Archive notice: This article was originally published on 17 July 2020. It has been translated into English and lightly edited for clarity while preserving its historical context.
Realtime ray tracing on RTX hardware
Chaos Group continued expanding the Project Lavina beta, which used the RT cores in Nvidia GPUs to accelerate ray tracing. Brick Visual tested the updated feature set in the showcase below.
Animation, cameras and materials
The beta gained a basic animation editor, physical-camera parameters and camera roll, BRDFVrayMtl metalness support, and the V-Ray Sun and Sky model. Bitmap opacity maps worked in Clip mode, while imported lights could be grouped through instancing.
Lighting and data exchange
Dome-light textures could be imported as environments. IES and spot lights were supported from Maya, Modo, Katana, Cinema 4D and SketchUp. A MAXScript transferred camera and animation changes from Lavina back into 3ds Max.
Historical requirements
The beta was free for V-Ray Next licence holders and required a DXR-compatible RTX GPU, Nvidia driver 436.02 or later, Windows 10 version 1809 build 17763 or later, and 8 GB of RAM. Pricing, DCC integration and a final release date had not yet been announced.
Studios should test material parity, light translation, animation round-tripping and GPU memory use before relying on an early realtime renderer.
Sources
https://www.chaosgroup.com/lavina
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/LAV/What%27s+New
https://www.digitalproduction.com/2020/02/12/chaos-group-lavina-in-beta-verfuegbar/
