--- title: "3.40.01" canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VSKETCHUP/155126094/3.40.01" format: markdown --- *Official Release* **Date** – Mar. 8, 2017   ### **Installation & Licensing** - New streamlined installer combining installations for SketchUp 2015, 2016 and 2017 - The license can now be activated or released in a floating license environment - New License Server introduces flexible licensing for all Chaos Group products, without the need for any physical devices to be plugged into your machine ### User Interface - V-Ray Asset Editor - Manage settings, materials, lights and geometry in a single window - Updated V-Ray for SketchUp toolbar - Quick access to common features, and the V-Ray Asset Editor - GPU Device Selection tool added to the V-Ray Tools menu - Select which graphic card/s should be used for GPU accelerated rendering - Added Render, Render with V-Ray Interactive, Export V-Ray Scene File and Show VFB buttons to the Asset Editor - Improved V-Ray context menu in the host application, which allows shortcut key-binding through SketchUp - Implemented buttons for switching between basic and advanced parameters for various setting sections - Improved and re-organized light list and advanced light parameters editor - Improved and re-organized geometry list and advanced geometry parameters editor - Improved and re-organized Quick/Basic Rendering Settings section - Improved and re-organized Advanced Rendering Settings section - Implemented Save and Load V-Ray Settings from file buttons. Added Revert to default Render Settings button - Added easy to use interface for switching between Interactive, Progressive, and GPU based rendering - Improved Quality slider and quality preset values - Improved Camera Controls - Toggle between simple and advanced camera parameters - Added exposure value(EV) control - Added white balance control - Added a defocus slider and input value field - Change the defocus amount without altering camera exposure - Implemented Vertical Tilt control commonly used for perspective compensations - Improved Render Output roll-out interface - Improved render elements selection - Implemented Get View Aspect function in the UI - Automatically get the exact screen aspect ratio - Implemented Show Safe Frames function in the UI - See the exact render frame, and easily set camera positions - Improved Environment roll-out interface - Added easily accessible toggles for commonly used effects such as Material Override, GI, Caustics, and AA Filtering - Exposed Material Override functionality for easy access - Enable or disable the effect with a toggle - Exposed V-Ray Swarm functionality for easy access - Toggle the network resources usage, and change usage percentage with a slider - Added a V-Ray Swarm manager - Monitor network rendering jobs - Improved Material Library and Library UI - Implemented drag and drop functionality when adding a material from the library to the scene assets list - Added seven new Material Swatch Previews: Generic, Fabric, Floor, Ground, Subsurface Scattering, Wall and Wall Close-up - Implemented Purge unused materials function and a button - Improved material layer management, ordering, and naming - Improved tool-tips - Easily accessible, detailed information about the use and application of parameters and buttons ### **Improved Speed and Quality** - A large number of render speed/performance optimizations were introduced - Implemented multi-threaded scene parsing - The Intel® Embree library is now integrated into V-Ray and boosts performance when rendering both static and dynamic geometry - Improved rendering performance for dynamic meshes, instances, V-Ray Fur and V-Ray Proxy objects - Implemented Variance Base Adaptive Sampler (VBAS) - It improves and balances the sampling adaptation in dark or bright areas of the image ### **V-Ray Swarm** - Implemented V-Ray Swarm (previously Distributed Rendering) - Implemented the Swarm Manager - A web interface that lists all the machines used for rendering. It gives access to status and additional information about the distributed rendering process - Added Cap CPU Utilization toggle - Limit the utilization of the local machine CPU (to a maximum of one thread). Continue using your computer without noticeable slowdown, while the other Swarm nodes are rendering the image   ### **Additional Improvements** - Implemented a new Progressive Image Sampler - Render with the production engine in progressive mode - Implemented V-Ray Swarm (previously Distributed Rendering) - Implemented V-Ray Scene exporter (exports .vrscene files) - Implemented Probabilistic Lights optimization control - Added Max Ray Intensity optimization control - Implemented global minimum Shading Rate control - Implemented Dynamic Bucket Splitting - Dynamically decrease the bucket size in the final rendering stages - Light leak prevention added and enabled for the Light Cache (GI engine) - Created the Wipe Scene tool - Clean a model from the 3D Warehouse, or clear all V-Ray related data from a scene and start from scratch   ### **Materials General** - Implemented Material Presets system and Quick Setting interface - Drag and drop materials from the OS file browser and into the V-Ray Asset Editor - Drag and rearrange material layers for easy shader creation and management - Implemented ready-made V-Ray Material Library - Choose from more than 500 materials, organized in categories - Microfacet GTR / GGX BRDF added to the V-Ray Material options - With fine highlight control, this is ideal for shading metal and other reflective surfaces - Thumbnails are automatically saved when saving a material file ( .vrmat). Materials can then be visually identified in the OS file browser - Added the option to display any texture from a shading tree in the SketchUp viewport. The same texture can be used for SketchUp size modifications - Implemented texture helper to give full control over geometry UVs when using procedural V-Ray specific textures ### **New or improved materials** - Improved Generic material (VRayMtl) - Added V-Ray Subsurface Scattering material - Added V-Ray Car Paint material - Added V-Ray Stochastic Flakes - Added V-Ray Override Material - Added V-Ray Bump Material - Added V-Ray Hair Material - Improved V-Ray Blend material - Improved Two-sided material ### **New or improved textures** - Improved procedural textures UI, parameter arrangement and default values - Added ability to copy-paste or drag & drop texture maps and color values between different input slots - Added V-Ray Curvature map - Added V-Ray Edges Tex - Create wireframe rendering and a rounded corners effect - Added V-Ray MultiSubTex - Added V-Ray TriPlanar texture - Added Angle Blend - Added V-Ray Composite map - Added Tiles texture - Create procedural tile and brick patterns with random variations in color - Improved V-Ray Dirt - Improved Falloff - Improved Fresnel - Improved Noise   ### **V-Ray Interactive Rendering** - Improved performance and stability - Added support for the V-Ray Clipper objects and SketchUp section planes (treated as clippers) - Added support for the V-Ray Material anisotropy effect - Added support for V-Ray Fur - Added support for the V-Ray Infinite Plane - Added support for textured IOR of the V-Ray Material   ### **V-Ray GPU Acceleration** - The CUDA engine supports and is optimized for Fermi-, Kepler-, Maxwell- and Pascal- based NVIDIA cards - Added support for Light Cache GI and Irradiance Map loaded from file - Improved support for big number of material effects and procedural textures - Implemented Coherent Tracing, which improves rendering performance - Implemented QMC sampling, which improves rendering performance - Added support for displacement - Added support for anisotropic highlights and reflections - Added support for V-Ray Fur - Added support for layered material transparency ### **V-Ray Stereoscopic Rendering** - Implemented One-Click **VR Cubemap** and **VR Spherical Panorama** stereo rendering. This is a hard-coded way of rendering dual camera stereoscopic images for use with preferred VR headsets   ### **V-Ray Proxy** - Added support for Alembic 1.5 ( .abc) files   ### **Environmental Effects** - Implemented Aerial Perspective atmospheric effect - Added support for the SketchUp viewport fog, using the Aerial Perspective effect   ### **V-Ray Sun & Sky System** - Added a new sky model - Hosek et al - Added ground color parameter - Ground Albedo - Added Blend Angle and Horizon Offset parameters   ### **V-Ray Mesh Light** - Implemented V-Ray Mesh Light - convert any geometry to a light source - All the Mesh Lights in the scene can be found in the Lights list for easy access and control - The V-Ray Mesh Light automatically becomes a component and can be copied as component in the SketchUp scene   ### **Rectangle Light** - Improved rendering performance with area lights - Implemented Shape parameter that lets you change the light shape to Ellipse - When creating a rectangle light one can set the direction by holding down the Shift key   ### **Spot Light** - When creating a Spot Light one can set the direction by holding down the Shift key. Cone size and Penumbra Angle can be controlled as well - Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections for the Spot Light   ### **Sphere Light** - Added support for bitmap textures and texture projections ### **V-Ray Dome Light** - Implemented a function to control the Dome Light orientation by rotating the scene gizmo   ### **Light Intensity Tool** - Implemented Light Intensity Tool for adjusting light intensity in the viewport of SketchUp. Click-dragging up or down over a light will change its intensity   ### **V-Ray Clipper** - Implemented V-Ray Clipper - Added support for native SketchUp Section Planes, handled and displayed in the interface as a V-Ray Clipper - Added support for nested/grouped Section Planes and Clipper meshes - Added ability to clip with custom meshes - Added support for Section Plane visibility. Layer visibility can also be used   ### **V-Ray Fur** - Implemented V-Ray Fur - A SketchUp component will be created with the fur object - The V-Ray Fur can use the material of the base geometry, component or group   ### **V-Ray Render Elements** - Added Extra Texture render element. This produces an element with a single texture applied to all objects in the scene. The input texture can be a bitmap or a procedural texture such as V-Ray Dirt or V-Ray Curvature. - Added a Z-Depth render element, which provides information about object distance from the camera in the current view. Objects between the furthest and nearest points are rendered in varying shades of gray. - Added V-Ray Denoiser (as a render element). The V-Ray Denoiser takes an existing render and applies a denoising operation to it after the image is completely rendered. The denoising operation detects areas with noise and smooths them out - Added Object ID render element. The IDs can be determined based on groups and components   ### **V-Ray Frame Buffer** - Added the option to automatically save each render in the history (enabled from the VFB history options dialog) - The 1-9 keyboard keys can be used to switch between recent images saved in the VFB history - Added new color correction controls - Contrast & Highlight Burn, HSL, Color Balance, White balance, and Background image - Implemented Save and Load color correction functions - Added the ability Apply color corrections when saving to file - Added the ability to load arbitrary image file formats in the V-Ray VFB for post-processing - Deleting an image from the VFB history now sends it to the Recycle Bin - The History and Color Corrections toolbars can be docked to the VFB - Added ability to save multi-channel Open EXR and V-Ray Image files directly from VFB - Support for Open Color IO color corrections - Added an option for loading image files as VFB background or foreground layers - LUT ( .cube) files can be generated and saved based on color corrections set in the VFB > Lens effects can be applied directly in the VFB