Chaos Group has finally released an official version of V-Ray for Houdini after years of development. Its core functions are not very different from V-Ray for Maya or V-Ray for 3ds Max, but by convention it should not be as complete as V-Ray for 3ds Max in functionality. Anyway, there’s another option for people who like to fiddle with films and television special effects now. In short, V-Ray for Houdini will take your VFX pipeline to the next level.

As a powerful, award-winning renderer solution, V-Ray for Houdini has high-quality CPU and GPU rendering capabilities that have been proven by production for high-end VFX and animation, self-contained lighting, material shading and rendering tools, as well as powerful computing ability. Besides, it can make full use of all the hardware resources, is especially designed for dealing with great range of scenarios and complex projects, and can work seamlessly with Houdini and other V-Ray programs you like.

V-Ray for Houdini comes with the most complete and advanced rendering solutions, enabling users to easily develop visual effects and perform high-performance ray tracing and interactive rendering, thus effectively simplifying the complex workflows. With its help, your rendering work will be smarter and easier, saving you a lot of valuable time.

// Key Features //

Feature	Description
HIGH-PERFORMANCE RAY TRACING	Powerful CPU and GPU-accelerated rendering built for the demands of high-end production.
INTERACTIVE RENDERING	Interactive look development supported in the Houdini render view.
VOLUME RENDERING	Fast and accurate rendering of native Houdini volumes and OpenVDB caches.
MULTI-GPU PRODUCTION RENDERING	GPU bucket rendering with fast multi-GPU performance and support for Cryptomattes.
UNIFIED WORKFLOW FOR CUSTOM ATTRIBUTES	Control custom attributes of geometry (including splines and particles) with the User Color node.
TEXTURE BAKING	Bake lighting and textures for game assets and real-time environments.
CHAOS CLOUD RENDERING	Simple, one-click solution to submit jobs to render on the Chaos Cloud.
ADAPTIVE DOME LIGHT	Exceptionally fast image-based environment lighting using V-Ray Scene Intelligence.
ADAPTIVE LIGHTS	Unique method for ultrafast rendering of scenes with hundreds or even thousands of lights.
GLOBAL ILLUMINATION	Highly optimized indirect lighting with V-Ray’s proprietary Light Cache and brute force GI methods.
LIGHT INSTANCES	Instance lights with full control over per-instance light parameters, without affecting light link settings.
MATERIAL STYLESHEETS	Support for material overrides based on groups, bundles and attributes.
V-RAY SCENE MATERIAL OVERRIDES	Automatically import material node hierarchies from V-Ray scene files and make changes in Houdini.
PHYSICAL HAIR	Create realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights using the V-Ray Physical Hair material.
PBR MATERIALS	The standard V-Ray Material supports Metalness reflection values for PBR shader workflows.
ALSURFACE MATERIAL	Physically-based shader with built-in SSS controls, popular for rendering realistic skin.
GPU MATERIAL ASSIGNMENTS	Per-Primitive Material Assignment is now supported on the GPU, allowing artists to utilize Stylesheets and the Material SOP.
VRSCANS MATERIAL LIBRARY SUPPORT	1000+ ultra-realistic physically scanned materials ready to import and render.
V-RAY SCENE EXCHANGE	Transfer and override the properties of V-Ray scenes from other apps like Maya and 3ds Max.
INSTANCING	Instance any object type (including volumes) using Packed Primitives, Instancer and “instancepath” attributes.
PACKED PRIMITIVES	Efficient handling of Houdini’s native packed primitives for instancing at render time.
ALEMBIC SUPPORT	Support for Houdini’s native Alembic layering, transformations, instancing and per-object material overrides.
PARTICLES	Drive shader parameters such as color, alpha and particle size through custom per-point attributes.
V-RAY FUR	Fast rendering of realistic fur and hair with V-Ray Fur.
ENVIRONMENT FOG	Quickly simulate the effects of participating media such as fog and atmospheric dust.
AERIAL PERSPECTIVE	Create natural-looking atmospheric depth as objects fade into the distance.
RENDER ELEMENTS	Render any set of lights (including wildcard selections) as separate render elements.
LIGHT SELECT RENDER ELEMENT	Render a wide variety of beauty, utility and matte passes for complete control in compositing.

// Official Demo Video //

// Edition Statement //

AppNee provides the V-Ray (Next) for Houdini multilingual full installers and unlocked files (cgauth.dll, V4RCore.dll, vray_BRDFScanned.dll, etc.) for Windows 64-bit only.

// Installation Notes //

for v4.30.03:

1. Download and install V-Ray Next for Houdini (there is no need to install the License Server)
2. Copy the unlocked files to the corresponding paths:
   • cgauth.dll -> C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Houdini 18.0.460\appsdk\bin\
   • vray_BRDFScanned.dll -> C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Houdini 18.0.460\appsdk\bin\plugins\
3. Done

// Download URLs //

Version	Support	Download	Size
V-Ray Next for Houdini
v4.30.03	Houdini v18.0.460		224 MB

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