You can now use V-Ray free for commercial work in Blender
Chaos has released the V-Ray for Blender Community Election, a new free edition of its ray tracing renderer for Blender.
The Community Edition, which is aimed at “students, hobbyists, educators and freelancers”, is capped at 2K resolution, but is largely feature-complete, and can be used for commercial work.
Extending Chaos’s recently reinstated support for Blender
Chaos began properly supporting Blender last year with V-Ray 7 for Blender, integrating V-Ray directly inside the open-source 3D software, for interactive or final-frame rendering.
At the time, that meant a paid subscription, although a cheaper one than standard V-Ray sub: V-Ray for Blender is the only edition of the software to which you can subscribe individually.
Paid V-Ray for Blender subscriptions cost $33/month or $199/year, which gets you a named-user license, plus access to the Chaos Cosmos asset library and Chaos Cloud rendering.
What are the limitations of the free V-Ray for Blender Community Edition?
The new Community Edition makes it possible to use V-Ray for Blender for free, including for commercial projects, but with some limitations on workflow.
The main one is that render resolution is capped at 2,560 x 2,560px, and output is limited to 8-bit formats, so you can’t render EXR files or 32-bit TIFFs.
And while you get V-Ray’s core features, you don’t get pipeline integration: in particular, you can’t export .vrscene files for rendering in other editions of V-Ray.
You’re also limited to using the Community Edition on your local machine, rather than a render farm: it doesn’t support distributed rendering or headless batch rendering.
The Community Edition comes a cut-down set of Chaos Cosmos assets – although you still get access to almost half the current Cosmos library: over 14,000 assets.
And, as you’d expect of a free edition, you don’t get direct product support from Chaos.
Who is the V-Ray for Blender Community Edition for?
The limitations on the Community Edition are essentially intended to stop larger VFX and animation studios, who need pipeline integration, from using it for free in production.
The 2K resolution cap will also be a deal-breaker for product and architectural visualization.
That’s still a relatively niche market for Blender, but it’s one of V-Ray’s strengths, and one of its selling points over Blender’s own very capable Cycles renderer.
However for individual artists, particularly generalists, the Community Edition looks like quite a reasonable option, particularly for demo reel or portfolio work.
Chaos describes it as suitable for “students, hobbyists, educators and freelancers looking to accelerate their careers”.
“For years, Blender has been the great ambassador for our industry, an accessible entry point that gives people the confidence to become 3D artists,” said Chaos co-founder Vlado Koylazov.
“With this free version, we want to actively support this vibrant community and all the important work being done by The Blender Foundation, so new artists can aim even higher.”
How does the Community Edition compare to the Blender editions of other key renderers?
V-Ray is also one of the only major production renderers to have a Blender edition that can be used for free on commercial projects, alongside OctaneRender Prime.
RenderMan has a free edition with Blender support, but it’s for non-commercial use only.
Maxon discontinued the Blender edition of Redshift last year, and Arnold only has an unofficial community-developed Blender integration.
Price, system requirements and release dates
V-Ray for Blender is compatible with Blender 4.2+ on Windows 10+ or macOS 11.0+. It supports GPU rendering with NVIDIA or Apple Silicon GPUs. The software is available rental-only.
The V-Ray for Blender Community Edition is free, including for commercial use, with the restrictions covered in the story above.
Community Edition licenses are available for 90 days at a time, although they can be renewed an unlimited number of times if you complete a “short survey” each time.
Read Chaos’s announcement of the V-Ray for Blender Community Edition
Download the free V-Ray for Blender Community Edition
(Requires registering for a free account on the Chaos website)
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