This year, real-time became really important. For architects and arch-viz artists, the ability to explore and design interactively is nothing short of game-changing, drastically shortening project life cycles and making it easier to present and discuss ideas with co-workers and clients. With remote collaboration becoming a normal part of day-to-day life, real-time views of projects have become invaluable.
Computer graphics software company Chaos Group has embraced real-time with two new technologies, V-Ray Vision and Chaos Vantage, to create a complete visualization solution across workflows. These two tools use different methods to achieve high-quality, real-time output with the digital design tools you already know. Let’s take a look at what these technologies are, how they work, and when to use them.
V-Ray Vision
V-Ray Vision links to your project and gives you a live, high-quality, real-time view of your scene as you work, with the ability to make changes to lights, materials, and objects. V-Ray Vision is a new addition to V-Ray's architectural rendering software; you'll find it in V-Ray 5 for SketchUp and V-Ray 5 for Rhino, and it's coming soon to V-Ray 5 for Revit.
Because V-Ray Vision uses game engine graphics, it will run quickly and smoothly on the majority of systems — and you can explore your scenes with the simplicity of playing a video game. It makes it easy to make design decisions on the fly, collaborate remotely, and take part in interactive reviews. When you’re ready to share, you can instantly record fly-throughs and save snapshots, or use V-Ray to create photorealistic renderings at any time.
“V-Ray Vision is basically a supercharged interactive render, and it’s definitely going to increase the level of client engagement in our work,” said Dan Stone, head of operations at arch-viz studio Archilime. “The reason we have this job is to show people their designs, and V-Ray Vision will give them a new level of realism. It requires no extra work — all we’re doing is hitting the V-Ray Vision button and that’s it, pretty much.”
Chaos Vantage
Chaos Vantage also delivers real-time visuals, but it gets there in a different way, using NVIDIA’s RTX technology to deliver 100% ray traced, photorealistic graphics. It’s effortless to set up — simply drag and drop your V-Ray scene file into Vantage and it’s instantly explorable in real-time, without any model preparation or light baking. When used in conjunction with 3ds Max, Vantage’s live view will even update live as you work, with this functionality coming to other creation tools soon as well.
Once in Vantage, you can move around freely and direct lights, cameras, and views. With its built-in animation editor, you can record short films perfect for client presentations. Chaos Vantage can handle scenes of nearly any size, from simple models to detailed cityscapes.
“Our work is focused on large-scale developments and international competitions with some of the biggest architecture and development companies,” said Carlos Cristerna, principal and RadLab director at Neoscape. “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.”
V-Ray Vision or Chaos Vantage?
V-Ray Vision shines in day-to-day use, running alongside your design software to give you a quick guide to how a project will look, or how a material will line up with your design. Chaos Vantage’s hardware requirements make it a more specialized tool, but it also gives an incredible level of visual fidelity, so you can see how a huge project will fit in an entire cityscape or drill down to minute details.
These real-time rendering tools, combined with the rendering capabilities of V-Ray, create a complete visualization solution for any project from start to finish, making it easier to assess how changes, big or small, will impact projects. Both systems will quickly become a natural part of the design process and key parts of more communicative and productive workflows.
Get V-Ray Vision and Chaos Vantage
V-Ray Vision is already built-in to V-Ray 5 for SketchUp, V-Ray 5 for Rhino and V-Ray 5 for Revit, with 30-day trials available.
