SketchUp + V-Ray 7: A match made in Studio
- ops
- May 20
- 6 min read
Updated: May 21
Need to produce high-quality visuals directly from your SketchUp models?
SketchUp Studio users can access V-Ray directly to create photorealistic renderings, helping to eliminate design ambiguity and reach consensus more quickly. For MacOS users, no worries - you can purchase V-Ray 7 separately.
And with the new updates, V-Ray 7 delivers up to 3X Faster on MacBooks – New Metal support triples rendering performance when using both the GPU and CPU sides of Apple M4 processors, while doubling performance on M3 processors.
For SketchUp Pro users, we can offer an option for you try out V-Ray 7 for free.
With a V-Ray subscription, you can access Chaos Cosmos, your built-in, render-ready content library featuring hundreds of high-quality 3D models: vegetation, furniture, lighting, accessories, people, etc.
All assets are optimized for performance and render beautifully, whether you’re previewing in SketchUp, viewing in Vision, or producing final output with ray tracing. Best part? It’s searchable, always expanding, and included in your toolbar. Compatibility with Enscape
Users can transfer real-time scenes from Enscape into V-Ray, including materials, 3D models, and lights, for a seamless end-to-end design process.
By presenting your design story, you can showcase proposal merits to clients, and win more work. With SketchUp 2025, there is a significant speed boost in SketchUp Viewport. Additionally, there is a new Simplified Material Binding where the material viewport preview configuration is streamlined and made more intuitive.
New for V-Ray 7
Gaussian Splats - Designers can now tap the power of Gaussian Splats for virtual tours and eye-catching effects — all in one place. You can quickly produce complex 3D environments from photos or video, using presets and other tools that reduce most processes down to a couple of clicks.
With native support for Gaussian Splats, it is now possible to place buildings in context or render rich, detailed environments that can be reflected and accept shadows.
Interactive Tours - Use Chaos Cloud, optimized for seamless CAD and 3D design workflow. Collect design reviews and keep everything on track via a single cloud-based platform for easy creative workflows.
Users can now create advanced virtual tours, collaborative design reviews and smart rendering. It’s ideal for engaging your clients in immersive exploration of interior designs, landscape and urban architectural projects - from anywhere and on any device. These immersive panoramic experiences are highly customizable and you can add floorplans, contextual details, and design elements.
In the V-Ray Framebuffer, go to tab "Collaboration".
Start using interactive virtual tours by creating a new project and upload all visual materials to communicate your design concepts.
Automatically generate hotspots in the Chaos Cloud Web UI.
Personalize the hotspots in your project and provide more information about any design detail, significantly enriching the user experience. Adjust the size of the hotspot and choose from a range of icon and color options.
Invite stakeholders to collaborate and share visuals or panoramas, projects and/or selected folders.
Manage user permissions by role and access type.
Anyone can use Chaos Cloud virtual tours and design reviews
You don’t need to be a Chaos customer to use Cloud virtual tours and collaborate during design reviews. Here is how anyone can join:
Open cloud.chaos.com or access it from the product page.
Create a Chaos account if this is the first time you are using Chaos products. Or if you are already a Chaos customer, login with your account.
Start using interactive virtual tours by creating a new project and upload all visual materials to communicate your design concepts.
Customize the user experience with floorplans, hotspots, and transitions.
Invite peers to collaborate and manage user permissions by role and access type.
"My team uses renders for a client’s review. For people that aren’t used to CAD or 3D modeling, the rendering helps them visualize how a building will look when it’s complete, which is ideal for getting approvals or conveying design intent."
Scott Miller, Architecture & Design director from The Remington Group
Additional Features and Improvements
V-Ray Frame Buffer Updates
Freeform Render Region – Designers can now re-render specific parts of their image with any shape they want. With limitless flexibility, users can render multiple regions at once, or hone in on a single area they want to fine-tune.
Color-Correction Presets – A new color-correction filters library can quickly boost the visual appearance of a render, providing users with quick access to many high-quality grading options.
Vignetting Layer – Vignette camera effects can now be added using quick shaping controls, helping users bring more attention to the center of an image.
Artistic Aids
Layered Textures – A powerful new layering system will bring a Photoshop-esque experience to high-detail textures. Each texture layer can be stacked and tweaked with complete control over opacity, blending modes and more.
Gradient Texture Remapping – Advanced UV mapping capabilities now enable an advanced texture recoloring workflow. This is especially useful for procedural texture edits like pattern colorization, brick randomization and custom wallpaper designs.
V-Ray Luminaires – The ever-expanding Chaos Cosmos asset library, accessible through V-Ray, now brings a new light fixture optimization called Luminaires, which preserves the accurate light distribution while optimizing render times. Most of the light fixtures within Chaos Cosmos are now Luminaires in V-Ray 7.
Light Mix for Emissive Materials – Light Mix now lets designers adjust the intensity and color of specific emissive materials after rendering, for better lighting control and customizable renders.
Enhanced V-Ray Sun & Sky – For designers looking to create nautical twilight looks, V-Ray 7 offers an improved PRG sky model that can create more realistic images and immersive animations. V-Ray Sky can also now render various observer altitudes up to several kilometers.
Firefly Removal – V-Ray 7’s new algorithm automatically detects and finishes unresolved pixels, known as “fireflies,” during bucket rendering, greatly reducing the time needed to produce final images.
Scatter Tools
Edge Trimming – Scattered elements now fit perfectly within set boundary lines, making it easier to populate any precisely defined area.
Camera Clipping – Users can now limit scattered instances to the current view of their camera.
Chaos Cosmos Improvements
Non-Destructive Material Override – Users can now swap out Cosmos object materials without breaking the asset’s connection to Cosmos.
Asset Variants Support – Chaos Cosmos now has more asset variations to choose from, including seasonal options for 3D vegetation models (ex: summer or autumn leaves). Once users select their desired variant, they can just drag and drop it into their scene or even change the variant at a later stage.
400 New Render-Ready Assets – V-Ray 7 incorporates the latest Chaos Cosmos update, which is packed with 250+ vegetation models, 70+ static people featuring both single and couple-based poses and new furniture from IWC Home and Fanuli.
GPU Boosts
Faster “Time to First Pixel” – New optimizations for scatter rendering, texture heavy scenes, data uploads and geometry compilations offer a better interactive rendering experience and a faster time to first pixel for speed-conscious users.
Caustics Support – V-Ray GPU now supports caustics, enabling realistic surface reflections and refractions in both production and interactive rendering. The new Caustics solver is also optimized to fully utilize GPU hardware, delivering significantly faster results than a CPU.
RAM for Texture Memory – Textures are no longer processed by V-Ray GPU, giving users the ability to employ even bigger textures without worrying about memory constraints.
How to access it
Your SketchUp Studio subscription is Windows-only. You can use V-Ray 7 directly in SketchUp on your CPU or GPU, V-Ray Vision, and Chaos Cosmos.
Simply download the V-Ray installer through your Account Management Portal under “My Products” and start using it. You also get access to Chaos Cloud, which allows you to render your 3D models straight in the cloud, freeing up your computer to do other work. That means you can get the power of V-Ray without expensive hardware: It’s all powered in the cloud.
You can easily submit render jobs to Chaos Cloud directly from V-Ray for SketchUp's interface. It handles everything for you automatically - from licensing and uploading your scenes to launching virtual machines - so you get your job done fast.
SketchUp Studio is a Windows-only offering and includes only a Windows installer for V-Ray. V-Ray is not currently available to Higher Education Studio Subscription holders.
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