V-Ray 7.2 for Houdini and Maya, along with Chaos Vantage 3.1, are officially here, bringing some of the biggest workflow upgrades VFX artists have seen in years. These updates unlock real-time path-traced rendering directly inside Houdini and Maya, new VFX-focused improvements, AI-powered tools, and faster, more flexible rendering across the board.

If you use Houdini or Maya for look development, layout, previsualization, animation, or volumetric effects, this update dramatically improves how quickly you can iterate and visualize your scenes. From the new Vantage Hydra Delegate to enhanced Live Link to AI Material Generation and a real-time fluid simulator, these tools are designed to help teams move faster without sacrificing visual quality.

Below is a complete breakdown of everything new in Chaos Vantage 3.1 and V-Ray 7.2 for Houdini and Maya.

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Feature highlights

• Vantage Hydra Delegate for Houdini: Real-time, fully path-traced rendering now appears directly inside the Houdini viewport. Houdini artists can use Vantage for instant lookdev and previz with production-quality results, no extra round-tripping required.

• Enhanced Vantage Live Link in Maya: The upgraded Live Link streams high-quality real-time rendering from Vantage straight into the Maya viewport. This boosts lighting, animation previews, and layout workflows. It now also supports Linux and macOS via remote connection.

• Real-time fluid simulator in Vantage: Artists can simulate fire, smoke, explosions, fog-like effects, exhaust trails, steam, and other lightweight volumetrics directly inside Vantage, perfect for fast experimentation before committing to full simulations.

• V-Ray Displacement Material in Maya: This new material streamlines the creation of complex, highly detailed surfaces. It also makes blending displacement across materials much easier while offering more flexibility for V-Ray Proxy objects.

• Pyro-ready volume shader in Houdini: The updated V-Ray Volume Shader gives Houdini users deeper control over fire, smoke, and explosion effects. Combined with volumetric sampling improvements, you get cleaner and faster renders.

• Faster volume rendering in Houdini: Improvements to volumetric sampling yield noticeably faster rendering speeds, making iteration more efficient in effects-heavy scenes.

• V-Ray Night Sky in Houdini and Maya: Artists can now generate physically accurate, real-world night skies directly within V-Ray, using geo-location, date, and time inputs. This makes creating day-to-night sequences or precise star positions much easier.

• Gaussian splats clipping in Houdini and Maya: You can now trim unwanted areas of Gaussian splats and seamlessly replace them with 3D geometry. This is especially useful for integrating 3D assets into photogrammetry scans.

• AI Material Generator in Houdini and Maya: Turn any photo into a complete PBR material in just a few clicks. Ideal for quickly generating secondary or background materials without needing extensive manual texturing.

• AI image enhancement and upscaler in Maya: Use AI to clean up details, improve vegetation and fabric realism, and upscale low-resolution outputs to up to 16K. Perfect for converting draft renders into high-quality previews.

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Not yet using V-Ray or Vantage?

V-Ray remains one of the world’s most trusted photorealistic renderers, while Vantage is Chaos’s GPU-accelerated, fully real-time ray tracer built for instant visualization. Together, they provide exceptionally fast lookdev, lightning-fast previs, and an intuitive way to preview complex scenes.

Note: To use Vantage in Houdini, you must have an active Chaos Vantage license and a clean installation of the Vantage Hydra Delegate build. Users running older builds should update to the latest version.

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Vantage 3.1 updates

Real-time rendering plugin for Houdini

The Chaos Vantage Hydra Delegate brings real-time, path-traced rendering directly into the Houdini viewport. This integration is designed to streamline lookdev and previz workflows by giving artists instant, high-quality feedback while they work.

Chaos also plans to expand Hydra Delegate support to additional DCC applications as Hydra adoption continues to grow across the industry.

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Vantage Live Link enhancements in Maya

The improved Live Link streams real-time, path-traced Vantage output straight into Maya’s viewport. With this update, you can:

• Preview lighting and lookdev live in the viewport
• Generate high-quality playblasts and animation previews
• Use a remote Vantage host on Linux or macOS
• Combine USD and MaterialX rendering with native Maya geometries

This gives Maya users a more powerful, unified real-time preview experience.

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Real-time fluid simulator

Vantage’s new lightweight fluid simulator lets you generate smoke and fire effects instantly. You can add:

• Explosions
• Dust clouds
• Engine exhaust
• Fog-like atmospherics
• Fireplace or chimney smoke
• Ambient environmental effects

The simulator is designed for instant feedback so you can iterate quickly before committing to heavier simulations.

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Splittable side panels

Vantage’s interface now allows users to split side panels into two columns, reducing the need to scroll and giving faster access to essential tools. Adjusting panel widths provides more flexibility and screen space when working with large scenes.

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V-Ray 7.2 for Maya updates

Enhanced Vantage Live Link

Maya users now get immediate, production-quality real-time rendering inside the viewport thanks to the improved Live Link.

The workflow allows:

• Instant WYSIWYG feedback
• True real-time path tracing without third-party tools
• Cross-platform support via remote Vantage host
• Smooth animation previews and lighting iterations
• Partial USD and MaterialX support

This makes the Maya viewport a far more powerful environment for lighting and lookdev.

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V-Ray Displacement Material

The new Displacement Material simplifies complex displacement workflows, allowing:

• Blended displacement between multiple materials
• Displacement assignment to individual V-Ray Proxy objects
• Export-ready materials with displacement built in
• More flexible and efficient displacement rendering

This update is especially helpful for environments, creatures, and props requiring intricate surface detail.

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Gaussian splats clipping

With Gaussian splats becoming more popular for photogrammetry and volumetric capture, V-Ray now allows users to clip and trim splat data directly in Maya without regenerating the dataset. This enables:

• Cleaner integration with 3D models
• Removal of messy or unwanted splat areas
• More control over hybrid photogrammetry + 3D workflows

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V-Ray Night Sky

The new procedural night sky system lets you generate realistic, physically accurate night skies using real-world parameters:

• Date & time
• Geo-location
• Moon and star positions
• Full day-to-night transitions

Artists can blend accuracy with creative freedom using manual overrides.

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New AI rendering tools for Maya

Three powerful AI-driven tools are now available in beta:

• AI Enhancer: Part of Chaos Cloud Collaboration. It improves realism in specific elements (vegetation, people, terrain, cloth, etc.) and allows per-object control with before/after sliders.
• AI Material Generator: Create instant PBR materials from photos. Ideal for quickly building out secondary assets.
• AI Upscaler: Boost low-resolution outputs or draft renders up to 16K. Also enhances texture detail and sharpness.

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Extended Maya USD support

V-Ray 7.2 adds compatibility with the latest MayaUSD versions (0.33.0, 0.34.0, and 0.34.5), improving cross-application consistency and pipeline flexibility.

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Distributed Rendering 2 (DR2)

DR2 introduces:

• No machine/node limits
• Faster, more scalable distributed rendering
• Improved stability for both progressive and bucket rendering
• Better performance for large scenes
• A dispatcher machine for better resource control

Legacy DR builds remain available for users who prefer the older system.

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V-Ray 7.2 for Houdini updates

High-quality, real-time rendering in Houdini

The new Vantage Hydra Delegate streams fully path-traced pixels directly into the Houdini viewport, delivering:

• Real-time lookdev
• Real-time lighting iteration
• Instant previz feedback
• USD + MaterialX support
• Automatic viewport updates as you work

This eliminates the need for external preview windows

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V-Ray Volume Shader improvements

The new Pyro-ready shader gives artists deeper control over volumetric effects while delivering faster volumetric rendering and improved compositing options, including:

• Deep output support
• Volumetric holdouts
• Enhanced Light Path Expressions

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AI Material Generator (beta)

Houdini users can quickly convert photos into production-ready PBR materials. Ideal for filling out environments or quickly generating background materials that don’t need extensive art direction

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Gaussian splats clipping

Like in Maya, Houdini users can now clip Gaussian splats without regenerating data, perfect for cleanup and photogrammetry integration.

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V-Ray Night Sky

Build procedural night skies inside Houdini using real-world data or complete manual control. Perfect for full environment lighting setups or animated sky transitions.

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Houdini 21 support

V-Ray 7.2 adds compatibility with Houdini 21, ensuring smoother integration with modern pipeline upgrades.

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Additional improvements

• Resolution-independent bump mapping: Change render resolution without having to redo bump mapping settings.

• Acceleration blur support: Add natural blur to anything that speeds up, slows down, or changes direction.

• Mip.map level object overrides: Render heavily blurred or background objects more efficiently while maintaining visual quality.

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Ready to experience real-time VFX workflows?

Explore the latest versions of V-Ray 7.2 and Chaos Vantage 3.1 and see how real-time path tracing, AI tools, and faster volumetrics can streamline your pipeline, speed up your lookdev and lighting workflows, and help you create higher-quality visualizations in less time.

Download the latest versions and start transforming your Houdini and Maya workflows today.