V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Program Now Available

V-Ray for Softimage is the fifth product in the Chaos Group portfolio covering platforms from Autodesk 3ds Max and Maya to Rhino and SketchUp. V-Ray for Softimage now supports all major Softimage features and comes with ICE support, animated parameters, strong render tree support, weightmaps and Sun & Sky functionality.

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Eligibility and Feedback Process
All of you interested to join the V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta can do this by following just a few simple steps:

All Beta testers are encouraged to actively provide feedback and submit questions. The V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Testing Program has its own forum on the Chaos Group website. Everyone who is eligible and becomes a part of the program will gain access to the forum and will be able to share opinion and exchange information with other people from the industry. This is one of the ways you can submit bugs, requests for new features and share your work. Personal contact with the Development Team is also an option. You can send your comments to vraysoftimage@chaosgroup.com

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Download and Installation Requirements
To obtain access to the Beta Program, please fill in the form with your contact information. In order to fill in the form you have to be a registered user at the Chaos Group website. Shortly after you submit your application, you will receive an email from our support team informing you that you can now download the V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta from the Chaos Group website. In order to complete the process and confirm your willingness to test V-Ray for Softimage, you will be asked to send your authorization key to support@chaosgroup.com.

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Benefits
Throughout the years, our experience has proved that beta testers and contributors are of an exceptional importance to the success of Chaos Group products. Knowing and communicating with our beta testers and keeping strong relationships with them are our main priority during the development stage. Your meaningful and valuable feedback is what makes our products trustworthy, competitive and very much oriented to the specific needs of the 3D artists. During the V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Program we will aim to provide additional incentives to the active, passionate and devoted beta testers.

Time Frame
The V-Ray for Softimage Public Beta Program will run for a period of approximately 2 months, starting on September 28th.

Video used with permission, courtesy of Simon Reeves

• ICE support support - render geometry produced by the award-winning Softimage ICE system, including particles, strands, hair, ICE-managed color arithmetic, all fully animated.

• Animated parameters - V-Ray will efficiently render Softimage objects with animated parameters and an arbitrary number of keyframes. All geometry modifications and many color-oriented animatable parameters are supported.

• Strong render tree support - V-Ray supports dozens of the procedural shader node types for the Softimage render tree, and new ones are added on a regular basis and made available through service packs.

• Weightmaps - apply transformations to geometry or color attributes of a scene on a per-vertex basis with full support for Softimage weightmaps.

• V-Ray Sun and Sky - create realistic outdoor scenes with physically accurate lighting and atmosphere effects, while maintaining control over rendering times.

V-Ray supported features

Shading

• Support for efficient material layering.

• VRayCarPaintMtl.

• Support for PTex textures.

• V-RayToon shader.

• Support for dispersion in refractions for VRayMtl.

Lights

• Physically accurate lights.

• Efficient illumination from HDR environments.

Camera

• Lens distortion through Nuke displacement maps.

• Option to turn off camera motion blur.

• Shutter efficiency for motion blur.

Render output

• Support for additional render elements.

• Output of multi-channel scanline OpenEXR files with data-window.

Effects

• Depth of field with bokeh effects.

• Accurate motion blur.

Scene translator

• Support for .vrscene output for rendering with V-Ray Standalone.

Supported platforms

Softimage 7.0
Softimage 7.5
Softimage 2010
Softimage 2011
Softimage 2011 ASP
Softimage 2012
(64-bit supported on all platforms)

The V-Ray Rendering System has single-handedly transformed the CG industry with state-of-the-art rendering technology. If you currently work within the Softimage platform, you will certainly want to checkout what V-Ray has to offer.