Chaos just made a big play for real-time virtual production. Ahead of SIGGRAPH 2025, the company announced support for USD, MaterialX, and most excitingly Gaussian Splats in Chaos Arena, with the same capabilities coming to Vantage 3.0 this fall. You do not need a V-Ray license to use them.
Gaussian splatting has moved from research demos to real productions because it captures real spaces quickly, looks photorealistic at interactive rates, and does not require a heavy meshing step. If you can keep a USD scene intact, layer in splats, and preview with physically based lighting inside the same toolset that many film teams already know, you get faster decisions and fewer asset rebuilds. That is one of the value propositions of real time radiance fields.
Arena's implementation of gaussian splatting is ray tracing based, meaning that you are not suffering from some of the rasterization based issues such as sorting and popping effects. Additionally it enables more complex secondary lighting effects such as reflections and refractions.
You are also able to get fast, photoreal previz from captures. Scan a location, bring the splat into Arena, and block cameras with ray-traced lighting that matches your lookdev goals.
Hybrid scenes that mix splats with USD assets. Place CG props or characters over a splat capture. You keep the natural richness of the real space and still get art-directable elements.
Continuity across departments. Editorial, art, and VFX can evaluate the same scene representation, rather than jumping between a splat viewer for scouting and another renderer for lighting.
Chaos says Vantage will pick up USD, MaterialX, and Gaussian Splats with version 3.0 this fall. That should matter to teams that lean on Vantage for playblasts, lookdev, and director reviews. Bringing splats into that loop would let non-V-Ray users stay in the same real-time path tracer as Arena, which simplifies handoffs.
If you have been waiting for cleaner pipelines and real-time path tracing that does not require a game engine, Chaos just removed some of the biggest blockers. I will update this piece with findings from real projects, including stress tests on lighting, occlusion, and mixed splat plus USD scenes.
These updates are live in Chaos Arena as of today. Chaos will be on site at SIGGRAPH next week, doing both demos and speaking engagements.
