V-Ray 5 for SketchUp

V-Ray 5 for SketchUp Delivers Photoreal and Real-Time Rendering

Photorealistic rendering and real-time visualisation all in one—all in SketchUp.

From beginner to pro, V-Ray 5 for SketchUp has all the tools you need to visualise your projects from start to finish. Whether you are an architect, interior designer, wood worker, furniture designer, or even a 3D modelling enthusiast, V-Ray 5 helps artists bring designs to life by offering a complete spectrum of visualisation tools, supporting each step of your workflow.

Introducing V-Ray Vision

V-Ray Vision*, included as a part of V-Ray 5, is a real-time viewer that makes V-Ray the ultimate visualisation solution for SketchUp users. Users can create design iterations faster and communicate them easily and effectively. V-Ray will produce incredible photoreal imagery with true-to-life lights, cameras and ready-to-render materials. It helps you handle the biggest projects, enabling you to render anything and everything at any time.

*Though planned for release, V-Ray Vision is not yet available on MacOS at time of writing.

Why Choose V-Ray 5 for SketchUp?

V-Ray 5 helps artists and designers to:

  • Visualise designs in real real-time
  • Explore endless lighting variations automatically with Light Gen
  • Create multiple lighting scenarios from a single render without re-rendering
  • Post-process renders directly in V-Ray
  • Make materials look more realistic with new randomness controls
  • Save time with the improved and more-efficient material workflow
  • Add more variety to your scenes through new material layers
  • Extend magic hour with the new sun and sky system

Key Features in V-Ray 5 for SketchUp

Visualise designs in real-time.
Now with V-Ray Vision, you can visualise your designs in real-time while you work in SketchUp. Move around your model, apply materials, set up lights and cameras—all in a live real-time view of your scene. And when you’re ready for photo quality renders, V-Ray is ready to go.

Lighting made easy.
Adjust the lights in your scene even after you render. With Light Mix, once your scene is rendered, you can interactively adjust the brightness and colour of any light without having to render again.

Add randomness for realism.
To create more realistic materials, Chaos Group have added new tools that randomise textures and colours. The ‘VRayUVWRandomizer’ lets you randomise texture coordinates and includes Stochastic Tiling that automatically fixes repeating textures. Built-in controls have also been added to the VRayMultiSubTex material to randomise colours.

Improved Sun and Sky model.
Render your scene at the perfect light of magic hour. The Improved Sun & Sky model is more accurate, with a better looking sunrise and sunset, even as the sun dips below the horizon.

Optimised V-Ray Core.
V-Ray 5 is the fastest and best rendering experience yet, featuring new software architecture, and much faster scene loading and scene export thanks to the newly refactored V-Ray backend.

See your designs in their best light.
Light Gen is a new V-Ray tool that automatically generates thumbnails of your SketchUp scene in a number of environment lighting scenarios. Choose your favorite look and you’re ready to render.

Post-process your renders right in V-Ray.
V-Ray 5 features a new V-Ray Frame Buffer. With built-in compositing, you can make colour corrections, combine render elements and save them as presets to be used in future—all without needing another app.

New layered V-Ray material.
The V-Ray Material now includes built-in Coat and Sheen layers. Coat makes it easy to create materials with reflective coatings like varnished wood, and Sheen makes it easy to create fabrics like silk, satin, and velvet.

Improved contour rendering.
The global Contours control gives you more control over linework, making it easier than ever to give your renders an illustrative look.

Dirt and weathering.
Give your SketchUp models a weathered look with the improved V-Ray Dirt texture. Add dirt and streaks anywhere—in corners or across entire surfaces.

New documented API.
For developers looking to create and connect tools with V-Ray for SketchUp, we’ve added a new fully documented API to make it as easy as possible.


V-Ray 5 for SketchUp…

…works seamlessly with V-Ray for 3ds Max, V-Ray for Rhino and V-Ray for Revit.
…supports VRscans which allows for the most physically accurate materials to be used.
…supports many tools and provides optimised support for numerous third-party plugins.
…works with Chaos Cloud to give one-click access to cloud rendering directly from V-Ray’s UI.


Project Lavina vs V-Ray Vision

Project Lavina is a standalone application for exploring and manipulating V-Ray scenes in real-time within a 100% ray traced environment, whereas V-Ray Vision is a real-time raster engine.

Project Lavina

  • Standalone application
  • For exploring and manipulating 100% ray-traced environments in real-time
  • An independent product with it’s own installer and file format etc.
  • Runs on NVIDIA RTX cards
  • The fastest route to a dedicated real-time experience

V-Ray Vision

  • Built into V-Ray 5
  • For viewing and exploring models in a real-time raster environment
  • Displays what is live in the host application and doesn’t maintain files.
  • Requires DirectX
  • Scales to photoreal and is not limited to game engine quality

Still Using V-Ray 3?

Now that V-Ray 5 is available, there is no longer an option to upgrade from V-Ray 3 to V-Ray 5 directly. That doesn’t mean you’re out of luck though – you can migrate your old perpetual licence to a term licence. When using V-Ray as part of a term licence, you will always have the latest version available to you.

Using V-Ray Next for SketchUp?

If you’re on a termed licence, V-Ray 5 for SketchUp is already yours! If you’ve got a perpetual licence, you can purchase an upgrade to V-Ray 5 for SketchUp on our website.

Visit CAD Software Direct.com where V-Ray 5 for SketchUp is available right now!

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