What's New

New Features

USD

• Initial support for importing and rendering static and animated USD (Universal Scene Description) format files(.usd, .usda, .usdc, usdz).

Materials

• Initial support for MaterialX shaders. 

• Added functionality for creating and editing materials within Chaos Vantage. Note: Currently only materials created in Vantage can be edited.

Gaussian Splats

• Support for rendering Gaussian Splats from .vrscene files and Live Link.

Volumes

• Initial support for importing and rendering volume caches (.aur, .vdb) from Chaos Phoenix and VRayVolumeGrid. 
• New “Create new Volume Grid” object available from the main toolbar. Note: Volume shading controls are currently limited inside Vantage.

Scatter

• Added support for Object Clustering in Chaos Scatter. Note: Instance layer painting and instance color maps are not yet supported.

Textures

• Added support for the probability parameter in MultiSubTex.

• Added support for VRay2SidedTex.

• Added support for Maya Projection Texture.

• Added support for Cinema 4D projection mappings, including screen and frontal types.

Camera

• Added support for camera tracking with the following protocols: LONET 2, EZtrackTCD, FreeD, stYpe HF.

View Modes

• New Selection Mask View Mode: Selected objects render white while all others render black.

UI/UX

• Added camera object editing in the Details panel (Object tab). Note: Changes will not be visible in the viewport until the camera is re-selected from the Camera Lister.

Render Elements

• Render element names can now be remapped using the environment variable VRDX_REMAP_ELEMENT_NAMES with the following available convention: VRDX_REMAP_ELEMENT_NAMES=OldName:NewName  and VRDX_REMAP_ELEMENT_NAMES="Old name:New name"

Modified

UX/UI

• Redesigned Chaos Vantage UI: changed color palette, side panels are now resizable.

• Redesigned Home Screen.

• Render setup is now Render mode. Available from top right side.

Performance

• Enhanced the Lavina renderer to better handle very large numbers of unique meshes.

Textures

• Improved handling of V-Ray Dirt visibility inside nested groups in .vrscene files.

Light Linking

• Improved loading performance for large include/exclude lists on environment lights.

Fixes

File

• Crash when opening .vantage files referencing .vrscene files with deleted animated cameras.

Textures

• Incorrect rendering of large HDRI maps in environment textures on Blackwell GPUs.

• Rendering issues with specific animated textures when DLSS denoiser is enabled.

• UV set mapping issues for Blender scenes with multiple channels.

Displacement

• Crash caused by per-triangle tessellation displacement on multi-geometry meshes (multi-voxel .vrmesh).

Lights

• Incorrect rendering of light meshes from multi-geometry meshes (multi-voxel .vrmesh).

• Instance prototype flag handling in lights.

Light Linking

• Non-functional light linking on procedural objects (e.g., Chaos Scatter).

• Random black artifacts on directly visible area lights using light linking.

UI/UX

• Navigation gizmos flickering and disappearing prematurely.
• Incorrect DLSS settings display when the denoiser should be hidden.

New Features

Lens effect

• Added lens effects from the V-Ray VFB.

Materials

• Support for VRaySwitchMtl.

• Support for compensate camera exposure in VRayMtl и VRayLightMtl.

Lights

• Support for light linking through include and exclude lists.

Textures

• Support for the parallax room shader used by wParallax(jiWindowBox_All_v1_10.osl, wParallax_SMP.osl/wParallax_ADV.osl) and Evermotion (Evermotion_wBox_VRay.osl).

• Support for using video files as bitmap textures . Supported codecs are H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8, VP9.
• Support for VRayUVWRandomizer's Random Flip U/V options.

Scatter

• Support for the temporal consistency option of Chaos Scatter.

Hardware

• Support for recent integrated AMD GPUs (16 or more CUs).

Environment

• Support for animated environment rotation from vrscene.

Statistics

• Implemented Texture and mesh statistics dialogs.

Modified

Performance

• Improved rendering speed up to 80% faster(scene dependent) with implementing Shader Execution Reordering (SER). Available on NVIDIA Ada and Blackwell GPUs.

Denoiser

• Upgraded OIDN to version 2.3.3, adding support for latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

Color management

• Upgraded OpenColorIO to 2.4.2, adding support for ACES 2.0 configurations.

Clouds

• Improved support for clouds from Enscape exported vrscene.

Color corrections

• Improved Blur radius to better match the one in VFB.

Fixes

Camera

• Warning about not found object for saved cameras in .vantage file.

• Improperly distinguished imported Original Camera

Materials

• Reflection filter clamping to better match V-Ray.

Displacement

• Missing displacement when shift is non-zero and bounds are disabled.

Textures

• Dynamic textures not working correctly with vrscenes from Cinema4D (higher than necessary mip resolutions were used).

New Features

Scatter

• Support for V-Ray 7 Scatter density patterns, edited scatter instances and scatter surface color from .vrscenes.

Textures

• Support for V-Ray Dirt texture.

Sky

• Upgraded the PRG Clear Sky model with added altitude and turbidity parameters to match V-Ray 7.

Camera

• Support for camera lens distortion with ST maps.

• Support for camera vignetting and optical vignetting.

Color management

• Added support for Open Color IO color management. Can be accessed from top toolbar>Render settings>Display correction.

Output

• Added support for 16-bit .png output files. Option can be set in Edit>Preferences>General>Save 16-bit PNG files.

• Added support for video encoding on Intel and AMD devices.

Color corrections

• Added Blur/Sharpen post effect.

UI/UX

• Added animated camera path visualization in the viewport. Camera path can be disabled from Top toolbar>View filter>Camera path. 

Modified

DLSS

• Upgraded DLSS Ray Reconstruction to version 4.

UI/UX

• Improved navigation speed controls. Now the movement speed can be contolled when pressing the right mouise button(RMB) and mouse wheel up to increase and mouse wheel down to decrease it.

• Improved the performance of object highlight and selection.

Water surface

• Improved the accuracy of water surface swell (wind speed) when using different scene units.

Fixes

Materials

• Emissive layers from SketchUp/Rhino/Revit not rendering.

Camera

• Camera types other than Perspective not working in 2.6.2.

• Bloom threshold not working properly when using physical camera exposure.

Live Link

• Live Link animation rendering hanging randomly after first frame.

• Camera thumbnails reset to black when navigating in DCC during Live Link.

• V-Ray Fur rendering in Vantage during Live Link from SketchUp despite being disabled.

• Renaming a camera in Vantage results in a new camera when in Live Link.

Geometry

• Crash when playing animation after deleting an animated procedural object loaded from a .vrscene.

• Alembic UV channels/sets being ignored if they reused the main topology channel.

Sky

• Gray dot artifact at the zenith when using most sky models.

UI/UX

• Missing HDR display options in 2.6.2.

• Stored window position failing to restore properly on startup.

• Inconsistent undo action when renaming objects in Scene Outliner.

• Slow responsiveness of Water Surface object when High Detail is enabled.

Rendering

• Random colored pixels when a mesh has three or more UV channels/sets with some unused.

• Random colored pixels with Alembic files with more than one UV set and more than one object/voxel.

New Features

Material

• Support for Sub Surface Scattering translucency mode of V-Ray material.

• Support for stochastic opacity. Now gradients in opacity map can be rendered. Has to be enabled from Render tab > Materials > Opacity dropdown button.

Clipper

• Support for importing and creating V-Ray Clipper.

Water surface

• Added a Water surface object.

Virtual Reality

• Support for navigation with Virtual Reality controllers.

Camera

• Support for animated camera near and far clipping planes from vrscene.

• Cameras are now scene objects. They are listed in scene outliner and have gizmos in the viewport and can be selected and manipulated.

• Added Smooth camera key interpolation for smoother camera movement. 

• Functionality for setting the average camera movement speed for Animation Transitions. 

UI/UX

• Added import camera, light and material buttons in Camera, Lights and Materials tab respectively.

Clay mode

• Added Wireframe/Edges override option for the Clay mode.

Texture

• Support for PhoenixFDOcean texture.

• Support for V-Ray Water Texture in Maya, SketchUp, Rhino and Revit.

Chaos Cosmos

• Support for Cosmos multi-asset selection and import.

Multi GPU

• Added support for Light Cache on multiple GPUs.

Modified

Material

• Improved Thin-walled - now it works with SSS translucency mode of V-Ray material.

UI/UX

• Added object type specifier icons to the Scene outliner.

• Improved opacity - now clip opacity is enabled by default.

• Improved soft ranges of UI sliders to be readjusting based on type-in input.

• Improved the text elision in dropdown boxes.

• Improved the Home Screen - now it doesn't appear when starting a Live Link session and Vantage is not started.

Tools

• Improved Move Pivot tool to respect the local/world coordinate space toggle.

Scene states

• Improved the interpolation of scene states when NONE is used - now NONE is skipped when calculating state interpolation.

Clouds

• Improved the rendering of clouds when using DLSS, at large upscale ratios the flickering is greatly reduced.

Color corrections

• Improved the Bloom post effect to better match round shapes.

Multi GPU

• Improved the multi-GPU offline rendering speed with compositing elements.

Fixes

Virtual Reality

• Washed out colors on Virtual Reality headsets.

Chaos Cosmos

• Blur on newer Cosmos animated assets.

UI/UX

• Wrong undo action when renaming objects in the Scene outliner.

• Long Home Screen delay when loading DropBox scene thumbnails.

• Inconsistency in display selection on startup.

Rendering

• Black pixels caused by weighted firefly filter in rare cases.

Importing

• Mismatch of timing of deformed and animated transformed objects when .vrscene is imported instead of opened.

• Wrong loading of Anima textures at arbitrary frames when .vrscene is imported instead of opened.

Render devices

• Device selection regression introduced in 2.5.2.

Importing

• Wrong point light intensity when using Lumens or Watts.

New Features

Virtual Reality

• Initial(WIP) support for interactive rendering in VR headsets.

Animation

• Support for Chaos Cosmos animated vegetation assets.

Materials

• Support for VRayEdgesTex in bump and rounded corners.

Geometry

• Support for animated partial object visibility.

Rendering

• Support for ACEScg rendering color space.

• Tool for quickly saving a previz video with DLSS.

UI/UX

• Search filtering and sorting for scene objects, lights, and cameras.

• Progress bar for importing assets.

• Added meter scale information in the log and Scene stats.

• Added "Flip horizontally" option to the Background image.

• Added ability to drag and drop files onto FilePath property labels(LUTs, Environment texture, Background texture, Point, Spot, Directional Projection textures).

Color Corrections

• Loading chromatic aberration from VFB settings in .vrscene.

Modified

Decals

• Added decal option to lock the width/length ratio.

• Improved the "place decals" tool to be activated when importing or dragging decals from the Chaos Cosmos browser and to load the decal properties.

UI/UX

• Improved the "Always on top" behavior, now it is disabled while HQ rendering.

• Improved UI - now distance parameters display with scene units.

• Improved the camera settings layout.

• Improved the highlighting and selection in scenes with millions of instances.

Environment

• The default sun is now auto-enabled when it is the only light in the scene.

• Added Improved shading option to the clouds that improves self-shadowing.

Performance

• Texture loading speed is now 5-10% faster.

• Improved acceleration structure rebuilds and instance updates for better performance.

Vantage file

• Merged assets as a result of "Open file as config only" now are properly saved in the .vantage file.

Installer

• New default install directory is C:\Program Files\Chaos\Vantage\. For versions prior to Chaos Vantage 2.5, the default location is - C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Vantage\

Fixes

Environment

• Visible strip artifacts on clouds.

• Incorrect environment rotation when using the "Flipped" option in Maya

Decals

• Decals not rendering from Live Link from Revit or other V-Ray 6.1 builds.

• Decals not updating on animated objects under specific circumstances.

• Transform animation from .vrscene being ignored for decals.

Textures

• Incorrect saturation of textures when dynamic textures are enabled.

• Reduced checker artifacts with UVWRandomizer random rotation and certain normal maps when dynamic textures are enabled.

UI/UX

• Overlay issue when using multiple GPUs with OptiX or DLSS upscaling.

• Incorrect change of the "View mode" after "Frame Selected/Scene" action.

• Hiding of the "Create scene state" dialog when "Always on top" option is enabled.

• Undo transformation for objects in very large scenes.

• Non-functioning undo shortcut while the Transform Dialog is open.

Vantage file

• Generation of additional clone objects when opening the scene as config only.

New Features

Geometry

• Support for importing and creating V-Ray Decal. 

• Support for nested V-Ray scenes inside V-Ray scenes.

Materials

• Support for "Thin walled" option in V-Ray material.

Textures

• Support for UDIM textures.

Color corrections

• Added white balance to color correction tab.

• Loading most VFB color corrections settings from .vrscene files (Exposure, Filmic, White Balance, Hue/Saturation, Color Balance, LUT).

Camera

• Support for setting "Auto-exposure" and "exposure bias" from .vrscene or Live-link.

Lights

• Support for dome light "horizontal flip" option from Maya. 

UI/UX

• Search filter functionality in the Scene outliner.

Animation editor

• Imported animated cameras in/out ranges setting.

• Undo/Redo actions for animation editor.

Modified

Geometry

• Improved Scatter generation and update for detailed target and area include/exclude meshes.

• Improved denoising of deforming geometry.

UI/UX

• Scatter and fur objects can now be selected in the viewport.

• Improved tooltips timing.

Denoiser

• Updated DLSS-RR to version 3.7.

Performance

• Improved playback performance with a small number of animated instances and a large number of non-animated instances.

• Improved dynamic textures update performance.

Fixes

Geometry

• Merging of animated scenes with different Up vector results in wrong orientation.

Chaos Cosmos

• Wrong rendering of Cosmos assets exported from Maya.

UI/UX

• Crash when modifying key shortcuts.

• Disappearing popup dialogs for camera settings.

• Hiding an object doesn't hide its descendants if they are procedural objects (scatter, fur, light).

• NVENC failure when falling back from AV1 to H264 on older GPUs.

Installer

• Installer doesn't proceed when there is no V-Ray License Service installed.

New Features

Materials

• Support for rendering V-Ray Blend Material (BRDFLayered).

Render element

• Support for the Multi Matte render element. 

UI/UX

• Added viewport toggle filter for the light gizmos.

• Added option to improve desktop responsiveness while rendering.

• Added information, in the status bar, for the host application used for Live Link.

• Added ability to rename of objects created inside Vantage (Fur, Scatter, Lights, Multi Matte) with a context menu or double-click on object name.

Output

• Added AV1 codec for video encoding, enabled by default (if supported by GPU).

Modified

Displacement

• Improved memory used for displacement by varying tessellation level within a mesh.

Denoiser

• Updated Intel Open Image Denoise to version 2.2.

Light Cache

• Improved Light Cache to slightly better preserve low intensity samples.

UI/UX

• Chaos Cosmos Browser UI responsiveness.

Fixes

Displacement

• Random displacement when using unsupported secondary UV channel of the geometry object.

Scene states

• Broken sub-states after dropping Environment texture.

Live Link

• Wrong Live Link update for Nodes with unsupported materials.

• Wrong rendering of Glossy Refraction with rotated texture during Live Link with Rhino.

Lights

• Sun azimuth rotation values to match geographical azimuth. Old saved .vantage files will be automatically updated to use new values on Save.

Collision

• Missing "Height ratio" update when collision "Height tolerance" is changed.

Clouds

• Wrong cloud shading with sun slightly under the horizon.

Lighting

• Wrong lighting when rendering using direct light reservoir resampling and the scene contains a normal map.

• Refraction artifacts when rendering with direct light reservoir resampling.

UI/UX

• Disappearing toolbar in the Debug Log window after second opening.

• Hiding of the HQ rendering dialog while "Always on top" is enabled.

Denoiser

• Streak artifacts with Optix denoiser and multi GPU setup.

• Broken temporal (“reduce flickering”) denoising in multi GPU mode.

New Features

Geometry

• Support for V-Ray Fur, Ornatrix, Hairfarm, and XGen hair.

• Support for V-Ray Displacement.

• Support for new V-Ray 6.2  Forest pack and Rail clone instancing.

Materials

• Support for V-Ray Hair Next material.

Hardware

• Support for Intel Meteor Lake iGPU.

Batch rendering

• Render Setup options and render queue items are now stored in the .vantage file.

Live Link

• Added Vantage Live Link settings dialog in 3Ds Max Vantage toolbar.

UI/UX

• Implemented a warning and error count indicator in the status bar.

Rendering

• Implemented a Firefly filter.

Modified

Geometry

• Improved GPU peak memory usage when loading the geometry for a scene.

• Improved check for failed geometry allocations.

DLSS

• Improved DLSS - added 2.25x and 3x upscale modes (available when Secondary (when static) denoiser is set to Same as Primary).

• Reduced memory usage.

Denoiser

• Improved OptiX denoiser quality. Added a Legacy mode option to revert to old OptiX behavior. 

• Improved Intel denoiser: upgraded to 2.1.0, enabled GPU acceleration on Intel devices.

Scene States

• Properly update the Scene States helper message on undo/redo.

• Update scene state button now creates necessary sub-states if ORIGINAL SCENE or SAVED SCENE is currently chosen.

• Detected changes for scene states when modifying a New file.

Navigation

• Improved Orthographic camera navigation. Now Navigate around cursor ray hit and Navigate around selection work properly.

UX/UI

• Improved Viewport Fill - now filter is disabled when sharpness is set to 0.

• Improved DPI scaling on 150% and similar ratios.

Fixes

Geometry

• Crash when loading invalid Instancer2 with missing node reference.

UI/UX

• Bug with wrong UI slider ranges.

• Wrong trimming of the scene animation track.

• Auto-exposure and noise mask overlay while using Intel GPUs for rendering.

• Wrong reloading of a saved .vantage file, with imported .vrscene.

• Animated cameras from imported vrscenes are not loaded with animation after reload of .vantage file.

• Wrong camera grouping on import.

Textures

• Missing texture UVs if their UVW generator is missing.

Output

• Wrong baking of Exposure bias in EXR when exposure correction is disabled.

• Camera white balance not getting saved in EXR.

New Features

DLSS

• Implemented NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction for interactive upscaling and denoising. GPU driver 537.13 or newer is required. Accessible from Edit > Preference > Render Defaults > Primary (when moving) > DLSS Ray Reconstruction.

Material

• Support for refraction glossiness.

Hardware

• Support for discrete Intel Arc GPUs (experimental).

Modified

Batch rendering

• Render queue items are now stored between offline rendering sessions.

UI/UX

• Camera thumbnail now updates automatically when scene states are changed for the camera.

Fixes

UI/UX

• Crash when clicking the new version notification button in the menu bar.
• Incorrect render resolution settings when adding multiple cameras using the Group enqueue mode and the <from camera> resolution preset.

Scene States

• Incorrect Undo action on moved objects after applied scene state.

• Incorrect NONE sub-state for Objects and Materials
• Incorrect camera scene state in the camera scene states dropdown menu when editing render queue item.