I received a quick note from Damien Bataille who mentioned that the DeeX V-Ray Arsenal plugin for Autodesk Maya will see an official release February 7 2013 after a year of work, and more than of month of beta testing, so congratulations for that Damien!
We had a sneak look at the DeeX V-Ray Arsenal plugin for Maya back in September showing how you can save and use V-Ray rendering settings in Maya adjusting render quality with one simple slider.
DeeX VRay Arsenal is a plug-in that allows you to accelerate and facilitate the management of rendering scenes in Maya with VRay -The aim being to work faster without technical constraints
The DeeX VRay Arsenal for Maya displays three tabs for Pass, Quality and Toolbox controls. The Pass Tab allows for control over render pass properties such as Black Hole compositing elements, GI, Visibility controls and Shadowing controls, but also give you “on the fly” controls for lighting contributions, an elaborate area for Matte Control, and a tab devoted for quick access to the V-Ray Rendering Settings.
The Quality Tab sports an interesting user interface allowing you to not only set things like sampler settings, light cache rays, and DMC Sampler settings, but also provides a unique display for quickly reading and understanding the values.
Finally the ToolBox Tab allows for control of proxies, material and object ID’s, and some simple material controls.
Damien provided a brief rundown of Deex Vray features:
Pass manager
- Object properties on fly : create black hole, control the primary visibility, reflection, refraction, GI… in one click (nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- Matte on fly : create matte mask in one click. Forgot “ID” here, just select your object, simply. Bonus : you can create hierarchical masks ! (Nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- On fly render : – automatic material ID (work with blend material) (nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- automatic object ID into proxy (nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- render you scene with a lambert to check your lighting in one click. Displacement and bump will be kept (nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- create “light select renderElement” on fly, manually or automatically (nothing is created in your scene, all is created on the fly during rendering)
- Fast control : control your render settings quickly, with GI preset.
Quality: control the quality of your render with one slider !
- set the quality (subdivisions) of your materials automatically in one click (based of the glossiness)
- Add offset quality for some part of your render (irradiance map, LC, AA…)
ToolBox: many tools to give you an easy life, like :
- Import multi proxies in one click
- Connect shader(s) on proxies in one click (with namespace or not)
- Material ID manager : add, remove, or set materialID in one click. An unique number can be generated for each « material », based of the name of the « material ».
- Object ID manager : add, remove, or set objectID in one click. An unique number can be generated for each « mesh », based of the name of the « mesh ».
- Material control : control subdivisions, interpolation, max depth of your materials quickly.
- Lights control : control subdivisions of lights quickly.
Pricing for Deex Vray Arsenal has not been established yet, however you can sign up for a free trail version of Deex Vray Arsenal here.