Tech Reviews: Chaos’s V-Ray for Blender, Wacom’s Cintiq Touch Line

This article was written for the September-October ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 352).

V-Ray for Blender

Chaos Group’s V-Ray for Blender brings the power of a production-proven renderer to the open-source 3D community. While Blender users have long relied on Cycles and Eevee, V-Ray offers photorealistic quality, deep customization, and a pipeline integration that rivals any high-end DCC.

The installation is smooth, providing access to V-Ray via the add-on, which connects to the V-Ray license server. Once activated, you get a dedicated menu, a panel of tools, some additional tabs and buttons in the viewport, as well as a dedicated node panel for building materials.

V-Ray integrates well into Blender’s interface, adding a dedicated tab in the Render Properties panel. Most settings are accessible here, including image sampling, global illumination, denoising, and render elements. V-Ray materials use custom shader nodes in Blender’s node editor — familiar but more complex than Cycles’ streamlined PBR setup. But if you want to stick with the Cycles shaders, V-Ray supports them, so you don’t need to rebuild the shader trees. Furthermore, you have access to the Chaos Cosmos Browser, which grants access to over 5,000 materials, HDRIs and 3D assets that can be easily imported and assigned to your shot.

The V-Ray progressively renders in the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB2) with post-processing controls like exposure, color balance and Light Mix. For interactive lighting, a V-Ray option is added to the viewport display modes enabling live rendering directly in the viewport.

This commercial plug-in’s strength is in its image quality and flexibility. It supports both CPU and GPU rendering with RTX acceleration and delivers outstanding results in lighting, reflection, shadows, and global illumination. You also get access to the full range of V-Ray lights, including mesh lights (which allows you to convert objects or collections into light sources) and IES lights. Chaos’s denoising options — including NVIDIA and Intel AI denoisers — aid in speeding up render time by removing the noise in renders, which would normally take much longer to resolve.

Key production features are present as well: Cryptomatte, Light Select, Multimatte, AOVs and V-Ray Proxies. The Light Cache and Adaptive Lights systems help optimize performance in complex lighting scenarios, especially interiors or multi-light setups.

For studios using Blender alongside Maya or Houdini, V-Ray for Blender is a game-changer. With .vrscene import/export and consistent material/render outputs, it becomes easy to match looks across departments and DCCs. V-Ray’s wide adoption in VFX and archviz pipelines means Blender can now slot into more professional workflows without compromise.

For Blender users who are unfamiliar with the V-Ray workflow, the learning curve may seem steep. Then again, the same could be said for V-Ray users who are unfamiliar with Blender’s workflow (which I am one). Fortunately, Chaos provides excellent tutorials that will get you rendering in no time — regardless of which side of the fence you’re starting from.

Website: chaos.com/vray
Price: Free 30-day trial offer $33 per month; $199 per year

Wacom’s Cintiq 16, 24, 24 Touch

This summer, Wacom introduced the latest additions to the Cintiq line: The Cintiq 16, 24, & 24 touch (which we’ll be looking at today). The new models sit above the Cintiq One but below the Pro line, with the 24 touch inheriting the 10-finger, multi-touch gesture of its big brothers.

The active display surface area has increased while the overall size and weight have been reduced thanks to slimmer bezels — which is debatably a good or bad thing. The Cintiq 24 Touch measures a slim 21mm and weighs in at 11lbs. Its boxy profile pairs with an included adjustable stand that supports a 16-69 degree working angle. The stand can be removed if the user prefers a VESA arm mount. The fan-less design ensures quiet operation even during long sessions.

The surface is smooth and consistent — even crossing over the bezels —covered with an etched anti-glare glass that is bonded to the panel. This provides minimal parallax between the screen and the pen nib, and a satisfying, tactile tooth.

The 23.8” 2.5K WQHD (2560 x 1440) resolution display delivers sharp detail at a roughly 0.205 mm pixel pitch. It covers 100% sRGB, supports roughly 99% DCI-93, and has a contrast ratio of 1000:1. The response tie of ~12ms ensures minimal lag when sketching.

Bundled with the 24 Touch, the Wacom Pro Pen 3 offers 8,192 levels of pressure, 60 degrees of tilt, and three programmable side-switches, which can be swapped for different button configurations — or no side buttons, if that’s your jam. Its EMR-based design means battery-free operation and near-zero parallax.

The multi-finger touch allows for a lot of control — manipulating your artwork or bringing up your programmable radial menus. Plus, you have on-screen versions of modifier buttons, which have replaced what were traditionally physical buttons. I have to admit that I miss those buttons. In Wacom’s effort to make the design and workflow more minimal, I feel this might have been a step too far. I still have the ability to connect the ExpressKey puck for my physical button needs — but we’ve lost the ability to attach it to a bezel — because there is very little bezel left. But this is a very minor nit to pick.

This new line of Cintiqs is a great mid-tier tablet solution tablet for those who want something more robust than Wacom’s One or Movink, but don’t need the resolution or color fidelity of the Pro line. As always, the tablet comes with a cornucopia of drawing and art software to try out and play with.

Website: wacom.com
Price: Cintiq 16: $499.95; Cintiq 24: $1,299; Cintiq 24 Touch: $1,499.95

Software reviews were written after being tested on a Puget Workstation AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7975WX 4.0GHz 32 Core 350W: 128GB DDR5-5600 RAM and NIVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Ge 48GB PCI-E. (pugetsystems.com)

Todd Sheridan Perry is an award-winning VFX supervisor and digital artist whose recent credits include I’m a Virgo, For All Mankind and Black Panther. He can be reached at todd@teaspoonvfx.com.