Chaos Envision - Features
Learn what's new and explore key features in Envision.
Try freeBuy nowStorytelling
Architectural realism.
100% ray-tracing in real-time
Enjoy physically accurate lighting, reflections, shadows, and global illumination while supporting scenes that can grow into the trillions. This ensures unmatched visual fidelity without relying on screen-space tricks or raster-based shortcuts.
Complex scenes
Handle richly detailed scenes with trillions of polygons while maintaining real-time performance and ray-traced quality. The engine behind Envision efficiently manages intricate geometry, high-resolution content and dense environments, without compromising speed or stability.
Immersive environment
Combining volumetric effects, animated vegetation, and high-fidelity assets with dynamic camera controls, Envision delivers a rich sense of depth, atmosphere, and spatial context in architectural scenes.
Lifelike characters
Hyper realistic 4D people and smart vehicles (coming soon), driven by behavior-based movement, make it effortless to create complex crowd and traffic simulations that seamlessly follow real-world rules and intersection dynamics.
Animation
An intuitive timeline that coordinates camera movements, environment changes, and scene variations. With an easy-to-learn workflow and user-friendly interface, creating cinematic animations is fast, effortless, and visually striking.
Creative control
Object-level manipulation of referenced scenes and included assets enables extensive customization of materials, positioning, behaviors, and more, giving artists greater flexibility and reducing dependence on creative teams.
Assets
Add high-quality details instantly.
Cosmos
A collection of high-quality, ready-to-use 3D assets, including furniture, vegetation, people, and vehicles, as well as HDR images and materials that quickly add believable detail to interior or exterior scenes. These assets are optimized for rendering, saving significant time and effort.
People
Hyperrealistic, AI-powered 4D and 3D people with lifelike facial expressions and movement, available in diverse ethnicities, outfits, activities, seasons, and genders, ready to bring dynamic, social realism to your architectural scenes.
Cars
High-quality vehicle models, recognized for their realistic behavior, including wheel spin, chassis roll, braking, and cornering, as well as dynamic responses to terrain features like slopes and bumps.
Workflows
Explore every option with no extra effort.
Assembly
Combine render-ready content from a variety of creation tools. Envision can assemble .vrscene files with common industry formats (.fbx, .obj, .dae), while also supporting canned animations and audio tracks. Instantly transfer data from Revit, SketchUp, and Rhino via Chaos Bridge, or from any application served by Enscape or V-Ray.
Continuous design
Envision visualizations remain linked to the original scenes throughout the entire process, promoting a non-destructive workflow. This persistent connection ensures that updates to the source model, such as changes in geometry, materials, or layouts, automatically propagate into the visualization without requiring a full rebuild, minimizing repetitive work and saving time.
Path following animations
Control precisely the movement of individual objects and cameras along predefined trajectories, ideal for animating walkthroughs, flyovers, and complex motions like aircraft, bird, or even conveyor belt systems. Detailed fine-tuning of speed, orientation, and timing ensures smooth, coordinated motion within your scenes.
Design exploration
Define as many scene variations as needed in order to research various lighting scenarios, materials, object transformations and visibility settings. Quickly animate transitions between versions to create immersive design reviews such as phasing demonstrations and interactive spatial exploration in full-screen, over-the-shoulder presentations.
Environment
Surround your designs with lifelike context.
Sky & atmosphere
Adjust time of day, sun position, cloud density, sky tint, and atmospheric haze to shape mood and ambience. These settings dynamically affect shadows, reflections, and overall scene color, enabling everything from bright daytime to dramatic sunset or foggy mornings.
Water surfaces (coming soon)
Create realistic, naturally animated water surfaces. With adjustable parameters for wave motion, surface clarity, reflection, and color, Envision brings oceans, lakes and pools to life with believable physical behavior and visual detail.
Scatter
Utilize a versatile scattering tool to easily place trees, grass, shrubs, and rocks in your scene. You can limit tree placement on steep slopes and carve out roadways using splines. A wide range of controls allows you to achieve the precise results you’re looking for.
Materials
Customize realistic surfaces in seconds.
Physical Materials Library
A wide range of realistic, ready-to-use materials, from metals and glass to wood, concrete, and fabrics. All material options are based on real-world physical properties, enabling accurate light interaction and high visual fidelity with minimal setup.
Material Editor
Mix multiple material types to create complex textures - such as weathering, ageing, patina and more. Adjust material properties like glossiness, roughness, tonality and micro details to refine the overall appearance and add character to your visualizations.
One-click enhancements
Easily apply complex effects like rounded corners, translucency, strands, displacement, and more with a single click. Envision’s one-click enhancements simplify the process, allowing you to add sophisticated visual details quickly and effortlessly.
Decal objects (coming soon)
Easily create authentic textures by adding decal graphics to flat or curved surfaces. Quickly adjust projection to perfectly align decals with the object’s shape, unlocking more artistic looks and greater visual realism.
Cameras
Frame every shot like a pro.
Viewpoint creation
Frame the scene and organize precise camera positions, focal lengths, and angles to ensure consistent composition across your project. Easily switch between viewpoints or animate transitions for smooth navigation and effective storytelling within your scene.
Camera animation
Create cinematic sequences with dynamic movement and dramatic framing - no animation experience required. With an intuitive timeline system, you can easily choreograph fly-throughs, walkthroughs, and tracking shots, adding a polished, film-like quality.
Camera effects
Easily enhance realism with camera effects that mimic real-world lenses. Adjust depth of field with bokeh, apply vignetting, bloom, and white balance, and switch between two-point perspective or orthographic views for polished, dynamic visuals.
Animations
Bring your scenes to life.
Vegetation & wind
Bring your scenes to life with realistic wind effects that animate trees, plants, and grass. Subtle or strong breeze effects create natural movement and more lively environments.
Crowds
Benefit from a vast collection of characters to populate your scenes. Effortlessly simulate natural crowd walking behavior to create bustling urban environments or lively event spaces.
Traffic (new)
Instantly generate realistic vehicle traffic that flows, interacts with pedestrians and even responds to terrain geometry. Simulate busy streets and project fit for urban environments.
Proximity sensors (new)
Add interactive space exploration with proximity-activated object animations, triggered when a specific component gets near key items such as doors, windows or elevators.
Playful animation effects
Automate the animation of multiple elements, with creative control over motion, randomization, and transitions and visualize construction phases or evolving scenes over time.
Environment animations
Animate solar studies, light source combinations, and lighting profiles, including IES lights, color temperatures, and intensities to demonstrate how natural light changes throughout the day.
Canned .vrscene animations
Combine Envision’s intuitive animation tools with external animation software, offering a hybrid approach for creating expressive, professional animations.
Audio
Enhance your animations with synchronized ambient sounds—like conversation or clinking glasses in a restaurant. Control timing and transitions for polished, client-ready content.
Lighting
Realistic light simulation.
Natural lighting
Simulate realistic sunlight and shadows, accurately adjusting for time of day, weather, and geographic location. The interaction between light and surfaces creates depth and dimension, adding a natural, immersive feel to your scene.
Artificial lighting
Add customizable interior and exterior light sources to control ambiance and mood. Interacting with natural light conditions, these lights accurately highlight key areas, enhance realism, and contribute to the overall atmosphere.
Image-based lighting
Leverage HDR images of real-world environments to replicate site-specific lighting conditions. This method ensures accurate representation of natural light, reflections, and interactions between surfaces, achieving a high level of realism and consistency throughout your scene.
Efficiency
Speed up your workflow from import to presentation.
.vrscene
The .vrscene file format provides a unified structure for architectural visualizations, including materials, lighting, and design decisions, enabling seamless integration within the Chaos ecosystem for streamlined workflows.
Common exchange formats
Envision can also import other widely used exchange formats (.fbx, .obj, .dae) from tools that do not support .vrscene. This ensures broad compatibility across different modeling workflows and enables teams to bring in assets from virtually any 3D software for visualization.
File linking
Thanks to the file linking, Envision enables distributed teams to work simultaneously on the same project. Visualization decisions are aligned with design iterations, providing for quick adjustments and removing the need to restart the whole process from scratch.
Render controls
Simple and intuitive settings let you tailor the rendering process to your needs—optimize for speed when quick previews are needed, or increase quality settings to produce high-fidelity, photorealistic images and animations.
Still image rendering
Generate high-end still images with exceptional visual realism, ideal for presentations, marketing, and design reviews. With powerful engine performance, you’ll rarely face rendering limitations due to scene size or the number and quality of your assets.
Render queues (new)
Automate batch rendering of images and animations across selected camera views. Integrated with AI enhancer and Cloud Collaboration, this workflow reduces manual effort and ensures consistent output.
Cloud collaboration
Seamlessly send stills and panoramas to Chaos Collaboration for real-time feedback and approval. Collaborators and stakeholders can comment directly on visuals, enabling smooth, centralized communication and faster decision-making throughout the design process.
360-degree panorama rendering
Generate fully immersive 360-degree panoramas that let viewers explore your project from every angle in a single view. Ideal for interactive virtual tours, these panoramas can be shared via Chaos Collaboration.
Full-screen
Enter a distraction-free, full-screen mode designed for over-the-shoulder reviews and client presentations. This lean interface keeps the focus on the design while offering quick access to scene and environment variations.
Navigation presets (coming soon)
Easily switch between navigation styles based on your preferred 3D software. Navigating scenes, interacting with objects, and making adjustments feels fast and familiar. Currently supported: Enscape and 3ds Max, with more coming soon.
Replace object & instances tool (coming soon)
Quickly swap objects in your scene with alternatives from the project, Cosmos, or custom asset library. Replace a single object or all its instances while preserving position, rotation, and scale.
Selection controls (coming soon)
Work more easily with dense object layouts using precise, configurable selection controls. Filter by object type, toggle selection through transparent geometry, and switch between window or crossing modes to ensure accurate selections every time.
Animated tooltips (coming soon)
Learning tools and features is easy - just hover over a tool to see a brief, animated demo of its key functions right in the interface. These visual guides help users learn faster, reduce errors, and unlock new creative possibilities.
Post-processing
Creative control & AI Enhancements.
AI enhancer
Utilize advanced AI to enhance assets, focusing on people and vegetation, by improving facial expressions, leaf textures and skin details, achieving a more organic, lifelike appearance with minimal adjustments.
Color corrections
Create cinematic looks by adjusting color balance, saturation, contrast, and tone with options like hue shift, highlights, shadows, and mid-tones. Fine-tune the mood and enhance realism or define a personal visual style.
Lens effects
Add bloom effect to simulate real-world camera glow around bright areas. Additional effects like glare, lens flares, and chromatic aberration will be available soon to further enhance the cinematic style of your presentations.
Compositing
Gain control in post-processing by fine-tuning individual render elements like lighting, reflections, and shadows. Adjust layers independently for a more realistic final output and to reflect your creative vision.
Chaos Ecosystem
Perfectly integrated with industry renowned solutions.
As the ultimate design companion, Enscape streamlines decision-making throughout the design process and seamlessly hands over projects to Envision via .vrscene format, enabling scalable visualizations with detailed environments, high-end realism, and impactful animations.
Delivering exceptional realism to SketchUp, Revit and Rhino scenes, V-Ray integrates smoothly with Envision for immersive animations and real-time visualization, transferring data accurately via the .vrscene format, and supporting continuous design workflows.
Easily export .vrscene files directly from SketchUp and Rhino (free options available for Revit too) and instantly load complete scene data into Envision. Visualizations remain linked to the original modeling tools, ensuring seamless updates and design iteration without restarting the process.
Mondlicht Studios © STCChaos Cloud is a cloud-based platform that streamlines communication, sharing, and presentation of architectural visualization projects. With Envision integration, it facilitates collaboration during design reviews and allows for immersive, interactive virtual tour generation.
Integrated with Envision, the Cosmos library offers a wide selection of high-quality materials, 3D assets and HDRI skies, including detailed models of furniture, trees, cars, and people, enabling you to bring your projects to life with ease and realism.
The renowned Chaos Anima is deeply integrated with Envision to provide a powerful crowd and soon, traffic animation directly from the product interface. It has never been easier to fill your architectural scenes with life and context.