June 17, 2014: Today, Clara.io, the most popular* online 3D modeling and rendering app, is pleased to announce the formal launch of our V-Ray renderer integration. It's ready for all of our users to try out right now (although you probably want to read the rest of this announcement first.) V-Ray integrated into Clara.io is perfect for all types of renderings, including architectural and product renderings (including 3D printing models.) We are celebrating with a $1000 contest for the best V-Ray rendering using Clara.io -- see details here at the bottom of this post.

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Renderings of the 'Beats by Dre', 'The One Ring', and 'Nintendo Wii' Clara.io example scenes.

We soft-launched ChaosGroup's V-Ray renderer in February, and over 60,000 V-Ray render jobs later, we are pleased to officially launch our V-Ray Cloud rendering solution. V-Ray is the leading renderer in the CG industry, and it is pretty obvious why everyone loves it: V-Ray creates stunningly beautiful images, it is packed with the latest features, it is blazingly fast and it is easy to use. With our full featured integration of V-Ray into Clara.io, V-Ray becomes even more accessible to V-Ray's hundreds of thousands of existing users.

Here is a quick overview video of our V-Ray integration in to Clara.io:

In this update, we will have a quick look at how we’ve integrated V-Ray into Clara.io:

High Quality V-Ray Integration

We have been working for over a year on integrating nearly every major feature of V-Ray into Clara.io for a seamless and pleasant experience. Here is just a few of the features we've made available:

Light Types : Mesh, Sun, Area, Hemisphere, Omni, Spot and Directional.

: Mesh, Sun, Area, Hemisphere, Omni, Spot and Directional. Materials : Standard, Car Paint, Subsurface Scattering, Bump, and Layered BRDF Materials.

: Standard, Car Paint, Subsurface Scattering, Bump, and Layered BRDF Materials. Rendering : Global Illumination, Color Bleeding, Reflections, Refraction, and Caustics.

: Global Illumination, Color Bleeding, Reflections, Refraction, and Caustics. Custom Formats : Vismats, VRMats and VRScenes.

: Vismats, VRMats and VRScenes. Advanced Controls: Sampling, Quality, Bucket Order, Color Mapping, and Environment Maps.

And there are many little touches too. For example, you can select a PolyMesh in Clara.io and click "Mesh light" in the tool bar and it automatically creates a V-Ray mesh light from that mesh in the exact same location. We also translate from our WebGL standard materials to their closest V-Ray representations including Specular, Bump, Emissive, Reflections and Transparency.

Easy Setup with Powerful Options

Rendering any Clara.io scene with V-Ray is always just a click or two away. To start an interactive progressive render, click on “Cloud Render” button in any viewport and then select either “Live Preview” or “Production”. Live Preview uses V-Ray RT for fast progressive rendering while Production uses V-Ray Advanced for high quality bucket-based rendering. If V-Ray is not already configured in your scene, it will be automatically configured for you and your render will start right away.

But having an easy V-Ray setup in Clara.io doesn’t mean that V-Ray’s flexibility in Clara.io is limited. We have built into Clara.io a full multi-render and multi-pass system inspired by the powerful design of Softimage. For the full details on our powerful render/pass management system, see our documentation: Rendering Basics..

Clara.io scene: Blue Glass Clumsy Dragon, 3D Model Credit: Clumsy Dragon.

Interactive 3D Progressive Rendering

One of the benefits of Clara.io’s cloud-based design is when you start a V-Ray render, it doesn’t slow down your local machine at all. All of the hard work is done on our secure private cloud, and the results are streamed back to you in real-time. This means that you can start a Live Preview render in one viewport while continuing to model or set up lights and materials in another. The Live Preview will continuously update without slowing you down. Cloud rendering is perfect for users with low end or portable machines with limited battery life.

3DStream™ Render Embeds

Once you have a beautiful scene setup in V-Ray, what do you do with it? Well, you could render it to an image, or a series of images and share them the old fashion way. But we’d like to introduce a new option for sharing your beautiful renders: 3DStream™ render embeds. Check out this rendering of Porsche Cayman:

Clara.io scene: Porsche Cayman

The above "image" is not an image, it is a live progressive V-Ray render that started automatically when you opened this web page. You can interact with it using your mouse or finger. It is rendered on our secure servers and the resulting rendered images are streamed to your web browser.

3DStream™ render embeds, are unique to Clara.io. You can instantly turn any of your scenes into 3DStream™ render embeds. 3DStream™ render embeds are great for showing off your work to clients, and peers, but it can also enhance the user purchasing experience for online websites that sell physical goods.

Material Library with +1000 Presets

While we support the key V-Ray materials like the VRay’s Standard Mtl (as well as the more advanced BRDFs like SSS2 Complex, and Car Paint, and Bump), we know that often you just need things to look beautiful without infinite tweaking. So we have partnered with Flying Architecture and Entresd to enable our users access to a material library of over 1000 presets. Just go to “Render > Material Library” to bring it up. You can instantly search through the materials via keyword search or tags.

Background Rendering

While interactive progressive rendering is great for getting your scene’s look and feel just right, it isn’t that practical when you want to render large frames with high quality settings. To trigger a background render and have the results emailed to you, just click the menu item “Render > Render Current Pass.” We are currently imposing a 2hr limit on render times.

VisMat, VRMat & VRScene Support

To simplify working with Clara.io and your favorite existing desktop tools, we have worked hard to support accurate V-Ray material transfers. It is possible to drag and drop both V-Ray Vismas and VRMat files into Clara.io and then apply them to meshes.

Full details are available in our documentation here on Vismats and VRMats support.

Proxy Meshes for Unlimited Scalability

Often it will be necessary to work with really large meshes, meshes so large that it isn’t feasible to download them all and display them in the browser. Therefore, we have created the ability to convert any PolyMesh in a scene into a Proxy mesh (and vice-versa.) Proxy meshes do not load their geometry client side, only in V-Ray on our powerful cloud servers.

You can also read more about Proxy meshes in our V-Ray optimization documentation.

Show off your V-Ray skills and win $1000 in Prizes

To celebrate the launch of V-Ray in Clara.io, we are running a contest. Create a scene in Clara.io (either model it yourself or import the objects) that looks beautiful when rendered in V-Ray through Clara.io. To enter the contest make your scene visible to the public (set it as public or gallery.) If you want to really ensure you are in the contest, tweet us your scene! One Clara.io scene that looks beautiful when rendered using V-Ray created before midnight of Monday, June 23th, will be chosen to win $500 CDN, while two others runner-ups will win $250 CDN each. The winners will be chosen and celebrated on our blog and on Facebook before the end of June.

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Until the next update!

Ben of Clara.io