V-Ray 7 for Blender, Update 4.2 is out

[shaio]

Hello everyone,

V-Ray 7 for Blender Update 4.2 is out now. We’ve added support for running V-Ray on ARM64 architecture under Windows 11, and introduced a new procedural texture for creating oceans and water surfaces. Alongside these a new categorization feature was added for the Material Manager and the V-Ray shading node editor has received thumbnail previews for each node.

All changes and new features apply for both the Community Edition and the Commercial Edition of V-Ray for Blender.

Download the latest build from our website and check the Documentation page for more information and resources.

Changelog:

New Features

• Introduce support for running V-Ray for Blender on Windows for ARM64 devices
• Introduce Phoenix Ocean texture for rendering ocean and water surfaces

Modified features and Improvements

• Introduce “Thumbnail previews” for each node inside the V-Ray Shader node editor
• Introduce “Categories” in V-Ray Material Manager
• Add support for Chaos Cosmos assets with variations
• Add Divide blend mode to the V-Ray Layered texture
• Add V-Ray Material Manager and Object Lister inside Right Mouse Button > Tools menu
• Add enable conditions for the TexDistance radius when both inner and outer separate are enabled
• Add enable conditions for the colors and multipliers of the Color Arithmetic node
• Add object visibility list in the V-Ray proxy
• Ability to import animations from V-Ray Scene (.vrscene) files
• Add the material slot move buttons in the material properties
• Allow TexMulti to be used as a texture switch node
• Allow both the Object Lister and Material Manager to be docked in the same window
• Allow scattering of collections in Chaos Scatter
• Change the defaults of the TexAColorOp colors to white
• Convert several V-Ray Gaussian splat parameters to type “slider”
• Do not block Blender during Vantage startup
• Draw common properties when creating objects or using operators
• Expose the Composition Guides of the Blender camera in V-Ray
• Expose the Stochastic Bump global settings option
• Grey out the Clipper material field when Mesh mode is enabled
• Improve export of packed images
• Improve the conversion of Cycles worlds
• Improve the thumbnail preview of the Toon material
• Make Shift+R used to repeat last operator to work in V-Ray
• Suppress the “Cannot save c:/*0000.jpeg” log in headless mode
• Utilize the Cosmos error reporting notifications

V-Ray Installer

• Add an “Install for All Users” option during the installation process of V-Ray

Bug fixes

• “Object Tree +” in Object properties on a V-Ray Decal creates the wrong tree and breaks export of the whole scene
• “V-Ray Luminaire Light” missing from Add (Shift+A) menu
• A Gaussian splat with a path relative to the .blend does not load
• A mesh used as a V-Ray Mesh Light shows in the preview but renders nothing when picked as a model in Scatter
• Add the ability to enable or disable motion blur for the camera in the object lister
• Animated V-Ray Gaussians attributes are exported only for one frame
• Applying non-uniform scaling to the Camera distorts the render view
• AttributeError on node addition in Objects tab
• AttributeError when rendering headless animation
• Bad viewport performance in large scenes with many instances
• Batch Rename “Selected Only” option is ignored in Material Lister
• Blender can sometimes crash when changing visibility of mesh light sources
• Blender crashes after Ctrl+Z after vrmesh is exported
• Blender crashes when V-Ray is enabled while a file containing a V-Ray node group is open
• Blender crashes when vray addon is enabled a second time in a session
• Blender freezes when a Reroute loop is linked to a V-Ray node input
• Blender’s compositing setup doesn’t update render layers after loading a scene
• Camera aperture has default of 5 meters
• Cannot dock Object Lister into the area where Material Manager was docked and vice versa
• Cannot multi-select materials in Material Lister
• Clipper (Plane mode): Clipper Material is dropped on export unless an earlier-exported object uses it — no cut surface is rendered
• Coat Anisotropy has no effect when Coat Amount is at its default value
• Console flooded with errors when editing a material while the material preview is open
• Copying V-Ray nodes crashes Blender 5.1+, V-Ray groups leak textures
• Cosmos import ignores the scene Unit Scale for light sources, decals, and triplanar size
• Crash during editing a colour of unassigned material
• Crash when enabling V-Ray in a scene with gradient nodes
• Cycles Normal Map UV map and Image Texture Clip/Extend/Mirror extension are ignored
• Displacement and subdivision are not applied correctly on objects sharing the same Mesh
• Do not grey out the Mesh Mode property of the V-Ray Clipper when the Use Object Material option is enabled
• Edge and vertex crease sharpness does not match Blender
• Every export carries the grease-pencil depth channel
• ExtraTexInt and ExtraTexFloat are visible in the UI
• First scene update sometimes ignored in interactive
• Fix “Cannot render with V-Ray to more than one viewport” with a single viewport
• Headless render with -F fails with “Unsupported output format” for any format (PNG, JPEG, EXR)
• IPR doesn’t update correctly when object tree is changed for duplicated objects
• IPR ignores V-Ray light property edits unless the edited light is the active object
• Ignore camera object scale
• Importing a .vrscene with a V-Ray Sun hits an Exception error every time
• Incorrect Cosmos error notifications
• Infinite Plane and Perfect Sphere ignore Disable in Viewports and Local View during IPR
• Infinite Plane and Perfect Sphere ignore matte and visibility object properties
• Live-link with Vantage crashes when adjusting Scatter parameters
• Material Manager and Object Lister switch to Preferences window when changing workspaces
• Material preview doesn’t re-render after license type change unless forced
• Multiple problems with spline nodes
• Node preview thumbnails for V-Ray Color Arithmetic and Separate Color nodes render as transparent black
• Node sockets without a UI block are drawn as sliders while their property is a plain number field
• Objects with a Fluid Flow or Effector modifier render as nothing
• Opening the N-Panel for Luminaire and IES Light raises an exception
• Export V-Ray Proxy with “Add Proxy to Scene” fails with “‘Context’ object has no attribute ‘object’” and leaves an empty VRayProxy object
• Remove the Random By Particle and Random By Handle modes in the UVWRandomizer
• Render elements enabled in node tree but not rendered
• Render settings import in vrscene covers 11 of 23 plugin types
• RenderView: explicitly set ortho_adjust_to_scene=False for ortho cameras
• Reset Parameters button does not reset Filter Blur to default value
• Sun exposure is wrong when scene scale is updated
• Texture Controls shown in the UI never reach the export
• The vrscene importer converts positions but not other lengths
• Toon material thumbnail ignores Specular ramp after Viewport Interactive
• Unassigned materials are lost on save/reopen
• V-Ray Fur viewport preview does not update when the growth mesh is deformed by animated shape keys
• V-Ray Luminaire does not emit light on CPU
• V-Ray scene import ignores frameStart/frameEnd, and animated values cannot be read at all
• Chaos Scatter “Factor” has no effect when Scatter Type is On Splines (1D)

[binjun_wu]

This thumbnail is a fantastic addition. Now that you’ve taken it this far, would it be possible to update the texture display in Blendr’s viewport as well?

[bozhidar_ivanov]

Unfortunately we do not have much control over that single texture preview in the viewport. It works only with bitmaps and not not full shader graphs. However, the thumbnails started off as a full realtime viewport preview mode experient(like in Cycles with eevee). I wasn’t very happy with the performance and the final look, so it ended up being left out. We will be trying it again in the future, but it is a huge task as it basically requires implementing a simplified V-Ray.

[binjun_wu]

I understand. I used AI to write a small add-on, but the results aren’t ideal—the resolution is very low.

[binjun_wu]

I’d like to make a couple of other small suggestions:

1. Could you add a separate material preview window like the one in 3ds Max? The current texture previews are too small to see the details clearly.

2. Blender’s daily builds have a developer option that lets you toggle previews for individual nodes. Perhaps you could take inspiration from that, since previews can currently only be toggled globally.

   
   

[bozhidar_ivanov]

Yes, per-node thumbnail is certainly possible(in a similar way with a eye icon), should be available in next release. About the big window display, we will need to consider it a bit more.