LOS ANGELES, Calif., Aug. 09, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today,  Chaos Group releases the open beta for  V-Ray for Houdini, bringing its Academy Award-winning rendering technology to every part of the VFX pipeline. With V-Ray for Houdini, artists can apply high-performance ray tracing to all of their creative projects, connecting standard applications like Autodesk’s 3ds Max and Maya and Foundry’s Katana and Nuke. Now, no matter where production artists are in the pipeline, they’ll be able to create and move assets seamlessly, without having to duplicate work.

“Adding V-Ray for Houdini streamlines so many aspects of our pipeline,” said Grant Miller, Creative Director at Ingenuity Studios. “Combined with V-Ray for Maya and Nuke, we have a complete rendering solution that allows look-dev on individual assets to be packaged and easily transferred between applications.”

V-Ray for Houdini utilizes the same smart rendering technology introduced in V-Ray Next, including powerful scene intelligence, fast adaptive lighting and production-ready GPU rendering. V-Ray for Houdini includes two rendering engines – V-Ray and V-Ray GPU – allowing visual effects artists to choose the one that best takes advantage of their hardware.

V-Ray for Houdini, Beta 1 Features :

• GPU & CPU Rendering – High-performance GPU & CPU rendering capabilities for high-speed look development and final frame rendering.

• Volume Rendering – Fast, accurate illumination and rendering of VDB volumes through the V-Ray Volume Grid. Support for Houdini volumes and MacOS are coming soon.

• V-Ray Scene Support – Easily transfer and manipulate the properties of V-Ray scenes from applications such as Maya and 3ds Max.

• Alembic Support – Full support for Alembic workflows including transformations, instancing and per object material overrides.

• Physical Hair – New Physical Hair shader renders realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights. Only hair as SOP geometry is supported currently.

• Particles – Drive shader parameters such as color, alpha and particle size through custom, per-point attributes.

• Packed Primitives – Fast and efficient handling of Houdini's native packed primitives at render time.

• Material Stylesheets – Full support for material overrides based on groups, bundles and attributes. VEX and per-primitive string overrides such as texture randomization are planned for launch.

• Instancing – Supports copying any object type (including volumes) using Packed Primitives, Instancer, and "instancepath" attribute.

• Light Instances – Instancing of lights is supported, with options for per-instance overrides of the light parameters and constant storage of light link settings.

To join the beta, please visit: the  Chaos Group website.

Availability

V-Ray for Houdini is currently available for Houdini and Houdini Indie 16.5.473 and later. V-Ray for Houdini supports Windows, Linux and MacOS.

About Chaos Group

Chaos Group is a worldwide leader in computer graphics technology, helping artists and designers create photorealistic imagery and animation for architecture, design, and visual effects. Chaos Group’s award-winning physically-based rendering and simulation software is used daily by top design studios, architectural firms, advertising agencies, and visual effects companies around the globe. Today, the company's research and development in ray-traced rendering, cloud computing and real-time ray tracing is shaping the future of creative storytelling and digital design. Founded in 1997, Chaos Group is privately owned with offices in Sofia, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Tokyo. For more information, visit:  chaosgroup.com.