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V-Ray Support Comes to HDR Light Studio Blender Add-on
Today we've released an updated version of our Blender add-on, and the headline feature is support for the V-Ray renderer. Alongside that, this release adds support for Blender 5.2 and brings a few version requirements up to date.
What's new in this release
- Support added for the V-Ray renderer
- Support added for Blender 5.2
- Minimum supported Blender version is now 4.5.12
- Requires HDR Light Studio 9 drop 5
- If you use Octane, please pair this with the Octane add-on version 2026.4 31.10 or higher
A little about V-Ray for Blender
Chaos brought V-Ray properly into Blender with V-Ray 7, integrating the renderer directly inside the app for interactive and final-frame work. In April 2026 they launched the free V-Ray for Blender Community Edition, which can be used for commercial projects. The free licence runs for 90 days and can be renewed an unlimited number of times by completing a short survey.
The Community Edition gives you nearly all of V-Ray's functionality, with a few caps: output is limited to 2K square (2560 x 2560) and 8-bit, and Chaos Cloud rendering and collaboration, the Chaos Cloud AI tools, batch and distributed rendering, export to V-Ray formats for pipeline integration, and the VFB History panel are reserved for paid subscribers, as is official Chaos support. Everything else is identical. The paid version lifts the resolution and bit-depth limits and unlocks the rest, and is available as a standalone subscription or bundled with wider Chaos plans. Community Edition launched on Mac and Windows, with Linux in the works.
For many artists the appeal is pipeline consistency. V-Ray is an established standard in archviz, product rendering, VFX and animation, so if you or your clients already have V-Ray scenes, materials and lighting from 3ds Max, Maya, SketchUp or Rhino, rendering with V-Ray in Blender avoids a translation step. You also get the Chaos Cosmos asset library, V-Ray's physically accurate cameras and lights, and Chaos Cloud rendering for heavy animation work.
Get lighting
A large number of our customers already light with HDR Light Studio and V-Ray every day, in Maya and 3ds Max. It's a combination we know inside out, and one that's been used on countless commercial projects. Now that pairing is available in Blender too, with lighting you build interactively and see update live in the V-Ray render.
For studios and freelancers moving work between Blender and their existing V-Ray pipelines, it means the same lighting tools and the same renderer, wherever the shot is being built. We're excited to see what artists create with it - please do send us your renders.