Austris Cingulis is a 3D Artist from Latvia. He has almost 10 years of work experience in the field of Arch-Viz, Product Viz and gaming industry using 3ds max. He has posted a Tutorial on "How to create realistic wood material with Vray and 3ds max". It is a 4 part tutorial and I am sure you can produce the same after going to the tutorial. This tutorial is not meant to just show you how to create wood, it’s also meant to show you how you can achieve complex results using some simple V-Ray and 3DS Max maps.

Read More :
http://www.maxunderground.com/archives/mututorials/creating_a_realistic_wood_material_with_v_ray/

AXYZ Design is running a photorealistic rendering contest and the contest prizes are worth over $21,000. You need to download the digital charater model provided and render it either to replicate a real studio lighting set-up, or in a wider architectural space, and you could win stock assets from AXYZ Design itself, software from Siger Studio, and a range of books, training and online render credits. You need to use 3ds max and Mentalray or V-Ray and there is no post work allowed. Closing date for entries is 5th Nov.

http://www.axyz-design.com/index.php?categoryId=222

Bertrand Benoit added a superb Making of Bits and Bread. His approach in lighting, texturing and modeling a number of breads. The softwares used by him in the making of were Autodesk 123D catch, Zbrush, MassFX, Forest Pack Pro and Marvelous Designer (for Cloth Draping). All the images were rendered using Vray.

Read More :
http://bertrand-benoit.com/blog/2012/09/22/bits-of-bread/

Every newbie has this question on "How to create realistic Rugs and Carpets using 3ds max and Vray ?" .. Well Viscorbel posted some nice tutorial to create 3d rugs and carpets using 4 different methods. Viscorbel posted video tutorial of making 3d rugs and carpets using Vray displacement, Vray Fur, 3ds max native Hair and Fur and with Forestpack pro. It is a simple workflow to create them..do have a look

http://viscorbel.com/3ds-max-tutorials/3d-rugs-and-carpets/

Jing Zhang wrote for us a very nice tutorial "The Making of Rome" for 3ds max. Jing was inspired by chiesa do Santa Maria di Loreto. The tutorial teaches you the tips and tricks involved in creating Roman Architecture buildings in 3d The softwares used were Sketchup, 3ds max, V-Ray and Photoshop for post work. The basic modeling was done using Google Sketchup and then fine tuned in 3ds max. The columns and sculptures are from Jing’s own 3d database…and finally very nicely composed using Photoshop. Jing has provided all the details involved in the complex Material making, Lighting and Rendering and Post Production

Read More : http://www.cgarchitect.com/2012/08/the-making-of-rome

Chaos Group celebrates Vray’s 10th Anniversary with new additions to its line of plugins.
Chaos introduced Vray for Nuke and Katana. Together with these additions new feature updates for 3ds max and maya.

V-Ray RT GPU improvements – CUDA support, support for new materials and textures, Motion blur support, proxies and instancing with RT, using V-Ray RT for animation preview
Enhancements from latest service packs – V-Ray hair material, Ptex support in V-Ray for 3ds Max.
New features expected with future releases – deep pixel images support, metaballs, Alembic support, Vismat materials, lens effects in the V-Ray frame buffer.
Phoenix FD for Maya: Creating realistic fire, smoke, and explosions. Simulating liquids, adding foams and splashes .
V-Ray for Softimage: key features and examples of V-Ray for Softimage used in production

Embree is a collection of high-performance ray tracing kernels, developed at Intel Labs. The kernels are optimized for photo-realistic rendering on the latest Intel® processors
with support for the SSE and AVX instruction sets. In addition to the ray tracing kernels, Embree provides an example photo-realistic rendering engine. Embree is designed for
Monte Carlo ray tracing algorithms, where the vast majority of rays are incoherent. The specific single-ray traversal kernels in Embree provide the best performance in this scenario and they are very easy to integrate into existing applications.

The VRayEmbree helper is a V-Ray implementation of Intel’s Embree raycaster, courtesy of Chaos Group. It is specifically optimized for ray-tracing on Intel CPUs and can reduce render times with V-Ray. Speed-ups of up to 30% have been observed in some scenes.

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/misc/

VisCorbel has released its new Tutorial videos which teaches you the technique to create realistic V-ray Materials Vol-2. Viscorbel has covered almost all the aspects you require to create Exterior ArchViz scenes. The tutorial covers the tricks used to create exterior materials like

http://viscorbel.com/creating-v-ray-materials-vol2/

ItooSoft announced its new version of Railclone 1.4.2. RailClone is a 3ds max plugin for modeling parametric objects based on custom geometry parts. Railclone has a new unique concept of modeling that lets you create very complex and realistic models for ArchViz, Civil Engeneering and Interior design. The software includes a full library of preset models to create Fences, Railings, Barriers, Guardrails, Handrails or Walls. RailClone is not limited to a fixed set of primitives, you can use any geometry from the scene and define your own parametric structures.

http://www.itoosoft.com/railclone/reference/release_notes.php

Happy Digital updated its new version of Autograss 1.0.3 which supports 3ds max 2013 now. Autograss is a single click solution for creating various kinds of grass for your visual needs. Autograss creates photorealistic grasses that renders in V-Ray for 3ds max. Autograss uses advanced memory management system which allows the computer to use only a fixed amount of RAM no matter any amount of grass you have within your scene. Model a one acre lawn or an entire golf course you are still limited to minimum RAM usage. Its fully multi-threaded which allows you to use all the cores available on your computer. Autograss has realistic grass presets so its very easy to use…just a one click grass solution for V-ray in 3ds max.

http://www.happy-digital.com/autograss/