Vray 5 for Rhino: Lighting Innovation at Your Fingertips

Vray 5 for Rhino brings powerful new features that can significantly improve your 3D rendering and visualization workflows. In this post, we'll highlight the top 5 most exciting features that Vray 5 has to offer for Rhino users. Whether you're an architect, product designer, or 3D artist, Vray 5 provides tools that can save you time and take your renderings to the next level.

Vray Light Generator - Effortless Lighting Variations

One of the most innovative features of Vray 5 is the new Vray Light Generator tool. This gives you an easy way to generate multiple lighting variations for a scene with just a few clicks.

Simply select the ‘Exterior’ or ‘Interior’ option, choose between Sun & Sky or HDRI, and let Vray Light Gen do the rest. It will automatically create different versions of your scene by altering the sun orientation, sky settings, and HDRI rotation.

With the Exterior Sun & Sky option, you can get up to 9 different lighting setups. However, using Interior HDRIs generates a whopping 105 variations from 35 HDRI images. This is an excellent way to quickly explore different lighting moods and find the best option for your project.

The interface makes it simple to browse the generated images, select your favorite, and let Vray update the scene lighting accordingly. It takes the guesswork out of lighting and gives you options fast.

Vray Light Mix - Non-Destructive Lighting Adjustments

Another handy new feature of Vray 5 for Rhino is Vray Light Mix. This allows you to tweak lighting settings and intensity directly in the Vray frame buffer, without having to re-render the entire scene.

To use it, you simply enable the ‘Light Mix’ render element before rendering. Once complete, the frame buffer interface will have a list of all the scene lights. You can independently control each light's intensity, color, and more.

Turning lights on and off or dimming them lets you quickly see the lighting impact and make adjustments. This saves tons of time compared to having to do test renders for every change.

Vray Light Mix is great for fine-tuning the balance between interior artificial and natural lighting. The ability to refine the lighting non-destructively makes it an invaluable addition.

Vray Vision - Interactive Lighting Preview

Vray Vision gives Rhino users a simplified real-time preview of their scene lighting, materials, and renders. It uses technologies like AI denoising to provide an interactive viewport experience.

The key advantage of Vray Vision is that you can tweak the sun position and intensity directly in the viewport. Use the mouse wheel to raise/lower the sun and see shadows update instantly. It’s a fast way to preview different lighting scenarios.

While not as accurate as a final render, the speed of Vray Vision enables quick iterations when setting up lighting. You can get the lighting looking correct without having to wait for test renders to finish. It’s great for quick previews and iterations.

Upgraded Vray Frame Buffer

Vray 5 also brings a redesigned and improved frame buffer interface. It's easier to manage render elements and make adjustments.

The new frame buffer allows you to create composite layers right inside Vray, similar to working in Photoshop. You can stack filters like Color Correction, Vignette, and more. This gives incredible flexibility for non-destructively adjusting renders without rasterizing layers.

Saving output presets with composite layer stacks provides a smooth iterative workflow. Vray's frame buffer evolves into a full post-processing workspace and completes the rendering pipeline inside one application.

Vray Chaos Cosmos Integration

Lastly, one of the biggest additions in Vray 5 for Rhino is native integration with Chaos Cosmos - a massive online library of ready-to-use 3D models and assets.

The new Vray Chaos toolbar makes it easy to quickly browse and import a wide range of photorealistic furniture, accessories, lighting, textures, and more. It lets you drag and drop models directly into your Rhino scene in seconds.

Having access to thousands of realistic assets removes the need to model everything from scratch or purchase models. This can help accelerate architectural and product visualization workflows.

Chaos Cosmos assets are also optimized to render quickly in Vray, taking advantage of tools like Proxy models. This integration with Vray delivers huge productivity and convenience benefits.

Conclusion

Vray 5 introduces key features that improve and speed up the lighting, rendering, and post-processing stages for Rhino users. The combination of powerful new tools like Light Gen, Light Mix, Vray Vision, upgraded Frame Buffer, and Chaos Cosmos integration make this a very compelling upgrade.

If you spend time rendering detailed 3D scenes, the efficiency gains with features like interactive lighting previews and non-destructive adjustments can quickly add up to saving you hours or days of time. For any Rhino users involved in visualization and rendering, Vray 5 is an essential upgrade with major workflow enhancements.