Project Lavina finally comes to fruition as Chaos Group broadens its portfolio with new fully interactive design viz tool
Chaos Group, the developer of the legendary photoreal rendering tool V-Ray, has launched Chaos Vantage, a brand new application that lets users ‘instantly explore’ 3D scenes in a fully ray traced, real-time environment.
Users simply drag-and-drop a V-Ray scene from any recent V-Ray integration, or live link from Autodesk 3ds Max, to bring it into real-time. There’s no geometry to optimise, UVs to unwrap, or lighting to bake. Users then have the ability to see every camera, model and lighting adjustment in Vantage as they create. According to Chaos Group, this turns Vantage into a fully ray-traced viewport that allows artists to make their creative decisions with higher fidelity than ever before.
Vantage, formerly known as Project Lavina, is designed for massive scenes. According to the developers, it can handle billions of polygons without any loss in detail or significant decrease in speed.
The software automatically reads V-Ray’s physically-based lights and materials to produce photorealistic results with 100% ray tracing. Chaos Group states that Vantage is currently averaging 24-30 frames per second on a consumer-grade Nvidia RTX GPU at HD resolution, with additional speed boosts available using two GPUs.
Vantage also includes an Animation Editor that can create, edit and render animated sequences for presentations or previsualization purposes, using a simple transition-based method. Alternatively, the ‘Record Camera’ feature allows a real-time session to be recorded as an MP4 video.
When exploring scenes in real time, automatic Collision Detection allows users to walk upstairs and avoid walking through walls.
“Vantage removes the hurdles that used to hold people back, introducing a ‘real-time anytime’ workflow that lets designers and artists use real-time as freely as they use 3D,” said Phillip Miller, VP of product management at Chaos Group. “As real-time begins to live comfortably within every stage of the design process, it will make a huge impact on how people get their work done, from client meetings and over-the-shoulder reviews to the way they art direct various iterations. This will change everything.”
“For too long, the production process has been getting in the way of the design. With Vantage, you can manipulate scenes right in front of your clients. There’s no more waiting or ‘let me get back to you,’ which completely changes the dynamic of a meeting and the way you collaborate together,” said Carlos Cristerna, principal and RadLad director at Neoscape. “Our work is focused on large-scale developments and international competitions with some of the biggest architecture and development companies. When you are working at that level, anything that helps get people on the same page is extremely powerful. Vantage does that faster than anything I’ve ever seen. It’s truly the way of the future, there’s no going back.”
Chaos Vantage is available now and is compatible with all V-Ray Next and V-Ray 5 integrations. A one-year license is free until June 2, 2021, after which it will cost $389 annually. The software uses DXR ray tracing and currently requires an Nvidia RTX series GPU.
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