Chaos releases Vantage 2.7
Chaos has updated Vantage, its real-time ray tracing renderer, intended for exploring large V-Ray scenes in architectural visualization and visual effects projects.
Vantage 2.7 adds OCIO color management, new lens distortion and vignetting effects, and support for a wider range of V-Ray’s scattering features.
A GPU-accelerated ray tracer for exploring large production scenes in real time
First released in 2020, Vantage is a hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer intended for exploring large V-Ray production scenes in near-real time.
The initial release was targeted at visualization, but in 2023 Chaos added support for rendering deforming meshes, like animated characters, and began pitching Vantage at VFX work.
Vantage 2.7: support for more native V-Ray scattering features and the VRayDirt texture
Vantage 2.7 adds support for more of V-Ray’s native features, particularly from Chaos Scatter, its object scattering system.
The renderer now supports scatter distribution maps, introduced last year in V-Ray 7, and scatter surface color from .vrscene files.
Vantage also now supports V-Ray’s VRayDirt texture map, described on Chaos’s blog as a “highly requested” change.
The Sun and Sky system has been updated to the PRG Clear Sky model introduced in V-Ray 7, which generates more realistic results at sunrise and sunset.
New lens distortion, vignetting and Blur/Sharpen effects
Vantage 2.7 also introduces a new lens distortion system, with users able to mimic distortions created by real-world camera lenses using ST maps, as in many compositing and camera tracking apps.
The renderer also now supports vignetting – both camera vignetting and optical vignetting – and gets new Blur/Sharpen controls in the Color Corrections tab for post effects.
Support for OCIO and DLSS 4
Other key changes include support for VFX color management standard OCIO (OpenColorIO).
DLSS, NVIDIA’s AI-based image reconstruction system, first integrated into Vantage in 2023, has been updated to DLSS 4, the current generation of the technology.
According to Chaos, the change “improve[s] temporal stability to minimize artifacts like ghosting and flickering” during real-time rendering.
The update also adds support for video encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs, and the option to export 16-bit as well as 8-bit PNG files, although they remain standard dynamic range images.
Price and system requirements
Chaos Vantage is compatible with Windows 10+ and DXR-compatible AMD, Intel or NVIDIA GPUs. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $108.90/month or $658.80/year.
Read an overview of the new features in Vantage 2.7 on Chaos’s blog
Read a full list of new features in Vantage 2.7 in the online documentation
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