It’s currently available for 3ds max, Revit, Blender, SketchUp, Modo, Maya, Cinema 4D, Form-Z, and of course, Rhino. If you’ve not come across V-Ray before, it’s essentially a singular physically-based rendering system that has been developed for integration in a wide spread of 3D modelling and visualisation systems. This month, we’re going to take an indepth look at the latest update to one of these - namely, V-Ray for Rhino - which costs £220 per year and is developed by the Bulgarian team at Chaos Group. While Rhino has its own built-in rendering tools and its own add-ons (Flamingo and more recently, McNeel has built in the open source Cycles renderer), there are a range of third-party vendors looking to add their own special brand of magic.

One of the most popular classes of add-on is rendering and visualisation. The final reason for its popularity is, I suspect, the huge wealth of third-party add-ons that are available. It’s also very good value for money – the list price is 995 Euros – no subscription, no maintenance costs – and this includes the powerful Grasshopper visual scripting tool. It can create incredible forms from scratch and import and export a huge array of data types. Rhino is hugely popular among architects for its advanced surface modelling capabilities.

Rhino vray