Autodesk Expands Photorealistic Rendering Options

[Hirazi Blue]

For years, a vibrant network of third-party solutions (including V-Ray from Chaos Group, AccuRender from Robert McNeel & Associates, and many others) has been providing alternatives to and augmenting the existing rendering and visualization technology inside Autodesk applications such as AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit. Even Autodesk’s two best-known animation and visualization products, 3ds Max and Maya, work with a variety of third-party rendering products.

In recent years, however, Autodesk has aggressively built up its in-house rendering expertise through acquisition and research. The results of those efforts are now starting to hit the market, in the form of two ray-tracing engines — one that’s embedded within the design workflow, and the other for standalone rendering projects.

(Quoted from here)

Of the two new products mentioned, the first one - "Autodesk Raytracer" - was apparently actually developed in-house,
not being the direct result of Autodesk acquiring existing technology, unlike the second one, "VRED"...

[Bullit]

Well i don't know why they even compare them to Vray and the likes. Does not have same span of capability.

[NNois]

Hum i think that's the renderer from Thiago Costa they bought.

Because an "in-house" renderer one without a proper minimum of 2 years of intensive tests in real production can't be anything but ready.
Look at Arnold or Redshift, Arnold needed like 10 years of beta to be ready for the needs of studios ;-)

[Mathaeus]

If I'm correct Lagoa renderer and VRED are different things, while both are property of AD, now. Thiago is now an AD employee. Also, which seems to be more important for rendering side of story, 'rendering wizard' Arno Zinke is an AD employee, too. However I don't believe they (AD) are going to compete against DDC-ish CPU path tracer like Arnold, or against a number of V-Ray's GI solutions. I think it's more an effort to take a strategic prevalence in visualisation, based on GPU renderers, or something like that. We will see what future holds.

[luceric]

think iray market, not mental ray.