Thursday, February 13th, 2025Posted by Jim ThackerChaos releases Vantage 2.7html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Chaos has updated Vantage, its real-time ray tracing renderer, intended for exploring large V-Ray scenes in architectural visualization and visual effects projects.Vantage 2.7 adds OCIO color management, new lens distortion and vignetting effects, and support for a wider range of V-Rays scattering features.A GPU-accelerated ray tracer for exploring large production scenes in real timeFirst released in 2020, Vantage is a hardware-accelerated ray tracing renderer intended for exploring large V-Ray production scenes in near-real time. The initial release was targeted at visualization, but in 2023 Chaos added support for rendering deforming meshes, like animated characters, and began pitching Vantage at VFX work.Vantage 2.7: support for more native V-Ray scattering features and the VRayDirt textureVantage 2.7 adds support for more of V-Rays native features, particularly from Chaos Scatter, its object scattering system.The renderer now supports scatter distribution maps, introduced last year in V-Ray 7, and scatter surface color from .vrscene files.Vantage also now supports V-Rays VRayDirt texture map, described on Chaoss blog as a highly requested change.The Sun and Sky system has been updated to the PRG Clear Sky model introduced in V-Ray 7, which generates more realistic results at sunrise and sunset.New lens distortion, vignetting and Blur/Sharpen effectsVantage 2.7 also introduces a new lens distortion system, with users able to mimic distortions created by real-world camera lenses using ST maps, as in many compositing and camera tracking apps.The renderer also now supports vignetting both camera vignetting and optical vignetting and gets new Blur/Sharpen controls in the Color Corrections tab for post effects.Support for OCIO and DLSS 4Other key changes include support for VFX color management standard OCIO (OpenColorIO).DLSS, NVIDIAs AI-based image reconstruction system, first integrated into Vantage in 2023, has been updated to DLSS 4, the current generation of the technology.According to Chaos, the change improve[s] temporal stability to minimize artifacts like ghosting and flickering during real-time rendering.The update also adds support for video encoding on AMD and Intel GPUs, and the option to export 16-bit as well as 8-bit PNG files, although they remain standard dynamic range images.Price and system requirementsChaos Vantage is compatible with Windows 10+ and DXR-compatible AMD, Intel or NVIDIA GPUs. The software is rental-only, with subscriptions costing $108.90/month or $658.80/year.Read an overview of the new features in Vantage 2.7 on Chaoss blogRead a full list of new features in Vantage 2.7 in the online documentationHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). 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