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.)

Download V-Ray 7 Maya, update 2

Download V-Ray 7 Houdini, update 2

The post Real-time Chaos: Vantage now inside Maya and Houdini first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When a group of architectural illustrators set out to test Chaos Vantage, they planned a few small real-time experiments. Instead, they built Unbox, a fully animated short film where an architectural cube folds open like a mechanical puzzle. From “a few little minis,” it grew bigger – there are worse outcomes for a stress test.

DP: What was the initial spark for testing Chaos Vantage and why risk it on a narrative short instead of a comfy archviz sizzle?

Peter Stulz: Honestly, at first we intended to do a few little minis in Vantage… and then the second test spinned out of control and grew bigger each day. But no regrets, we embraced the prospect to develop a narrative architectural piece ourselves.

You see, we are architects and not an animation studio. So this was a massive learning journey for us: sequencing shots in an attractive manner, telling a story, how to reveal information and how to retain it… Vantage was fantastic, because it allowed us to be quite experimental here, make mistakes and learn while working on it.

DP: Give us the pipeline in one breath: DCC(s), renderers, interchange (Alembic/FBX/USD), and the editorial path from storyboard/animatic to picture lock.

Peter Stulz: Natively we use 3ds Max in our studio, still the main tool for architecture. Our studio mostly renders in Corona Render, but I feel very home in Vray. For asset creation I use Blender which then sent to Max via FBX. The animation was rendered in Vray CPU – 5 months was tight enough and I know Vray as an engine that delivers without funky surprises.

For the creative part, I drew initial sketches and the storyboard in Procreate. We were lucky to have my friend and cinematographer Olaf Aue (LinkedIn) on board, who was kind enough to share some of his Know-How. The storyboard was straight away sequenced in Resolve with some stand-in SFX and music, just to get a feeling for timing. The stills were then replaced with Vantage Previz shots; the iteration frequency could be kept fastpaced due to Vantage, that was a tremendous relief. Finally for that project we also familiarized ourselves just enough with character creator and Iclone to pull off a somewhat decent protagonist – which then is mostly kept out of focus anyhow :).

Depth of field and lighting are crucial in linear storytelling formats. Vantage allows for having these available during the early layout phase, enabling us to evaluate the flow and precise timing of edits early on, resulting in fewer iterations and more streamlined communication, features that Olaf, as a cinematographer, found lacking in the animation feature films he previously worked on.

DP: Hardware reality check: what exactly were the two workstations (CPU/GPU/VRAM/RAM/storage), and how did that cap scene size, proxies, and iteration speed?

Peter Stulz: There are two parts to this, the GPU and CPU specs: For working with Vantage, I had a 4060TI with 16GB. It was mainly the ground displacement in Vantage that was the key factor for VRAM necessity. Otherwise Vantage is smart when scaling to smaller GPUs. You don’t need massive GPUs to get started with Vantage.

For the final CPU rendering – we have several AMD 9950x in our studio with 64GB Ram, totally unspectacular workstations. In fact rendering moved between machines, whatever was available, the bottleneck was that we had just two render licenses available. Another thing, that I really appreciate about Vray CPU – it stays pretty consistent even if you throw in an older architecture.

DP: How did you keep the master scene nimble?

Peter Stulz: 3ds Max can become a real chore, when scenes get too heavy. I wholeheartedly hate unresponsive scenes – anything that breaks the creative flow has to be solved. Technically, there are several approaches: obviously using Proxies for heavy assets is a must; staying parametric if possible also keeps my scenes small; my modifier stacks can get quite impressive and I avoid baking them.

I xref wherever it makes sense, especially if parts of your scene are used in different settings. If I find the time, I localise heavy textures and reduce them – tedious but worth the effort later. Ideally the Master Scene only contains the camera, the lights and a few key assets. All the heavy load is loaded from external files. These scenes mostly are only a few MB in itself – helping with autobackups.

DP: Camera language before pixels: how did boards/animatic evolve once you could “walk the set” in Vantage?

Peter Stulz: It was important to develop a storyboard outside of 3D first to avoid thinking as a 3d designer. The environment was conceived like a sandbox, so we could freely explore the set with different lenses and angles. The superfast iterations we could do with Vantage really helped to test alternatives. That felt very powerful. Obviously some storyboard shots were then adapted or omitted. Vantage was great to secure we are on the right path.

DP: Lighting in Vantage: What translated 1:1 to finals, and where did parity crack?

Peter Stulz: At first it is scarily impressive how close Vantage can feel to the final look. We did a few final shots directly in Vantage and realised afterwards we could have done more in Vantage to prove the point. The extra turntable animation is done 100% in Vantage, but we really had to go deep in the settings to get rid of some flickering.

You have to understand, Vantage works like this: It downscales automatically to achieve close-to realtime speed and then gradually refines the look. But that logic causes limitations: For example GI depth in tricky setups might cause visible flickering. If you want to get rid of unwanted artefacts like these, you have to go deeper into the settings; and then you get these Vray 2010 vibes again :). Apart from that the denoiser might create some artefacts, textures are getting blurry, VDBs were not possible etc.

DP: Materials & lookdev: which shader features were non-negotiable, and what did you simplify for real-time parity?

Peter Stulz: Since we decided to use Vray CPU for finals, we just accepted that some stuff for Previz looked different – we knew it would be ok in the finals. But to answer the question we used Vantage for a another client project and it became clear again: If you want to produce in Vantage you can not set stuff up in Vray and hope for the best. In that case we had a semitranslucent ocean setting and that looked quite diffferent in Vantage and had to be especially adapted.

DP: The moving house: How was it rigged , and what broke first under real-time playback?

Peter Stulz: The architectural cube is in fact one scene with 2000 frames of animation. No cheap tricks – nothing appears magically out of thin air – it’s all in there. Only the initial cube with the rough surface is a different prop because it had a tricky blending shader which was animated ( animating materials in 3ds Max is a disaster …).

The rig for the unfolding was very basic and was built out of a lot of nested helpers. That was the most simple way to avoid the “locked axis” problem. What is this? Well, rigging a rubics cube is in fact not so straightforward as it seems: after a few twists the individual parts start to move quite unexpectedly – try it yourself, it’s actually pretty hard. The nested helpers solved this, now it was a matter of adjusting the right timing; how fast is the right speed for a massive 12m cube? You want to correspond a certain weight without boring the viewer. At the end we sprinkled some subtle secondary movements on top.

DP: Performance metrics: What were typical FPS for look-dev in Vantage and per-shot render times? Both for Vantage previews and V-Ray finals?

Peter Stulz: We could render out playblasts in Vantage (+/- 200 frames) over a toilet break in 1.5k resolution at 1:2.39. For finals in Vray I attempt to stay around 10 minutes / frame. If you want to use Vantage for final quality in FullHD, you crank up the settings to 1 minute / frame. If there was any noise left, the Resolve temporal denoiser is the last polish.

DP: The famous 95%: where did Vantage land “close enough” to V-Ray and what are the missing 5%?

Peter Stulz: Every “resolution” in Vantage is more coarse. I am not only talking textures, but sampling, atmospherics, global illumination. Obviously the denoiser also tends to smear everything. Everything is just lower definition than in Vray / Corona. That’s why oldschool rendering is still very valid to achieve that crispy level of detail.

DP: Editorial rhythm: how often did you re-cut while “shooting in engine,” and what told you a shot was edit-locked before triggering finals?

Peter Stulz: In our case that answer is quite simple: the presentation date was coming up, so we had a very strict timeframe when shots had to be done. Only thing we updated in the last days, we extended a few shots by 30 frames, because they felt rushed in the beta cut. That little change improved the rythm quite substantially.

DP: Pitfalls & fixes: three things that wasted time before you found the trick and what was the trick?

Peter Stulz: Vantage is built in a way that it actually could be used as a standalone loading in VrayScenes. Since I had my friend Olaf Aue as a cinematographer on board we tried to use it in that way. Theoretically that works, but with a lot of drawbacks and very limited editing and getting the changes from Vantage back into 3dsMax is hard.

We omitted that concept and resorted to live link only with 3ds Max. But actually that standalone option is not so bad – Chaos could really focus there more.

DP: If you rebuilt “Unboxed” today at 100% Vantage, what would the delivery plan look like? QC, shot classes that stay real-time, and the shortlist that still goes offline?

Peter Stulz: I know, that there are more shots that could be realised in Vantage directly. But if you plan this, it is smart to set up the whole project more focused on Vantage directly. Switching to Vray, if needed, is easy, the other way can be frustrating.

DP: What did “Unboxed” change in how you scope, price, and pitch real-time narrative work to clients?

Peter Stulz: We can offer fast animation works more easily which don’t need very high quality or are visually suitable for Vantage (clay shots).

DP: Wishlist to Chaos: What are the top parity/features that would let you ship more shots straight out of Vantage next time?

Peter Stulz: I would like easier quality settings if you intend to use Vantage as final renderer. We had to do a lot of tweaking for specific scenes or even change the 3d scene to avoid artefacts. Additionally Vantage ships with specific assets like a water surface or animated plants. These are great, but in LiveLink they are hard to be used, because there is not way to insert them in your Root Scene.

DP: For Vantage newcomers: What is your “first-day” checklist?

Peter Stulz: Familiarize yourself with the basic UI and do some stress tests to find the limits. Additionally I would look for a study project that comes close to a client environment. There is no point in having all the bells and whistles, if in a real production case you are missing the crucial components.

DP: One more hypothetic: with one extra week or one extra GPU, which single area would you invest in—and why?

Peter Stulz: Funny alternatives. As described above a half-decent GPU is good for previz which was the main usage in “Unbox”. Having a week extra is always great – so I would opt for that!

DP: Where exactly did you keep the “cube layer” for the whole piece: did we start life on the Blender Default Cube, and how much of that origin survived?

Peter Stulz: It sure was great that we could hire the mighty default cube as a support role. It didn’t even mind too much to be shipped into another 3d-suite – what a humble character and it really outshined itself in our short. 3d-artists should show more appreciation to have it per default all free!

DP: The cube’s side text: What does it say, and why?

Peter Stulz: The cube text gives instructions how to mix the perfect Daiquiri as it is served on Kepler 5 but it is quite explicit so I can’t go into depths here. But if you look for easter eggs, we have hidden various personal items in the architecture. Talking about audio my friend Olaf had a lot of fun browsing through his SFX library and pull out quite unusual sounds for the cubes inner mechanics.

The post The Cube Moved: Go for the Chaos (Ad) Vantage first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

When Chaos Labs first showed off Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together, the pitch sounded almost heretical: a real-time virtual production suite that skips game engines entirely. To some, that sounded impossible. To others, overdue. We spoke with Chris Nichols, Director of Chaos Labs, about what it means to go “engine-free,” why USD and MaterialX matter when the lights go up, and how Gaussian splats actually behave outside a SIGGRAPH paper. *¹

DP: Chris,before we jump into the tech: Chaos Arena and Chaos Vantage together are pitched as a virtual production suite without the usual game engine baggage. How would you describe the idea behind this approach in your own words?

Chris Nichols: One of the biggest issues with virtual production is rendering. There are options that have existed for a while, including working with game engines, but they require you to move to an entirely different platform, use an entirely different ecosystem, and switch to an entirely different pipeline. What we’re doing is focusing on the rendering part in a way that lets you keep your current ecosystem and pipeline. 

Using Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena simplifies the entire process. You can basically just take what you already do and work with real-time content. You don’t need to bring in additional experts or learn new systems, you just do what you’ve always been doing and take it a step further. 

DP: Arena and Vantage now support USD, MaterialX, and even Gaussian Splats. Could you walk us through why these formats are important?

Chris Nichols: A lot of times, people are forced into using a specific system or format that puts them in a walled garden. It makes them take additional steps, which just slows everything down. We’re trying to break out of that by adopting open source formats and making things as easy as possible, and the visual effects companies that have begun to accept and support USD and MaterialX have an advantage. With USD and MaterialX, no matter what tools they are using – Blender, Maya, Houdini, 3ds Max, etc. – they are directly compatible with Chaos Vantage and Chaos Arena without needing to convert anything. 

With gaussian splats, that’s just a general demand that people want. It also works really well with some of the things we specialize in, especially ray tracing, and it allows us to utilize them more than just a 3D point cloud. 

DP: One of the bold claims is that you can work without pre-processing, no baking, no data wrangling. From a technical standpoint, how are you pulling that off?

Chris Nichols: This is a very interesting question. If you’re looking at game engines, which use rasterized rendering, that does need pre-processing, and you do need baking and data wrangling. But if you skip rasterization and go full ray tracing, none of those things are necessary. So they are essentially two separate things that seem similar, but are not. It’s kind of like asking how many miles per gallon an electric car gets, which is an understandable question given that we’ve been thinking in those terms for years, but it’s really two different technologies that work differently. 

With rasterized rendering, pixels are free. No matter what the resolution you’re working in, the render times are not affected that much, but adding more polygons slows it down. With ray tracing, polygons are free. So no matter how much geometry you throw at the system your rendering isn’t affected all that much. Alternatively, when you start adding more pixels you need more rays, which slows things down. 

What has really changed that allows us to bring it all together is recent technological breakthroughs. That includes AI, which lets us denoise and upscale our renderings at very, very high quality, using something called “ray reconstruction,” which was first introduced in DLSS 3.5 and has since been improved. Ray reconstruction allows us to produce very good renders using smaller resolution bases with fewer rays, while keeping the speed. Add in AI and you can get clean, high resolution results with far fewer rays cast, and significantly fewer pixels. AI fills in the gaps. 

With ray tracing, there is no baking. That’s the point. We don’t have to pre-render the lighting, it’s full global illumination in real time. Move lights and move objects, all the lighting follows in real time, no rebaking. There’s also no need for data wrangling, because we can just throw the maximum geometry at everything all the time. We don’t need to create levels of detail, we don’t need to do anything else. We can just say the final asset is in real time and enable that, which basically means one asset for everything across the board. 

DP: If I’m an artist walking onto a stage with Arena and Vantage for the first time, what does the workflow look like from setup to shooting?

Chris Nichols: It’s actually very straightforward. Vantage itself is a simple program. You can just load your asset into Chaos Vantage as either a .vrscene file or as a USD with a MaterialX system. We also support OBJ and a couple other formats, but those are the most common.

Navigating around is then very straightforward, like most 3D applications. Chaos Vantage is not trying to be a game engine, and it’s not trying to add all kinds of complicated systems. It’s just meant for real-time visualization. So you put your cameras down, move your lights, and move your objects along with a couple of other things. Arena manages multiple instances of Vantage and enables them to operate simultaneously, synchronizing multiple render nodes across a large LED wall. Essentially, it’s saying “here is a master Vantage scene, here’s all the slave nodes that are working in the background.” Arena makes sure everything is synchronized and rendering together. 

Arena also adds the camera tracking system you are already using, and we support multiple camera tracking systems. We just enable the protocols. It could be OptiTrack, stYpe, Mo-Sys, or any of those systems, and it enables where the camera is looking. It’s very straightforward and there’s not much of a learning curve. It’s essentially a viewport. This makes it much easier for people to adapt to the system. 

That means that a Maya user can easily jump into Arena within a half an hour or less. Same with a Houdini user, a Blender user, or any of those types of tools. Those are the types of artists we are specifically targeting, giving them the ability to continue in the real-time world. That also includes people like directors of photography, because it operates like how a real camera operates. It’s the same language they would use. 

DP: Virtual production workflows often involve deciding what to solve in real time and what to leave for post. How does your toolkit support that balance?

Chris Nichols: In the past, there’s always been this break between what you need for offline rendering, and what you need for real-time rendering. It’s two different pipelines, two different teams, sometimes two different companies doing completely different things. We’re looking to make one system that can cross many departments and many avenues simultaneously. We want to offer the same asset that can be used from previs to virtual production to post-production, and make it as seamless as possible. With USD and MaterialX, you are free to use the same asset across the whole production cycle, no matter what DCC, what renderer, and what pipeline you use. It’s your pipeline, and your choice.

The transition from virtual production to visual effects to post-production should be as seamless as possible. That’s one thing that we feel that we support very well. The best example of that is the asset we used for the short film we created to announce Arena, Ray Tracing FTW. You can watch it here in full:

That was just one massive asset that had the entire town. That included the interior of the bank, five kilometers of train tracks, the tunnel, the bridge, every blade of grass… everything. In total, the asset contained around 2.8 trillion triangles, and the whole asset was generated in a matter of days. We used it for everything, then we’d take that same asset and use it for post-production, because we still had all the detail that we originally had from the beginning. That’s how you save a lot of money. So basically, why build it three times when you can build it once?

DP: You tested Arena extensively on the short film Ray Tracing FTW. What were some surprises?

Chris Nichols: Our assistant director on Ray Tracing FTW was Ben Hansford, a well-established commercial director that has experience with virtual production. He told us to plan for an hour to an hour and a half of crashes every day, because that’s what’s expected when traditionally working with virtual production. We ended up completing the shoot in three days without a single crash.

In fact, I don’t know of any crashes that have ever happened on set with Arena, at least nothing that was not recoverable in a matter of a few minutes. We didn’t expect it to be as stable as it was, especially in those early days when it was barely a product and the shoot partly meant to be a test for it. 

DP: Real-time changes on set are often the stress test for virtual production. How did Arena and Vantage handle that during Ray Tracing FTW?

Chris Nichols: We aren’t doing any baking or anything like that, so real-time changes are trivial to us. That’s exactly the way it should be. Rasterized rendering can look very photoreal, but you have to do a lot to make it look like that, and some of the things you have to do to make it look photoreal involve not being able to edit it later. For us, if you’re just ray tracing the whole time, none of those things matter. 

DP: Vantage has always been about pure ray tracing in real time. How does Arena extend that, and what does the combination unlock that wasn’t possible before?

Chris Nichols: When you’re done ray tracing, you’re done. You don’t have to solve any of the other problems, so you massively simplify your process. If you go back to 2006 when VFX started to adapt full ray tracing – not just the hybrid ray tracing that most game engines use – teams were still trying to rasterize things, but they started to realize they could simplify the process. They didn’t need to have things like full teams of shader writers, instead they could use ray tracing and that essentially solved the problem. It made things much, much faster and more efficient. 

The same philosophy is true here when we’re doing real-time ray tracing. It gives us a big advantage, and it’s not just in the quality of how things look, it’s how fast you can make something look good, and how easy it is to get there. So you’re actually saving a ton of money by ray tracing. 

In terms of what new technology has made all of this possible, when the 2080 graphics cards came out in 2018, it was the first time ray tracing cores were enabled on NVIDIA cards, and that let us design around that technology. But we weren’t able to achieve that super high level of quality resolution needed for virtual production until DLSS 3.5 came out. More recently, AI has made a lot of things possible. The best way to think about it is one out of every eight pixels is real, the rest are AI generated.

DP: For artists who are used to Unreal Engine or Unity, what’s the biggest mental shift when moving into an Arena/Vantage-based workflow?

Chris Nichols:  Unreal and Unity are fantastic tools for making games, and essentially what they’ve done for virtual production is to try to gamify the film making process. Game engines turn everything into a game control system, which can work to some extent, but it completely deviates from the other systems that the movie industry has been using for a long time, especially visual effects. What we’re doing is we’re making it easier to streamline that process across all departments. 

For people that have been using game engines, Arena is much simpler and you’re not sacrificing anything to get there. There are a lot of tricks and processes that you need to know for a game engine, and that’s just the way it has been. With Arena, we’ve had people ask if we can recreate a unique process they’ve been doing, but we don’t need to implement their workarounds. So their very clever tricks are completely unnecessary in the way that we do things.

DP: Gaussian Splats are hot right now. How do they behave inside Arena and Vantage compared to the hype we see in research papers?

Chris Nichols: Gaussian splats seem like they are here to stay, plus they are simple enough that it was relatively easy to support them compared to other standards in the past. The technology is also fairly familiar, and builds on the older light field technology that we experimented with years ago, first with companies like Lytro, then Google. Gaussian splats are essentially a representation of color and light from multiple different angles that change based on the angle you are viewing it, which is similar to what a light field does.

The problem with light fields is that it involves massive amounts of data, and lots of redundancy to get it there. So much so that they were impractical to use. But if you use neural fields to represent all the redundancy, it changes things. That’s basically what neural radiance fields, or NeRFs do, they are essentially light fields with a neural network. It’s a really cool system, but still very cumbersome. 

So when gaussian splats came along, it solved a lot of issues. All we really need is a point in space and a shape on that point – typically a disc or an ellipsoid – that changes colors depending on the viewing angle. It’s such a simple idea that began as a concept and grew from there. And because they’re so lightweight, because they do so well, it just became so easy for us. 

The benefit that we get from gaussian splats, and the way that we’re approaching it by actually ray tracing it – as opposed to rasterizing it – is that we can put 3D objects inside of a gaussian splat and they will ray trace that gaussian splat directly. The best example I can give is that you can take a gaussian splat of a city, and then you put a CG car on a street within the city. Then when the car travels through the city it will accurately reflect the environment within the gaussian spalt. If you did it as an HDR, every light point is at infinity, and that’s not how it really should be.

DP: From a director’s or DoP’s point of view, what kind of creative control does this system provide on set?

Chris Nichols: Everything that a DP would do manually, we can offer virtually. You can move lights, you can change colors, you can do all kinds of things. You can manipulate all of those different areas as well. We’re actually in the process of working on getting a DMX control for what we’re doing, so the digital gaffers can work together in terms of all the lighting controls you would have.

Another thing that we’re working on for the future is a new way of doing depth of field so that we can control the ability to figure out the distance between the camera and the wall, and add the appropriate compensated depth of field postwall. When the camera and wall defocuses are combined, it is the correct level that you would need for your set. 

DP: Are there particular hardware setups that Arena and Vantage thrive on, or can it scale from laptops to full LED stages?

Chris Nichols: Most LED stages I’ve worked on have, at a minimum, an A6000 card, if not two, and that’s perfectly reasonable for most setups. That’s one of the practical advantages of Arena – it can be installed on an existing LED wall in a matter of a few hours, without changing any hardware. In fact, we do that all the time. 

Another benefit of using this type of setup is that Chaos Vantage is a standalone app that can be installed on any laptop running an NVIDIA card. So a virtual production supervisor, a VFX supervisor, or even a director can open the scene and look through the 3D environment on their laptop.

DP: What role does MaterialX play in enabling consistency across tools, especially when moving assets between DCCs and Arena?

Chris Nichols: When someone uses Arena, they may work on an asset that ends up going to several different visual effects studios, each of which has their own pipeline and tools. Some might be using V-Ray, some might use Mantra, some might be using Arnold, and on and on. We want to make sure all of those studios can continue to use the same asset without any compatibility issues. And for shaders to translate, the best thing we can do is support MaterialX. As long as a studio supports MaterialX, they can use the same asset as everyone else without issue. 

DP: If you look at the ideal future workflow, what would be the hand-off between on-set capture with Arena and finishing in post with Vantage or other Chaos tools?

Chris Nichols: Really, it’s just a matter of being able to use the same asset. You can have an asset at a post-production house, then hand it off to a virtual production studio and keep doing what you’re doing. The asset might receive some changes along the way, but when you get it back, it’s essentially the same asset. 

When we were working on Ray Tracing FTW, there’s a scene in a Spanish hacienda. We were busy getting everything ready, so we didn’t have time to build one ourselves. We just went to Evermotion and bought one for around $100, and within 10 minutes it was on screen. It just worked. There are a ton of great assets out there that are Arena ready, and you can find comprehensive libraries filled with virtual production-ready assets from sites like Turbosquid, Evermotion, and KitBash3D to name a few. Hopefully, future workflows will keep things easy. We’re not trying to overcomplicate things. Just use one asset and use it across everything.

DP: Finally, what’s next for Chaos Labs in this space?

Chris Nichols: With Chaos Labs, each project builds on the success of the last, and each new experiment opens the door for the next. For our film Ray Tracing FTW, we wanted to know if Arena could work as a virtual production tool, and it did, because we could see how easy it was to go from one asset to the next. Right now, we’re building on that and testing to see how we can improve the complete filmmaking workflow, from the earliest stages of development to the final pixel, all using a single asset that will be developed throughout the lifecycle of a film. 

One of our focuses with Chaos Labs right now is on creating a previs system for Vantage that enables camera tracking on a bluescreen environment. Using the same asset for previs, we can then translate it for virtual production for in-camera VFX, and then go on to be used for final production. So we’re really looking at the full lifecycle. 

DP: What would be your recommendations for people getting into it?

Chris Nichols: Arena is designed to be easy. It’s virtual production made simple. You don’t need to learn any complicated new techniques or workarounds, you just use what you already know. Your pipeline, your choice. Load the free trial and give it a whirl!

DP: What good resources are out there to learn more about it?

Chris Nichols: There’s a lot of great documentation out there. We make it a point to offer as many tips and documents as possible. There are also tutorials and things like CG Garage. I recently recorded an episode specifically about this. 

DP: What is the next project you are working on ?

Chris Nichols: There is a feature film in development that we are using as a major case study for Chaos Labs, designed to showcase how this can all work. We feel strongly that Arena and Vantage will debunk the idea that virtual production is only for big, expensive movies. It’s a tool that can be used for everything, even low budget independent films. They can have the same power and process as a major production, at a much lower cost. That’s what we’re trying to do within Chaos Labs. We want to show people that you can do your $5 million movie with virtual production and get the same results as films with huge budgets.

1. Editorial Comment: Did Chaos Lab want their name in every sentence? No. But we find it funny to have a highly technical topic, talking to a top-shelf expert, and almost every sentence has the word “Chaos” in it? Yes, because I am somehow still cursed with the humor of a 5-year-old. ︎

The post Keep Your Pipeline: Chaos on Skipping the Game Engine first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Chaos Vantage 3 is out — and it’s not just another point update. The real-time renderer has graduated from “lookdev tool” to a proper ecosystem node, now supporting USD, MaterialX, and even AI-assisted material generation.

The upgrade makes Vantage a far more flexible bridge between traditional V-Ray pipelines and modern USD-based production workflows.

USD, MaterialX, and the End of Lock-In

Vantage 3 now reads and writes USD and MaterialX assets, meaning scenes can travel between 3ds Max, Maya, Houdini, and other DCCs with their look intact. The integration finally breaks Chaos’ walled-garden limitation, allowing artists to mix assets from different renderers without a round-trip bake-fest. Chaos also promises Hydra render delegate support in a future release, which would let Vantage render directly inside DCCs without separate exports. Not there yet – but clearly on the roadmap, we think/hope/fear.

AI Material Generator and In-App Editing

A built-in AI Material Generator now converts plain photos into physically based materials, producing maps for albedo, roughness, normal, and displacement. Combined with the new Material Editor, you can tweak these materials directly in Vantage without bouncing back to your host app. For quick turnarounds, that means less context-switching and fewer excuses for “placeholder grey.”

Volumetrics, Gaussian Splats, and Scene Complexity

Volumetric rendering brings fog, smoke, and atmospheric light to the viewport. Add the new Gaussian splat support, and you can combine real-world capture data (like LiDAR or photogrammetry scans) with ray-traced geometry in one real-time scene.

Chaos claims major performance gains for massive datasets: Vantage 3 can now handle “countless unique meshes” without grinding the GPU to dust. That’s an ambitious statement, but early tests suggest somewhat smoother navigation in large-scale architectural scenes.

Camera Tracking, Offset Animation, and Scatter Control

New camera tracking support imports real-world camera motion directly into Vantage, streamlining hybrid VFX workflows. Offset animation allows duplicating entire animated sequences with spatial variations, handy for crowd setups or modular action beats. The scatter clustering tools have also matured: objects can now be distributed by color maps, procedural layers, or direct painting, allowing denser and more natural vegetation layouts.

Night Skies, Selection Masks, and Cosmos Expansion

A new Night Sky mode renders stars, the Milky Way, and moon phases based on location, date, and time or entirely by hand if you prefer cosmic fiction (James Cameron would have needed that!). Selection Masks allow exporting B&W object mattes directly from Vantage for compositing or color correction. And Chaos expanded the Cosmos library by more than 5,000 new assets, including 1,300 people, 2,000+ vegetation items (with Asian species), and 1,800 pieces of furniture and props.

Pricing and Availability

Chaos Vantage 3 is available now via subscription from Chaos, free for users with active V-Ray Premium or Enterprise licenses. Everyone else can try it under the free tier with feature limits. Nothing beats free, though GPU time will still make you pay.

Verdict

For visualization and lookdev artists, Vantage 3 feels less like a companion to V-Ray and more like its real-time twin. With USD and MaterialX, Chaos finally joins the open-standard conversation; with AI materials and volumetrics, it edges closer to a production-ready preview engine. As always, real-world performance will decide whether it becomes a daily driver or just a very shiny sandbox.

The post Chaos Vantage 3 Released: USD, MaterialX, AI Materials & Volumetric Rendering first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

Chaos has released Anima 6.2, a significant update to its character and crowd simulation software used in architectural visualisation, VFX, and realtime previsualisation. The update focuses on making animated urban scenes feel more alive, with new automatic driver systems, expanded crowd tagging, and a sharper integration with 3ds Max and Unreal Engine. The release was announced on the Chaos blog and is available through the Chaos documentation portal.

Traffic, meet humanity

Anima’s traffic tools, first introduced in version 6.0, have been expanded into a more self-contained system. Vehicles are now automatically populated with drivers and passengers from the software’s digital human library. Users no longer need to manually rig or seat figures inside vehicles — every car on the road now behaves as a populated, believable entity. Brake lights and turn indicators are also animated automatically, triggering as cars slow, stop, or change lanes. These features are integrated into the simulation system rather than post-processed keyframes, meaning they respond dynamically to changes in scene layout. Chaos confirms the addition of 120+ new vehicle and human models optimised for these functions, ensuring visual consistency between drivers, passengers, and exterior assets.

New path types and smarter crowds

Crowd animation also sees technical improvements. 4D Paths, previously restricted to individual character animation, now extend to crowd movement. This allows dense, varied pedestrian sequences to be generated with consistent timing and collision logic, especially in high-detail close-ups. A new tagging system enables users to define and sort population traits — including clothing category, gender, or ethnic appearance — when generating large groups. This makes it easier to balance or stylise crowd composition in large-scale scenes without manual filtering. Chaos reports an overall reduction in memory consumption when handling large scenes and an improved texture management system for assets with multiple materials.

3ds Max and Unreal: tighter integration

The 3ds Max bridge plugin has been rewritten for greater stability. Importing and material generation now occur faster, particularly in dense traffic simulations. Anima scenes can be exported as native V-Ray proxies or rendered directly inside Chaos Corona or Chaos Vantage, depending on the pipeline. The Unreal Engine plugin (tested with Unreal 5.4) continues to support realtime playback of crowds and vehicles, but now benefits from more efficient animation caching, reducing draw calls and stutter during heavy traffic shots.

Quality-of-life and UI changes

The Capture Video function inside Anima’s viewport lets users record quick scene previews without exporting to another DCC package. A simplified asset browser improves navigation in large project folders. For layout and scene iteration, Chaos highlights general UI performance gains and faster scene reloading. Tests cited by Chaos show shorter project load times, though no numeric benchmarks are provided.

Licensing, pricing, and availability

Anima 6.2 is available only via subscription licensing. Perpetual licences were discontinued earlier in 2025. Pricing remains at $121.80 per month or $717.60 per year. The software supports Windows 64-bit (Windows 7 and newer) and offers integration plugins for 3ds Max 2023+, Cinema 4D R26+, and Unreal Engine 5.4+. Anima 6.2 is now also included in the Chaos ArchViz Collection, which bundles Anima with V-Ray, Corona, and Vantage for unified licensing across visualisation pipelines.

Production reality check

For visualisation studios, the update directly addresses two persistent pain points: believable traffic and lightweight crowd management. Automatic driver and light animation reduce manual setup time, while the tagging and path updates allow for more precise crowd distribution. The system’s new caching behaviour and memory optimisations may prove valuable in Unreal-based VR and realtime review contexts, where Anima’s heavy data footprint previously limited usability. However, as with any major version, studios should validate plugin compatibility in staging environments before committing to pipeline upgrades.

The post Chaos Anima 6.2: cars that finally drive themselves (almost) first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.