V-Ray SDK

This page provides information on V-Ray SDK.

Overview

The V-Ray SDK comes with V-Ray for 3ds Max installation and allows the creation of V-Ray compatible materials, textures, lights, atmospheric effects, cameras, and custom geometric primitives. In addition, the V-Ray SDK includes the source code for some of the additional V-Ray plugins - for example, the VRayDomeCamera plugin.

Installation

The V-Ray SDK is installed with the Workstation installation type and is normally installed in the folder C:\Program Files\Chaos\V-Ray\3ds Max #### where #### is the version of 3ds Max (2021, 2022, etc.).

Note that for versions prior to V-Ray 7, the V-Ray SDK is installed by default in C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\3ds Max ####.

Folder Structure

The V-Ray SDK includes the following folders:

\docs – Includes general information about the V-Ray architecture as well as a help file vrayclasses.chm with documentation of the various classes in the SDK. The vrayclasses.chm file is automatically generated from the header files included with the SDK.

\include – Contains the header files for the V-Ray SDK needed for compiling 3ds Max plugins that use the V-Ray SDK.

\lib – Contains the library files needed for linking plugins that use the V-Ray SDK.

\samples – Includes the source code for some of the plugins that ship with V-Ray (e.g. the VRayDomeCamera plugin), as well as some additional samples (e.g. VRayBlinnMtl).

Compiling the Samples

The sample projects come with a CMake project that can be used to generate Microsoft Visual Studio solutions or Ninja projects. The toolset version to use should be Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 with the MSVC runtime version 14.2x

A matching 3ds Max SDK is needed to build the example projects. The setup needs the CMake variable 3DSMAX_SDK_ROOT set to point to the 3ds Max SDK root.

To get started with the samples for 3ds Max 2022:

1. Open Command prompt in the samples directory, e.g., C:\Program Files\Chaos\V-Ray\3ds Max 2022\samples
2. Execute CMake, e.g. cmake -B"C:\build\VRay3dsMax2022Samples" -H"." -G"Visual Studio 16 2019" -A"x64" -T"v142" -D"3DSMAX_SDK_ROOT=C:\conan\pack\Max2022SDK"

If no errors occurred, the solutions should be in the output directory specified by "-B".

If you are using V-Ray Next and older versions of 3ds Max, click here to see how to compile samples.