Architectural rendering

Find out how architects, artists and designers use V-Ray to plan and visualize their most incredible architectural rendering projects.

What is architectural rendering?

Architectural rendering is the process of taking an architect’s design and using software to create 2D and 3D photorealistic visualizations. These allow everyone involved in a project to see into the future and find out how a building will look. They also make it easier to make decisions and create better designs.

While it sounds simple, there are a potentially infinite number of options available for each project. What time of day will we depict in the image? Which angle accentuates the building’s features best?

Sometimes architectural renderings can be created in-house by a dedicated team or individual, or they can be outsourced to architectural visualization companies that specialize in creating eye-catching imagery.

Chaos V-Ray is the number one software for architectural rendering

Almost everyone who creates architectural renders uses V-Ray®: In CGarchitect’s Architectural Visualization Rendering Survey, almost 65% of respondents said they use the software. Architects and designers can use V-Ray to render any size project, from a home remodel to a city masterplan, exactly as it will look when it's built.

Architectural rendering showreel

How V-Ray is used in architectural rendering?

Early renders

Realistic architectural rendering plays a role right from the very beginning of a project. A massing model is used to define the physical constraints around a building and work out how it will fit in with the surrounding environment. V-Ray can help with quick but accurate renders of this crucial step.

Perfecting designs

V-Ray is there to help with the evolution of an architectural rendering project. Property owners, planning authorities and the architects themselves can benefit from photorealistic renders and virtual reality tours to explore ideas and the building’s impact on its locale.

Marketing

Potential buyers and investors can be won over with glossy images and slick videos that show what it will be like to live in their dream homes. With V-Ray, artists have access to an array of tools that can really bring a project to life and make it look stunning.

Work simply & in harmony with your favourite tools.

Intuitive controls and compatibility are a must when time is of the essence. V-Ray is easy to learn — and it gets easier to use with each new version — and it’s compatible with the most popular plugins for arch viz, including Forest Pack, Railclone, Substance Painter, plus many more. When your tools work together, everything is faster.

Chaos Cosmos

Entourage such as trees, vehicles and people can be used at every stage of the design process to add realism and a sense of scale, and help make decisions. Chaos has made this easy and accessible with Chaos Cosmos, a library of over 650 free assets. Everything in Cosmos has been curated by Chaos and optimized for V-Ray and real-time with V-Ray Vision and Chaos Vantage, so users can add content with the added confidence that it will work flawlessly.

Learn more about Cosmos >

Real-time rendering

Real-time is one of the most exciting recent developments in architectural rendering. Chaos offers two products that allow users to interactively explore their designs in high quality: V-Ray Vision and Chaos Vantage.

V-Ray Vision is built-in to V-Ray 5 for SketchUp, V-Ray 5 for Rhino and V-Ray 5 for Revit, and it will run on almost any hardware. Using rasterized graphics, like a video game's, V-Ray Vision gives users the ability to look around their scenes and instantly adjust lights, materials and cameras.

Chaos Vantage is a standalone product that works with V-Ray scenes (.vrscene files) generated from any version of V-Ray. By harnessing NVIDIA's RTX-series graphics cards, Chaos Vantage can present a photorealistic real-time ray traced view of any scene — even if it has billions of polygons.

Learn more about real-time rendering >

Get started with V-Ray.

Speed up your architectural rendering skills with our collection of tutorials & case studies.

Arch Viz technology report

We surveyed more than 5500 architects and artists from over 70 countries to get their take on the latest technology and trends. Check out our key findings.

Read report

Architectural rendering showcase

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