Chaos releases V-Ray 7 for Blender
Chaos has officially released V-Ray 7 for Blender, the long-awaited new version of its ray tracing renderer for Blender.
The new edition makes it possible to use the heavyweight production renderer – a common tool in visualization, VFX and motion graphics pipelines – directly inside the Blender UI.
The release makes the open-source 3D software a first-class citizen in the V-Ray product line once more, alongside DCC applications like 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Maya.
Below, we’ve summarized the key capabilities of the initial release, its limitations, and its price.
How does V-Ray 7 for Blender differ from the legacy Blender plugin?
Although V-Ray had a legacy Blender integration, it hadn’t been updated for over five years, and only supported Blender 2.79.
The release of V-Ray 7 for Blender makes V-Ray available for the current version of Blender.
Unlike the legacy plugin, which exported scenes to V-Ray Standalone, it integrates V-Ray directly inside Blender, with V-Ray available for interactive rendering in the 3D viewport.
It supports Blender’s hair system, and has “initial support” for rendering materials and nodes from Cycles, Blender’s principal built-in production renderer.
That includes the “essential Cycles materials”, including the Principled, Diffuse, Emissive, Glossy, Sheen, Glass, Refraction BSDFs.
Users can also create, edit and manage V-Ray materials, textures and geometries inside Blender via the V-Ray Node Editor, using a workflow similar to Blender’s native node editors.
What features of V-Ray 7 are available in the Blender edition?
V-Ray 7 for Blender has many of the same key features as the other editions of V-Ray.
That includes CPU, GPU and hybrid rendering; render denoising on both CPU and GPU; and the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB) for interactive rendering, relighting and compositing.
Support for V-Ray Proxies makes it possible to import geometry from external meshes at render time only, improving performance on very large production data sets.
It is also possible to import or export scenes to compatible DCC apps, like 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Maya, via V-Ray’s .vrscene format – functionality added since the initial public beta.
What limitations are there in V-Ray 7 for Blender?
However, there are still some limitations in the current release, both in terms of the Blender and V-Ray features supported, and the platforms on which V-Ray 7 for Blender can run.
V-Ray for Blender does not yet support Geometry Nodes, Blender’s procedural modeling, scattering and effects system, or support distributed rendering.
It is also currently available for Windows only, not Linux or macOS.
You can read a full list of the features currently supported in the online documentation, and vote for the next features to prioritize on Chaos’s ideas portal.
How much does V-Ray 7 for Blender cost?
V-Ray for Blender is available through existing V-Ray subscriptions, which provide access to all of the other current V-Ray integrations, plus a range of other tools and services.
V-Ray Solo subscriptions cost $84.90/month or $514.80/year, while V-Ray Premium subscriptions cost $119.90/month or $718.80/year. You can find more details in this story.
However, uniquely, V-Ray for Blender is also available via separate, single-edition subscriptions.
As well as a named-user license of V-Ray for Blender, they include the Chaos Cosmos asset library and Chaos Cloud rendering, and cost $33/month or $199/year.
Price, system requirements and release dates
V-Ray 7 for Blender is compatible with Blender 4.2+ on Windows 10+ only. It supports GPU rendering with NVIDIA GPUs only. You can find pricing details in the story above.
Read an overview of V-Ray 7 for Blender on Chaos’s blog
Read a list of new features in V-Ray 7 for Blender in the online documentation
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