V-Ray RT was released early of June this year and it is now fully integrated in my studio’s work-flow. this tool is remarkably helpful at setting up scene lighting and editing materials on the fly. although it doesn’t support all of V-Ray’s features (Displacement & Proxies for example) i started to think about how it could become a replacement for the standard render engine when it does. it seems Chaosgroup decided to take this even further as seen on this latest demo from SIGGRAPH 2009 posted by Jeff Mottle of CGarchitect.com.

V-Ray RT GPU rendering

It seems that the predictions some of us had a few years back about targeting GPU’s as the rendering hub are starting to take shape and are on the way into V-Ray RT. I don’t think this will become available any time soon, perhaps in one years time, but clearly this seems to be what everyone is aiming for.

In the past I was contemplating the use of game engines in our studio for real time solutions, but this latest demo shows one will be able to possibly use the V-Ray RT engine as a real time tool for production and possibly for actual display and recording of walk through sequances.

One other such tool I keep my eyes on is Randomcontrol’s Fryrender RT and their VirtualEditor.