Photorealistic Renderers Add Over 30 Features/Improvements for Beginners and Specialists Working in AEC, Product Design and More
KARLSRUHE, Germany — December 10, 2024 — Today,
Chaos releases
V-Ray 7 for SketchUp and
V-Ray 7 for Rhino, helping designers tap the power of Gaussian Splats, virtual tours and eye-catching effects — all in one place. With V-Ray 7, designers can start accelerating everything from 3D environments to immersive experiences, using presets and other tools that reduce most processes down to a couple of clicks.
3D Gaussian Splats, the talk of this year’s SketchUp 3D Basecamp, are becoming prized as a rapid way to create complex 3D environments from photos or video. With native support for Gaussian Splats, SketchUp and Rhino users can now leverage this trend, as they easily place buildings in context or render-rich, detailed environments that can be reflected and accept shadows.
V-Ray 7 is also a fast path to creating interactive virtual tours that will entice clients and effectively communicate design intent. These immersive, panoramic experiences can easily be customized with floor plans, personalized hotspots and other contextual details that will highlight a space’s unique attributes.
New Material Override options have been added to make massing/form studies a breeze. While anyone can make a model monochrome with a click, V-Ray 7 allows them to also preserve specific surface details like bump maps, and material characteristics like refractions, reflections and self-illumination, offering more control over the final presentations. Stylized rendering presets are also available, including options for clay, plastic, wood and more.
Additional Features and Improvements Include:
V-Ray Frame Buffer Updates
- Freeform Render Region – Designers can now re-render specific parts of their image with any shape they want. With limitless flexibility, users can render multiple regions at once, or hone in on a single area they want to fine-tune.
- Color-Correction Presets – A new color-correction filters library can quickly boost the visual appearance of a render, providing users with quick access to many high-quality grading options.
- Vignetting Layer – Vignette camera effects can now be added using quick shaping controls, helping users bring more attention to the center of an image.
Artistic Aids
- Layered Textures – A powerful new layering system will bring a Photoshop-esque experience to high-detail textures. Each texture layer can be stacked and tweaked with complete control over opacity, blending modes and more.
- Gradient Texture Remapping – Advanced UV mapping capabilities now enable an advanced texture recoloring workflow. This is especially useful for procedural texture edits like pattern colorization, brick randomization and custom wallpaper designs.
- V-Ray Luminaires – The ever-expanding Chaos Cosmos asset library, accessible through V-Ray, now brings a new light fixture optimization called Luminaires, which preserves the accurate light distribution while optimizing render times. Most of the light fixtures within Chaos Cosmos are now Luminaires in V-Ray 7.
- Light Mix for Emissive Materials – Light Mix now lets designers adjust the intensity and color of specific emissive materials after rendering, for better lighting control and customizable renders.
- Enhanced V-Ray Sun & Sky – For designers looking to create nautical twilight looks, V-Ray 7 offers an improved PRG sky model that can create more realistic images and immersive animations. V-Ray Sky can also now render various observer altitudes up to several kilometers.
- Firefly Removal – V-Ray 7’s new algorithm automatically detects and finishes unresolved pixels, known as “fireflies,” during bucket rendering, greatly reducing the time needed to produce final images.
Scatter Tools
- Edge Trimming – Scattered elements now fit perfectly within set boundary lines, making it easier to populate any precisely defined area.
- Camera Clipping – Users can now limit scattered instances to the current view of their camera.
Chaos Cosmos Improvements
- Non-Destructive Material Override – Users can now swap out Cosmos object materials without breaking the asset’s connection to Cosmos.
- Asset Variants Support – Chaos Cosmos now has more asset variations to choose from, including seasonal options for 3D vegetation models (ex: summer or autumn leaves). Once users select their desired variant, they can just drag and drop it into their scene or even change the variant at a later stage.
- 400 New Render-Ready Assets – V-Ray 7 incorporates the latest Chaos Cosmos update, which is packed with 250+ vegetation models, 70+ static people featuring both single and couple-based poses and new furniture from IWC Home and Fanuli.
GPU Boosts
- Faster “Time to First Pixel” – New optimizations for scatter rendering, texture heavy scenes, data uploads and geometry compilations offer a better interactive rendering experience and a faster time to first pixel for speed-conscious users.
- Caustics Support – V-Ray GPU now supports caustics, enabling realistic surface reflections and refractions in both production and interactive rendering. The new Caustics solver is also optimized to fully utilize GPU hardware, delivering significantly faster results than a CPU.
- RAM for Texture Memory – Textures are no longer processed by V-Ray GPU, giving users the ability to employ even bigger textures without worrying about memory constraints.
- Up to 3X Faster on MacBooks – New Metal support triples rendering performance when using both the GPU and CPU sides of Apple M4 processors, while doubling performance on M3 processors.
SketchUp-Only Updates
- Faster Rendering in the SketchUp Viewport – Users will find a significant speed boost when utilizing the viewport rendering overlay in SketchUp 2024.
- Simplified Material Binding – Users can now configure the way V-Ray materials are displayed in the SketchUp’s viewport in a more intuitive and straightforward way.
Rhino/Grasshopper-Only Updates
- New Object Modifiers UI – A new and improved user interface makes managing object modes like Fur, Clipper, Mesh Light, Displacement and Scatter a lot easier.
- Swarm in V-Ray for Grasshopper – Distributed rendering is now possible in Grasshopper, making it easier to use the power of multiple machines to turn out faster renders.
To see all the new features, explore the “What’s New” pages for
V-Ray 7 for SketchUp and
V-Ray 7 for Rhino/Grasshopper today.
Pricing and Availability
V-Ray 7 for SketchUp is available now for Windows and MacOS, while V-Ray 7 for Rhino/Grasshopper is available for Windows . All V-Ray subscription plans work for all supported host applications, including Rhino, SketchUp, 3ds Max, Revit, Maya, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Blender. Pricing can be found on the
Chaos website .
About Chaos
Founded in 1997, Chaos is a leading global visualization technology company. Chaos is defining visualization by offering accessible tools, simplifying and accelerating workflows, and empowering visual storytelling for artists, architects, designers and other creative professionals.
Chaos’ portfolio of visualization technologies for architecture and design, media and entertainment, and product e-commerce includes:
- V-Ray, a physically based renderer that has been honored with an Academy Award and an Engineering Emmy
- Enscape, a high-quality real-time rendering and virtual reality plugin
- Corona, an artist-friendly photorealistic renderer
- Cylindo, a 3D furniture product visualization platform for e-commerce
- Anima, a 3D/4D animation software to add realistic people and crowds to visualizations
Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Chaos has nearly 800 employees and offices in 11 cities worldwide. It is actively
seeking new talent across multiple departments to continue expanding its ecosystem.