Chaos releases V-Ray 7.2 for Maya
Chaos has released V-Ray 7.2 for Maya (V-Ray 7 for Maya Update 2), the latest version of the Maya edition of the renderer, used in VFX, animation and motion graphics pipelines.
The update adds a new displacement material, a procedural night sky system, and AI tools for generating PBR materials from photos, and for enhancing and upscaling renders.
In addition, the live link to Vantage, Chaos’s real-time ray tracing render, has been updated, making it possible to use Vantage as a viewport renderer.
New displacement material opens up new, shader-level displacement workflows
Key changes in V-Ray 7.2 for Maya include the new V-Ray Displacement Material.
It has fewer attributes than the existing Displacement Node, but applies displacement directly at shader level, opening up new workflows, including blending displacement across materials, and applying it to individual V-Ray proxy objects.
New procedural night sky
V-Ray 7.2 for Maya introduces several of the new features recently rolled out in the 3ds Max edition of the renderer, including the new procedural night sky.
Users can generate a night sky matching a specific real-world location, date and time, or adjust the position and brightness of the moon and stars manually.
Access to new AI tools in Chaos Cosmos and Chaos Cloud
The update also adds support for three of Chaos’s new AI tools, all available through the online services included with V-Ray subscriptions, and all currently still experimental.
Available via the Chaos Cosmos asset library, the AI Material Generator generates PBR materials from photographic source images.
The AI Enhancer, available in Chaos Cloud Collaboration, adds AI-generated details to renders.
The AI Upscaler, also available via Chaos Cloud Collaboration, makes it possible to upres renders to a maximum resolution of 16K.
You can read more about the data on which the AI models were trained in our story on V-Ray 7.2 for 3ds Max.
Updates to existing features
The 3D Gaussian Splatting toolset introduced in V-Ray 7 for Maya has been extended, with the option to clip splats, helping to blend 3DGS scans with conventional 3D assets.
In addition, V-Ray now supports animated Gaussian Splats; Gaussian Splats are now supported in the V-Ray GPU renderer; and Splats can be exported in USD files.
Other changes include resolution-independent bump mapping in the V-Ray Material, and support for caustics on all V-Ray light types.
The update also introduces Distributed Rendering 2 (DR2), the updated version of V-Ray’s network rendering system, which improves performance scaling across multiple machines.
Updated live link makes it possible to use Vantage as a viewport renderer
Chaos has also updated V-Ray for Maya’s live link to Vantage, its real-time ray tracing renderer.
Users can now launch a live link directly in the Maya viewport, rather than having to view a Maya scene inside Vantage itself.
Chaos pitches the live link as a way to get more accurate real-time previews of scenes during layout and look dev work, particularly for effects elements like smoke and fire.
Vantage 3.1, released alongside V-Ray 7.2 for Maya, adds a new Fluid Volume object for real-time effects.
Price and system requirements
V-Ray 7.2 for Maya is compatible with Maya 2023+, running on Windows 10+, RHEL, CentOS and Rocky Linux, and macOS 10.14+. It is rental-only.
V-Ray Solo subscriptions now cost $89.15/month or $540/year, up $25.20/year since the previous release. V-Ray Premium subscriptions cost $119.90/month or $718.80/year.
Read an overview of the new features in V-Ray 7.2 for Maya on Chaos’s blog
Read a full list of new features in V-Ray 7 for Maya in the online release notes
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