Chaos Group has released 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 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, says Grant Miller, creative director at Ingenuity Studios. 

V-Ray for Houdini utilizes the same smart rendering technology introduced in V-Ray Next, including 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 include:

  • 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.

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