Chaos V-Ray for 3ds Max is the world’s most complete 3D rendering software for high-end visualization and production.
V-Ray for 3ds Max is a production-proven rendering software. Known for its versatility and ability to handle any type of project — from massive, dynamic scenes having thousands of lights to a sublime still life – it is the go-to solution for artists and designers across 3D industries.
NOTE: New Perpetual Licenses are no longer available. However, upgrades to version 6 are still available for V-Ray for 3ds Max (v3, Next or 5) license holders.
For new licenses, you will need to subscribe to the new single V-Ray annual license.
Free 30 Day Trial
Try V-Ray, Phoenix, Vantage, Cosmos, Player, and Scans for free with a 30 Day trial. Tech support included.
Award-winning rendering technology for any project.
For truly photorealistic renders, you want a raytracer that’s built for quality, optimized for speed, and ready to scale. V-Ray gives you the power to work with lightning-fast interactive and heavyweight production rendering—all while getting the most from your CPU and GPU hardware.
Built to handle your toughest scenes.
When you’re working with the biggest scene you’ve ever seen, you need a renderer that won’t let you down. Billions of polygons? Thousands of lights? V-Ray can handle it all. Render anything and everything with V-Ray. Adaptive Lights, Proxy Objects, Distributed Rendering— an arsenal of production-proven features when you need them.
Post-process your renders without the need of a separate tool.
V-Ray equips you with a complete set of lighting, shading, and rendering tools—all integrated with 3ds Max. The redesigned V-Ray Frame buffer with light mixing and layered compositing means you only need to use one tool for more than just rendering — no need to go back and forth between different apps.
Create interactive experiences in real-time — in a 100% raytraced environment.
Present your ideas in 100% ray-traced quality without the need of extra optimizations and conversions. Make project changes directly in 3ds Max and validate your designs on the spot.
V-Ray is compatible with all the most popular 3ds Max plugins — Substance, Forest Pack, Railclone, Ornatrix, Tyflow, Phoenix FD, and more. V-Ray is also the perfect fit for any pipeline with support for open standards such as Alembic, OSL, OpenColorIO, and now ACEScg.
Need Render nodes or a Rental of V-Ray Next for 3ds Max?
V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max brings in scattering, memory-efficient 3D geometry pattern tiling across objects, procedural clouds, cloud collaboration, and much more.
V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max is packed with powerful new features and improvements to help you create faster and render better than ever before.
New world-building and workflow tools let you quickly populate scenes with millions of 3D objects to create natural-looking landscapes and realistic environments. You can also generate detailed surfaces using repeating patterns of 3D geometry, create beautiful custom skies with procedural clouds, and much more.
Build worlds
Create anything imaginable with new tools, allowing you to quickly and easily build worlds – without limits.
Chaos Scatter
Populate your scenes with millions of objects in just a few clicks. Our new scatter tool allows you to quickly and easily create forests, fields, crowds, and more, without using lots of memory. Download free 3D models and scatter presets from Chaos Cosmos to get started.
V-Ray Enmesh
Tile 3D geometry patterns across objects to create complex surfaces with lots of detail for stunning close-up shots. Enmesh is ideal for creating intricate panels, fences, fabrics, and so much more, and it uses much less memory than displacement or copying by hand.
V-Ray Decal with Displacement
You can now use V-Ray Decal to add displacement to any surface for even more realistic cracked walls, rocks, embossed lettering, and more.
V-Ray Proxy Object Hierarchy
Easily turn an individual object’s visibility on or off or override their material with the new V-Ray Proxy hierarchical view. Set custom order by name, and streamline your geometry exchange and custom library workflows.
Collaborate as you create
Fast-forward your project’s reviews and approvals.
Chaos Cloud Collaboration
Get rapid, consolidated feedback on your work’s progress. Upload your renders to Chaos Cloud Collaboration right from V-Ray’s Frame Buffer, and share your work with clients, team members, and other stakeholders for easy review, markup, and comments at any time.
Streamline your workflow
Get the job done faster and save time to be creative.
Procedural clouds
Craft just the right cloudy sky for your environment in just a few clicks with V-Ray Sun and Sky’s new procedural clouds system. Easily simulate a variety of cloud types and weather conditions, from partly cloudy to overcast. Render realistic stills, or dynamic timelapses.
Finite dome light mode
Elevate your HDRI environment renders with the new, more flexible ground projection capabilities of the V-Ray Dome Light. Set the scale of a dome light, and have full control over blend settings with the new finite mode.
Faster UI draw times
Get a smoother experience when working with shading networks. V-Ray’s materials and textures interface now comes with much faster load times.
Light Mix light selection
Easily access scene lights with the option to select them directly from the Light Mix interface.
Texture batch load
Add variety to your scene even faster than before and create shader variations in no time with the new texture batch load option inside VRayMultiSubTex.
Shading – powered up
Speed up shading and create even more physically accurate materials.
Enhanced V-Ray Material energy preservation
Render metals and rough reflective surfaces even more accurately using the new energy compensation method.
Thin Film layer
Easily create iridescent materials such as soap bubbles, oil spills, and more with the new Thin Film option available in the V-Ray Material.
V-Ray Material Faster SSS
Render translucent materials even faster with a brand-new V-Ray Material subsurface scattering mode. Plus, low-poly translucent objects render more smoothly.
And more!
VFB Panorama Viewer
Now you can preview your spherical panorama renders while rendering, right from your V-Ray Frame Buffer.
Composition Guides Layer in VFB
Fine-tune your scenes’ compositions without a separate application. With customizable overlays, the new composition guides layer in the VFB allows you to easily experiment and enhance your image compositions.
Key Features in V-Ray for 3ds Max
Rendering
CPU & GPU RENDERING
Powerful CPU and GPU rendering built for the demands of high-end production. V-Ray GPU CUDA renders on CPUs as well as GPUs to take full advantage of all hardware.
DENOISING
Automatically remove noise and reduce render times with V-Ray or NVIDIA AI denoiser.
CHAOS CLOUD
Render scenes directly to the cloud with a push of a button.
READY-TO-RENDER ASSETS
Our integrated asset library, Chaos Cosmos, enables you to search and add render-ready models, materials, and HDRI skies to your scene directly from the V-Ray toolbar. Cosmos assets have automatic level-of-detail, accurate scale, and can be used across 3ds Max, Rhino, and Revit.
RESUMABLE RENDERING
You can stop your render at any point and pick up where you left off.
DEBUG SHADING
Easily isolate textures, materials and geometry to help debug large shading networks in V-Ray IPR and V-Ray GPU IPR.
Native ACEScg support
Select industry-standard ACEScg for rendering with automatic color space adjustment for textures, dispersion, sun & sky, and light temperature colors.
Initial out-of-core
Initial out-of-core implementation to handle your largest scenes.
Intel® Open Image Denoise
Excellent for interactive rendering, Intel® Open Image Denoise cleans up noise fast and runs on any machine.
Progressive caustics
V-Ray’s new progressively calculated caustics achieve real-world reflections and refractions in less time. Easier to set up, without the need for pre-calculated photon maps.
Lighting & Illumination
Procedural clouds
Craft just the right cloudy sky for your environment in just a few clicks with V-Ray Sun and Sky’s new procedural clouds system. Easily simulate a variety of cloud types and weather conditions, from partly cloudy to overcast. Render realistic stills, or dynamic timelapses.
Multiple Additive Dome Lights
You can now render multiple dome lights at the same time. Direct support in Light Mix makes it easier than ever to fine-tune the results.
Finite dome light mode
Elevate your HDRI environment renders with the new, more flexible ground projection capabilities of the V-Ray Dome Light. Set the scale of a dome light, and have full control over blend settings with the new finite mode.
ADAPTIVE LIGHTS
This new algorithm dramatically speeds up rendering in scenes containing many lights.
LIGHTING ANALYSIS TOOLS
Accurately measure the light levels in your scene using the new lighting analysis tools.
V-RAY INSTANCER LIGHTS DISTRIBUTION
More versatile ways of distributing lights in the scene. Instance your lights based on any kind of particle system.
ATMOSPHERIC LIGHT CONTRIBUTION CONTROL
Improved control to speed up your lighting setup. Easily tweak how much an individual light illuminates the environment fog around it.
GLOBAL ILLUMINATION
Choose from several global illumination options – exact, approximate or a hybrid of both.
ACCURATE LIGHTS
Simulate any type of natural, artificial, or image-based lighting with a wide range of light types.
Camera & Optical Effects
LENS EFFECTS
Fast and accurate simulation of real-world camera lens effects like bloom and glare with dust and scratches. Fine-tune lens effects interactively while you render.
POINT & SHOOT CAMERA
Perfect renders are as easy as taking a snapshot with new Automatic Exposure and White Balance settings.
PHOTOREALISTIC CAMERAS
Real-world camera controls let you work like a photographer. Render images with detailed depth of field and cinematic motion blur.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Experience your project in virtual reality. Create content for popular VR headsets with 6×1 cubic and spherical stereo camera types.
Materials
Advanced material override
The new material override option preserves a scene’s original opacity, bump, refraction and self-illumination, giving you even more creative control.
Auto-translation of Physical Materials
Autodesk’s Physical Materials are auto-translated to V-Ray materials without additional conversions.
New V-Ray Material translucency
Create true translucent materials with the updated V-Ray Material. Now with built-in volumetric subsurface scattering, it’s easier than ever to render realistic skin, plastic, wax, and more.
Improved V-Ray Material in viewport
Representations of V-Ray materials in 3ds Max viewports are now closer to the final render, giving you a better idea of how your results will look.
PHYSICAL HAIR MATERIAL
Render more realistic-looking hair with accurate highlights. Use melanin color as a base and Glint and Glitter controls for additional highlights.
METALNESS
The V-Ray Material adds support for PBR shaders with new Metalness reflection controls.
PHYSICALLY-BASED MATERIALS
Create any type of physical material. From multilayered car paint to accurate subsurface scattering, you can make any material imaginable.
V-RAY TOON SHADER
Quickly add cartoon and cel-shading effects to your 3D projects.
CHAOS SCANS MATERIAL LIBRARY SUPPORT
1000+ scanned materials. Import and render directly in V-Ray.
MATERIAL MANAGER
Efficiently browse from a library of over 500 render-ready materials including metals, glass, wood and more.
MATERIAL PRESETS
Save time creating common materials with presets for aluminum, chrome, glass and more.Presets for most used hair colors have also been added.
MATERIAL PREVIEWS
New rendered material swatches show you exactly what your materials will look like.
COAT LAYER
Add reflective coatings directly in the updated V-Ray Material, saving you both material creation and rendering time vs. using Blend material.
Sheen layer
Create soft microfiber fabrics like velvet, satin and silk with the new Sheen options in the updated V-Ray Material.
THIN FILM LAYER
Easily create iridescent materials such as soap bubbles, oil spills, and more with the new Thin Film option available in the V-Ray Material.
Textures
MEMORY EFFICIENT TEXTURES
Work with production-ready, multiresolution tiled textures from your favorite applications, like MARI, Mudbox and Zbrush.
TRIPLANAR MAPPING
Quickly apply seamless textures without UVs.
ROUNDED CORNERS
Generate perfectly smooth edges at render-time with no extra modeling.
Texture randomization
Add variety to your scene with the new VRayUVWRandomizer map and enhanced VRayMultiSubTex controls.
Stochastic texture tiling
Automatically remove texture tiling artifacts with the new Stochastic tiling option on the VRayUVWRandomizer.
V-Ray Dirt
Weathered streaks and dirt in crevices are easy with the enhanced V-Ray Dirt, which now employs both ambient and inner occlusion.
New Sun and Sky model
Reproduce the subtleties of twilight when the sun is below the horizon with the new Sun and Sky model.
Blue-noise sampling
Achieve better noise distribution with fewer samples.
Geometry
CHAOS SCATTER
Populate your scenes with millions of objects in just a few clicks. Our new scatter tool allows you to quickly and easily create forests, fields, crowds, and more, without using lots of memory. Download free 3D models and scatter presets from Chaos Cosmos to get started.
V-RAY ENMESH
Tile 3D geometry patterns across objects to create complex surfaces with lots of detail for stunning close-up shots. Enmesh is ideal for creating intricate panels, fences, fabrics, and so much more, and it uses much less memory than displacement or copying by hand.
PROXY GEOMETRY
Render massive scenes with proxy objects. V-Ray proxies efficiently replace complex scene geometry and load only at render time.
CLIPPER W/ RENDER-TIME BOOLEANS
Create complex cutaways and sections using any mesh object.
HAIR & FUR
Render realistic hair efficiently and flicker-free. V-Ray includes procedural fur, optimized hair shaders, and supports 3ds Max Hair&Fur, HairFarm and Ornatrix.
SPECIALTY GEOMETRY
Create unique geometry like infinite planes, metaballs, and isosurfaces, particles and object cutaways with render-time booleans.
V-RAY DECAL
Project V-Ray Decals onto surfaces at any angle without extra UVW work or disturbing any underlying materials. It’s ideal for quickly adding anything from stickers and labels to cracks, stains, and scratches. Add displacement for even more realistic results.
Atmospheric & Volumetric Effects
VOLUME RENDERING
Render fog, smoke, and atmospheric effects that respond correctly to light. Bring in volume grid caches from Houdini, FumeFX, and Phoenix FD.
AERIAL PERSPECTIVE
Simulate natural-looking skies with realistic atmospheric depth.
Render Elements
RENDER ELEMENTS
Choose from nearly 40 unique beauty, utility and matte passes to give you more control over your rendered images in compositing.
CRYPTOMATTE
Automatically create ID mattes with support for transparency, depth of field, and motion blur.
Light Path Expressions
Use the behavior of light, rather than just geometry, to produce flexible masks for very efficient compositing. Built-in presets make getting started easy, while scripting is there for ultimate control.
Post-processing
Light Mix
Create dozens of lighting scenarios from a single render. Interactively edit the color and intensity of lights, and see the results without rendering again. You can save your light mix settings, send the render elements to compositing, and update the light values in your scene.
Layer compositor
Fine-tune and finish your renders in the new Layer Compositor. Combine render elements, set blending modes, and adjust colors without a separate post-processing app.
Pixel-perfect masks in the V-Ray Frame Buffer
Make pixel-perfect adjustments to your image without re-rendering. You can now use any of V-Ray’s masking render elements—Cryptomatte, MultiMatte, and Object/ Render/ Material IDs—to select and fine-tune parts of your render.
SHARPEN/BLUR LAYER IN V-RAY FRAME BUFFER
V-Ray’s extensive post-processing capabilities are bolstered with batch image processing and a new Sharpen/Blur layer for even more artistic control without leaving 3ds Max.
Description
Licensing details
To simplify our V-Ray product line and offer customers more value and flexibility, we will no longer sell V-Ray for specific host applications. Instead, customers only need to purchase a single V-Ray license to access all V-Ray integrations, including 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, and Unreal. V-Ray will also be offered in three plans: Solo, Premium, and Enterprise.
New license sales will be subscription only
Subscriptions are an easy and flexible way for customers to stay current with all updates and new features of V-Ray. Monthly, annual, and three-year subscription options are available for Solo and Premium plan, providing an affordable option to start using V-Ray right away while benefiting from further discounted pricing for longer subscription plans. Enterprise plans do not include a monthly option and are priced for annual and three-year terms.
Toolfarm can only sell Chaos Group products to customers in North America (Canada, USA, Mexico). If you’re outside of North America, please visit Chaos’ website to purchase or find a reseller.
Upgrade to latest version
If you have a V-Ray perpetual license version 3, Next or 5 and you would like to stay on a perpetual license but move to version 6, you can still do so.
Currently, upgrades to version 6 are available for license holders of V-Ray for 3ds Max. Upgrades for other V-Ray integrations will be possible upon their release to the new version.
System Requirements
Processor
1st Gen Intel® Core™* or compatible processor with SSE4.2 support (x64)
RAM
Minimum 8 GB RAM, recommended 64 GB RAM
Operating system
Microsoft® Windows® 8.1, Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating system
Support for IES files containing the comma (“,”) symbol in the light’s description
Bug fixes
V-Ray
Blowup and Auto Region Selected produce stretched results
Crash when exporting vrscene to a non-existing directory
Direct light selects are always propagated through refractions
Drop action should fall back to default
MaxScript error occurs with viewport menus when V-Ray is downgraded to an older version with no viewport IPR support
Separate VRayCryptomatte REs names are not exported to .vrscene
Wrong keyframes export to .vrscene, breaking animation rendering
V-Ray GPU
Viewport IPR has wrong perspective when switching the active viewport from orthographic projection
VRayDenoiser is not always applied on the complete pass
VRaySamperInfo render element is not exported
Wrong Object XYZ texture mapping for Volume grids rendered
VFB
Color corrections panel is missing when is maximized during IPR session
Lightness color correction with values close to zero lead to artifacts in Lens Effects results
VRayPhysicalCamera
Vertical shift is reset in the viewport preview
VRayProxy
“Expand # to frame number” doesn’t work in the viewport
VRayVolumeGrid
Volume grids loaded from OpenVDB caches that contain internal rotation render clipped with V-Ray GPU
.vrscene exporter
Crash when trying to export vrscene to a non-existent folder
Decimal separator changes randomly on every export in a specific scene
Installer
Silent uninstall does not work for V-Ray Next
What’s new in V-Ray Next for 3ds Max, update 1
v4.10.01 Date – 29 November 2018 Download – Build 4.10.01
New Viewport IPR & Improved Interactivity
Keep working while you render with fast new viewport IPR. Interactivity in V-Ray IPR on CPUs is now faster and supports atmospheric effects.
New Lens Effects
New glare and bloom lens effects have been fully redesigned to be faster and more accurate.
GPU Bucket Rendering
Faster multi-GPU performance on workstations and distributed rendering, plus added support for Cryptomatte render elements.
GPU Fast Fog
Faster, better sampling of environment fog helps you quickly add depth to any scene with V-Ray GPU.
GPU Dispersion
Now available in V-Ray GPU, render highly accurate light refractions that split into their component colors.
Rolling Shutter
Emulate the warped motion blur effects common in digital video and cell phone cameras.
Glint & Glitter Hair Controls
The V-Ray Physical Hair material adds new Glint and Glitter controls for better highlights.
Improved Lighting Render Elements
Improved lighting passes provide consistent, artifact-free results that are independent of light sampling as well as better support for the Adaptive Dome Light.
Enhanced Color Corrections
VFB color corrections (incl. Background and LUT) can be saved with the final render as raw .vrimg or OpenEXR files. LUT strength can also be controlled.
Improved V-ray Cloud Support
Improved V-Ray Scene export adds support for more features when rendering on V-Ray Cloud. Now in Beta. Learn more
This is a compilation of the Introductory tutorials for V-Ray Next including 3ds Max, Revit, Sketchup, Rhino, Unreal, Modo and Houdini. Most of these tutorials also have downloadable assets.
Creating accurate, realistic leaves in 3D is difficult because of all the subtle differences present in the natural world. TILTPIXEL partner Ramy Hanna explains the best tools and techniques to use in V-Ray for 3ds Max to get “impeccable results.”
This tutorial, part of ” The Ultimate Introduction to V-Ray for 3ds Max ” course from Mograph Plus, shows you how to render realistic explosions and smoke in V-Ray for 3ds Max.
This step by step tutorial teaches you how to use Forest Pack’s “Forest Color” map features plus a bit of customizing, to create macro-photorealistic sand.
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