Chaos has released V-Ray 7.4 for Maya, the fourth update to V-Ray 7 for Maya, extending the renderer's native support for 3D Gaussian Splats with controls to relight imported splats inside V-Ray, and the ability to clip out unwanted regions of a splat when rendering on the GPU.
The Gaussian-splat pipeline first arrived in the Maya edition with V-Ray 7, where captured splats could be brought into a V-Ray scene and rendered alongside conventional geometry. What that initial support could not do was reconcile a splat, baked with the lighting of its original capture, against the lighting of the scene it was placed into, nor trim the stray, low opacity Gaussians that cluster around the edges of a reconstruction.
With the new 7.4, the new relighting controls let a splat respond to the scene's lights rather than carrying its captured illumination as a fixed appearance, and GPU-side clipping removes the floaters and out of bounds regions that otherwise have to be masked or cleaned up before a splat is usable.
Relighting, GPU splat rendering, and clipping volumes all shipped earlier in V-Ray 7 Update 3, but only for the 3ds Max, SketchUp, and Rhino editions, with Maya explicitly left out at the time. Update 4 is the Maya edition catching up. Splat relighting and GPU clipping reach Maya for the first time, bringing it into line with the rest of the V-Ray family. It also mirrors the relighting work Chaos has been rolling out across its wider ecosystem, where Chaos Vantage gained 3DGS relighting in its real time ray tracer with version 3.3.0, so a splat authored and relit in one Chaos tool now travels through the others with more consistent behavior.
It is available now, with the full change list in the V-Ray for Maya release notes.
