Last month I purchased my new work computer at the office and last week I purchased the software to go along with it.

One purchase was for 3d Studio MAX 2010 which I will be using to create a lot of graphics for work. The other was Chaos Group's Rendering Engine V-Ray 1.5 SP3a.

At home I messed with V-ray but the demo was feature lacking and the "extended evaluation" version had very poor performance. I am pleased with the quality of this renderer and the speed. As you can see above, the top image looks quite nice aside from being very "primitive" *cough*... The scene is a raytracing nightmare lit by an HDRI map, Global Illumination on, and Caustics on (though it's hard to see).



Rendered at 1920 x 1080, it took 8 minutes, 12 seconds to churn out. Impressive.

Along with the full renderer, I also purchased V-Ray RT; the "real-time" interactive renderer counterpart to the Full V-Ray. While it doesn't support everything the full version does, it goes very far to give rapid, usable feedback for designing scene materials and lighting. Activating the window for V-Ray RT, gave me a near-instant preview of the scene that perpetually refines in quality as the scene remains static.

As you can see from the image, 25 seconds in, I get a very appealing image that aides me in deciding hot to treat the scene. If I wait for two minutes, I get an almost complete representation that for some cases is high enough quality to use as a final render.

I point that out to point this out:

V-ray RT uses the system's CPU to do the processing. GPU processors on modern graphic cards are capable of doing these kind of processing routines as speeds many times greater.

Chaos Group showed off this technology running on a consumer-level graphic card at SIGGRAPH this year and it showed speed bumps from 20 times to 200 times in some situations.

This is where we are going people. In the next two years we are going to see commercial rendering solutions take advantage of GPU-CPU processing and soon for less than the cost of a three server render farm, we'll be able to buy "desktop supercomputers" like the NVIDIA Tesla Series and have the rendering power of a rack full of "old school" render servers in a desktop chassis.

I can't wait to be able to spit out full HD frames of animation in reasonable times. Computer animation will go through a quantum leap in quality, seemingly overnight! TV shows and movies will be able to spend more time and money on having good stories and higher quality animation and models! Independent animators and Indie Studios will pop up and be able to produce competitive material in production time-lines!

*squeee*

I'm not saying V-Ray will be the shepherd of this new era, but the underlying technology that is showing itself today will appear in the next-gen software and hardware.

I'm looking forward to it!