Wednesday, April 30th, 2025 Posted by Jim Thacker Chaos releases Vantage 2.8 html 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 2.8 adds support for light linking, V-Ray’s lens effects and switch material, and Shader Execution Reordering on current NVIDIA GPUs. A GPU-accelerated ray tracer for exploring large production scenes in real time First 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 2.8: light linking and lens effects Key changes in Vantage 2.8 include support for light linking, via include and exclude lists. The change makes it possible to choose which lights affect which objects in a scene, making it easier to art direct renders, particularly the position of shadows and highlights. Vantage also now supports the Lens Effects from the V-Ray Frame Buffer (VFB), including bloom and glare, and mimicking the effects of dust and scratches on the lens. New material and texture options Vantage also now supports the V-Ray Switch Material, used to switch quickly between variant materials on an asset during look development. It is also now possible to use source videos as bitmap textures: for example, when rendering TV screens or animated billboards. Vantage supports the H.264, H.265, AV1, VP8 and VP9 codecs. The update also adds support for the parallax room shader used by third-party architectural visualization asset providers wParallax and Evermotion. Support for AMD iGPUs and SER on current NVIDIA GPUs Performance improvements include support for Shader Execution Reordering (SER) providing “performance gains of up to 80%” on current NVIDIA Blackwell and Ada generation GPUs. Vantage also now supports new AMD integrated GPUs with 16 or more compute units. Price and system requirements Chaos 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 2.8 on Chaos’s blog Read a full list of new features in Vantage 2.8 in the online documentation Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects. Latest News Chaos releases Vantage 2.8 Real-time renderer gets support for light linking, lens effects, and Shader Execution Reordering on NVIDIA GPUs. See all the new features. Wednesday, April 30th, 2025 Ziva VFX and OIDN creators win Sci-Tech Academy Awards Soft tissue simulation and render denoising system win tech 'Oscars', due to be presented at a ceremony tonight. Check out the other winners. Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 Sparseal adds SDF modeling to Uniform 1.4 Big update to the iPad app for creating 3D models for games and concept art adds SDF modeling system and 3D printing features. Tuesday, April 29th, 2025 EZ-Tree is a lightweight free open-source tree generator 3D web developer Dan Greenheck's browser-based tool generates stylized 3D and 2D trees for games, online and illustration work. Monday, April 28th, 2025 Substance 3D creator Sébastien Deguy to leave Adobe Allegorithmic founder pays tribute to Substance 3D staff and artists after announcing decision to 'close this chapter of my career and life'. Monday, April 28th, 2025 Download free Houdini tools from SideFX's Project Grot Updated: Get tools for generating procedural ruins, bridges - and even procedural flesh - from the Houdini-to-UE5 game environment demo. Sunday, April 27th, 2025 More News Master FACS Rigging for Facial Motion Capture Unity 6.1: discover 5 key features for CG artists Adobe releases Photoshop 26.6 Chaos releases Corona 12 Update 2 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D Get 260+ modular Wild West building assets for Unreal Engine Get VFX artist Thomas Marcos' free Blender clouds shader NVIDIA open-sources PhysX's GPU simulation code Hair Cinematic Tool 2.0 simplifies hair shading in Unreal Engine 5 Tutorial: Creature Animation for Games LightWave Digital releases LightWave 2025 Get the free version of ZibraVDB for Unreal Engine and Houdini See JangaFX's first demo of IlluGen, its app for in-game VFX Older Posts