A Quick Tour of Nvidia’s IRay for Cinema 4D

Senior Applied Engineer for NVIDIA, Will Braithwaite gives a quick overview of iRay for Cinema 4D. iRay is NVIDIA’s physically based path-tracing GPU render engine that is intended both for interactive rendering and final frame.

The quick tour offers a look at the workflow for using iRay within C4D, and how it can provides immediate visual feedback while lighting and designing the scene.

A little while ago, Maxon announced a technical collaboration with NVIDIA, in which they would facilitate the interactive renderer for Cinema 4D. You can find more on that here.

NVIDIA will be competing with an already established Octane Render, and higher end production renderers like RedShift for Cinema 4D users. Still, there might be a place for iRay among the C4D community.

iRay can work with C4D’s physically plausible materials, but iRay is really built upon NVIDIA’s MDL, or Material Definition Language, which was made to share physical materials and lights between applications using iRay and Mental Ray. This means that the full vMaterial library is supported as well as exchange with other MDL-supported apps, like 3ds Max, Maya and Rhino.

iRay seems like a good quality renderer for a good price, coming in at under $300.00 for a single floating license. Visit NVIDIA iRay for more information.

iRay is only for Windows systems on every host, and requires Cinema 4D R16 or R17, and of course a CUDA GPU.

Iray for Cinema 4D functions on any system certified to operate Maxon Cinema 4D. Rendering speed is increased with faster CPU, and GPUs, more CPU and GPU cores, and especially with NVIDIA GPUs. Most NVIDIA products from the past 5 years (using the Fermi, Kepler, or Maxwell architecture) are supported. Iray for Cinema 4D scales very efficiently across all processors within the system and provides control over which processors are used.

1 comment

  1. What type of video card do you need for this? Will it work on a new Mac Pro Trashcan?

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