Chaos develops V-Ray, one of the most widely used production renderers, and Vantage, its real-time GPU path tracer. Together they form a rendering ecosystem used in VFX, architecture and product design. While V-Ray handles final offline rendering, Vantage enables instant GPU-based previews.
Real-time rendering directly in the viewport
The update introduces two key integrations. Houdini gains a Vantage Hydra Delegate, a fully path-traced, real-time renderer that streams pixel-accurate output straight into the Houdini viewport. Artists can use familiar camera and scene controls while working with physically correct lighting and materials. Maya receives an expanded Vantage Live Link that mirrors the same approach. It streams path-traced frames directly into Maya’s viewport. Live Link now also supports Linux and macOS through remote rendering connections, making the integration platform-independent across major production systems. Vantage 3.1 supports USD and MaterialX, ensuring shading and geometry consistency throughout a production pipeline. Artists can evaluate layout, lookdev and previs at full fidelity without test renders or external exports.
Real-time simulation and visual feedback
Chaos has added a real-time fluid simulator within Vantage. It supports interactive smoke, fire and fog previews, enabling fast iteration for explosions, exhaust trails or atmospheric effects. These can be evaluated interactively in Lookdev or Previs without resorting to slow caches or offline rendering passes. This feature links to V-Ray and Maya, allowing smoke and fire simulations to be reviewed instantly in the viewport with physically correct lighting and shadow behaviour.
V-Ray 7.2: new features for Maya and Houdini
Alongside the viewport integration, Chaos released V-Ray 7 Update 2 for both Maya and Houdini. In Maya, the release adds a new V-Ray Displacement Material system that allows complex displacements to be blended across different materials, applied to single V-Ray Proxy objects, and exported as independent texture maps. The update also introduces a Night Sky tool that generates physically accurate star fields and lunar lighting based on geolocation, date and time. This makes day-to-night timelapses and creative celestial setups possible without relying on external HDRIs.
Maya artists also gain access to several AI-driven tools in beta, including the AI Enhancer, AI Material Generator and AI Upscaler. These allow artists to create PBR materials directly from photographs, automatically enhance secondary assets such as vegetation or people, and upscale renders up to 16K resolution. In addition, Gaussian Splats clipping has been introduced, enabling selective editing of scanned environments without the need to regenerate data sets.
For Houdini users, the update brings a Pyro-ready volume shader designed for realistic fire, smoke and explosion rendering. Volume sampling has been optimised for faster performance, and the renderer now supports Deep output, matte rendering and extended light path expressions, providing more flexibility for compositing workflows. V-Ray also extends USD compatibility to versions 0.33 through 0.34.5 and expands its Distributed Rendering 2 system to remove the previous machine limit for network rendering. Procedural hair rendering in Solaris now delivers consistent results, aided by a new Cubic Samples parameter that gives artists finer control over hair tessellation. The update also adds resolution-independent bump mapping, ensuring consistent shading across output resolutions, and acceleration blur support, which improves motion blur accuracy for accelerating or decelerating objects.
Practical considerations
For lookdev, layout and animation, the ability to preview path-traced results directly in the viewport can reduce iteration times significantly. Artists no longer need to export intermediate renders, allowing faster visual feedback during creative decisions. However, Chaos classifies several features, such as AI-based tools, as beta. Real-time rendering remains GPU-intensive and depends on scene scale, lighting complexity and hardware performance. As always, stability and performance should be evaluated before adopting these tools in a production pipeline.
Pricing and availability
V-Ray 7 for Maya Update 2, V-Ray 7 for Houdini Update 2, Vantage 3.1, and the Vantage Hydra Delegate are available now for Windows, macOS and Linux. The Hydra Delegate requires a Vantage licence but does not need a V-Ray licence and can operate with any renderer. Licences can be purchased individually or as part of the Chaos M&E Collection, which includes V-Ray, Vantage, Phoenix, Player, Anima, Cosmos and Scans in one subscription. Current pricing is listed on the Chaos pricing page.
Download Chaos Vantage 3, update 1
Download Vantage Hydra Delegate builds for Houdini* (An active Chaos Vantage license and a clean installation of the Vantage Hydra Delegate build are required to run the plugin in Houdini. Users who have an older Vantage version installed should download the latest version.)
