We had the opportunity to make an interview and ask questions Vladimir Koylazov, the co-founder and CTO at Chaos Group. Chaos Group is a company located in Sofia, Bulgaria with more than 10 years of experience in CG industry and well known for their popular render engine, V-Ray. The questions in this interview were pointed not only on the company but also on their flagship V-Ray which became in the last years a complete render solution used by many CG studios around the world. By this occasion we would like to thank you Chaos Group for their time and support during this interview. At the end of the interview is a presentation of V-Ray V-in an Automotive Demo Reel for this year.
Q: What was behind the formation of Chaos Group and who?
Peter Mitev and Vladimir Koylazov are the founders of Chaos Group and inventors of the world famous renderer V-Ray. Initially, Chaos Group started its business as a CG production studio for 3D design and animation services. After creating the render engine called V-Ray in 2002, the company dedicated its efforts to the development and global distribution of rendering solutions for 3D visualization through its daughter company – Chaos Software.
Q: You are in the CG industry for more than 10 years. When you had to compare the renderers that time and now, what has been changed? How the competition changed?
One of the major changes in the CG industry landscape compared to 10 years ago is the drastic increase in speed for 3D production that has led to a big growth in the use of visual effects. Both the industry demand and the companies’ innovations made that possible. Nowadays, it would be hard to imagine completing all the demanding projects with heavy scenes and lots of effects with the technology that was available back then.
Q: V-Ray is one of the most used and advanced renderer on the market. What unique technologies are implemented inside it? Can it use the advantage of nVidia Cuda?
- Some of the innovative technologies that we take pride in are:
- V-Ray Dome Light – this is one of the best IBL solutions on the market. It provides a simple, artefact-free solution for creating image-based lighting. Its powerful importance sampling analyses HDR images to optimize light tracing and GI precision.
- V-Ray Proxy – it is an indispensable tool for managing scene memory and efficiently rendering massive amounts of geometry. To enhance viewport performance, VRayProxy includes the ability to specify a separate preview mesh.
- The light cache is a global illumination solution that can give accurate light distribution results in complex scenes with unparalleled speed.
- V-Ray RT is a revolutionary new rendering engine that leverages the power of CPUs and/or GPUs to provide instant feedback, streamlining the process of setting up lighting and materials.
In one of V-Ray’s latest service packs, we announced V-Ray RT GPU support for NVIDIA’s CUDA. With this we have further optimized V-Ray for smoother work with NVIDIA’s GPUs.
Q: On what method is V-Ray based. Unbiased, Ray Tracing or other method?
V-Ray is a pure ray tracer. Whether it is biased or unbiased depends on the particular settings. By default, it is set up for biased GI solutions, but it can also work in unbiased mode.
Q: Is V-Ray a CPU or a GPU-based renderer?
The latest version of V-Ray harnesses the power of both the CPU and GPU making rendering a lot faster and smoother. With the advance of the CPU technology, our team is focused on optimizing V-Ray’s performance even further to allow complex scenes to be rendered really fast.
Q: How would the ideal workstation for V-Ray look like?
With a couple of fast processors, lots of RAM, one GPU for rendering and one GPU for UI.
