Instant scene variations, deforming geometry and render elements power new update
Chaos has released Chaos Vantage 2.0, in what it describes as a massive upgrade to its realistic real-time visualisation tool.
With nearly 20 major new features, Vantage is said to provide ‘easy access’ to photorealistic animations, previs and scene explorations at ‘lightning speeds’.
“In 3D, you tend to wait for quality, and people accept this, even when it disrupts their whole flow,” said Simeon Balabanov, Senior Product Manager at Chaos. “With Vantage 2, we are giving them quality, speed and flexibility in one place, so they can respond to any creative idea or client request.”
Representing years of proprietary R&D, Vantage was designed to help users ‘instantly explore’ massive 3D scenes in a fully ray-traced, real-time environment. During import, Chaos highlights that, there is no geometry to optimise, UVs to unwrap or lighting to bake. Users simply drag and drop a V-Ray scene (.vrscene), or Live-Link to Vantage from 3ds Max, SketchUp, Rhino, Revit, or Cinema 4D.
One of the headline new features is ‘Scene States’, which is designed to allow artists to use non-destructive variations to explore different styles, moods and camera angles. According to the developers, each state can easily be saved and cycled through with a click, making it easier for teams to determine which lighting, materials or post-processing effects will appeal most to their intended viewers.
To enhance realism, Vantage 2 features a host of new animation capabilities, including support for deforming meshes to support natural human movement, AXYZ’s anima 4D people and .vrscene effects that were previously only available in V-Ray.
“Vantage’s speed is just unbelievable. 20K images are taking 20 minutes,” said Dương Thanh Nguyên, Founder at BOC Studio. “This is especially helpful because our clients are looking for fewer iterations and faster feedback. Vantage helps us interact with them more effectively, so they can explore their projects, see changes and make important decisions faster — even while collaborating online.”
The new ‘Render Elements’ (aka AOVs) feature is said to prepare Vantage for the world of production rendering, which requires careful composites to achieve the best look. According to the company, rendered output can now be split into their ‘back-to-beauty’ components for real-time editing in post, enabling more artistic effects and quick integration with live-action footage.
Meanwhile, Chaos Scatter, allows millions of 3D objects to be distributed in a few clicks, forming forests, fields and crowds without weighing down the scene.
Other new features include Nvidia AI Denoiser with upscaling (for denoising or going from HD to 4K without adding more render time); new animation effects; light creation and placement; scattering fog; quality presets; HDR Monitor Support; nested .vrscenes; and a refined UI.
Finally, Vantage can now also run on DXR-compatible AMD GPUs, as well as Nvidia GPUs.
