V-Ray 7, update 4 for M&E: One asset. Real-time to final frame.

Key takeaways:

• Real-time right where you work: You can now render in real-time at final-frame quality with Vantage without ever leaving your DCC viewport. No extra windows or tools, no asset conversions for game engines.
• Gaussian Splats relighting: Finally, you can integrate scanned environments into your 3D scenes naturally, making real-world locations look like they belong in your digital world.
• Virtual production-ready from day 1: Your V-Ray scenes are ready for the virtual stage the moment you start working on them. Chaos Arena gives you instant creative control during shoots to achieve that perfect cinematic look.
• Perfect final frames in record time: We’ve boosted production and interactive rendering performance across CPU and GPU and introduced new artist-friendly workflows, so you can reach the desired look and deliver your final frames faster.
• Fits any setup: V-Ray is more accessible than ever, working with all your hardware, OS, and favorite DCCs.

Table of contents

In this blog post, you can read about how V-Ray 7, update 4 lets you:

1. Create worlds in real-time
2. Blend virtual with real
3. Render faster and more efficiently
4. Reach the desired look faster and easier
5. V-Ray for any production and setup

Create worlds in real-time

Real-time viewport rendering

Render your concepts and creative exploration in real-time at final-frame quality, right from your DCC viewport with Chaos Vantage. Right from the start of a project, you get instant, path-traced feedback with stunning realism, including physically accurate cameras, lights, materials, and global illumination. No extra windows or tools—just a smooth, unified workflow for faster iteration and more confident creative decisions. Same asset. Real-time to final frame.

This feature is currently available in the Maya, Houdini, and 3ds Max viewports. A Chaos Vantage Live Link is coming soon to Blender.

Disclaimer: This feature is available to Vantage and V-Ray Collection customers.

Blend virtual with real

Gaussian Splat relighting

Gaussian Splats have been a great workflow enhancement for memory-efficient environments and real-world locations, but their baked-in lighting was always a troublesome problem to solve—until now. V-Ray is one of the first to solve this, introducing splat asset relighting so you can match a scan's lighting to your scene perfectly. Finally, you can blend captured locations into your 3D worlds without the usual workarounds.

Available for: V-Ray for 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, and Chaos Vantage
Coming for: Blender

Virtual production-ready

Your V-Ray scenes are ready for the virtual stage the moment you start the project. Chaos Arena lets you blend real with virtual for true cinematic realism, giving you total control over your materials while you shoot:

• Real-time material editing: Tweak shaders live on set without stopping the cameras or going back to the DCC.
• Real-Time Depth of Field (DOF): Use natural DOF to blend live talent with virtual worlds, synced to your physical camera.
• Decal Color Corrections: Quickly match physical props to your digital background with real-time, regional color matching.
• Lens Encoder support: Keep your physical and virtual cameras in perfect sync for focal length and focus.

Render faster and more efficiently

Deliver pixel-perfect shots with maximum efficiency, no matter your hardware setup. Update 4 delivers a serious boost to production and interactive rendering across both CPU and GPU:

• Faster time to first pixel: V-Ray GPU IPR is now more responsive than ever, starting up to 2x quicker.
• 13% faster CPU rendering: Thanks to Profile-Guided Optimizations (PGO), you can now get up to a 13% performance gain on CPU rendering.
• Light Cache Denoising: Get cleaner, smoother rendering previews in less time for a much better interactive experience.
• Out-of-frustum displacement tessellation: Render faster by cutting down on memory usage and speeding up geometry compilation for all your scenes featuring complex displacement and subdivision surfaces.
• Distributed Rendering 2 (DR2): Our next-gen system provides a consistent, high-performance experience for both progressive and bucket rendering.

Reach the desired look faster and easier

We’ve added new artist-friendly workflows to help you hit that perfect look and get your project out the door in record time.

• V-Ray Parallax Texture: Need to dress a massive cityscape? Create the illusion of furnished, lit rooms behind your windows using just textures. It’s way faster than modeling every interior and keeps your scene files light.
• Quick caustics: Generate realistic caustics quickly and easily, skipping the trial-and-error nature of traditional photon workflows.
• V-Ray Displacement Material: Build, blend, and export displacement shaders for native geometry as well as V-Ray proxies with ease, making it simpler than ever to create detailed surfaces and transfer them to other DCCs.
• New Volume Shader updates in Houdini: Speed up your volume rendering and gain more control with new parameters and a fresh, intuitive interface that makes working with volumes much smoother.
• AI-powered workflows: Generate concepts, refine renders, or generate video from an image using Veras in Vantage, Maya, or Blender. You can also turn photos into PBR-ready materials or upscale your renders to 16K in just a few clicks.

V-Ray for any production and setup

V-Ray’s rendering is seamlessly integrated and fits perfectly into any studio setup or hardware configuration.

• AMD GPU rendering: You’ve got more hardware choices than ever. V-Ray GPU now supports AMD graphics cards via the HIP platform.
• Support for the latest host apps: Stay up to date with official support for 3ds Max 2027, Maya 2027, Houdini 21 (with initial Houdini 22 support), and Blender 5.1 and 5.2.
• Native Bifrost Graph support: Maya users can now benefit from initial native support for Bifrost Graph nodes.
• Hydra 2: We’ve added support for the Hydra 2 framework in Houdini.
• More accessible: We’ve made V-Ray even more accessible to the Blender community with a free Community Edition and Linux support.

Coming soon: We’re also working on OpenUSD V-Ray and Vantage Hydra Delegates to bring real-time and offline rendering to your USD pipeline in apps like Nuke, Katana, and others.

Experience V-Ray 7, update 4

Say goodbye to pipeline friction, streamline your workflow, and stay in the creative flow with V-Ray. This release is all about focusing less on the technical hurdles and limitations and more on your art. We can’t wait to see what you create with V-Ray 7, update 4!

Want to learn more about what’s new for V-Ray for your DCC, Vantage, or Arena? We’ve put everything you need to know on our what’s new page.