V-Ray Pricing 2026: Solo, Premium and Collection Costs

All three tiers work with the same set of host applications — Chaos lists 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini, Maya, Nuke, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, and Unreal on the buy-online page — and none of them require a separate purchase per host. There is no published Enterprise plan; Collection is the ceiling of the self-serve range, and anything larger goes through a volume quote from Chaos Sales.

V-Ray Solo — $540/yr

The entry tier, and a named license rather than a floating one: the V-Ray rendering engine itself, up to 15,000 Chaos Cosmos assets and materials, an Arch Viz training course, Veras AI image generation, Cloud Collaboration, and 100 Chaos AI credits a month. For one person rendering under one login, Solo is the whole product — there is nothing functional missing from the renderer itself at this tier.

V-Ray Premium — $778.80/yr

Chaos marks Premium its "preferred choice." It steps up to 18,500 assets, an enhanced material library, and five times the AI credit allowance (500 a month against Solo's 100), for $238.80 a year more than Solo's $540 — a 44.2% increase. Premium also switches to a floating license, which matters the moment more than one person on a team needs to sign in.

V-Ray Collection — $1,210.80/yr

Everything in Premium, plus the full 22,000+ asset library, Veras AI ideation and an AI Material Generator, 4,000+ Chaos Anima crowd characters, real-time viewport rendering through Chaos Vantage, and both Cloud Collaboration and Cloud Rendering. At $1,210.80/yr it is $670.80 more than Solo — more than double, at 2.24 times the Solo price — and it is the only tier that adds genuinely new tools rather than more of the same asset library and credit pool.

"Collection" is the word that causes the confusion in this category, because Chaos uses it for V-Ray's own top tier and for Enscape's own top tier, and the two are not the same purchase. There is no single "Chaos Collection" that hands you V-Ray, Enscape, and Corona for one price. Buying V-Ray Collection buys more V-Ray, plus the tools Chaos ships specifically inside the V-Ray product line:

The bottom two rows are the ones worth reading twice before paying for Collection expecting a bundle discount. Enscape and Corona are each their own Chaos render engine, each with its own Solo, Premium, and Collection tiers, and neither is unlocked by any V-Ray purchase at any tier. A studio that wants both V-Ray and Enscape pays for both subscriptions in full — see Enscape pricingfor Enscape's own $574.80–$730.80/yr range.

V-Ray charges one price regardless of which host application it plugs into. What differs by host is platform support, and one of the five results is genuinely counterintuitive:

3ds Max and Revit being Windows-only is not a V-Ray limitation — neither application has ever shipped for macOS, so no renderer plugged into either one can run on a Mac. The row that actually surprises people is Rhino: Chaos's own support documentation states plainly that V-Ray for Rhino is not compatible with macOS and is Windows-only, even though Rhino itself is a native Mac application. A Mac-based Rhino studio can model on macOS and still needs a Windows machine, or a Windows virtual machine with known compatibility issues, the moment V-Ray enters the pipeline.

SketchUp and Maya are the two exceptions. V-Ray for SketchUp supports macOS at the same price and version cadence as its Windows build, and V-Ray for Maya goes further, supporting Windows, macOS, and Linux. For a firm choosing between SketchUp and Rhino specifically because it wants to stay on Mac hardware, this table — not the price list — is the deciding factor.

Chaos prices monthly and annual billing as genuinely different offers, and the gap widens sharply as the tier goes up — the same shape Chaos uses across its Enscape pricing:

Solo is the odd one out: $45 a month for twelve months is $540, the identical figure Chaos charges for committing to a year up front. There is no reward for prepaying Solo, and no penalty for paying month to month either.

Premium and Collection tell a different story. Twelve months of Premium at the monthly rate is $1,464, against $778.80 billed annually — a $685.20 gap, or 88.0% more for the flexibility of month-to-month billing. Collection is the extreme case: paying monthly for a year totals $2,844, against $1,210.80 billed annually. That is 2.35 times the annual price for the identical product, which makes month-to-month Collection a poor fit for anything longer than a short, defined project.

Cloud Rendering — offloading a render job to Chaos's farm instead of a local workstation — comes bundled into V-Ray Collection, but the credits that actually pay for compute time are billed separately and are a genuine line item, not an afterthought. Chaos publishes two package sizes on its own store:

The 60,000-credit pack works out to $0.0175 a credit against $0.0208 a credit for the 30,000-credit pack — 16% cheaper per credit for buying twice the volume. Both packages are "billed annually" and the credits are "freely distributable between users attached to a floating license," per Chaos's own page, which matters for a studio splitting one credit pool across several V-Ray seats.

These render credits are a different currency from the 100 / 500 / 1,500 Chaos AI credits bundled into Solo, Premium, and Collection — those cover Veras AI image generation and enhancement, not farm rendering, and Chaos meters the two separately.

Chaos publishes a single education bundle rather than a V-Ray-only student price: the Student Collection costs $149 a year and includes V-Ray, Vantage, Anima, Veras, Phoenix, and Cosmos, plus 500 Chaos AI credits a month. It is one license per verified student, requires proof of enrollment at checkout, and renews annually.

Against the $1,210.80/yr commercial V-Ray Collection it most closely matches in scope, $149/yr is 87.7% less. It is also the same $149/yr figure Chaos charges for its Enscape Student Collection — the education price does not change based on which Chaos renderer a student cares about most, since one license covers the whole suite either way.

Not for lasting commercial use, but there are two real free paths. Chaos runs a 30-day free trial of V-Ray across its supported host applications — the trial page advertises "V-Ray — and more — free for 30 days."

Separately, V-Ray for Blender Community Edition is free indefinitely rather than time-limited: the license runs 90 days and renews at no cost, repeatedly, with no purchase required. The trade-off is real — output is capped at 8-bit color and 2K square resolution (2560×2560), and the Community Edition drops official Chaos support, batch/headless rendering, distributed rendering, and cloud collaboration. It is built for solo creators, students, and portfolio work, not a production pipeline.

There is no free viewer-only tier of the kind KeyShot or SketchUp ship, and no product on chaos.com called "V-Ray Vision" — anyone searching for that name is likely thinking of Chaos Vantage, V-Ray's real-time viewport companion, which is bundled into V-Ray Collection and has its own separate free trial.

The subscription is the floor. Two costs sit outside the price list above, and for a studio comparing V-Ray against a real-time renderer, the first one is the one that actually changes the calculation.

Hardware: the CPU/GPU choice

Chaos's own buy-online page states that "V-Ray differs from other rendering solutions in that it includes both CPU and GPU+CPU hybrid rendering options." That sentence is worth more than it looks: real-time renderers in this category, like Enscape, require a discrete GPU with dedicated VRAM to run at all. V-Ray does not — a studio can render on CPU alone, on hardware it may already own, and buy a GPU only when the speed is worth paying for rather than because the software refuses to start without one. That flexibility is also the trade V-Ray makes for fidelity: CPU rendering is slower per frame than a real-time viewport, which is the whole reason Chaos bundles Vantage — a GPU-accelerated, real-time companion — into Collection rather than shipping it as V-Ray's default preview mode.

For the exact GPU models, VRAM, and OS versions V-Ray 7 supports, see V-Ray system requirements — this page covers the subscription cost, not the workstation spec sheet.

Training

V-Ray has the steepest learning curve of the architecture-render category, and that reputation is earned honestly: it exposes a full physically based material system, lighting and camera controls built for production stills, and render settings that reward understanding sampling and noise rather than accepting a single quality slider. Studios adopting V-Ray typically budget real onboarding time, not an afternoon — the same trade-off that buys the fidelity V-Ray is chosen for in the first place.

Putting a host license and V-Ray together, here is what three common setups cost in a year. License figures for SketchUp and Revit come from this site's own SketchUp pricing and Revit pricing pages; the training line is marked as an estimate.

A freelancer on SketchUp with V-Ray Solo pays SketchUp Pro's $399/yr plus V-Ray Solo's $540/yr, for $939/yr before a GPU. A three-person Revit studio on V-Ray Premium pays Revit's $3,005/yr per seat — $9,015 for three — plus V-Ray Premium at $778.80/yr per seat, or $2,336.40 for three, totaling $11,351.40/yr before three Windows workstations. A five-seat SketchUp studio on V-Ray Collection with an estimated $1,500/yr in training pays $1,995 for five SketchUp Pro seats plus $6,054 for five V-Ray Collection seats (5 × $1,210.80), landing at $9,549/yr — a figure only as precise as the training estimate inside it.

The middle scenario is the expensive one, and Revit is the reason: at $3,005/yr per seat, the BIM license costs nearly four times as much as V-Ray Premium sitting on top of it. Comparing renderer prices in isolation understates what a Revit-based studio actually spends on visualization software each year.

V-Ray competes with both real-time renderers built for client walkthroughs and one browser-based option that skips the render engine entirely. These are each vendor's current published entry price:

Enscape, from the same publisher, is the closest price match at $574.80/yr against V-Ray Solo's $540/yr — a $34.80/yr gap, with V-Ray the cheaper of the two. The real difference is workflow, not cost: Enscape trades fidelity for an near-instant live preview synced to the model, while V-Ray targets final, production-quality stills and accepts a slower iteration loop to get there. Credit where it's due to Lumion for the deepest asset library in the category, but Lumion Pro's $1,149/yr is the most expensive entry point on this table and it is Windows-only outright.

D5 Render is the cheapest paid seat here at $30/mo, and its Community tier is a genuinely usable free option — the closest thing on this list to V-Ray's Blender Community Edition having a mainstream equivalent. None of these five paid renderers, V-Ray included, removes the GPU or CPU rendering step itself; that is the one thing a browser-based tool like Render a House changes, at the cost of the fine-grained material and lighting control V-Ray gives a production artist.

When V-Ray is the right tool

• The deliverable is a final, production-quality image.V-Ray's physically based rendering engine is built for stills and animations that need to hold up at full resolution, not for a fast walkthrough.
• The studio already works across multiple CAD packages. One V-Ray subscription plugs into 3ds Max, SketchUp, Revit, Rhino, and Maya alike, at the same price regardless of host.
• GPU budget is limited or non-existent. V-Ray's CPU rendering mode means a firm can start on hardware it already owns and add a GPU later for speed, not as a requirement to launch the software at all.
• The team can absorb a real learning curve. V-Ray's depth is the same thing that makes it slower to onboard than Enscape or D5 — worth it when the output quality is the point.

When to consider alternatives

• The deliverable is a live client walkthrough, not a still. Enscape or Chaos Vantage answer that need directly; V-Ray answers a different question.
• The studio is on Rhino and needs to stay on Mac. V-Ray for Rhino is Windows-only, full stop — no V-Ray tier changes that.
• Rendering is occasional, not a standing workflow.Paying Collection month-to-month for a short project already costs 2.35 times the annual rate; a per-render tool or D5's free Community tier undercuts that for infrequent use.
• The team wants to skip rendering hardware entirely. Neither V-Ray nor any renderer on the comparison table above removes the CPU/GPU requirement — only a browser-based tool does that.

For a studio whose deliverable is a final, print- or presentation-quality image, yes — V-Ray earns its reputation as the industry reference renderer, and $540–$1,210.80/yr is priced in line with what that quality costs across the category. Credit where it's due: no renderer on the comparison table above matches V-Ray's combination of format breadth, physically based accuracy, and the option to render on CPU alone when a GPU budget isn't there.

What V-Ray cannot do is make that quality instant. It is not a live, walkable preview the way Enscape or Chaos Vantage are — path tracing a final frame takes real compute time, whether that time comes from a local CPU, a local GPU, or a Chaos Cloud render credit. A studio that needs to show a client a change in real time during a meeting is asking V-Ray to do something it was not built to do quickly, and no tier upgrade on this page changes that trade-off.

If the render step itself is what you want to remove — no GPU, no CPU render queue, no host CAD license — Render a House takes an exported view, a screenshot, or an OBJ or GLB file and returns a photorealistic image in a browser. It starts free at 3 renders a day, and paid plans are $39/mo, or $312/yr, well under V-Ray Solo's $540/yr. It will not replace V-Ray's material-level control for a production still, but it answers a different question: a fast, photorealistic image with no render engine to install, license, or feed a GPU.

Pricing a different piece of the same stack, or the machine V-Ray needs to run on? These cover the ground this page assumes.

• Enscape pricing— Chaos's own real-time renderer, the closest price match to V-Ray Solo and the tool most often bought alongside it.
• V-Ray system requirements — the exact CPU, GPU, VRAM, and OS numbers behind the hardware note above.
• Enscape system requirements — the GPU-mandatory spec sheet for V-Ray's closest in-house competitor.
• SketchUp pricing and Revit pricing — the two host licenses behind the real-cost scenarios above.
• Rhino pricing — the third major V-Ray host, and the one where the Mac question actually bites.
• KeyShot pricing and Lumion pricing — two more renderers on the comparison table above, covered in the same depth.
• D5 Render pricing — the cheapest paid seat in the comparison table, and the one with a genuinely usable free tier.
• Archicad pricing and Vectorworks pricing — two more BIM hosts Chaos prices Enscape into at the same rate regardless of CAD choice.
• Twinmotion pricing — Autodesk's bundled real-time alternative for anyone already paying for Revit.
• Topaz AI pricing and Magnific AI pricing — AI upscalers for cleaning up a V-Ray render's final output.
• Render a House's image upscaler — a free way to raise the resolution of an existing V-Ray render.
• Render a House plans and pricing — the full breakdown behind the $39/mo figure quoted above.