V-Ray's Real Time Viewport Update Quietly Closes the Gap With Game Engines

Chaos has shipped V-Ray 7 Update 3 for SketchUp, Rhino and 3ds Max, and the headline feature is real time rendering directly inside the V-Ray viewport itself, rather than a separate preview window lagging behind the scene. Native parallax interiors and a Quick Sun Caustics option round out the rendering side, and V-Ray GPU finally supports AMD hardware via HIP, eight years after it first supported Nvidia.

The feature worth actually noting is the ability to relight 3D Gaussian Splats inside V-Ray. Splats have mostly been a capture and display format, useful for showing a scanned scene but resistant to the kind of lighting changes a render pipeline normally takes for granted. Being able to relight one inside a full render engine, rather than treating it as a fixed backdrop, starts to close the gap between a scan and something you can actually use in a lit scene with other assets.

For studios that already scan real spaces or products, this is the update that matters more than the real time viewport headline. A splat that can hold up under new lighting is a splat that stops being a dead end once the scan is done.