Chaos is launching V-Ray for Blender, bringing its Emmy and Academy Award-winning rendering technology to one of the world’s most widely used 3D creation tools. Artists working in animation, visual effects, archviz, game cinematics and beyond can now create production-quality images and animation directly within Blender without the need for complicated setups, using the same rendering tools employed by some of the top studios in the world.
V-Ray for Blender offers a seamless, professional-grade rendering experience for artists of all levels, enabling everything from photorealistic scenes to stylized animations. Its intuitive controls let users mimic real-world camera effects and lighting using Chaos’ Global Illumination technology, which simulates natural light behavior to ensure realism. Paired with adaptive lighting and PBR-ready materials, V-Ray for Blender automatically optimizes render times by focusing processing power on the most important areas, boosting efficiency without compromising quality.
“Blender’s open-source model and active community make it one of the most versatile 3D creation tools for users of any level, and adding V-Ray takes it a step further,” said Allan Poore, Chief Product Officer at Chaos. “With this plugin, Blender artists can render with confidence, all without compromising a thing.”
Blender users will also have access to over 5,600 free, high-quality, ready-to-use assets through the Chaos Cosmos asset library, all of which can be accessed within Blender. Once a scene is ready to render, users can access noise-free, interactive viewport rendering with the NVIDIA AI Denoiser and the Intel Open Image Denoiser, or produce clean, final images through the V-Ray denoiser. From there, they will have a full range of post-processing tools for color correction, light mix, compositing layers and masking, all available directly within the Blender UI.
V-Ray for Blender supports CPU, GPU and hybrid rendering configurations, making it fully scalable based on available hardware. Users can also utilize Chaos Cloud to move their data off their local machines and render in the cloud, allowing them to continue working on the next shot or project when deadlines are tight. Chaos Cloud has the added benefit of simplifying the collaboration process, enabling the easy sharing of work and annotations.
Along with the tools themselves, V-Ray for Blender users will also gain access to a much larger ecosystem through the V-Ray universal scene file format. Blender users now have the option to export their scenes as a .vrscene file, along with all geometry, lights, shaders and textures data. From there, they can import the scene as an asset into any other V-Ray-supported tool (and vice versa) to assemble the project/shot — including Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini and more — ensuring consistency, avoiding time-consuming asset conversions and giving users better options for previz and final production rendering.
A full list of V-Ray for Blender features can be found here.
A standalone version of V-Ray for Blender is available exclusively for Blender users at a special price ($33 paid monthly or $199 annually, which comes out to $16.50 per month). V-Ray for Blender is also available now to all current V-Ray license holders at no additional cost, and is available through all V-Ray suites. Educational pricing for V-Ray is available as well. V-Ray for Blender is available for Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems.
Complete details on the pricing can be found here.