What’s new in V-Ray Collection

Explore the latest features for M&E.

One asset. Real-time to final frame.

V-Ray 7, update 4 for Media & Entertainment is here. Experience final-frame quality, real-time rendering directly in your DCC's viewport. Eliminate pipeline bottlenecks, get your scenes on virtual production stages in minutes, and get to final frames faster than ever.

Create worlds in real-time. Light them perfectly.

Pre-production
Explore creative ideas and assemble your scenes in real-time at final-frame quality, right in your DCC viewport. Match real-world scans to your scene’s lighting.
Real-time viewport rendering

Explore and render your ideas in real-time at final-frame quality, right in your DCC viewport with Vantage. No extra windows or tools, just a smooth, unified workflow for faster iteration and confident creative decisions, delivering stunning realism with physically accurate cameras, lights, materials, and global illumination from the start of a project.

Available for: Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max / Coming for: Blender

*This feature is available to Vantage and V-Ray Collection customers.

Gaussian Splats relighting

Bring scanned environments into your 3D scene and light them your way. Use V-Ray Lights and blend controls to match Gaussian Splats to your scene's lighting, effortlessly integrating them, especially those scanned under ambient light, without working around baked lighting.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, and Chaos Vantage / Coming for: Blender

Even better real-time volumes

Render real-time volumetric effects faster. Vantage now also supports exporting VDB cache files, allowing you to seamlessly reuse and integrate existing fluid simulations from early-stage previz all the way through to final production.

Available for: Chaos Vantage

AI-powered ideation with Veras

Supercharge early ideation. Upload simple block-out renders, sketches, or reference images to instantly generate concepts. Easily create backgrounds for set extensions that match your assets, refine stills, or generate video from an image.

Available for V-Ray for 3ds Max, V-Ray for Maya, V-Ray for Blender, and Vantage.

Build for the stage: Creative control on and off set.

Virtual production
Seamlessly blend real and virtual, achieve true cinematic realism, and have control over the materials in the scene during shoots.
Real-time material editing

Available for: Chaos Arena

Make on-set, real-time creative decisions with control over shaders directly from Arena's material editor. Instantly apply material changes as a natural part of the creative process without costly delays. With no need to go back to the DCC, you can show the director requested updates on the volume without stopping the cameras.

Real-Time Depth of Field (DOF)

Available for: Chaos Arena

Achieve true cinematic realism by simply enabling a natural, real-time depth of field that seamlessly merges live-action talent and props with the virtual world. When paired with lens encoders, changes you make to the physical camera lens will be reflected on the LED wall, ensuring your virtual and real-world cameras are always in perfect sync.

Decal Color Corrections

Available for: Chaos Arena

Gain precise, region-specific control over your scene's look with decal color corrections. By placing a Decal object in your scene, you can instantly color-correct selected elements live on set. Seamlessly match physical props and ground set pieces with the digital background on the LED volume, without going back to the DCC or fixing it in post.

© Tonic CGI
Lens Encoders support

Available for: Chaos Arena

Perfectly synchronize your physical camera on set with the virtual camera in the 3D scene. When you make manual changes to the focal length and focus of your physical camera lens, those changes will be dynamically reflected in the 3D scene's virtual camera rendered on the LED wall.

Faster rendering on any setup, for any look.

Production
Deliver pixel-perfect shots with maximum efficiency, regardless of your pipeline or hardware configuration. Bring your ideas to life with tools that make complex looks and stunning effects effortless to achieve.

Even faster time to first pixel

Experience highly responsive rendering with a significantly faster time to first pixel. V-Ray GPU IPR now starts up to 2x quicker, thanks to accelerated asset uploads to VRAM and faster texture compression.

Available for: V-Ray GPU (all integrations)

Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO)

Get up to a 13% performance gain in CPU rendering, thanks to our switch to the Intel® ICX Compiler and the implementation of Hardware Profile-Guided Optimizations supported by Intel® Core™ Ultra processors. Speed up your workflow and experience best-in-class performance to maintain your creative momentum and meet even the tightest production deadlines.

Available for: CPU rendering (V-Ray for Max, Maya, Houdini, and Blender)

Light Cache Denoising

Get cleaner, smoother rendering previews faster. By applying the denoiser directly to the Light Cache before rendering begins, high-frequency noise is smoothed out instantly. This is enabled by default for the NVIDIA Denoiser, delivering better interactive feedback with zero extra setup required.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Blender

Out-of-frustum displacement tessellation

Optimize scene memory when rendering complex displacement and subdivision surfaces. Control and dynamically dial down the tessellation detail of geometry outside the camera's view frustum. This significantly reduces memory usage, speeds up geometry compilation, and achieves faster render times without compromising visual quality.

Available for: V-Ray for Houdini and Maya

Distributed Rendering 2 (DR2)

Experience a next-generation distributed rendering for both progressive and bucket modes. DR2 eliminates machine limits, allowing your rendering power to scale infinitely. Gain control and optimize network performance with a dedicated dispatcher, intelligent bucket splitting, and asset caching to eliminate bottleneck delays for heavy scenes.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, and Blender

Artist-friendly workflows

V-Ray Parallax Texture

Breathe life into massive cityscapes and background buildings while saving time on modeling and keeping your scenes light and fast to render. The V-Ray Parallax Texture lets you create the perfect illusion of fully furnished, beautifully lit rooms behind your windows using just textures instead of heavy 3D geometry. As your camera moves through the scene, the interiors shift dynamically to preserve a convincing sense of depth from every angle, letting you effortlessly dress vast environments so you can focus on the bigger creative picture.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Blender

Explore ready-to-use interior parallax assets in Chaos Cosmos >

Quick caustics

Enable the new, quick caustics in V-Ray to easily generate stunning light refraction patterns, bypassing the tedious, trial-and-error setup of the traditional photon-based workflow. Much simpler to control and significantly faster to render, a single depth toggle delivers believable underwater caustics without the high performance cost of full photon tracing. The result is realistic caustics with minimal effort, making complex light simulation accessible, predictable, and highly practical for every artist and project.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, and Blender

V-Ray Displacement Material

Take your shading networks to the next level with the new V-Ray Displacement Material. Designed to simplify the creation of complex surfaces, this material allows you to build and effortlessly blend displacement shaders, apply them to native geometry or V-Ray Proxy objects, and export fully shaded assets with displacement intact to seamlessly transfer them to other V-Ray integrations across your pipeline.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Blender

New Volume Shader enhancements

Optimize and speed up V-Ray volume rendering further with powerful, new parameters. Gain control over velocity motion blur, dynamically scale the motion blur effect and sampling rate to balance quality and performance, making it faster to render complex effects, all while enjoying an updated user interface that delivers a more intuitive experience and a streamlined workflow.

Available for: V-Ray for Houdini

AI Material Generator*

Turn any photo of a real-world surface into a render-ready PBR material with all the necessary maps in just a few clicks. Part of Chaos Cosmos, the AI Material Generator is ideal for creating secondary materials that don’t require extensive art direction, letting you quickly shade your scenes without time-consuming setups or extra tools.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Blender*

Learn more >

*V-Ray Solo, Premium, and Collection subscriptions include a monthly Chaos Credit allowance to use this feature. Free subscriptions and V-Ray for Blender monthly/annual plans do not include credits. To access AI-powered features, please purchase Chaos Credits separately or upgrade to a higher-tier plan.

Flexible, seamlessly integrated rendering

AMD GPU rendering

Enjoy greater flexibility when choosing your hardware with V-Ray GPU support for AMD graphics cards through the HIP platform, including competitive 16 GB VRAM options, and industry-leading performance for out-of-core rendering.

Available for: V-Ray GPU for 3ds Max and Blender

Read more here >

V-Ray for Blender on Linux

V-Ray now also runs on Linux and is available to all Blender users out there along with Windows and macOS. Any Blender artist, studio pipeline, or render farm can now use it.

Available for: Blender

Download Linux build here >

V-Ray for Blender Community Edition

Access V-Ray's rendering power in Blender free of charge. Perfect for learning, personal projects or even freelance work, the Community Edition offers all key V-Ray features and is renewable every three months at no cost.

Get your free, community edition license here >

Support for the latest host app versions

Update your host platform with confidence as V-Ray now officially supports the newest versions, including Autodesk 3ds Max 2027, Maya 2027, SideFX Houdini 21 (with initial Houdini 22 support), and Blender 5.1 and 5.2.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Blender.

Initial* Native Bifrost Graph Support

Work seamlessly with Bifrost Graph nodes in Maya. Now, you can simply hit render as V-Ray translates procedural setups for you instantly, completely eliminating the need to worry about manual caching and re-linking.

Available for: V-Ray for Maya

See supported features>

Hydra 2 support

V-Ray for Houdini now officially supports the latest Hydra 2 scene processing framework, ensuring flawless communication with Houdini’s Solaris environment. This latest architecture delivers highly optimized scene processing for complex USD scenes.

Available for: V-Ray for Houdini

Coming soon: OpenUSD V-Ray and Vantage Hydra Delegates

Bring powerful offline and real-time rendering into your USD pipeline. OpenUSD Hydra Delegates for V-Ray and Vantage* will soon enable rendering within industry-standard tools like Nuke, Katana, and any other host that supports Hydra Delegates.

*V-Ray Delegate will be available on all OS; Vantage will support Windows and Linux.
Preview builds available upon request.

More control in compositing and AI-powered upscaling.

Post-production
Easily integrate CG elements with live-action footage, work with volumes effortlessly in post, and instantly boost the resolution of your final frames without re-rendering.
Backplate workflow

Your live-action compositing workflow just got easier. You can now easily integrate CG elements with live footage using advanced Light Path Expression (LPE), which allows you to isolate reflections and Global Illumination (GI) from holdouts. This workflow gives you the tools and control to perfectly blend digital assets into real-world plates, eliminating the need for manual tracking and complex masking in post.

Available for: V-Ray for Houdini

LPEs for Volumes

Working with volumes in compositing just got a lot easier thanks to Light Path Expressions (LPEs) for Volumes. Now you can easily isolate the light cast by smoke, clouds, or fog in your scene, or extract the self-illumination of a fire into a separate render channel, simplifying post-production for scenes with effects.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini

AI Upscaler*

Save hours of rendering time and still get crisp, photoreal results with the AI Upscaler. Available in Chaos Cloud Collaboration, it lets you turn low-resolution images into high-quality, presentation-ready visuals up to 16K in a single click. Boost resolution while also sharpening textures and enhancing fine details.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, and Blender*

Learn more >

*V-Ray Solo, Premium, and Collection subscriptions include a monthly Chaos Credit allowance to use this feature. Free subscriptions and V-Ray for Blender monthly/annual plans do not include credits. To access AI-powered features, please purchase Chaos Credits separately or upgrade to a higher-tier plan.

One workflow. One asset. Real-time to final frame.


V-Ray Collection eliminates pipeline friction - carry the same assets from pre to post —so you can move faster through production stages and deliver with confidence.
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