V-Ray 7.4 brings final render quality straight into the Maya and Houdini viewports, and Blender gets a free edition

Chaos has released V-Ray 7 update 4 for film, animation and VFX. The main change concerns the workflow itself: the real-time Vantage engine now connects to the viewport in Maya, Houdini and 3ds Max and shows a final-quality image right while the scene is being built — with physically accurate cameras, lights, materials and global illumination.

Until now Vantage ran as a separate application: you exported the scene there, looked at it, went back to the DCC and made corrections. Update 4 closes that loop — no extra windows and no asset conversion required. One and the same V-Ray scene travels from early real-time look development through virtual production to the final render.

For Blender, the real-time viewport and Vantage Live Link are promised later. A caveat for anyone watching the budget: the mode is available to Vantage customers and V-Ray Collection subscribers. Separately, Chaos is preparing Hydra Delegates for V-Ray and Vantage based on OpenUSD — they will make it possible to render in Nuke, Katana and other hosts with Hydra support; the V-Ray delegate is announced for all operating systems, Vantage for Windows and Linux.

Scans stop being a still image

The second notable thing is Gaussian splat relighting. Splats have become a convenient way to bring a real location into the frame, but their lighting is baked in at the moment of capture, and fitting a CG object with its own lighting into such a scan was a problem. In update 4 the splat responds to V-Ray light sources, and there is blending control, which especially helps with scans shot in diffuse light. It works in 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini and Chaos Vantage; support in Blender is announced as coming next.

For studios this changes the status of the technology: a scan turns from reference material into an element of the shot that can be lit to match the scene.

Where the update wins back time

Part of the speed gain comes from rebuilding the engine. Chaos moved to the Intel ICX compiler and introduced hardware profile-guided optimization (PGO) with support for Intel Core Ultra processors — up to 13% faster CPU rendering. Interactive GPU rendering starts roughly twice as fast thanks to accelerated loading of assets into video memory and faster texture compression. In addition, V-Ray GPU has learned to compute on AMD graphics cards via the HIP platform — in the versions for 3ds Max and Blender.

The remaining changes hit specific production bottlenecks:

• denoising is applied to the Light Cache before the render starts — previews become clean faster, and for the NVIDIA denoiser it is enabled by default;
• Distributed Rendering 2 has gained a dedicated dispatcher, smart bucket splitting and asset caching, with no ceiling on the number of machines, for progressive and bucket modes;
• the V-Ray Parallax Texture draws the interior behind a building's windows without real geometry — a saving on background architecture, with ready-made assets available in Chaos Cosmos;
• fast caustics are switched on with a single depth toggle, without setting up photon maps;
• the V-Ray Displacement Material collects and blends displacement shaders, applies to native geometry and proxies and carries over between integrations;
• Houdini and Maya have gained displacement tessellation outside the view frustum — less memory and faster geometry compilation;
• LPEs for volumes make it possible to separate the light in smoke, clouds and fog or the self-illumination of fire, while the backplate workflow isolates reflections and GI from holdouts;
• the volume shader in Houdini has gained control over motion blur scale by velocity and over the sampling rate;
• Maya has received initial native support for Bifrost graphs — procedural setups are translated at render time without manual caching and relinking;
• V-Ray for Houdini officially supports Hydra 2 for working with Solaris and complex USD scenes.

The compatibility matrix has been updated as well: 3ds Max 2027, Maya 2027, Houdini 21 with initial support for Houdini 22, Blender 5.1 and 5.2.

A free edition for Blender

For the Blender community the main news is a different one: V-Ray now has a free Community Edition. Chaos positions it for learning, personal projects and freelance work, it includes the key rendering capabilities, and the licence renews for free every three months. At the same time the Blender version has gained Linux support — all three platforms are now covered, so studio pipelines and render farms can join in too.

The AI features follow a separate scheme. Veras in Vantage, 3ds Max, Maya and Blender generates concepts from a blockout, a sketch or a reference, refines stills and makes video out of an image; the material generator in Chaos Cosmos turns a photo of a surface into a ready PBR material, and there is also upscaling of renders up to 16K. All of it runs on Chaos Credits: the V-Ray Solo, Premium and Collection subscriptions include a monthly credit allowance, while free subscriptions and the V-Ray for Blender plans do not.

On the virtual production side, Chaos Arena has gained material editing right on set, real-time depth of field, synchronization with a physical lens via focal length and focus encoders, and colour correction of decals by region. Vantage has learned to export VDB caches so that simulations can be reused from previs to final.

Why renderers are going real-time

The release logically reads as a continuation of a general industry movement: the boundary between preview real-time and a full-fledged ray tracer has been blurring for several years, and Chaos is consistently bringing its two engines into a single pipeline instead of developing them in parallel. Competing renderers are moving in the same direction, and scans, USD pipelines and alternatives to NVIDIA are appearing in different vendors' releases at roughly the same time — the industry is probably converging on a new set of must-have capabilities.

AMD support looks like a strategic step here. Price and video memory capacity have defined render farm budgets for years; the appearance of a second vendor on the list of supported hardware gives studios leverage when purchasing. If that practice takes hold, the choice of hardware will stop being a foregone conclusion.

The free edition for Blender is a move towards an audience that commercial renderers long steered clear of. Giving away an entry level expands the base of users familiar with V-Ray and prepares the ground for a move to paid plans, all the more so since the most notable new capabilities are tied to the higher subscriptions and to credits. For an artist it is a convenient way in; for a studio it is a new line in the budget.

Community reaction

The V-Ray 7.4 update for Maya and Houdini itself is barely discussed in public feeds: the official Chaos account is silent, industry outlets and resellers retell the list of new features — final quality right in the viewport via Vantage, relighting of Gaussian splats, faster computation — but artists hardly reply to those posts or quote them. The lively conversation revolves around the free edition for Blender, which Chaos puts in the same overview. Part of the community welcomes the step warmly: they miss V-Ray after leaving 3ds Max and call the decision a strong one. Others have doubts: they consider a ninety-day licence an extended demo, a simple scene takes longer in V-Ray than in Cycles, and they call the eight-bit ceiling and the resolution limit too harsh for a final image.

“Beautiful. Haven't used V-Ray for about ten years, since I moved from 3ds Max to Blender, and I've missed it often.”

— @PolygonPeasant (X)

“Chaos is giving away V-Ray for Blender for free. I have good memories of working with V-Ray in 3ds Max. But V-Ray in Blender? Who needs that now? You hit the button — and you wait. And wait. And wait. Cycles renders scenes like that almost instantly. Don't waste your time on it.”

— @slavoartist (X)

“The site says the licence term is three months. If that's the case, it isn't free, it's just a longer demo. Still useful for learning V-Ray, but calling it free is deceptive.”

— @kjartys (X)

What is behind such a push by Chaos: pressure from real-time engines, the fight for the Blender audience, a bet on Gaussian splats?