This page provides information on the V-Ray Portable installation.
Please do not use multiple V-Ray installation methods at the same time. If you plan on creating a Portable V-Ray installation for Blender, make sure you have uninstalled any other V-Ray version for Blender.
Overview
The V-Ray installer can be unpacked and used as a portable version. Creating a Portable Installation provides several advantages over the regular installer:
The Portable installation allows for setting a custom environment when starting each Blender instance. To compare, running the regular installation multiple times overwrites the V-Ray environment variables.
The Portable installation can be used to run V-Ray for Blender and V-Ray Standalone from any location or even a network drive. That way, multiple users can start Blender along with V-Ray using just a script that sets up the environment variables without the need to run local installations.
Upgrading a Portable installation is a lot easier, as you don't need to run the installer on every user's computer.
The Portable installation allows for quick switching between different V-Ray versions without reinstalling it.
To use the Chaos Unified Login (a single login into whichever Chaos application grants access to all Chaos applications) with V-Ray portable installation, download and install separately.
When using V-Ray from a Portable installation, the EULA needs to be accepted to start a render. A pop-up window will prompt you to accept the EULA the first time you start a render. Batch rendering is an exception to this.
Required steps to run V-Ray
To create a Portable installation, you need to:
Download V-Ray for Blender Beta
1. Download V-Ray.
2. Unpack the installation file. See the Unpack the installation file section of this page for more information.
3. Set up the environment variables needed to run V-Ray for Blender. See the Environment setup section of this page for more information.
4. Activate your license. Visit the Activate your Product page to find out how.
5. Run Blender.
Unpacking the installation file
Unpack the installation into a suitable location, which you can later use to run V-Ray on any computer. Here is a detailed step-by-step guide:
- Download the V-Ray installer executable (.exe).
Open a Command Prompt. Type out: the location of the installer that you just downloaded -unpackInstall= location where you wish to unpack.
Alternatively, you can drag and drop the installer and a target folder for unpacking into the Command Prompt to insert their directories.
Press Enter to run the command. As an example, you can create a new folder called vray_builds to hold all portable V-Ray builds.
Then, you can make other sub-folders and name them according to the V-Ray build version, for example vray_adv_62000_blender410_x64. It should look something like this:
D:\Downloads\vray_adv_70000_blender430_x64.exe -unpackInstall=D:\vray_builds\vray_70000_blender430
After unpacking the installation, your folder structure should look like this:
D:\vray_builds\
├── vray_70000_blender430\
│ ├── blender_root\
│ ├── blender_vray\
│ └── vray\
The D:\vray_builds location is an example. The Portable Installation can be placed anywhere.
3. Set the necessary environment variables into a new Command Prompt and run V-Ray for Blender.
Setup for Blender
The easiest way to deploy V-Ray is to use the V-Ray module file that comes with the Portable Installation.
The V-Ray module is located in <unpacked location>/blender_root/modules. It contains all the variables needed to run V-Ray for Blender. It also has a readme part with instructions on how to set the environment using a module file. It can be set using one of two ways:
Recommended: Extend the BLENDER_MODULE_PATH variable to contain the folder with the module file. Open Command Prompt or Terminal and type.
The example directory and version names below are for V-Ray for Blender on Windows where vray_adv_70000_blender430_x64.exe has been unpacked into D:\vray_builds\vray_70000_blender430\
Here is a list of the environment variables, along with descriptions and examples. Below, we provide an example of a complete setup.
set BLENDER_MODULE_PATH=D:\vray_builds\vray_70000_blender430\blender_root\modules;%BLENDER_MODULE_PATH%
A truly portable installation can be deployed with a .bat file that extends BLENDER_MODULE_PATH and starts Blender. Multiple scripts can start Blender with the module for a different V-Ray version.
Moving the module file inside Blender's folders is useful for a quick setup, but not truly portable.
License setup
1. Before you run V-Ray, make sure that it can find a license.
You can set up your license using the tool to set or change your license settings.
Alternatively, you can use the VRAY_AUTH_CLIENT_FILE_PATH* environment variable and point it to the folder containing a vrlclient.xml file that holds the V-Ray license server settings (IP address and port number).
When using the environment variable is the best option for you and you need to create the vrlclient.xml file manually, the example below shows what it should contain: