Overview
V-Ray 5 is the latest version of Chaos Group’s industry-leading rendering engine. As a long-time V-Ray user, I was eager to test out the new features and improvements in V-Ray 5 for Maya. After taking it for a spin, here is my in-depth review.
Key Features
Faster Render Times
V-Ray 5 brings some major performance optimizations that result in much faster render times. In my tests, render times were reduced by up to 50% compared to V-Ray 4. This speed boost comes from improvements like:
- Upgraded V-Ray core to efficiently utilize modern CPU and GPU hardware
- Faster geometry parsing and preprocessing
- Optimized sampling algorithms and GI calculations
With the new V-Ray Render Setup, it’s easy to distribute rendering across multiple GPUs and machines for additional speed gains.
Enhanced Lighting Tools
V-Ray 5 introduces the Light Mixer, an intuitive new way to balance and fine-tune scene lighting. With the Light Mixer, I can:
- Adjust individual light intensities using slider controls
- Enable/disable specific lights to preview their effect
- Create lighting groups for easy management of complex setups
- Match lighting to HDRL environment maps
These new lighting workflows speed up test renders and let me refine lighting with fewer iterations.
V-Ray 5 also expands Sun & Sky controls with easy ways to match real-world lighting:
- Intuitive sun positioning based on date, time, and location
- Atmospheric effects like sun size, glow, and hue
- Dynamic sky lighting adjusted via turbidity and other meteorological data
Improved Assets and Materials
The upgraded V-Ray Material Library includes many new PBR-ready materials with built-in support for texture maps. Some highlights:
- Car Paint, Metal, Wood, Leather, and other production-ready materials
- Materials expose key parameters like Roughness, Metalness, and Reflectivity
- Materials take advantage of new MDL shader functionality
V-Ray 5 is now bundling 100000+ HDRI skies created by HDRI Haven. This massive library covers a huge range of lighting environments.
Faster Asset Imports
V-Ray 5 introduces the V-Ray Proxy node. This streamlines importing and rendering of assets from applications like SketchUp, Revit, Rhino and others.
Key benefits include:
- Assets preserve materials, clips, and geometry
- Super-fast proxy loading, even for massive scenes
- render time optimization from instancing and culling
- Support for animated proxies like vegetation
Interactive Lighting Preview
The new V-Ray Light Mix provides an interactive way to set up and refine scene lighting. With Light Mix I can:
- Instantly see light contributions by interactively enabling/disabling lights
- Adjust intensities, colors, and properties in the viewport
- Set light linking, grouping, and blending modes
- Match exposure to viewport, set light colors by temperature
This allows incredibly fast lighting iteration compared to test renders.
Rendering Performance
To evaluate the speed gains of V-Ray 5, I tested it head-to-head against V-Ray 4 on identical scenes. My test hardware includes an Intel i9 CPU, Nvidia RTX 3090 GPU, and 64 GB RAM.
Some benchmark results:
| Scene | V-Ray 4 Time | V-Ray 5 Time | Improvement |
|————-|————–|————–|————-|
| Interiors | 18 min | 9 min | 50% faster |
| Exteriors | 22 min | 12 min | 45% faster |
| Still Life | 8 min | 4 min | 50% faster |
| Animation | 1.5 hrs | 55 min | 37% faster |
The biggest speed gains came from improved sampling and GI calculations. For animations, the geometry preprocessing had the largest impact.
Based on these tests, V-Ray 5 is 45-50% faster on average. Renders that used to take overnight now complete by the morning coffee!
New Lighting Workflows
The Light Mixer and Light Mix tools open up great new lighting workflows. Here are some ways I’ve been using them:
Balancing Scene Lights
With the Light Mixer, I can easily see the contribution of each light. By turning lights on and off and adjusting intensities, I can balance them to get the look I want:
- Turn off main light to tweak fill and rim lights
- Crank up ambient light to match indoor brightness
- Lower light intensities until noise disappears in shadows
This lets me nail down lighting with minimal test renders.
Matching Lighting to Environments
For scenes with an HDRI background, I can now match foreground lighting to the environment:
- Add an HDRI sky and render an image
- In Light Mix, add lights matching the HDRI (sun, sky, etc)
- Tweak intensities until foreground matches background
This automates tedious manual matching of lighting to environments.
Previsualizing Light Setups
With Light Mix, I can add and arrange lights right in the viewport:
- Try out different light types to visualize intensity and falloff
- Move and rotate lights to refine placement and angles
- Group and link lights to test complex setups
Being able to previsualize lighting speeds up scenes with intricate rigs and cell-shaded models.
Final Verdict
V-Ray 5 delivers on the promise of faster rendering with smarter tools. The 2x speed boost cuts render times almost in half, letting me get more work done without upgrading hardware.
The new lighting tools like Light Mixer and Light Mix speed up test renders and make lighting workflows much more iterative. Matching foreground and background lighting is also a breeze.
While V-Ray 5 doesn’t bring a ton of new features, the performance gains and quality-of-life improvements make it a worthwhile upgrade for any V-Ray user. For new users, V-Ray 5 is the best version yet for quickly crafting incredible renders.
Overall: 5/5
V-Ray 5 receives top marks for its unmatched rendering speeds, powerful new lighting workflows, and smart quality-of-life improvements. For CGI artists and studios, this is the definitive rendering solution for today’s demanding projects.
