Hello everyone, It’s been a while since my last blog post. As a registered V-Ray user, I had the chance to be one of V-Ray 3.0’s beta testers around the end of September 2013, a little while before I became one of the speakers for the V-Ray Community Meeting Asia Pacific Tour on October 2013. At the time I created the “Simplistic Cozy Pantry” scene and managed to test one of the new features: Progressive Rendering.

After the tour I didn’t have any more chance to test V-Ray 3.0 Beta due to my busy schedule and rushed hours meetings, lots of deadlines and all our clients asking to finish their projects before the Christmas Holidays. Finally the holiday season came, we delivered on time and then got back to some deeper testing of V-Ray 3.0. Some of you might think that I’m a workaholic but trust me, I’m not. I always say that this is what CEO’s do, work on holidays and have holidays on work days, but apparently I’m still working this very day.

I used the same scene created for 2G Academy’s workshop for Universitas Tarumanagara back then but this time using a different technique. For the workshop rendering I only used V-Ray Sun and V-Ray Sky. This time I tried V-Ray Light Dome and used one of our own HDRI’s and at last had some free time to try Brute Force (previously we always used Irradiance Map). This scene was actually finished around January 2014 but I didn’t have a chance to post it or write about it in our blog.

I tested both of the normal production rendering (BF + LC) and the V-Ray RT GPU. In December our studio migrated to Itoo Software’s Forest Pack Pro because they have lots of flexibility and most importantly, they support the V-Ray RT GPU rendering and keep developing it.

For the production rendering test I used Brute Force + Light Cache, I tried to create a cloudy evening and still have the red sun shining.

Since this is my first try using BF + LC, I found out lots of problems and unfortunately found the problem after the rendering finished. As you can see on the raw render image, there are lots of fire flies scattered on the ceiling, white wall and the wooden wall. I used a render farm to render this image and it required approximately 30 minutes. I used my i7 3930k processor for the workstation and used 2 Boxx computers (32 threads each) and 4 Dual Xeon Pc’s (40 threads each). The fire flies happen when we have a very bright and burnt reflection. Fortunately V-Ray 3.0 already has the solution for this; they have a new feature to remove the fire flies issue, it’s called Max Ray Intensity. Unfortunately I forgot to turn it on. Brute Force has lots of problems when it comes to rendering trees or grass, mostly with the very dense leaves/grass it requires lots of samples to do the rendering. I tested this scene with V-Ray 2.4 and it required approximately 55 minutes. With V-Ray 3.0 now it’s so much faster than V-Ray 2.4. Thanks to the faster Ray Caster and the Embree option to speed up everything. Embree is an option to enable the Intel Embree Ray Caster and boost the rendering even faster.

Well anyways, I’m not going to discuss any technique in this blog, so here are the two images I created using BF and LC. I tweaked the sky to get a more dramatic look, played with motion blur for the clouds and added some fog using Z-Depth.

After testing the production rendering, I tried to do it using V-Ray RT GPU. Even though it’s not perfect, V-Ray RT can now be used for production rendering and can also produce render elements. Even though not all render elements are available, the crucial ones are such as Reflection, Refraction, GI, Lighting, and Light Select. Another point is that GPU’s nowadays have more memory. We managed to get our hands on the GTX Titan which has 2688 cores and 6 GB of RAM (and now NVIDIA announced the GTX Titan Black, it’s just great!). IToo Forest Pack has also really helped when they announced that it would support the V-Ray RT GPU. It really helps to scatter the grass and the trees and we don’t need to use lots of V-Ray proxies for GPU rendering saving lots of time and helping maximize the GPU memory.

For this scene it still requires around 1 hour using 1 GTX Titan. V-Ray RT is based on brute force, so when it comes to rendering trees and grass it needs more time since it needs to calculate lots of samples. Even though the result is produced using the V-Ray 3.0 Beta version, the result still looks good for some small – medium scale projects. These are the results using V-Ray 3.0 RT GPU. You can now check my review about V-Ray 3.0 RT GPU rendering.
Here are the results using V-Ray 3.0 RT GPU: