Chaos has now officially launched V-Ray for Blender, bringing its rendering technology to one of the most widely used 3D creation tools.
Artists can now create production-quality images and animation directly within Blender without the need for complicated setups, using the same rendering tools “employed by some of the top studios in the world.”
V-Ray for Blender enables 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 behaviour. Paired with adaptive lighting and PBR-ready materials, V-Ray for Blender automatically optimises render times by focusing processing power on the most important areas, boosting efficiency without compromising quality.
“Blender’s open-source model and active community make it one of the most versatile 3D creation tools for users of any level, and adding V-Ray takes it a step further,” said Allan Poore, Chief Product Officer at Chaos. “With this plugin, Blender artists can render with confidence, all without compromising a thing.”
Blender users will also have access to over 5,600 free, high-quality, ready-to-use assets through the Chaos Cosmos asset library, all of which can be accessed within Blender. 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 a full range of post-processing tools for colour correction, light mix, compositing layers and masking, all available directly within the Blender UI.
V-Ray for Blender supports CPU, GPU and hybrid rendering configurations, making it fully scalable based on available hardware. Users can also use Chaos Cloud to move their data off their local machines and render in the cloud. Chaos Cloud has the added benefit of simplifying the collaboration process, enabling the easy sharing of work and annotations.
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 — including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and more — ensuring consistency, avoiding time-consuming asset conversions and giving users better options for previz and final production rendering.
A standalone version of V-Ray for Blender is available exclusively for Blender users at a special price ($33 paid monthly or $199 annually, which comes out to $16.50 per month). 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.
Staff Reporter
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