I was reading through the notes on the Future release of Vray 7, and I see an increase in the subscription was mentioned. Is it going to go every year now ?
Itās getting quite expensive. Vray is approaching what? Double itās competitorsā¦even corona?
Vray - ā¬660 p/a (pre v7 increase)
Corona - ā¬360 p/a
FStorm - $360 p/a
Redshift - ā¬ 275 p/a
Since chaos is run by suits now it would be interesting to know what their future plans are however I imagine itās pretty grim for us based on how hostile things have gotten in the last year.
To play devils advocate, do other renderers have model and shader libraries? Vray does package up quite a lot of features.
Canāt you create your own shader? There are hundreds of websites with pbr materials/textures to use. Same about models. Not to mention creating own textures with Designer for example. Why one have to pay for the libraries if never use them?
Iād say thereās not much uncertainty in that. I have zero trust in chaos at this point.
- Chaos is an investment company. They maximize profits and minimize spending. Itās not particularly hard to see already if you look a bit closely. Increasing prices, reducing features, more tiers of āconvenientā bundling optionsā¦ you get the idea. Canāt wait to see what they have planned for Vray7 there.
- Chaos is already the market leader with Vray and Corona. Thereās not much more space you can grow into because youāre already dominating the field. So, what are your customers going to do? go somewhere else? Thereās still some room on the āinflicting pricing pain dialā. Why invest in Vray if there are no new customers to getā¦ and you have of course conveniently killed off the option to buy perpetuals, so thereās that. Just have to get rid of the remaining ones. Itās not like perpetual upgrades are cheap or anything.
- Since Offline rendering is basically saturated, what else can an investment company in that space do? Right! Go full on AI grift! See the cringe-worthy chaos unboxed thing from earlier this year.
- Apart from that, realtime. And I think thatās pretty much what they are pushing right now until they have something working with AI (if they ever get there). I donāt think thatās even a bad idea considering the ruckus that Epic makes with UE, but itās not a good outlook for vray.
So yeah, they will increase the pricing until people quit and they will do as much as they can to make perpetual upgrades unattractive. Frankly, I expected they would kill them outright this round but apparently not, maybe that would be too much backlash for now. Letās see what they choose to make them as unattractive as possible.
yeh, Iāll be honest, I dont ever use the shader libraryā¦if you show textures in the viewport in Maya, so many of those shaders crash Mayaā¦Im just playing devils advocate. I havnt used Redshift, in years and not used any of the others, but I do hear feedback from people that they lack a lot of features that Vray has.
And Renderman is 250 per year. This is getting confusing.
Each software is different. Would be pointless to make all the same, soā¦ In my opinion - Chaos which i used to admire, now is just another greedy company. And also i think itās just the beginning. Years ago an update used to be an update. Now, when all went subscription, they donāt have to put any effort to make significant changes in Vray. To be honest, these day a Vray update looks rather like bug fixing, nothing more. I knew it was going to be that way, so i bought perpetual license of vray 6 and Anima. And iām going to use it until my last breath. I will never pay a nickle to any company with rental-only plan. Never. I prefer pay several hundreds euros to company with less perfect software, but respecting the customers and OWN the software. I want to feel safe that i can use my software whenever i want. I understand that business is business, but i have principles. If you agree to be a sheep, youāll always be a sheep.
Shareholder greed now dictates pricing and that only goes one way.
If like me you use 3dsMax + Vray, then youāre still paying for (regardless of want or need) development/implementation into ALL of the other DCCs, licensing deals/curation of Cosmos assetsā¦etc.
I was going to go on, but others have said similar things so Iāll go have second breakfast instead 
Ya tbh I should have done that.
I did used to get excited about Vray updates, now Iāll go a few months before even installing a new version since there isnt really anything ground breaking anymoreā¦but isnt that just the law of diminishing returns? How many times can you truly develop a new tool thatās needed by the whole community year after year? Wages and costs at chaos will go up, so subscriptions and increasing costs of said subscription is to be expectedā¦I dont know if its justified, I would love to hear someone from Chaos explain why the cost is so much more than other render options.
It doesnāt have to be ground breaking. I would gladly take a solid release thatās addressing a good share of the things people have requested for 10 years! Thereās a lot of workflow enhancements that can still be made and would save me lots of time each week or even enable things I couldnāt do before.
Agree with this very much. I donāt need or want almost all additions to Vray but I would love just some simple fixes and updates to things Iāve been asking for for years.
As far as Iām aware, there are no planned pricing changes for the V-Ray 7 release.
Best regards,
Vlado
Well, pricing changes, as we have seen, can come in different shapes and forms. Putting floating behind a āpremiumā tier for example is very much a price increase for me - and thatās not remedied by putting other stuff into it as well that I wouldnāt have bought in the first place.
There are no changes planned for this either - as per the EULA, the V-Ray Solo licenses have always been licensed for a single machine whereas the Premium licenses are floating.
Best regards,
Vlado
My point is that vray used to be floating. By default, all of them. And then it got split into node-locked and floating with the floating one being made more expensive.
And I would gladly take a look at this list 
Also just a reminder that we now have this Product Development Feedback - CGconnect: Explore. Inspire. Grow.
I think the ideas portal is starting to get filled up with these now (worth pushing it more I think! Maybe put it in a newsletter as well, first item). Iāve been adding a few already but I still have a few more to make ā¦ I just need to prepare a bit of context for it when I got the time.
edit: just put some of mine here because it was asked for it:
- .tx or similar auto-conversion. Ram usage from non-mipmapped non-tiled textures is one of our greatest challenges. Same goes for geometry and proxies but this is hopefully going to be solved by usd in the not so distant future.
- barn doors and similar filters for lights. This has been requested for at least 10 years over and over again.
- more production friendly include/exclude lists with support for hierarchies and layers - one of these things that could save soooo much time and hazzle.
- decals are not done yet. Weāre still missing support for explicit channel overrides (like roughness). Without that decals are of limited use.
- and then thereās animaā¦ thereās a lot of work to be done to anima and its vray connection to get stuff done. Weāre regularly limited by anima in our scenes due to the ram usage. And Iām only talking optimizations, feature wise thereās heaps of stuff as well.
- standaloneā¦ I donāt know what people do with standalone but not rendering max scenes, thatās for sure. Some years ago I spent weeks and weeks with someone from chaos trying to get our stuff to work but I gave up on it at some point. This would need major work done if itās still in this state.
Hi Vlado,
Nice of you to reply here. According to Chaos releases V-Ray 7 for 3ds Max in beta | CG Channelā there would be a 24$ per year increase (for premium). I havenāt read this anywhere else though so not sure where they get the information from.
As I (and others) already stated a couple of times in the past, it would be nice if there would be more āflavorsā in choosing a subscription:
- Not everyone needs or wants to use: Phoenix, Cosmos, Scans, Player,ā¦ but at the same time these people might want a floating license (work vs home), but that does not justify a 40% increase in price.
- In my case Iām only interested in the 3dsMax version not in the other integrations.
- An indie license for a solo artist/freelancer would be a very nice gesture (cfr 3ds Max Indie, which is, imho, the best thing Autodesk ever did for us).
- Some people even use both Corona and V-Ray, would be nice for them to have a bundle.
I understand that managing 3 different types of licenses is a lot easier to manage, but please donāt forget about the end-user.
I know we can lock the price for 3 years but Iām not ready to fork over 2000 euros, seeing as times and technologies change quite fast, and the market these days is brutal for solo artists.
I just renew my V-Ray 6 license, and I ask the agent before I make payment, they confirm there is no change for V-Ray 7.