News

We are pleased to announce that Forest Pack and RailClone are now fully compatible, so you can take advantage of the latest updates from Chaos’ flagship renderer while continuing to benefit from the advanced scattering and procedural modelling features that you rely on in ForestPack 9 and RailClone.

This update includes support for ForestIvy in V-Ray GPU and Chaos Vantage, allowing you to use our new climbing plants plugin in any rendering pipeline whether you favor the final quality of V-Ray, the speed of Vantage, or the flexibility of V-Ray GPU.

Existing customers with an active maintenance plan can download the new releases of Forest Pack and RailClone by visiting the “My Products” section of your user panel. If your maintenance has expired, don't worry—there’s no penalty for lapsed licenses. Simply renew it from the Licenses section of your user panel to restart your maintenance and access the latest versions.

Download latest versions!

If you’ve yet to upgrade to ForestPack 9, then you’ll also get access to ForestIvy, our brand new plugin for creating climbing plants including a comprehensive library of presets. There’s also surface scattering improvements, optimised point clouds and memory management, ForestSet updates, and much more. Check out our blog post to learn all about the new release.

Learn more about ForestPack 9

What’s new in V-Ray 7?

The most eye catching new feature of V-Ray 7 is support for Gaussian splats. This new tool makes it possible to import and render scanned 3d objects created using this cutting edge techniques, and it makes 3ds Max one of the first commercial DCCs to support this object type. Additionally, V-Ray 7 introduces a tool for creating immersive virtual tours, with automatic hotspot generation and customizable transitions available directly from the interface in Max

The Frame Buffer has gained several new features, including the introduction of custom-shaped render regions. This allows you to define and refine single or multiple areas for rendering, so that you can focus only on re-rendering sections of a scene instead of the entire image. Another addition to the VFB is the new Vignette Layer, as well as color correction presets, designed for quick experimentation with different color styles and further minimises the need to work in 3rd party post production tools.

Chaos Scatter has also added  distribution maps and a new Instance Brush to Chaos’ bundled scattering tool. A new firefly removal algorithm automatically eliminates bright pixel artifacts. The updated PRG sky model now supports high-altitude rendering and delivers more accurate transitions throughout the day. In addition, V-Ray Luminaires have been added to Chaos Cosmos, providing a range of complex light fixture assets that improve realism and speed up render times. .

There’s a host of new Chaos Cosmos assets, all of which are of course compatible with Forest Pack and RailClone. For example, selected vegetation assets now come with seasonal variations and hundreds of new assets have been added, including models of people, vegetation, furniture, and fabrics. Just import these into the scene. and use them to scatter with ForestPack or distribute with RailClone.

For those users that want to get the most from their hardware, there’s a new V-Ray Profiler that provides detailed reports on rendering performance. It works alongside the Memory Tracker for a detailed analysis of resource usage.

The V-Ray Lister now has a new Geometry tab that makes it easier to manage and adjust settings for various V-Ray geometry objects, such as Proxy, Fur, and Decals. New filtering tools provide better control over complex scenes. The V-Ray Scene Converter has been redesigned for simplicity, offering features like selective object conversion and automatic updates to .TX file formats to improve performance.

The GPU engine has also seen some updates, including a new caustics solver optimized for GPU hardware. Out-of-core texture handling has also been implemented, improving the management of texture-heavy scenes by using system RAM efficiently. Lastly, V-Ray 7 extends USD support to align with the latest version of USD for 3ds Max released in 2024.3

If you’d like to learn more about V-Ray 7, visit the Chaos website. To discover how our plugins make the perfect companions to improve your V-Ray experience, check out the ForestPack and RailClone pages.