the local machine from DR rendering - Option to disable DR in batch mode - Ability to limit the DR servers - Added field "Server alias/description" for the DR servers dialog ### GI - Autocreate folders for irradiance map auto-save output - Recognize %d and %0nd format when saving and loading irradiance maps, light caches, photon maps and caustics maps - Ability to use tags in file names of GI maps - Optimized the loading of irradiance map files over the network ### Extra Tex render element - Extra Tex render element: Ability to include/exclude objects ### Matte Shadow render element - Added "Consider for AA" option ### Object ID render element - Option to store the values as integers when saving exr image files ### Scripting - Extend addSceneContent/appendSceneContent to work with environment vars and wildcards - Ability to export cameras with the Python Scene Access API - Help messages for the vray MEL command ### Subdivision / Displacement - True Catmull-Clark subdivision mode for quad meshes - The default subdivision level is now set to 4 - Support for object-space vector displacement - Optimized memory usage of subdivision surfaces - Option to cache the normals for displaced surfaces ### Batch - Support for the "Each frame in separate file" option ### Hair - Added options for dynamic view-dependent hair tesselation - Option to use a global hair tree for faster rendering with many hair systems ### samplerInfo - Added Bump Normal, Ray Depth, Path Length, Surface Material ID, Object ID and Parent Object ID outputs ### ply2vrmesh - Added option to specify the name of the velocity attribute - Added support for material IDs in .obj files - Support for .hclassic and .bhclassic files produced by Houdini 12 - Support for exporting the face and vertex normals in .geo and .bgeo files - Support for converting multiple uv sets from .get/.bgeo files - Convert RealFlow bin file using the correct coordinate system - Support for converting alembic files to vrmesh - Added .prt(krakatoa) to .vrmesh convert option ### vrimg2exr - Added an option to truncate channel names to 32 symbols - -Info switch to print information about render time, scene name and comments, if present - Increase the default buffer size to 100 MB to speed up conversions ### imapviewer - Reduced the number of messages that are printed to the standard output ## **Bug Fixes** --- - TexSampler is exported in the main .vrscene rather than the textures one - VRay Extra Attributes are not dimmed properly in some cases - VRayBlendMtl doesn't do clamping on the amount textures; - VRayBlendMtl should propagate the "Use irradiance map" option from the base material; - VRayBumpMtl not working with VRayMtlSelect render element - Material override doesn't work with VRayHair2, VRayHair3, VrayBumpMtl - VRayPTex does not work properly when it is inside a switch texture - VRayStereoscopic: Linux builds generate wrong .vrst shademaps - Problem exporting custom nodes with more than one 3darray parameter - The "Use 3d mapping" parameter for the custom texture nodes must be off by default - VRayPlaceEnvTex is not created for the dome light when the attribute editor is closed - Instancers and light linking are not exported properly when using plugin name prefix - Bitmaps are loaded even when Maps option is disabled - Crash with 2D displacement when "Static displacement" is turned on - Clamped displacemend with layered texture and negative values - Maya Camera Film Offset parameter doesn't update during rendering animation - User attributes with multiple underscores are not exported properly - User attributes of the form vrayUserColor_ are exported multiple times for the red/green/blue child attributes - "cameraAperture" is always written as 36 in the OpenEXR meta attributes - Incorrect calculation of normal vectors for motion blurred subdivision surfaces - ExtraTex render elements with filtering disabled produce odd results on transparent objects - LightSelect render element doesn't work correctly through reflections with Ward and Phong BRDFs - Multimatte render element with all IDs set to the same number renders as blue instead of white - Velocity render element: Lights do not contribute any velocity information - Render elements names cannot be changed from the Render Settings dialog - Undo delete render elements is not updated in the Render Settings dialog - Fixed rare crashes with tiled textures and dynamic geometry when the dynamic memory limit was reached - Layer Overrides for the AA filter size don't work - Wrong image file name when "images" name in Maya Project Window is empty - Issue with animated visibility of the vray lights - SGI files are read without alpha channel - Wrong render results of mipmapped TEX file format in the last mip-map level ### VFB - Do not show if the scene was saved without opening the VFB first - Fixed crash with curve color correction when there were NaN pixels in the image ### V-Ray RT - Crash with "Keep bitmaps between renders" - Crash when changing shaders connected to PTex textures - Crash when changing properties of VRayObjectProperties node applied to mesh with contruction history applied to it - RT ignores the Cast Shadows toggle of VRayFur - RT doesn't detect changes to global camera FOV override - CarPaintMtl uses much more RAM in RT than in production - When changing the Material ID attribute, RT GPU is not refreshing - RT ignores displacement control attributes applied to the VRayDisplacement node - RT fails update correctly, when the creation of a light is undone - RT does not react to changes in the camera environment color - Modifying a material assigned to an object and a face causes the object to disappear - Crash with RT after clearing script editor history - Crash with bump map connected to VRayFastSSS2 - RT doesn't detect changes to specular and diffuse contributions for standard lights - Stereo mode did not work correctly ### V-Ray RT GPU - The "Camera Scale" attribute is ignored - The standalone crashes when trying to render a 16000x16000 texture on the GPU - Fixed issues with Multi/Sub-object materials on dynamic geometry (instances) - Wrong environment overrides in GPU when swapping or disconnecting textures - RT/GPU is not refreshing when changing the Material ID attribute ### VRayMtl - VRay Extra Attributes are not dimmed properly in some cases - The "Fix dark edges" option has no effect - Dispersion uses the full subdivisions for GI rays increasing the render time - Wrong color in the refraction filter render element when the diffuse is black ### VRayFur - Error with projected textures ### VRayStereoscopic - Linux builds generate wrong .vrst shademaps ### VRayMesh - 'Show whole mesh' doesn't reconstruct the colour sets - Importing vrmesh file containing lots of material ids makes the attribute editor slow - Caches from previous frames must be cleared in batch mode - Proxy is not renderable if created with velocity interval start/end is 0/0 - Deleting history on proxies erases the VRayMesh nodes - The proxy import/create command doesn't execute correctly in Maya non-GUI mode ### VRayLightSphere - Scaling doesn't affect Intensity and Radius parameters ### VRayVertexColor - "Set Name" for "Type" works only when VrayVertexColor has connection with the material of the object ### Texture Baking - Region rendering must be disabled in texture baking mode ### VRayPhysicalCamera - Gizmo scaling reflects on the brightness of the output - The camera should not lock "Fit Resolution Gate" parameter of the Maya camera when "Specify FOV" is "From Maya camera" ### VRayFastSSS2 - Fixed the greenish tint; controlled with a"legacy mode" option - Artifacts at very small scene scales ### Distributed Rendering - V-Ray steps one frame forward when velocity render element or motion blur is used in DR ### nParicles - Randomly missing particles in specific scene when motion blur is off ### Batch - V-Ray log message level setting is not respected in maya batch render ### Hair - Artifacts with very thin strands - Strands with width less than 0.001 don't render correctly ### samplerInfo - The normals outputs are not correct for rays that don't hit anything ### Spot Light - Barn doors are rendered flipped ### Viewport 2.0 - Incorrect gamma with VRay materials