Features

As a rendering plugin for Maya, V-Ray supports most standard Maya features and many third-party plugins. The most common of these are listed below.

To check Maya version compatibility, see the Maya Compatibility page.

Geometry

The following geometry types are supported.

• Polygonal surfaces (optionally, these can be rendered as subdivision surfaces)
• NURBS surfaces (these are tessellated internally by V-Ray)
• Maya Subdivs surfaces – note that hierarchical edits are only partially supported. V-Ray will call the Maya API to subdivide the original mesh up to the last level that has hierarchical edits. If the required level exceeds 131072 vertices, a lower level will be chosen that has fewer than 131072 vertices. In the process, some of the hierarchical edits may be lost. Creases are not supported.
• Particles and nParticles – the supported particle render types are:- Multipoint
  - Multistreak
  - Points
  - Spheres
  - Sprites
  - Streak

• Instancer (Replacement)
• Maya hair
• Maya Paint effects are partially supported
• Maya Fluids (but not the fluid textures)
• V-Ray proxy
• V-Ray fur
• Alembic GPU cache
• XGen is partially supported
• Gaussian splats (.ply files) are supported in the V-Ray Gaussian splat node.

All geometry types support motion blur.

The Maya conversion utilities can be used to render some of the other Maya geometry types. For example, paint effects can be converted to polygons and then rendered with V-Ray.

Materials

The following material types are supported:

• OpenPBR Surface
• Anisotropic Shader
• StandardSurface
• Lambert
• Blinn
• Phong
• Phong Explorer
• Ramp Shader
• Layered Shader *
• Surface shader
• Use background
• USDPreviewSurface

For these materials, the supported parameters are:

• Diffuse color/texture
• Reflection color/texture
• Glossiness control
• Bump mapping
• Transparency
• Incandescence

* - Both Layered Shaders and Layered Texture modes are treated as Layered Texture (see the Maya reference for more info on those two modes).

2D and 3D Textures

The following texture types are supported:

• Bulge
• Checker
• Cloth
• File (see below for supported bitmap types and additional file name tags)
• Grid
• Noise
• Ramp
• Granite
• Leather
• Marble
• Rock
• Snow
• Layered Texture
• Volume noise
• Wood

The following texture types are partially supported (they will be mapped to the same V-Ray noise generator):

• Simplex Noise
• Ocean
• Fractal
• Mountain
• Brownian
• Cloud
• Crater
• Solid Fractal
• Stucco

USD and MaterialX Support

V-Ray supports USD and MaterialX in Maya. See the supported USD versions and the supported USD features here.

The mtlx format is supported. It can be loaded in a VRay Material X material node, in the MaterialX document or in the context of a USD stage.

The creation of V-Ray nodes in graphs for the MaterialX Document is not supported.

Utilities

The following Maya utilities are supported:

• Condition
• Distance Between
• Multiply Divide
• 2d Placement
• 3d Placement
• Plus/Minus Average
• Projection
• Reverse
• Sampler info
• Set range
• Stencil
• Vector Product
• Blend Colors
• Clamp
• Contrast
• Gamma Correct
• Hsv To Rgb
• Luminance
• Surface Luminance
• Remap Color
• Remap Hsv
• Remap Value
• Rgb To Hsv
• Switch utilities
• Particle sampler – the supported outputs are:
  - age
  - lifespanPP
  - acceleration
  - rgbPP
  - incandescencePP
  - opacityPP
  - userScalar1PP to userScalar5PP
  - userVector1PP to userVector5PP
• Image plane

Bitmap Formats

The following bitmap file types are supported:

• JPG
• PNG
• TGA
• BMP
• HDR
• EXR (regular and tiled mip-mapped)
• SGI
• PIC
• TIFF
• PSD
• Tiled mip-mapped TIFF files (.tx or .tex)
• DDS

For tiled mip-mapped textures (.exr and .tx/.tex), V-Ray is able to load only parts of the textures as needed during the rendering. By default, tiled textures use the same memory pool as the dynamic geometry used for displacement, proxies etc. The size of this pool can be controlled through the Dynamic memory limit parameter in the System tab of the V-Ray render settings. You can also specify a separate memory pool for tiled textures using the VRAY_TEXTURE_CACHE environment variable (see the section on Environment variables).

V-Ray also supports a number of tags in the file names, which are expanded at render time. See the File Names for Bitmap Textures section for more information.

Lights

The following light types are supported:

• Ambient light
• Directional light
• Point light
• Spot light
• Area light

V-Ray Sun & Sky

The VRaySun and VRaySky are special features which are provided by the V-Ray renderer. Developed to work together, the VRaySun and VRaySky reproduce the real-life Sun and Sky environment of the Earth. Both are coded so that they change their appearance depending on the direction of the VRaySun.

The V-Ray Sun and Sky are based largely on the SIGGRAPH'99 paper "A Practical Analytic Model for Daylight" by A. J. Preetham, Peter Shirley, Brian Smits.

In the VRaySky tab of V-Ray Render Settings Window there are buttons to create the two nodes.

Camera Settings

The following Maya camera settings are supported:

• Environment (background) color - this also determines the GI (skylight) color for GI calculations
• Angle of view (Field of view)

More V-Ray specific options are available in the Camera tab of V-Ray Render Settings window with separate tabs for DOF and Motion Blur.

Environment colors can be overridden and there is an option to easily assign a 2d texture as an environment texture. A V-Ray environment placement node is created with several mapping types available: angular, cubic, spherical, mirror ball.

Animation

The animation settings are in the V-Ray Render Settings window under Image File Output.

Therefore, a sequence of frames is rendered the same way, only the animation checkbox should be checked, and the corresponding start and end frames should be set.

Node from plugin

Help on the attributes for different plugins can be accessed in their respective doc pages or at the following locations:

HTML Help

Information on parameters available for each plugin node can be found as HTML files on your local hard disk. These files are included as part of your V-Ray installation, in the PluginDoc folder:

• Windows: C:/Program Files/Chaos/V-Ray/Maya 20xx for x64/maya_vray/PluginDoc

Where 20xx is your Maya version number, such as 2025.

For example, help on parameters for the BRDFVRayMtl node can be found in the file BRDFVRayMtl.html in this folder. These HTML help files can be viewed in any browser.

Command Line Help

Documentation of those plugins can also be accessed through two separate tools that contain the above information: plgparams.exe and plugininfo.exe. See the Create V-Ray PluginNode page for more information.

Bifrost Support

With each Maya version, V-Ray supports certain Bifrost versions listed below:

• Maya 2026 is linked with BifrostSDK version 2.13
• Maya 2025 is linked with BifrostSDK version 2.9
• Maya 2024 is linked with BifrostSDK version 2.1
• Maya 2023 is linked with BifrostSDK version 1.0

Additionally, Bifrost 2.14.1 is supported for Maya 2024, 2025, and 2026.

Bifrost 2.15.0 is supported for Maya 2024, 2025, and 2026.

XGen Support

V-Ray supports XGen in Maya. See the XGen and V-Ray in Maya 2015 and newer section for more information.

V-Ray also supports textures for interactive groom splines in Maya 2017.

Rendering Tools and Utilities

The following standalone rendering tools and utilities come packaged with V-Ray for Maya. For a full list of tools and utilities that come with V-Ray, see the Additional Tools page.

• V-Ray Image to EXR Converter - This is both a command-line utility and a simple GUI application that can be used to convert .vrimg image files to .exr files in OpenEXR format.
• Standalone Denoise Tool - This is a command-line utility that can be used to denoise still images or animations outside of Maya. This can be especially useful for animated sequences because the standalone tool can look at multiple frames at once and produce a better denoising result.