Chaos releases V-Ray for Blender

Chaos' production-proven and popular V-Ray renderer arrives natively in Blender for the first time.

Chaos has launched V-Ray for Blender, officially bringing its Emmy and Academy Award-winning, production-proven rendering technology to one of the world’s most widely used 3D creation tools. 

V-Ray for Blender is going to bump up the rendering experience on the popular open source software, offering a professional-grade rendering experience for everything from photorealistic scenes to stylized animations. Its controls let users mimic real-world camera effects and lighting using Chaos’ Global Illumination technology, which simulates natural light behavior to ensure realism. Paired with adaptive lighting and PBR-ready materials, V-Ray for Blender automatically optimizes render times by focusing processing power on the most important areas, boosting efficiency without compromising quality.

Blender users will also have access to over 5600 free, high-quality, ready-to-use assets through the Chaos Cosmos asset library. Once a scene is ready to render, users can access noise-free, interactive viewport rendering with the NVIDIA AI Denoiser and the Intel Open Image Denoiser, or produce clean, final images through the V-Ray denoiser. From there, they will have access to a full range of post-processing tools for color correction, light mix, compositing layers and masking, all available directly within the Blender UI.

It's powerful sounding stuff. V-Ray for Blender supports CPU, GPU and hybrid rendering configurations, making it fully scalable based on available hardware. Users can also utilize Chaos Cloud to move their data off their local machines and render in the cloud, as well as kick off collaborative working.

Along with the tools themselves, V-Ray for Blender users will also gain access to a much larger ecosystem through the V-Ray universal scene file format. Blender users now have the option to export their scenes as a .vrscene file, along with all geometry, lights, shaders and textures data. From there, they can import the scene as an asset into any other V-Ray-supported tool (and vice versa) to assemble the project/shot. These include Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and more, helping users avoid time-consuming and sometimes flaky asset conversions.

Pricing and availability

A standalone version of V-Ray for Blender is available exclusively for Blender users at a special price ($33 paid monthly or $199 annually). V-Ray for Blender is also available now to all current V-Ray license holders at no additional cost, and is available through all V-Ray suites. Educational pricing for V-Ray is available as well. V-Ray for Blender is available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems.