Vray is a rendering engine that uses advanced techniques, for example global illumination algorithms such as path tracing, photon mapping, irradiance maps and directly computed global illumination. The use of these techniques often makes it preferable to conventional renderers which are provided as standard with 3d software, and generally renders using these technique can appear more photo-realistic to the human eye, as actual lighting effects are more realistically emulated. The use of this engine has been known to increase the necessary computational power and rendering times due to the complicated nature and volume of calculations required

Core architecture

    Multi-platform object-oriented API
    Fully multithreaded core
    Unified sampling system based on Schlick sampling
    Distributed rendering
    Efficient shading system specifically optimized for ray-tracing
    Modular architecture - many components of the system can be replaced with custom ones

Geometry

    Efficient geometry handling
    True instance rendering
    On-demand dynamic geometry creation
    On-demand geometry loading from disk files
    Displacement mapping
    Catmull-Clark and Loop subdivision surfaces
    Extensible with custom geometric primitives through the V-Ray SDK

Image sampling

    Three different image sampling methods
    Full-scene antialiasing
    Progressive path tracing
    Support for additional render elements (diffuse, reflection, GI etc)
    Advanced color (tone) mapping controls
    Extensible with custom image samplers through the V-Ray SDK

Illumination

    Physically accurate full global illumination solutions
    Different GI algorithms: path tracing, irradiance cache, photon maps, light cache
    Reusable GI solutions for accelerated rendering of walk-through animations and animations with dynamic objects
    Physically accurate area lights
    Efficient illumination from HDR environments
    Procedural sun & sky models
    Extensible with custom lights through the V-Ray SDK
    Physically accurate area lights; IES photometric lights

Shaders

    Physically plausible materials
    Blurry reflections/refractions
    Accurate hilights
    Sub-surface scattering
    Support for efficient material layering
    Extensible with custom shaders through the V-Ray SDK

Camera effects

    Depth-of-field with bokeh effects
    Accurate motion blur
    Physical camera model
    Extensible with custom cameras through the V-Ray SDK

Extras

    Toon effect
    Fur generator/raytracer
    Extended matte/shadow capabilities
    Support for Render-to-Texture mode of 3ds Max
    VRaySphereFade to isolate only specific portions of the scene for compositing