The First V-Ray User Group

As I arrived at The Hub in the heart of Foster + Partner’s incredible Battersea campus, the sun was only just dipping over the Thames. Nearly 200 people had gathered to attend this community-led event, uniting V-Ray users from various disciplines including architecture, film, and design working in applications ranging from 3ds Max to Maya, Sketchup, Rhino and Revit.

After five days spent with Chaos Group - whose Sofia team were in the UK visiting with the luminaries of architecture - this was a suitably rewarding culmination to my week.

And I can only see things getting better. Revit and Rhino users will now be able to access the latest and greatest functions in V-Ray 3 such as DeNoiser and Grass and Fur while further benefiting from application specific features such as a material library and Section cuts with V-Ray Clipper. Thus empowered, specialist visualisers will be able to harness the full impact of V-Ray allowing them to work directly from supported BIM/design packages.

In-house design teams, too, can benefit from the latest photoreal rendering technology. With Adobe’s Project Felix integrating V-Ray from the get-go all levels of designers will soon have access to the leading renderer. This now brings a fully integrated workflow across disciplines inside a company and in the world at large.

Chaos Group continue to go from strength to strength with over 5 releases in the last month and their relentless development cycle shows no signs of slowing down. Last week saw the release of V-Ray 3.5 for Maya and 3ds Max, as well as updates to V-Ray for SketchUp.

I, for one, look forward to the continued evolution of V-Ray and what its users in various disciplines accomplish in the near future.