V-Ray for SketchUp

The ultimate visualization solution for SketchUp artists and designers.

Overview

Summary

V-Ray® for SketchUp is a 3D rendering software that combines real-time and photoreal rendering — all in SketchUp. From beginner to pro, Chaos® V-Ray has all the tools you need to visualize your SketchUp projects from start to finish.

Real-time and photoreal rendering in one.

Highlights

Real-time and photoreal rendering in one.

See your designs in real-time.

Seeing your Sketchup designs in real-time has never been easier. Now with V-Ray Vision, you can visualize your designs in real-time while you work in SketchUp. Move around your model, apply materials, set up lights and cameras — all in a live real-time view of your scene.

Rendering that’s as real as it gets.

With true-to-life lights, cameras, and materials, rendering with V-Ray is as real as it gets. For any project, you can see exactly how it will look. It's as close you can come to the real thing before it’s built.

Bring your scenes to life.

Employ our curated collection of smart assets — including high-quality models of furniture, accessories, vegetation and people — and stage your project with just a few clicks. The all-new Chaos Cosmos asset browser lets you easily drop render-ready 3D content right into your SketchUp scene.

Get a headstart on your next project.

V-Ray comes with hundreds of ready-to-render materials that you can apply to any scene and access to an extensive library of video tutorials, free technical support, and helpful forums. V-Ray has one of the largest visualization communities, with a world of community-created content that’s readily available.

V-Ray is the ultimate power-up for SketchUp.

V-Ray and SketchUp are the perfect team. SketchUp is the world's most widely used 3D modeling software for architecture and design. And V-Ray is the world's #1 rendering software for architectural visualization. The two together are the perfect combo to take your designs to the next level.

What's New?

Now, V-Ray for SketchUp gives you an essential collection of free ready-to-render assets and HDRI skies. Plus, we’ve boosted CPU denoising with Intel Open Image Denoise support and introduced more functionalities in V-Ray Vision and the VFB Compositor.

Enter the Chaos Cosmos.

The new curated 3D content library, Chaos® Cosmos, brings essential entourage to share your vision in a captivating way. With carefully selected assets from categories such as people, vehicles, plants, furniture and accessories, you can stage any interior or exterior. Searchable through the new Cosmos browser, the assets can easily be placed anywhere in your scene and will be visible through any viewport you chose to work with. Spend zero time on geometry optimization or material setup — the Cosmos assets are always render-ready and deliver high-quality results.

Bring scenes to life with ease.
Improved anti-aliasing

Finer texture details and small geometric elements like plants or facade ornaments are presented with better clarity with the new Temporal Anti-aliasing method.

Triplanar textures and randomization support

Take advantage of the Triplanar texture projection and Stochastic texture randomization features in Vision.

Soft Sun shadows

Objects cast soft shadows depending on the Sun Light size multiplier when the new high-quality shadows mode is enabled.

Faster denoising for CPU

The new Open Image Denoise engine is perfect for interactive rendering. As it runs on any CPU configuration, you are not constrained to specific hardware.

More precision in post

Use any mask render element from V-Ray to select and color correct specific areas of the rendered image directly in the VFB.

Transparent material reflections

Surfaces such as glass or water now reflect other scene objects in screen space.

Rendering

Smart 3D assets

Our integrated asset library, Chaos Cosmos, enables you to search and add render-ready objects and HDRI skies to your scene directly from the V-Ray toolbar. The Cosmos assets have automatic LODs, accurate scale, and can be used across 3ds Max, Rhino, and Revit.

Denoiser

Remove noise and dramatically cut the render times. Use the V-Ray Denoiser to denoise each render element in post-production. The NVIDIA AI Denoiser and Intel Open Image Denoise deliver instant noise-free feedback in V-Ray IPR.

Real-time rendering

With V-Ray® Vision, you can visualize your designs in real-time while you work in SketchUp. Move around your model, apply materials, set up lights and cameras—all in a live real-time view of your scene.

CPU, GPU & Hybrid rendering

V-Ray comes with two powerful rendering engines. You can choose between super fast GPU and CPU or Hybrid rendering to best suit your project needs and requirements.

Interactive rendering

Render interactively while you design. Fine-tune lights and materials and see the results right away. View the render result directly in the SketchUp viewport.

V-Ray Swarm

Powerful and scalable distributed rendering system that’s simple and fast. Get an extra speed boost with V-Ray Render nodes.

User Interface

V-Ray Color Picker

A powerful color-picker allowing you to choose the exact color you need with the right hue and saturation. Provides RGB color values and a Kelvin temperature slider corresponding to every color slot.

Smart Asset Editor

Create, edit and manage all of your assets including lights, materials, textures, geometry and render elements all in one place. All assets are structured in an intuitive folder structure.

Universal asset preview

Preview your materials, lights, textures and render elements in a single viewer. Observe how parameter changes affect the appearance of the asset in a specific isolated setting.

File Manager

Manage all of your scene files in one place. Set file paths, create scene archives, and keep track of assets like textures, IES files, and proxy objects.

V-Ray Frame Buffer

Track render history and fine-tune color, exposure, render elements and more, directly in V-Ray’s frame buffer.

Lighting

Light mixing

Adjust the lights in your scene even after you render. With Light Mix, once your scene is rendered, you can interactively adjust the brightness and color of any light without having to render again.

Light Gen

Light Gen is a new V-Ray tool that automatically generates thumbnails of your SketchUp scene each one presenting a unique lighting scenario. Choose your favorite look and you’re ready to render.

Sun & Sky

Simulate realistic daylight, sunrise and sunset, even as the sun dips below the horizon, for any time and location. SketchUp sun animation is supported.

Lighting analysis tool

The new Lighting Analysis render element makes it easy to visualize the real-world illumination (Lux) values of any scene.

Adaptive lights

Faster, cleaner and more accurate rendering in scenes containing many lights and image-based environment lighting.

Accurate lights

Render any type of natural, artificial, or image-based lighting with a wide range of built-in light types.

Global Illumination

Render photorealistic rooms and interiors with powerful and fast global illumination.

More Features

Camera

Automatic exposure & white balance

Capture the perfect exposure every time. The new Auto Exposure and Auto White Balance camera controls make rendering as simple as point and shoot.

Interactive lens effect

Instantly add GPU-accelerated glare, bloom and procedurally generated dust and scratches for added photorealism. Fine-tune lens effects interactively while you render.

Virtual Reality

Render VR-ready content for popular virtual reality headsets with the help of the VR Camera types in Stereo mode.

Real-world cameras

Work like a photographer, with controls for exposure, white balance, depth of field and more.

Shading

Randomizer

To create more realistic materials, we’ve added new tools that randomize textures and colors. The VRayUVWRandomizer lets you randomize texture coordinates and includes Stochastic Tiling that automatically fixes repeating textures.

Material library

Create great looking materials or select from 500+ readily available ones in the asset library. From multilayered car paint to accurate subsurface scattering, you can create any imaginable material.

Texture maps

Create realistic and unique shaders using any texture map or one of V-Ray’s many built-in procedural textures - Gradient, Temperature, Tri-Planar, etc.

Metalness

The V-Ray Material provides support for PBR shaders with the Metalness reflection controls.

Chaos Scans

1000+ scanned materials. Import and render directly in V-Ray.

Atmospheric & volumetric effects

Environment Fog

Quickly add realistic atmospheric depth and haze and use true 3D fog with realistic light scattering.

Aerial perspective

Simulate natural looking skies with realistic atmospheric depth.

Volumetric materials

Realistic material light scattering and translucency.

Geometry management

Proxy geometry

Bring more detail to your project with memory-efficient proxy models of complex objects like grass, trees, cars. Import and render V-Ray scenes (.vrscene) as references from other applications such as 3ds Max, Rhino, and Revit.

Displacement

Quickly add surface detail without extra modeling with the optimized V-Ray displacement. The 2d Displacement mode is perfect for architectural materials like brick and stone.

V-Ray Scene Importer

Import any .vrscene file directly as a SketchUp model with correctly sized and positioned objects, proper texture placement, lights and proxy references.

Section cuts & Clipper

asily create quick cutaways and section renders with V-Ray Clipper. Convert any scene object to a clipper.

Grass

Create realistic grass, fabrics, and carpet with V-Ray Fur.

Render еlements

Cryptomatte Render Element

Аutomatically generates and stores object- or material-based masks. It’s perfect when you need to accurately select objects in post-production.

Render Elements

Choose from many unique beauty, utility and matte passes to give you more control over your rendered images in compositing.

The Micrographics Advantage

We don’t just sell software, we are technical experts who understand your industry. We can help you:

Integrate Business Systems

We develop data sharing solutions to improve and speed up the communication between CAD & business management technologies.

Optimize Business Processes

We do unique assessments of our clients, enabling them to address workflow challenges, identify opportunities & achieve objectives.

Leverage the Power of BIM

By understanding BIM philosophies we can develop & implement BIM solutions for any project or establish BIM standards for any company.

Have Questions About Complex Applications?

Speak to us about your operational requirements or outcomes and we'll tailor a solution best suited to your business.

V-Ray for SketchUp

System Requirements for Windows

Operating System

Microsoft® Windows® 8.1, Windows 10 or Windows 11 operating system

Processor

Intel* 64, AMD64 or compatible processor with SSE4.2 support

Memory

Minimum 8 GB RAM, recommended 16 GB RAM

Hard Disk Space

Minimum 2GB, recommended 12GB (includes additional downloadable content)

TCP/IP

Only IPv4 required for distributed rendering is supported. IPv6 is currently not supported.

SketchUp

SketchUp 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

GPU Support

  • Maxwell-, Pascal-, Volta-, Turing- and Ampere- based NVIDIA card(s) with  latest recommended video driver
  • V-Ray Vision requires a Graphics card with DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 and Shader Model 5.0 capabilities

System Requirements for Mac OS

Operating System

Apple® macOS 10.14.x or higher

Processor

Intel 64, AMD64, ARM or compatible processor with SSE4.2 support

Memory

Minimum 8 GB RAM, recommended 16 GB RAM

Hard Disk Space

Minimum 2GB, recommended 12GB (includes additional downloadable content)

TCP/IP

Only IPv4 required for distributed rendering is supported. IPv6 is currently not supported.

SketchUp

SketchUp 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022

GPU Support

V-Ray GPU is not officially supported on macOS.

It works only with C++/CPU devices. V-Ray GPU can still be used in distributed rendering where a macOS machine runs the CUDA engine on a CPU device together with Windows/Linux machine(s) running CUDA engine on GPU device(s).