Chaos’ V-Ray has become a versatile renderer used by artists across a wide range of applications.  There’s V-Ray for SketchUp, Rhino, 3ds Max, Maya, Revit, Cinema 4D, and more.  Now, there’s the new V-Ray for Blender Community Edition—and it’s free for all Blender users.

V-Ray for Blender Community Edition offers a professional-grade rendering experience for artists of all levels, enabling everything from photorealistic scenes to stylized animations. With intuitive controls, real-world camera effects, ray-traced global illumination, access to Chaos Cosmos’ 14,000 render-ready assets, and more, artists can begin creating intricate imagery fast, trusting that it’ll hold up under a professional microscope. 

The Community Edition provides a sturdy foundation for portfolio building, 3D learning, online coursework, YouTube content, and other small-scale personal and freelance projects, giving users everything they need to create stunning visuals. And while the free licenses are initially valid for three months, they can be renewed an unlimited number of times by taking a short survey.

While the Community Edition can handle most projects, it will not include certain features still reserved for teams and large-scale productions. Limitations include no pipeline integration tools or support, a cap on resolution and output quality, and no distributed rendering.

V-Ray for Blender Community Edition is available now and is free for macOS and Windows users. A Linux version is also in the works. The feature-complete version of V-Ray for Blender is priced at $33 per month or $198 per year.