nVidia Iray has been one of those products that has been around for a long while, and not really gained any traction. Early on, the renderer was only available for limited platforms and hosts.
Now, nVidia seems to be pushing Iray to more hosts in the hopes that it will see some success.
The latest application to get a nVidia’s interactive renderer will be Cinema 4D. nVidia have recently “taken over” development of the third party solutions that allowed Iray to run on Autodesk Maya and Cinema 4D.
In C4D’s case, you may remember at2-software’s m4d, which was their implementation of the renderer under C4D’s environment.
nVidia will bring its feature-rich and interactive physically based rendering to C4D, supporting the nVidia Material Definition Language as well as the full vMaterials library. This will make it possible to exchange materials with other MDL compatible applications, of which, the list is many.
This would be the major selling point towards using the nVidia’s solution, over the highly popular Octane Render, which has found a home with, and has seen great success in the C4D community.
While Mental Ray comes bundled with applications like Autodesk Maya, Iray has been rolling out as separate product, that comes at an extra charge.
To learn more about Iray for Cinema 4D, you can visit nVidia, and sign up for the public beta.
