Chaos V-Ray for SketchUp

About Chaos V-Ray for SketchUp

V-Ray is the renderer a very large part of the architecture and visualisation industry standardised on, and the version that plugs into SketchUp keeps the whole process inside the modeller. Geometry, materials, lights and cameras all live in the same file being worked on, so there is no export step, no format conversion and no second application to keep in sync.

The lighting model is physically based. Sun and sky are driven by geographic position and time of day, image based lighting takes a high dynamic range environment and lights the scene from it, and the light types cover rectangle, sphere, spot, dome and mesh emitters with real units. Because everything is physical, the camera is exposed with aperture, shutter and sensitivity rather than an abstract brightness slider.

Materials follow the same logic. The physical material handles metal, dielectric, coated and sheen surfaces from one node with sensible parameters, and the bundled library carries several hundred ready made materials for glass, metal, concrete, timber, fabric and vegetation. Dropping one onto a face and adjusting two values gets far closer to a plausible surface than building it from scratch.

Two rendering engines ship together. The interactive engine updates a viewport live as materials and lights are adjusted, which is where most of the look development happens, and the production engine handles final frames on the processor, the graphics card or both. The frame buffer includes layered post processing, light mix for rebalancing lights after the render, and denoising that cuts render times substantially.

What is included in this build

• Renders directly from the modeller with no export or conversion step
• Physically based sun, sky, image based lighting and real unit light types
• Physical material node covering metal, dielectric, coated and sheen surfaces
• Bundled material library with several hundred ready made surfaces
• Interactive engine updating live while materials and lights are adjusted
• Production rendering on processor, graphics card or both together
• Frame buffer with layered post processing and light mix rebalancing
• Proxy geometry and scatter tools for vegetation and repeated objects

Changed in version 7.40.02

• Faster denoising with better detail retention on interior scenes
• Additional surfaces added to the bundled material library
• Improved graphics card rendering performance on current hardware
• Light mix now handles very large numbers of light sources
• More reliable scene loading on models with heavy proxy use

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Install the host modeller first, since the plugin registers into an existing installation.
2. Update the graphics driver, particularly if graphics card rendering will be used.
3. Disable real-time protection until the install has completed.
4. Extract the archive and run setup as administrator, selecting the host version detected.
5. Launch the modeller once so the toolbar registers, then set the render output folder.

System requirements and file details

Frequently asked about this title