Veras is Chaos’s popular AI-powered visualization tool and has been a hit within the larger Archviz professional community, competing against a sea change of new AI visualization platforms. This largely has to do with the integration of AI into the professional Chaos visualization tools that AEC visualization professionals already know and love.

Veras Integration

For years, Chaos’s library of visualization tools has been used from the earliest stages of design through final deliverables, and as the company’s software ecosystem grew, it became increasingly logical to tightly integrate Versa across it.

Key Takeaways

• Chaos is now issuing a single installer for all products, simplifying deployment and installation of Chaos ecosystem products, including Veras. With this comes a more unified licensing toolset.
• There are broad new updates for Enscape, V-Ray, and Corona beyond the Veras integration
• Veras is now deeply integrated across the product range listed above. 

“Our customers have spoken. Tool-hopping and disconnected workflows are burdens to anyone tasked with complex projects,” said Petr Mitev, Vice President of Product Development at Chaos. “Today, our ecosystem begins feeling a whole lot smoother, letting users tap a shared infrastructure, cross-product features, and the most purpose-built AI in the industry. This will speed up any workflow, without sacrificing quality or control.”

Veras is now fully integrated into all Enscape, V-Ray, and Corona renderer solutions.

Veras is highly important to the Chaos ecosystem of visualization tools because with it, designers, architects, and archviz pros can quickly turn hand sketches, 2D images, and 3D models into presentation-ready images and animations far faster than workflows that are missing the AI (artificial intelligence) technologies embedded in Veras.

Whether professionals are working in 3D modelers like SketchUp, Rhino, or 3ds Max, or working in BIM tools like Archicad, Revit, or Vectorworks, they can explore early design ideas, moods, and visualization styles easily when working in Chaos’s rendering tools.

Hybrid Licensing System

Chaos is also introducing a new hybrid-licensing system that adapts to the actual way users want to work. This license works on a new credit system that provides access to cloud rendering and AI services, and users can scale up or down the credits depending on what they actually need.

New ability for light to override materials, rendering example.

“Having AI capabilities integrated directly into our tools has made a big difference to our workflow,” said David Law, BIM Manager for Bellway Homes. “Going from Revit into Enscape with a click, and then into Veras with another click, is far more efficient than opening separate software and moving files around. Any design changes we make are instantly reflected, which keeps the whole process moving smoothly.”

Enscape Updates

As part of this launch, Chaos is also announcing fresh updates for several products, including Enscape. The new features include:

• vEnvision Live Link — Moving scenes from Enscape to Enscape Envision is now a one-click affair, helping users jump into advanced animations without a complex export-import process.
• 2500+ New Chaos Cosmos Assets — Chaos’ massive 3D asset library gains new real-time optimized people, vegetation, accessories and branded assets, making it easier to add AEC-ready entourage to a scene. In addition, a new AI-driven search tool will help users find their “perfect” Cosmos assets in seconds using natural language (also in V-Ray and Corona).
• Chaos Cloud Video Collaboration — New access to remote video collaboration tools connects the design, presentation and feedback process into a visually robust loop.

V-Ray and Corona Updates

• 1000+ New Chaos Cosmos Assets — New archviz-ready assets are available to visualization teams, including new high-quality accessories and furniture.
• Vantage in the Viewport — Chaos real-time rendering engine Vantage is now accessible within the V-Ray viewport, enabling rapid scene exploration and smoother design reviews, even while working with massive, fully ray traced scenes.

Corona-Only Updates

Today, also marks the launch of Corona 15, which will see Chaos’ push-button simple renderer continuing to evolve beyond visualization, as it brings AI ideation, photoreal rendering, and cinematic animation into one intuitive environment.

• Enhanced Material Detail — The new Glints layer simulates the sparkle of small, angled surfaces, making it essential for replicating metallic flakes in car paint, sand and snow.
• Improved Gaussian Splats Blending — Gaussian Splats now accurately bounce Global Illumination light onto 3D models, allowing captured environments to blend naturally into the scene.
• Faster Animation Parsing — Users can now reduce animation render times in 3ds Max, using a smarter rendering workflow that no longer reprocesses the entire scene for every frame.
• 3D Streaming — Anyone can now walk through their vision in real time. Users simply share a 3D streaming link and stakeholders can instantly explore the visualization interactively, at their own pace, on any device.

For more ecosystem updates, product tips and user stories, check out Chaos’ blog and social channels.

Pricing and Availability

All updates are available now. For full pricing information, please visit the Chaos pricing page.

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Claude Meets SketchUp

A new SketchUp Connector brings in the power of an MCP (model context protocol) service that allows Claude to interact directly with SketchUp (.SKP) files.

Key Takeaways

• SketchUp users can utilize Claude AI to generate 3D models from prompts, including both text prompts and pictures.
• SketchUp users will need a Claude AI account to utilize the new SketchUp Connector for Claude.

The connectivity benefits users by enhancing their ability to create 3D models, regardless of their SketchUp 3D modeling skill level.

What Can You Model

Users can create new geometry by simply describing their design goals, such as building massing models, landscapes, or furniture.

SketchUp Connector for Claude AI powers AI-generated 3D modeling in Trimble SketchUp.

They can provide plain-language inputs, reference images, sketches, photos, floor plans, and dimensions that they upload to give Claude the necessary context to understand the design modeling objective. Claude then builds the geometry in a cloud SketchUp session, iteratively verifying the dimensions.

Chris Cronin, vice president and general manager of architecture and design solutions at Trimble, says:

“Natural language prompts and the power of AI make it easy for anyone to get started and excel,” adds Cronin, “including inexperienced and non-traditional 3D design users, bringing us closer to our ‘3D for everyone’ goal.”

This new specialized Claude integration with SketchUp is consistent with Trimble’s overall initiatives to democratize advanced technologies and make them available to a wider range of users.

More Claude Advantages

SketchUp Claude Connector also tracks version history within a single chat, allowing users to quickly navigate, troubleshoot, and refine their models. If the design is not quite correct, the user can describe what is wrong, and Claude will make adjustments based on what is specified as wrong.

MORE: Trimble set to acquire AI-powered Document Crunch

When a model is complete, the Connector creates a 2D preview thumbnail and provides a direct download link to the (.SKP) file. Once downloaded, the user can then manually edit the model.

And one more final note. Users can train Claude on core skills and unique workflows to complete competitive tasks.

Availability

Users can get started today by enabling Trimble SketchUp in Claude’s MCP directory connector settings. Accessing the connector does require a Claude account and a Trimble ID for authentication. Users receive a free SketchUp entitlement that allows them to save up to 30 SketchUp models; after that, a paid entitlement is required. Resulting files can be opened in SketchUp for Web, Desktop, iPad, or iPhone.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

As some additional directions. When you log into your Claude account, go to Customize, click on Connect your Apps, and then you will have a list of all of Anthropic’s partners. Search for Trimble. Hit the plus icon to connect Claude with SketchUp. 

View of Claude’s main sign-in page. You need an Anthropic Claude account in order to link SketchUp to Claude for AI-powered modeling.

In watching some users explore this technology, the results are varied but also quite solid. Reference images only type Claude-generations may be off quite a bit, while others are strangely very good. Perhaps most positive is that a combination of detailed reference images (those including dimensions), combined with detailed prompts with dimensions, can yield substantially good results. We are talking about whole combinations of rooms, like a bedroom suite. Another positive side is that Anthropic‘s Claude appears to be quite fast. Trimble doesn’t really note that in their announcement, but user tests are showing good speed for results. You still have to download the file, but that doesn’t take a lot of time in the grand scheme of things, especially if Claude saves you 30 minutes of modeling. 

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C4D on iPad

Naturally built for the iPad’s touch user interface, Cinema 4D for iPad delivers core 3D modeling and design capabilities in a streamlined, mobile-first interface.

Key Takeaways

• Cinema 4D for iPad will enable creatives to take their 3D and animation skills on the go, whenever inspiration strikes
• Cinema 4D for iPad is designed to complement the desktop versions and will be a mobile, touch-centric version with its own capabilities and functions
• Cinema 4D for iPad is due in late 2026

Moreover, the iPad version of Cinema 4D is meant to complement the classic desktop version of Cinema 4D, so artists can explore ideas on the go, when traveling, or whenever they have a creative moment, and bring that work back into the desktop version.

Maxon is slated to release Cinema 4D for iPad, a touch-optimized version of the award-winning 3D content creation software.

Now the iPad version of Cinema 4D will be tailored for mobile workflows and will not be a carbon copy of the desktop versions of the application. It will also support cross-platform workflows, dovetailing with both Mac and Windows versions of Cinema 4D.

Additionally, Cinema 4D for iPad will support Redshift rendering capabilities, and Sculpts from ZBrush for iPad will also open directly on Cinema 4D for iPad.

Availability

Maxon has only said the release and availability are late 2026. Readers interested can join the official beta program here.

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V-Ray 7 Update 3

“By bringing real-time ray tracing directly into the V-Ray viewport, artists can iterate faster while maintaining the quality that V-Ray is known for, all within a single, unified workflow,” said Vlado Koylazov, Head of Innovation at Chaos.

Key Takeways

• Final-frame-quality real-time rendering is now possible in V-Ray Viewport for those with a Vantage account
• V-Ray 7 update 3 is now out for Rhino and SketchUp, with 3ds Max coming soon
• AI Mood Match technology brings the atmosphere from a reference photo into your render

Real-time ray tracing technology in Chaos Vantage transforms how archviz teams work because it is able to handle complex lighting, large scenes, and large-scale geometry without slowdown. Now, V-Ray 7 users with a Vantage license can tap the power of real-time rendering without leaving the V-Ray workflow.

Parallax Interiors is the software that uses interior shaders from Cosmos. The effect holds from any camera angle and can be varied across a facade to avoid repetition, bringing convincing life to every window, especially during night scenes.

While real-time final-quality ray tracing rendering is a powerful update, Update 3 has eleven other great new features we discuss below, including impactful new AI capabilities.

New Features

There are multiple new features beyond the new capability to tap into Chaos Vantage technology directly in V-Ray 7. These include a new Gaussian splats relighting, Quick Caustics, Chaos Cloud Reviews, new Cosmos Sets, and New Assets.

AI Mood Match technology will be a hit with users who can use a reference photo and have AI match the lighting and atmospheric mood of the image and implement that in the rendered scene.

Moreover, there are multiple new AI tools that bring the power of AI deeper into the production process. An important one is the new AI Mood Match feature. Now, a user can use a reference photo to automatically align a scene’s lighting with the image’s look and atmosphere, reducing manual setup and achieving desired outcomes faster. Other AI features include the ability to AI-generate materials at 4K resolution for eye-popping renders.

Other features include in summary:

• Parallax Interiors — Architects can now add realistic interior depth and lighting to exterior renders without modeling or heavy geometry. Using parallax interior shaders from Cosmos, the effect holds from any camera angle and can be varied across a façade to avoid repetition, bringing convincing life to every window, especially in night scenes.
• Node Material Editor (V-Ray for SketchUp and Rhino) — Users can now build and adjust V-Ray materials visually using a node-based editor, making it easier to understand material logic and create complex shaders with greater control. The node editing workflow offers a more intuitive and visual alternative to traditional material creation and editing. The tool is now available as a preview, with more possibilities to come in future releases.
• AI Enhancer: Large Surfaces Coverage — Architects can add more realistic details to large surfaces, such as floors, walls, asphalt, and terrain, adding natural variation at the correct scale without manual re-texturing.
• AI Enhancer: Improved Accuracy and Single Object Creative Enhancement — Users can achieve more precise results across the board, with new support for applying creative enhancement to individual objects.
• Video Collaboration — Chaos Cloud becomes a professional-grade video review platform for animations and render sequences, with precise commenting tied to timestamps, ranges, and visual annotations.
• Cosmos Sets and New Assets — Cosmos sets provide a fast and simplified way to populate scenes with grouped assets that naturally work together. This update adds 700+ new Cosmos assets, including 400 high-poly Globe Plant models and new branded models.

To learn more and explore what’s new, visit the V-Ray Collection page on chaos.com. Or watch the video below:

Pricing and Availability

Launching first on V-Ray for SketchUp and Rhino, real-time rendering in the V-Ray viewport is available to users with an active Chaos Vantage or V-Ray Collection license. AI Mood Match and real-time rendering in the V-Ray viewport are expected to be introduced to V-Ray for 3ds Max.

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Real-Time Redshift

Starting with sister company Vectorworks, Maxon has launched Redshift for Vectorworks, the German company’s first real-time archviz solution. Alongside this release, Redshift for Revit is also announced as an official beta launch. (There are open sign-ups here.)

Maxon Redshift is now available for Vectorworks, offering an industry competitive real-time to final render pipeline solution.

Graphisoft’s Archicad will get its real-time Redshift for Archicad later in 2026. In all cases, the new real-time Redshift solutions for architectural design tools mark a major milestone for Maxon, which has always served high-end architectural visualization users with its famed Cinema 4D solution. The new Redshift real-time technology embeds its features directly into the host design applications.

“Maxon’s tools have a rich history in media and entertainment, used by the creative teams behind so many popular Hollywood movies to create Oscar-winning visual effects,” said Nicolas Burtnyk, Maxon’s Executive VP Rendering. “Now, we’re bringing this same magic to architects and interior designers, helping them translate their vision into cinematic visual experiences worthy of big screens.”

Solution Details

Engineered for architects and interior designers, Maxon is bringing its award-winning Redshift rendering technologies straight into the AEC industry’s globally leading BIM and design solutions, beginning with global BIM/CAD solution Vectorworks.

An example of Maxon Redshift’s rendering quality.

Redshift for Vectorworks launches alongside the release of Vectorworks 2026 Update 4. The solution allows users to smoothly move from real-time design previews to high-end, photorealistic renders all within the same unified ecosystem. Redshift for Revit (now in beta) and Redshift for Archicad will be released later in 2026, with further launches planned for 2027.

Technicals include:

• Archviz in real-time — Architects can visualize designs instantly in real time, then elevate scenes using the same Redshift technology used in feature films – without leaving their CAD environment. Projects can be sent to Cinema 4D with a single click for advanced modeling, animation, simulation, fly-throughs, and rendering.

• Exceptional ease of adoption — Early user testing highlights a key priority: effortless setup, intuitive controls, and fast results, especially for iterative workflows where architects need to explore lighting, materials, and composition quickly.

• Intelligent, production-ready asset libraries — Maxon’s platform includes a vast library of assets known as “Capsules” – materials, plants, furniture, and environmental elements – updated monthly and supported by procedural tools and AI-assisted search for rapid scene building and creative iteration. As the Archviz solution evolves, so will its library.

• Full Mac and Windows parity — Whether teams work on Mac, Windows, or a mix of both, Maxon’s AEC solution delivers consistent performance and functionality across platforms. Architects can collaborate fluidly, share files with confidence, and maintain unified workflows throughout their design-to-visualization process.

• Better value for architects and studios — Compared with market alternatives, Maxon’s first-wave AEC offering launches at a significantly more affordable price, while offering compatibility with broader DCC pipelines, including Maya and Houdini.

Maxon will be showcasing this new Redshift product line at upcoming architecture and AEC events, including the DigitalBAU (24-26 Mar 2026) and AIA26 Conference on Architecture and Design (10-13 Jun 2026), in San Diego, California.

Availability and Cost

Redshift for Vectorworks is available now for purchase through either Maxon or Vectorworks (initially only in English language, with additional language support coming soon). When bundled with Vectorworks, users can benefit from significant discounts, making it the most affordable renderer in its category.

Redshift for Revit Beta Sign Up

For readers who are Revit users and want to sign up to test out the beta, visit here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Maxon’s Redshift renderer is a GPU-accelerated raytracing system and provides real-time raytracing. The more powerful your GPU, the faster and smoother the UX. Like several of its chief real-time rendering competitors, Redshift for Archviz—which will ship as an annual subscription and include all integration plugins—works as a plugin in a host application and brings up a second dedicated Redshift rendered window from which a side-by-side view is shown. When you rotate your building model in, say, Vectorworks, the building rotates in synch in the Redshift window. 

The visual results shift as you move around in the environment. When you stop the rendering, it up-scales in quality. We are curious how fast Redshift may be on the latest M5 Pro and M5 Max chips since they have much more powerful GPU cores with a neural accelerator in each core. We hope to speak to Maxon executives soon to learn more details about this new offering. So far, the demo results look compelling, but the market is crowded with excellent solutions. One thing we did notice is that Redshift for Archviz is priced quite low at just USD 289.00 per year. That is a compelling offer. 

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Miris is a newer 3D technology company we have never written about before that will be at Nvidia GTC as part of AI heavyweight company Coreweave (both 913). Miris will be demoing their exciting tech inside the Coreweave booth.

Miris

Miris is launching a public beta of its new 3D asset streaming platform. Miris is building the infrastructure to deliver high-fidelity 3D streaming at internet scale, and its technology sets it apart. Let’s discuss how things are a bit different right now. Developers today are forced to pick a lane: trade streaming speed for fidelity, or fidelity for reach. Miris says that neither really scales at the size of the Internet. This is the problem they are solving, delivering photo-realistic 3D at the cost (price) of 2D streamed content.

An example of Miris streaming technology in action. Notice the visual detail and quality. When zoomed in more, 3D texture data streams in real-time, zooming out purges that data, making the whole UI extremely fast while retaining high-visual fidelity.

Miris CTO Sean Looper says:

Rather than sending rendered pixels, which requires GPU infrastructure on a per-user basis, or entire asset files, which requires user downloads and asset compression, Miris uses adaptive spatial streaming to achieve sub-second load times and horizontal scaling.

Miris does this by implementing what is known as “preconditioned 3D assets” for on-demand delivery, only transmitting necessary geometry and texture data in real time. Miris features at launch:

• Sub-second load times for complex 3D assets – Even a 500MB product model loads and responds as quickly as a simple 5MB scene.
• High visual fidelity without massive client downloads – Only necessary geometric and texture data are transmitted, enabling real-time delivery.
• Internet-scale without per-user GPU costs– Since edge GPUs are not needed for every concurrent user, the architecture scales without additional infrastructure costs, supporting lower total cost of ownership compared to pixel streaming.

Miris is making it simple and cost-effective for organizations to enhance their applications’ user experience with high-fidelity 3D assets. They are doing this by tackling the four pillars of an ideal system for streamed 3D:

• Speed — sub-second load. No app to install
• Fidelity — Photorealistic quality is preserved
• Scale — Stream 3D as easily as video. Billions of viewers.
• Cost — Economics comparable to serving images.

Developers with beta access can use Miris with sample assets or their own content. Detailed documentation provides guidance on the integration process, and the entire flow is self-serve.

Miris technology in a diagram. The. steps and stacks are highlighted in stages.

Sign up for the public beta here.

About Miris

Miris is a 3D streaming infrastructure company applying the same paradigm shift to spatial content that adaptive streaming brought to video. Instead of downloading complete assets or renting cloud GPUs to render frames remotely, Miris streams spatial data that reconstructs on end-user devices in real time. Content loads in under a second, refines progressively, and scales to millions of concurrent users at CDN economics. Founded in 2024 and backed by IAG Capital Partners, Miris is headquartered in Culver City, CA. https://www.miris.com/

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Miris’ technology could be used across a wide variety of industries, including the AEC building industry, from windows to lighting to furniture. We also think this technology could enable streaming of 3D building scenes as well, but Miris did not focus its press materials or press-invite presentations in that direction. We will be following this company closely. 

The post Miris unlocks high-fidelity 3D streaming at scale appeared first on Architosh.

This collaboration was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress 2026 in Barcelona, Spain.

Integrated HY 3D

The HY 3D engine is developed by Tencent Cloud and trained on the company’s vast library of games. This helps artists jumpstart their creative efforts, serving as a creative and explorative starting point. Once the engine generates assets, they are fully customizable in Cinema 4D and compatible with Maxon’s broader ecosystem, including ZBrush, Redshift, and Red Giant tools.

“At Maxon, our mission has always been to empower artists,” said David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. “This partnership is about giving creators additional tools to move faster when they choose to, especially in early-stage ideation and prototyping. The artist remains in complete control of the final result. AI can assist with iteration and experimentation, but authorship and creative direction stay firmly in the hands of the creative.”

Maxon and Tencent Cloud partner on AI integration path.

Maxon’s longstanding philosophy of meeting artists where they are at means understanding that while AI technologies are de riguer artists want creative freedom and ultimately creative control. Therefore, the use of Tencent’s HY 3D integration within Cinema 4D is entirely optional. If artists prefer traditional modeling workflows, they can simply stick to that.

“Artists care deeply about authorship and originality – and so do we,” said Philip Losch, Chief Technology and AI Officer at Maxon. “Our approach is focused on responsible integration of AI capabilities into our tools. We are not building an autonomous system that creates finished art. We are applying technology that accelerates certain steps in a broader creative process that remains artist-led.”

Partnership and Availability

Cinema 4D is widely used across multiple industries and disciplines, including AEC, film and broadcast, motion graphics, advertising, product visualization, and game development. The new HY 3D integration gives users options and can help them meet tighter deadlines.

Once an asset is created, artists can refine it in ZBrush, texture and light it in Cinema 4D, and render it in Redshift renderer.

The partnership grew out of a long-standing relationship between Maxon and Tencent, including the latter’s continuous use of Maxon technologies in game development pipelines.

The integration of Tencent Cloud AI technology into Maxon tools marks a significant milestone. The HY 3D integration will be introduced later in 2026. More details will follow closer to the release date.

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New Capabilities

The updates add more than 20 new capabilities across lighting, scene population, AI materials, and more. Teams can now deliver and work within an uninterrupted workflow from ideation through review and approvals, within the Enscape design workflow.

Chaos has delivered major updates across over six products.

“Architects need to deliver more, faster, with less— while adapting to AI transformation,” said Petr Mitev, VP Product, Solutions for Designers. “Our end-to-end design and visualization workflow gives them integrated solutions that eliminate workflow friction from their first moments with Enscape to their final presentations, so they can focus on design instead of managing disconnected tools.”

Design Faster from the Start

Used throughout the architectural world, Enscape is one of the easiest ways to visualize CAD/BIM data in real time and is often most people’s entry point into the Chaos design ecosystem. Today, architects can take advantage of:

• Asset Brush Placement — Used for rapid scene population, 3D assets can now be painted into designs for refined creative control and instant visual feedback. Since assets are fully connected to the original BIM model, choices will remain consistent as projects evolve.
• Centralized Light Management — Users can now manage all of their light sources via a centralized list, removing the need for manual searches. Multiple presets can also be added to a single scene, making it easy to test, compare and refine lighting scenarios without duplicating views or breaking the workflow.
• AI Material Generator — Architects can now create custom 3D materials with real-world photos. High-resolution outputs not only support close-ups and final presentation deliverables, but encourage high-quality experimentation with finishes, surfaces and more — all without leaving the design environment.
• Consistent Assets from Design to Presentation — Assets placed in Enscape transfer cleanly into Envision, maintaining placement and quality across real-time and high-end workflows.
• Grass Visualization Improvements — More realistic grass rendering delivers denser, more natural-looking landscapes with better shading and detail.
• New Chaos Cosmos Assets — Over 1000 high-quality vegetation and branded assets – optimized for both real-time and high-end use cases – have been added to Enscape. These new assets are also designed to work seamlessly across Envision, Enscape and more.

There are also new AI-assisted ideation and design exploration features. Chaos says that AI is a rising star in AI-powered visualization and helps architects explore, ideate, and deliver moods and emotional imagery that propels projects forward through buy-in and approvals. Veras’ AI technologies work without breaking geometry or design intent.

New Cosmos assets are part of this round of updates. Over 1,000 high-quality vegetation and branded 3D assets have been added to Enscape.

Major updates include:

• Render Engine 7 — The recently released Veras 4 now comes with a new AI rendering engine powered by Google’s Nano Banana Pro. The new engine delivers cleaner, higher-fidelity images with fewer artifacts, so architects can cycle through faster ideations while working with SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit.
• Image as Input — Designers can now generate concepts using reference images like photos, plans or sketches on a napkin, offering one of the fastest ways to visualize full scenes without a prompt.
• Gallery Mode — A grid-based, thumbnail view of past renders has been added, making it easier to compare variations over time.
• New Video Presets — Twelve video presets provide render-ready animation settings for smooth, photorealistic motion, balanced lighting, and various cinematic styles.

Of course, more than Enscape obtained new updates. Chaos Envision has also been updated with significant new capabilities. The higher-end standalone visualization software that only runs on Windows and uses its own rendering engine gains several features that will help architects visualize, animate, and produce fully interactive scenes with complex multi-element interactions, such as traffic and crowds. New features include:

• Live CAD Linking — Envision now includes live links to Revit, SketchUp, and Rhino, ensuring that all changes are reflected in the original CAD file.
• Cinematic Camera Movements —  Users can now create smooth, natural camera paths with refined motion control for more polished and intentional walkthroughs.
• Animation Smoothing — Improve the flow of animations with smoother transitions and better interpolation between keyframes.
• Advanced Light Controls — Refine and adjust lighting with greater precision to achieve more accurate mood and presentation quality.
• New HDRIs — 20+ New Chaos Cosmos HDRIs expand your environment options, making it faster to set up realistic lighting and contextual backdrops.

Chaos Cloud, the software firm’s cloud service, helps teams do more together through collaboration, design reviews, and cloud rendering. Added to this are now these new abilities:

• Centralized Reviews — Chaos Cloud now helps teams share, review, and improve designs directly in the cloud, removing the need for downloads or external tools.
• 3D Streaming — Architects can now stream scenes directly from Enscape, providing full fidelity reviews from any remote location.

These features will aid architects in getting faster approvals within their workflows.

Performance Insights

Chaos has been focused on helping architects meet sustainable design objectives for several years now through its Enscape Impact product line. Impact helps teams understand energy analysis early in the design process, when larger impact decisions come more easily and with less rollback on interrelated decisions. New additions include:

• Thermal Comfort Analysis — Architects can now determine if a building will hit the sweet spot between too hot or too cold for occupants, assessing everything from air temperature to humidity in moments.
• Performance Summaries — All performance reports can now be exported and shared amongst relevant stakeholders, ensuring sustainability goals are being hit before decisions become too costly.

All of these new tools and updates benefit Chaos workflows and will help architects communicate more effectively with end users and clients. Chaos says that while each tool is designed to carry out specific workflows, sometimes from end to end, the Bulgarian-originated software firm says users should consider mixing and matching products to fully leverage the technical leadership and features Chaos offers.

New ThermalComfort measures are added to the energy-facing analysis tools for Enscape Impact. Architects can now determine and visualize thermal comfort in their designs.

New architectural design offering updates will be released on a quarterly basis. Stay tuned to Chaos’ blog and social channels for sneak peeks.

Price and Availability

The ArchDesign Collection update is available now for users with an annual license. The collection includes Enscape, Veras, Envision, Chaos Cosmos, Chaos Cloud, and Enscape Impact, and all subsequent updates as long as the subscription lasts. For full pricing details, please visit the ArchDesign Collection pricing page.

About Chaos

Founded in 1997, Chaos provides world-class visualisation and design solutions that empower creative minds to bring ideas to life.

The company serves multiple industries, including architecture and design, media and entertainment, and product e-commerce, providing an ecosystem of accessible tools that support every stage of the design and creation process. Its innovative solutions help architects, designers, VFX artists/animators, and other creative professionals share ideas, optimize workflows, and create immersive experiences.

Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Chaos has offices in 11 cities worldwide. For more information, visit chaos.com.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Envision’s live links to SketchUp, Rhino, and Revit are a big deal and will be greatly appreciated by users of Envision and those dominant CAD/BIM platforms. The Thermal Comfort analysis with Enscape Impact is also a significant end-user benefit to architects to ensure that their designs offer thermally balanced and comfortable environments for owners and users. And finally, the Enscape streaming to Chaos Cloud is another boost for users to leverage the Chaos Cloud in their workflows. 

We have already written about Veras 4.0 with Nano Banana Pro and all that it can do. The big improvements there (and yet we have not tested this ourselves) are the engine’s better understanding of the architect’s intent, especially in holding to intentional geometry. All these updates continue to add value to architects’ workflows, and we suspect that most practices still lag in leveraging the full capabilities of Chaos’ software tools. The Architectural Design Collection (which includes Enscape, including both Veras, their AI tool, and Enscape and Enscape Impact, the latter two likely not being fully appreciated in the market) could help solve this problem by getting these tools into more users’ hands. 

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This is the largest startup investment in Autodesk’s history and echoes a conviction that AI should augment, not replace, human ingenuity while going beyond text and language and entering the physical world.

World Labs

World Labs is a frontier AI research company co-founded by Dr. Fei-Fei Li (CEO), Justin Johnson, Christopher Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The company is focused on spatial intelligence and is a world leader in this domain of artificial intelligence. World Labs is building AI models that can perceive, generate, reason, and interact with the 3D world.

A screen capture from Autodesk’s video on its investment in World Labs. We like this image because it conjures the feeling of the unknown and the weightlessness of the promises of AI. How much weight will AI tech take off the shoulders of design professionals? But at the same time, working in the future of AI is like working in outer space. It’s that radical. (IMAGE:  Autodesk)

World Labs’ first product is called Marble, and it generates spatially consistent, high-fidelity 3D environments that you can inhabit and move through. Once created, you can also edit them as you are inhabiting them. You can also model inside them with familiar modeling tools, but in general, the feeling is a combination of traditional 3D manipulation and text-prompt-based editing and generation.

Investment from Autodesk

World Labs’ Marble platform looks especially strong in many, if not most, of the fields that Autodesk software operates, from architecture and interiors to robotics and manufacturing to gaming and entertainment. The strategic investment at a glance looks like this:

• USD 200 million in World Labs (an AI startup working at the frontier of AI)
• Autodesk’s largest startup investment to date
• A research-level / technical collaboration focused on physical-world AI and multimodal world models.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li remarks about the backing and investment by Autodesk and their strategic collaboration, saying:

“Physical AI must understand worlds, not just words. With Autodesk’s deep expertise in geometry, simulation, and real-world design, we have a uniquely complementary opportunity to ground AI in how the world is actually designed and built, for designers, builders, and creators.”

Marble’s API technology enables third-party tool providers to leverage the World Labs AI technologies in their host applications. One such application is web-based Fenestra. (see image below).

World Labs spatial intelligence AI technologies have attracted the investment interest of Autodesk, AMD, Nvidia, Fidelity, and more.

Both Marble and Fenestra are fully web-based, and both support Gaussian Splats rendering through SparkJS. When a user submits an image or text prompt using Fenestra, the web-based software connects to the Marble API and constructs a navigable 3D environment, which can be further edited and explored. Both spatial and 2D elements can coexist in supplying the AI engine the inference data it needs.

Another tool using the Marble API is Interior AI. This new tool has garnered quite a bit of publicity from top-shelf press, including the New York Times and Fast Company. We don’t like its homepage tag line, “Fire your interior designer,” and the messaging it sends, and especially think that Autodesk’s position with AI technologies is that they will complement the design professional, not eliminate them.

What Autodesk is saying is that the company wants to forge a different path for AI, as opposed to the hyperscale AI investments and centralized platforms crunching on ever larger LLMs. They write, “Our investment in World Labs represents a different path, focused on solving the hardest problems in designing, building, and operating the physical world, guided by human needs and domain expertise rather than scale alone.”

To read the blog post about the investment, go here. 

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

With a USD 1 billion funding round from heavy hitters like Nvidia and Fidelity, Autodesk’s largest-ever investment in a startup appears to be a strong strategic play. We wonder how the Marble API may interact with the new AI technologies we saw at last Fall’s Autodesk University. Those neural CAD engines were aimed at a different kind of utilization of AI technologies, but we can certainly see how multimodal AI workflows and technologies can be combined. 

World Labs says they are focusing next on fully interconnected design canvases. Fenestra is working on what they are calling an Infinite Canvas. CAD and BIM systems today already have infinite internal 3D and paper-space 2D worlds (ie, “canvases”). What we are seeing in the AEC/O market is vast, rapid advancements in the “pixel”-based technology stream of our industry. This has been the case since Midjourney and GANs. AEC pros, however, must get this pixel image-oriented or vide-oriented pixel laden content into precise and accurate parametric 2/3D vectorial data. That challenge has begun, but it’s a vital bridge piece that will greatly help the acceleration of these kinds of AI visual tools in the AEC markets (not that these tools aren’t already on fire in the market, because they are!) 

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Veras 4.0

The new Veras 4.0 focuses on delivering higher fidelity output with fewer unwanted errors. The latest engine reportedly makes a huge improvement in how it understands geometry, a key aspect that architects are focused on intently as part of any design workflow. Not just geometry, but lighting and materials fidelity are also much improved, says Chaos.

Unlocked Workflows

With this new engine, new workflows are unlocked for the first time. Images can be created from turning 2D floor plans, drawings, or even hand-sketched images into 3D scenes. The engine can also create multi-angled perspectives from mood boards and retain the correct geometry.

The hero image for the new Chaos Veras 4.0

When working with Veras 4.0, designers can add furniture and other entourage with a single text prompt or make changes like “change the color of the couch to blue” without selecting the item itself. Such capabilities speed up the workflow and eliminate tedious steps.

Clarity in Prompts

The new engine treats prompts as clear instructions and not as loose suggestions, producing outputs that more closely follow the stylistic intentions of the designer, or material changes or environmental adjustments.

version 1 image and text prompt version 2, next image

A version 2 text prompt image is different than version 1 image at left.

“When AI renders drift from the design, they create rework, lost time and awkward moments in client reviews,” said Bill Allen, Director Product Management, Chaos. “Veras 4.0 directly addresses this by keeping the AI aligned with the designer’s vision, rather than inventing its own version of the project. With greater control, designers can trust Veras to reflect their intent while exploring concepts quickly and confidently.”

Quick Iterative Visioneering

Chaos Veras 4.0 is built for architects and interior designers who need fast, design-faithful visuals directly from SketchUp, Revit, or Rhino without needing to have even intermediate rendering skills.

Image Reference as Input has also been updated, allowing designers to guide new outputs using an existing image instead of relying on text.

There is also Gallery Mode, a grid-based, thumbnail view of all past renders, which makes it easier to compare variations over time. Twelve new video presets have been added for ready-to-use animation options. Designers can produce smooth, photorealistic motion graphics with balanced lighting and a consistent cinematic style.

More Info

With this update, Veras becomes more predictable and versatile, providing a more stable foundation for daily design work.

For more information, please visit Chaos. 

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glTF 2.0

Khronos has announced an official glTF release candidate that enables storing 3D Gaussian splats in glTF 2.0. The release candidate allows for broad industry feedback prior to an official ratification of the standard to make sure it truly meets the needs of the industry broadly.

3D Gaussian splat tileset of a chemical refinery embedded with Celsium World Terrain in CesiumJS. (Data and image from Bentley Systems).

Gaussian splats support via glTF happens via the KHR_gaussian_splatting baseline extension. Splats are an important new geometry and visualization technology in 3D industries like AEC and infrastructure, among others. They support real-time graphics, digital twins, and large-scale geospatial visualization.

Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group, says:

Gaussian splatting is a radiance field representation technique that converts multiple 2D images into realistic 3D assets. Applications supporting this format use a collection of photos and videos to create a type of 3D point cloud data of an object or scene–more commonly a scene in the AEC and infrastructure industries. Cesium is one of the bigger exciting visualization platforms with Gaussian splat support.

MORE: D5 Render and Cesium Integration Unlocks City-Scale Storytelling

Gaussian splats are extremely useful for infrastructure, as seen in the Bentley-supplied image above of a chemical plant. Geospatial and similar AEC industry workflows are all well-suited, including:

• City-scale and corridor-scale reality capture
• Complex natural environments with vegetation and irregular geometry
• Reflective, translucent, or detail-rich urban surfaces
• Rapid field acquisition using commodity cameras, drones, or mobile devices

Gaussian spattting has also been adopted by other industries not yet mentioned in this article, including photojournalism, media and entertainment (M&E), robotics training, cultural preservation, and is well-positioned to bring 3D reality capture to social media. Despite this, generation, training, rendering, and compression techniques continue to evolve and advance.

Industry Need for Standardization

A need for standardization is important to prevent fragmentation in this critical new technology. The Khronos Group has been the steward of dozens of key industry standards in CAD and 3D technologies over the decades. The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group is focused on this development with Gaussian Splats resulting in the KHR_gaussian_splatting glTF extension.

KHR_gaussian_splatting extends the glTF 2.0 mesh primitive to represent 3D Gaussian splat datasets, including:

• Position, orientation, and scale
• Color and opacity attributes
• Interpretation rules for rendering spats rather than triangles.

With the extension, compatible renderers interpret primitives as Gaussian splat datasets. This eases the new standard and technology into existing tooling pipelines. To learn more, visit here for all the details.

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Steve Forde

Forde comes to Maxon with a long history of connection to the company. Earlier in his career, he founded two startups, including Gridiron Software, where Forde oversaw the development of plugins for Adobe After Effects, which led to his first deep connections to Maxon.

Steve Forde comes to Maxon with deep roots at Adobe and veteran software startup experience.

During his career, he held senior leadership roles at Adobe and Amazon, where he led product, engineering, and design teams for large-scale platforms such as Adobe After Effects and Amazon Prime Video.

“What drew me to Maxon was the convergence of people, technology, and a fundamental shift in how creative content is made,” said Steve Forde, Chief Product Officer at Maxon. “The proliferation of games, advertising, and social media is driving 3D from niche skillset to mainstream job requirement. With the right combination of product innovation and intelligent workflows, it can become accessible to an even broader audience. Maxon is uniquely positioned to lead that transformation, not just by building powerful tools, but by delivering experiences that scale with creators as their needs evolve. I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines while it happens.”

Industry Shifts

This new appointment comes at a time when the industries Maxon serves are undergoing skill democratization, and 3D skills are becoming increasingly mandatory across standard roles, including architecture, graphics, advertising, and film and television creatives. Specialists will continue to exist, but companies like Maxon are increasingly targeting their technologies to support broader access to 3D skillsets.

MORE: Maxon aims to bring Hollywood-level rendering to AEC

Forde’s appointment will reinforce Maxon’s promise to strengthen its leadership team while advancing its product offering to address the evolving needs of creators in the markets it serves.

“Steve brings a deep understanding of both where Maxon comes from and where the market is heading,” said David McGavran, CEO of Maxon. “His ability to connect long-term vision with practical execution makes him an ideal partner as we continue to grow. This appointment strengthens our leadership team and positions Maxon to lead the industry through the next phase of creative evolution.”

The Future

Forde’s mandate going forward will be to guide software and technology developments that integrate emerging technologies into Maxon’s products in ways that respect artistic craft and amplify human creativity. He will focus on removing friction in workflows and expanding the possibilities of creative 3D artists so that they spend less time navigating complexities in workflows and tools.

Maxon will continue to invest deeply in product innovation and deepen its connection to the artist communities it serves. To learn more about Maxon, visit here.

Architosh Commentary and Analysis:

Steve Forde had a prominent 10-year career at Adobe and was a key figure in the strategic alliance between Adobe and Maxon in 2013 when Cinema 4D Lite was directly integrated into After Effects. His career at Adobe began with After Effects, becoming principal product manager in 2013, group manager in 2014, and finally general manager of emerging products in 2017. Like Maxon’s CEO, David McGavran, Forde spent many years leading large teams centered on After Effects and Adobe’s motion graphics and video tools. 

This appointment further strengthens Maxon’s leadership with former key leaders from US-based Adobe. The two companies began with a single tool bridge into a deep, cross-platform ecosystem and has grown to include native engine integrations, specialized plugins and strategic product bundles. Adobe’s acquisition of Substance resulted in the recognition that a powerful bundle between the two companies is Maxon One + Adobe Substance 3D, which provides a complete 3D design and texturing pipeline in a single subscription. That was initially released as a limited-time bundle. 

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An essential theory change is to challenge the notion (current working method) that workflows function in separate stages, with visualization being its own stage across disconnected workflows. For decades, design, modeling, visualization, asset-sourcing, and presentation happened in isolated steps, often requiring repeated export, re-imports, etc. The underlying workflow remained fragmented.

D5 Workflow

D5 is aiming to reduce this friction inherent in this fragmented workflow by enabling visualization to be part of the design process itself. At the core of the new D5 Workflow is that visualization shouldn’t be treated as a downstream task but an upstream one. Architects should be able to immediately visualize and test their design ideas.

The new D5 3.0 delivers a smoother, unbroken workflow with AI at the center.

This shift is enabled through three components.

• D5 Lite, which brings AI-native real-time visualization directly into early design tools like SketchUp, bridging the gap between conceptualization and design development. It allows architects to visualize instantly, lowering the barrier to professional-grade rendering and keeping ideas moving from the earliest stages.
• D5 Works, a curated asset platform designed specifically for architecture, landscape, and interior design, is integrated into the workflow to remove the need for external libraries, manual file management, or format conversion.
• D5 Render 3.0, the latest evolution of D5’s real-time rendering engine, serves as the intelligent core of the workflow with advanced AI capabilities and physically accurate realism.

These three components of the workflow form a continuous loop in the workflow process, reflecting the ideal way in which architects want to work.

AI as Enabler

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a core component of the new D5 Workflow. D5 leverages AI to become a key assistant and to tackle repetitive tasks and set up work, all shortening feedback cycles. This happens through:

• AI Scene Match — use AI to simply describe your desired atmosphere in words such as ‘Autumn dusk’ or ‘Snowy winter’ and D5’s AI Agent generates reference visuals, matching lighting and post-processing parameters to your scene in a simple click.
• AI Asset Recommendations — either using an uploaded reference image or prompting D5’s AI Agent, will suggest the perfect models from the library for your scene. This can save hours in a standard week.
• AI Image-to-3D generation — upload an image to generate a 3D model to use in your scene. The AI Agent will analyze the image and smartly build a high-accuracy 3D model in seconds.

All of this helps architects and 3D artists iterate without restarting their work, and the emphasis is not so much on automation but on continuity in the design process.

AI technologies in the new D5 enable rapid asset recommendations based on uploaded reference images or text prompts, using AI Scene Match.

D5 notes that other similar industries have made a similar transition to integrated workflows by replacing collections of specialized but disconnected tools. As such, D5 sees the latest enhancements as signaling a long-term commitment to reduce friction in the entire architectural design lifecycle.

D5 Render 3.0

Other new features in the new rendering engine update include a new Ocean System. The new ocean system delivers dynamic waves, caustics, and shoreline interactions. The system will smartly analyze your terrain to generate organic coastline transitions, rolling waves, and wet-sand effects.

Also new is Displacement Material (beta) to complement the existing Parallax solution. Now users can physically displace geometry based on height maps. The weather system is also completely updated in version 3, with a new Volumetric Cloud. A new set of accurate preset skies gives your scene a start, and then you can fine-tune with sliders.

D5 introduces a new Ocean System that dynamically interacts with your terrain modeling, creating truly organic coastline transitions.

A new City Generator takes large urban models and transforms them to life with realistic building facades, urban streetscapes, and treelined parks and boulevards.

D5 Works

Directly in the launcher, D5 Works is a materials and creative hub putting comprehensive resources at your fingertips. This includes being able to acquire affordable assets to use in your scenes that complement the D5 Asset Library’s assets and workflow.

For presenting your visualizations, D5 v3 offers simplified ways for users to create Panorama Tours, Spatial Tours, and XR Tours, with the latter supporting 3D Gaussian Splatting. And there is also Cesium integration now in D5 for instant massive urban real-life context.

Supported Platforms and Integrations

For workflow integration, D5 version 3.0 works with SketchUp, 3ds Max, Rhino, Revit, Archicad, Vectorworks, Blender, and Cinema 4D.

D5 requires Windows 10 v1809 or later and has GPU threshold requirements of NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB or higher, AMD Radeon RX 6000 XT or higher, or Intel Arc A3 or higher.

To learn more, visit them here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary:

D5 Render does not support Mac natively because its core rendering engine is built on Microsoft’s DirectX 12 (DX12) with DirectX Raytracing (DXR) technologies, which are incompatible with Apple’s Metal Architecture. While the development team has noted that they plan to support the Mac, there is still no official release date. To support the Mac, they likely would need to develop a cross-platform compiler to translate their code into Apple’s Metal API. 

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The update is built on the latest version of Maxon’s acclaimed Redshift rendering engine and supports Nvidia’s new Blackwell GPU, Nvidia Hopper GPUs, as well as Apple M4 and M5 systems. The company says this is a major architectural update to the benchmark software.

Cinebench 2026

Based on the latest Redshift rendering engine, Cinebench 2026 reflects real-world 3D production workloads more accurately than ever before, applicable to 3D CAD/BIM/DCC industries. Redshift is Cinema 4D’s default rendering engine, and the benchmark now leverages the latest technological advancements in Redshift’s development.

Cinebench 2026 is now available and free.

The new benchmark supports Nvidia’s new Blackwell (5000 series) GPUs, AMD 9000 series GPUs on Windows, as well as Nvidia Hopper and Blackwell datacenter GPUs. Moreover, the latest version also supports Apple M4 and M5-based Macs.

The benchmark is also capable of evaluating the performance of SMT-enabled CPU cores, so users can directly assess the performance gains offered by SMT (simultaneous multithreading) compared to single-threaded execution. SMT refers to a processor’s ability to run multiple execution threads on a single physical core by sharing internal resources, and the term is used by AMD. Intel has its own term for this called Hyper-Threading.

More Technical Details

As most Architosh readers are aware, rendering is a highly parallel workload, and multicore processors can speed up render times dramatically. SMT and Intel’s Hyper-Threading essentially enable the operating system to see a processor’s physical cores as made up of two or more “logical” cores. For example, a 6-core CPU with SMT enabled will show 12 threads in Cinebench 2026’s multi-core test.

SMT and Hyper-Threading boost chip efficiencies. If one thread is waiting for data from memory, the core can use the idle time to process instructions for the second thread. When rendering software is well-optimized, SMT can provide performance gains of over 30% compared to running just one thread per core.

Apple Silicon Comparisons

While Apple’s M4 and M5 chips are significantly faster than Intel and AMD’s best processors at single-core performance, Apple has yet to deploy SMT. The new CPU Single Core vs Single Thread tests in Cinebench 2026 make for a useful comparison to processors from Apple, as well as to see how performance gain is enabled by SMT for AMD and Intel processors.

Because of the new architectural improvements to Cinebench 2026, the new scoring system is not compatible (comparable) with Cinebench 2024 scores.

To obtain the new free Cinebench 2026 industry-standard benchmark, go here to download.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary

Cinebench is considered a top industry-standard benchmarking software and is used and cited widely by Intel, AMD, Apple, and other chip makers. While Geekbench 6.5 is widely considered the best tool for comparing disparate chip architectures (like ARM vs x86), Cinebench is also right up there in that category due to its extensive cross-platform capability. It supports Windows on x86, Windows on ARM, and macOS (x86 and ARM). However, Geekbench covers a broad spectrum of everyday and professional computing tasks that are typically relatively short. On the flip side, Cinebench has always focused on brute-force “sustained” chip performance. Why does this distinction matter, especially for CAD and 3D users? 

Geekbench 6.5 tests and subtests are rather short (under five minutes). They also include a 5-second pause between sub-tests to minimize thermal throttling (ie, prevent it from happening). This makes it the gold standard for “bursty” single-core responsiveness kinds of tests. And CAD and BIM tools, in particular, are not only dominantly single-core (single-threaded) but also the workflows are very “bursty” by nature. In CAD and 3D, there are pauses between actions as the user manipulates 2D and 3D content. This makes it a very good test for measuring how “snappy” a computer feels when opening up an app or moving a line in CAD. 

Cinebench, on the other hand, measures “sustained” performance (not “bursty” performance) and will test a system’s chips to the maximum of their thermal and power limits. This is critical because in the real world, processors can throttle down performance when thermal limits are reached. And this is critical in mobile computers, where, under battery power, peak performance may be very short. If a given chip relies on “bursting” to hit peak performance and has poor cooling capability, its Cinebench score will likely plummet over time as Cinebench runs tests for 10-30 minutes. This is where we are likely to see large advantages of Apple Silicon (M4 / M5) over Intel and AMD mobile processors. 

Cinebench also tests how CPUs and GPUs handle large parallelized rendering workloads. It also measures 3D ray-tracing which is extremely taxing on heavy floating-point math. And a big reason why Cinebench is so widely considered a standard is for its multicore focus, where the system’s many cores can be hammered simultaneously at full power. Because the operating system has less input compared to other benchmarks, Cinebench is a favorite of high-end workstation builders and overclockers. 

We use both Geekbench and Cinebench as primary comprehensive testing tools. The first captures the “bursty” nature of general computing and CAD/BIM apps, while the latter (Cinebench) captures raw power and “sustained” performance up against a system’s thermal limits. We highly recommend both for readers to deploy when benchmarking their own systems and setups. 

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Importantly, SketchUp AI introduces two new powerful AI tools—AI Render and AI Assistant.

Sketchup AI

Trimble SketchUp now deploys “AI-driven modeling assistance.” These are the intrepid early steps BIM and 3D modeling companies are taking with AI inference, and where we point out in our special feature (coming Christmas Eve day), it shows direction for the future of BIM and how such compute workloads (in this case, inference-based generative geometry creation) are executed more favorably on GPUs and NPUs, and in this particular case, in the cloud.

AI Render

AI Render is the other half of the new SketchUp AI. Formerly called Sketchup Diffusion, this technology is also inference-based and can work with negative prompts, reference images, and inpainting. The goal is for SketchUp users to rapidly produce compelling visualizations, working with AI Render’s capabilities and predefined styles.

Trimble’s new SketchUp AI offers powerful generative-AI 3D capabilities, allowing users to text-prompt to new geometric 3D forms.

With AI Render, a user can combine their SketchUp model with a text prompt and/or predefined styles to create rendered images in seconds. These can be early-phase images or final quality images for realistic client deliverables.

AI Assitant

This new technology is a chatbot that is a 3D modeling partner. ‘AI Assistant’ can help the SketchUp user navigate, troubleshoot, or create 3D geometry in SketchUp. Generate Object, an AI Assistant capability, allows the user to turn a text prompt or image into 3D objects in seconds. These objects can then be utilized as part of your SketchUp model or scene.

“The design process should feel intuitive, not cumbersome,” said Sandra Winstead, senior director of product management at Trimble. “We are continually pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI. By reducing time-consuming tasks and lowering the barrier to entry for modeling and visualization, SketchUp AI empowers professionals to explore creative ideas more freely, work more efficiently, and make informed decisions at every stage of the design process — all within SketchUp.”

To learn more, visit here.

Architosh Analysis and Commentary:  In the case of SketchUp AI inference abilities, they are offloaded to the cloud and are possibly being computed on Nvidia Blackwell or Hopper GPUs at Microsoft Azure. Since SketchUp Diffusion requires an active internet connection to work, we know these AI features are not locally computed. So what we see here is what we are talking about in the special feature on silicon’s role on the future of BIM. SketchUp AI is a classic example of “heterogeneous” compute, mixing CPU, GPU, and NPU-based workloads. Though at this moment, it likely is just CPU and GPU (local) and GPU (cloud AI). 

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Update 2 – MacOS

Update 2 also addresses the demands of the Blender community, which have been calling for native Mac support in V-Ray for Blender. Now they have it!

V-Ray for Blender is now available for Blender on macOS. This is a fully native implementation of V-Ray for Apple’s Mac operating system.

“Responding to the Blender community, we’ve introduced macOS support to V-Ray for Blender, giving even more artists access to our industry-standard rendering and the latest AI technologies to deliver stunningly realistic rendering faster,” said Allan Poore, chief product officer, Chaos. “With streamlined workflows that enhance speed, scalability, and accuracy, artists can spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on creating exceptional images and animations.”

The Blender community has spoken and asked for V-Ray for Mac support, and Chaos has listened. Update 2 brings native macOS support for the first time.

V-Ray is a trusted rendering tool across multiple industries, including AEC, VFX (visual effects), product design, and animation. V-Ray offers a complete “studio-grade” visualization pipeline inside of Blender’s interface and app. Update 2 also includes support for the latest version of Blender 5.

Key features in the update include:

• Native macOS support for V-Ray for Blender
• AI Enhancer adds details and realism to supporting elements like foliage, people and terrain, helping artists refine renders without tedious rework and time-consuming re-renders. It allows them to fine-tune specific objects, such as clothing, and refine vegetation for greater precision and consistency.
• AI Material Generator turns any photo of a real-world surface into a render-ready, PBR material with all the necessary maps in just a few clicks. Part of the recently expanded Chaos Cosmos, AI Material Generator creates secondary materials that don’t require extensive art direction, allowing rapid scene shading without time-consuming setups or extra tools.
• AI Upscaler saves hours of rendering time while delivering crisp, photoreal results. Artists can turn low-resolution images into high-quality, presentation-ready visuals in a single click, boosting resolution while also sharpening textures and enhancing fine details. 

V-Ray for Blender also facilitates Distributed Rendering, spreading rendering loads across multiple computers. And support for Cycles’ Material Override, for easier lighting analysis, custom clay, and wireframe renderers.

For more information, please visit V-Ray for Blender.

Pricing and Availability

New users can get access to the update by purchasing the Blender-only version of V-Ray at a special price or as part of any of the V-Ray suites. Educational pricing for V-Ray is available as well. V-Ray for Blender is available for Windows 10, Windows 11, and macOS (11.0 or newer).

Complete details on the pricing can be found here.

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“Corona 14 brings arch-viz specialists the ultimate in photorealism in the easiest ways possible,” said Tom Grimes, product manager for Chaos Corona. The new version, he added, merges AI tools and procedural materials to accelerate workflows while supporting richer visual storytelling.

Gaussian Splats Arrive for Real-World Context

A headline addition is Gaussian splat support, enabling users to pull real-world captures directly into 3D scenes with accurate reflections, refractions, and volumetrics — all with high memory efficiency. The feature lets artists rapidly contextualize buildings inside detailed site environments or incorporate scanned objects with smoother surfaces and more natural depth.

Chaos adds Gaussian splats support in the new Chaos Corona 14 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D.

Other new features include AI tools for materials generation, enhancement, and upscaling. Additionally, Corona 14 expands Chaos’s push into AI as a creative co-pilot:

• AI Material Generator converts a photo into a tileable, PBR-ready material with full map sets — ideal for fast secondary materials without sacrificing realism.

• AI Image Enhancer improves detail and texture in supporting elements (people, foliage, terrain) and allows LightMix outputs to be enhanced for rapid lighting and mood exploration.

• AI Upscaler converts low-resolution drafts into crisp, presentation-ready renders, saving rendering hours during look development.

All AI features can be toggled on or off to meet client policies, copyright-risk requirements, or data-sensitivity rules.

New Procedural and Environmental Systems

Corona 14 introduces several artist-driven tools aimed at reducing reliance on external assets:

• Night Sky, an extension of Corona Sky, adds physically based moonlight, stars, and even the Milky Way. Time, date, and location can be set, or creators can manually direct the celestial environment — fully animatable for time-lapse or cinematic sequences.

• Fabric Material, a new procedural fabric shader, generates woven textiles with detailed control over thread patterns, opacity, bump, and displacement. Presets are included for quick setup, eliminating the need for bitmap-driven workflows.

Availability

Corona 14 is available now for 3ds Max 2018–2026 (Windows) and Cinema 4D R17–2026 (Windows and macOS). The software is offered via subscription with monthly and annual options.

For more information, visit Chaos Corona.

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Vantage 3

Chaos Vantage 3 is the first major update in more than two years. AEC visualization professionals will now be able to drop their projects into real-world locations, as well as leverage the USD file format.

“Vantage has always been about giving artists and designers an immediate, photoreal view of their work, whether they’re creating buildings, products, or entire worlds,” said Allan Poore, chief product officer, Chaos. “With Vantage 3, we’ve taken that even further for AEC users by introducing USD and MaterialX support, adding new tools to explore designs in a real-world context, refining materials and lighting with greater control, all while keeping the creative process fast, fluid, and inspiring.”

An example rendering from Chaos Vantage 3, highlighting the fog capabilities, among others, in this latest version.

Vantage 3 can now make use of Gaussian splats that are part of their V-Ray scene files. Gaussian splats have been discussed on Architosh before. The technology captures real-world 3D scene data (often captured by a drone) and enables it to populate a 3D scene, typically as context for a proposed building 3D rendering. With the addition of fog, smoke, and light rays, 3D imagery gets even more lifelike. And the addition of the Night Sky system delivers astronomically accurate stars, moon phases, and even the Milky Way for stunning nighttime renders.

MORE: AU: Chaos Unveiled Big AI News at Autodesk University

Vantage also boasts the Chaos AI Material Generator, directly available inside the Chaos Cosmos browser. This comes with a new material editor, giving AE users more control over the look of materials and scenes down to the smallest detail. Cosmos also comes with thousands of ready-to-use assets, while support for the USD file format unlocks the entire KitBash3D library of 20,000-plus production-ready assets.

Other features include:

• Camera Tracking — Translate real-world camera moves directly into Vantage to create natural cinematic shots without manual keyframing.

• Extended Texture Support — Apply mapping sources across all sub-maps, adjust texture variation with probability controls, and define front/back surface looks.

• New Render Mode — Switch cameras, resolutions, and define sequences in a streamlined, non-blocking interface.

• Offset Animation — Position animated V-Ray scenes freely in the scene with persistent spatial geometry, making it simple to build animated fields, crowds, and motion.

• Scatter Clustering — Generate natural cluster variations with noise calculations while color map mode and layer paint modes remain accurately rendered.

• Selection Mask (View Mode) — Instantly generate black and white masks of selected objects for compositing.

To support the broadest set of pipelines, Chaos Vantage 3 now supports USD and MaterialX, bolstering its ability to share or exchange assets across varied pipelines. Both AEC and VFX artists can integrate Vantage 3 into existing workflows for high-quality playblasts, previz, and final-quality rendering, even if they are not using V-Ray.

Pricing and Availability

Chaos Vantage 3 is available now, with monthly, annual, and three-year licenses available. For more information, including feature demos and trial downloads, please visit chaos.com

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New in 2025.2

From the core technology of Unreal Engine 5 comes Nanite virtualized geometry system. Nanite automatically streams only the visible data on demand in a real-time rendering system like Twinmotion 2025.2, thereby enabling users to work with extremely high-resolution complex meshes with up to billions of polygons while keeping real-time performance up. Only the geometry visible to the camera is streamed into the viewport, saving processing for hundreds of millions of polys that are not visible because they are behind other objects or themselves.

The new Nanite features in Twinmotion 2025.2 can also be applied to AEC scenes with lots of 3D plants, making scenes snappier.

Epic says you can convert meshes to Nanite on import or after the fact; it doesn’t matter. If your project scene feels sluggish, they suggest giving Nanite a try. You can also convert Megascans 3D assets and 3D plants to Nanite.

Parallax Windows

Now, on the architectural side of things, the new support for Parallax windows is quite useful. Epic notes that if you are visualizing the exterior of a building, handling the modeling of what is going on inside can be a lot of work. But this can be greatly simplified in many cases by using Parallax windows, which use an Open Shading Language (OSL) shader to create the illusion of interior depth on a simple, lightweight plane, simulating rooms or building interiors without the need for complex 3D geometry.

Parallax windows are new in Twinmotion 2025.2. A library of 27 different interior scenes comes with the software but users an add their own.

Twinmotion now features a Parallax Windows folder with 27 different interiors in the library, allowing you to utilize them for architectural building scenes. These include interiors for libraries, offices, residential, gyms, retail themes, and more. And you can add your own maps into a custom window from sources such as wParallax and Evermotion.

This is the finished version of the insertion of the Parallax window in the image above.

The new release also offers 17 new animated fog cards, included in the VFX folder of the library. You can easily art-direct fog into your scene with drag-and-drop action. And Epic adds that there is minimal performance impact. The fog can also react to wind speed and direction, specifically for each fog card.

FX Post Processing

Twinmotion 2025.2 has a reworked FX Post-processing system with painterly  and sketch-style effects to apply to finished rendered scenes. These include a hatching style, a Kuwahara filtering, and pen-style outlines. And all the parameters of each style are open to be customized with preset saving capability.

A finished Render.

FX Post-processing version.

The results of these FX post-processing styles is impressive. Users will likely enjoy the ability to edit them and then save presets that define a favorite look. And you can also now import your own look up tables (LUTs) in .cube format, so that users can achieve specific looks, hold color consistency across different shots or projects and streamline color grading workflows. There is also a higher-quality true blue motion effect most beneficial for exporting videos and you can also activate different technical viewport modes to help with scene debugging.

Exploded View Animations

New in this release of Twinmotion is a new Exploders Animator. The exploder moves children objects outwards from their original position or inwards to that position, based on a shape (plane, cylinder, or sphere) that the user selects. This makes for an easy to use exploded animation effect.

The feature includes a variety of presets (eg: Gentle Push, Deconstruct, Inflate, Ring peel, Pressurize, Plan split, and Stack reassemble) that users can test out. You can also set your own animations and save them into the presets. Architects and interior designers may very much enjoy using these especially with furniture dropping into rooms like people see in HGTV television show animations. Furniture can drop-in from the sky (like in the image sequence below) or come up through the ground.

Synchronized Twinmotion and DCC viewports

The big news for some users is that Twinmotion 2025.2 now supports synchronized viewports so that designers and architects can model interate within their DCC of choice, be that SketchUp Pro, Rhino, Revit or Archicad. As you move your model inside one of these tools, the viewport in Twinmotion 2025.2 stays synch’d.

This is a huge win for the program since it has long been a feature not matched by many of its competitors until now.

There are many other enhancements, some not applicable to AEC users but valuable to other types of users. You can learn all about them here. In the meantime, Twinmotion users who have to yet upgraded should do so because the benefits in this latest release are quite good.

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Cesium Integration

While readers on Architosh are likely aware of D5 Render as one of the newer, more exciting rendering solutions in the market, Cesium is likely not known. Cesium has earned a reputation as a powerhouse in 3D geospatial streaming, capable of delivering massive terrain, imagery, photogrammetry, and even photorealistic city models, all because of its open 3D Tiles standard.

Cesium integration with D5 Render, bringing geospatial streaming of terrain and imagery into every D5 Render scene.

At the same time, D5 Render has carved out its niche as one of the top choices for real-time, cinematic-quality path-traced rendering. At the recent AIA25 conference in Boston, the D5 booth was one of the busiest as architects from around the United States enjoyed learning about its capabilities. Now the power of Cesium and the popularity of D5 Render meet. Users can now stream high-fidelity geospatial data straight into D5 with no difficult and time-consuming alignment and reference models. This brings the incredible context into rendered scenes like never before.

From Site to Skyline

The thing that makes this integration special is its seamless scalability, which allows users to view site details with zoomed-in detail or enjoy bird’s-eye city views. Regardless of how far in or out you are in the scene, a single building is placed precisely on its terrain, flanked by actual streets, neighboring structures, and natural topography. This eliminates the time-consuming effort to build in stand-in assets for a project’s 3D context.

From distant birdy’s eye views to zoomed in detail, Cesium’s geospatial streaming technology has earned the company powerhouse status in the visualization and geospatial market.

With Cesium and D5 Render, district-level planning and visualization becomes vastly streamlined, while urban campuses, mixed-use zones, and transportation hubs can be visualized as a cohesive whole. As you back out whole cities can come into view. And thanks to Cesium’s scalable datasets, detail holds firm even at sweeping distances. The result is a new kind of architectural storytelling—visually rich, emotionally resonant, and grounded in the scale of reality you would like to see your project visualized in.

Real-World Use Cases

D5 Render says that the integration isn’t just an amazing technical achievement, it’s a workflow enhancer for today’s workflows across disciplines. Here’s a summary of what the rendering company is talking about:

• Daylight and Shadow Studies: With real terrain and topography in play, teams can demonstrate how buildings cast light and shadow across real streets and spaces, throughout seasons and times of day.
• District Planning and Urban Design: Massing, density, and phasing strategies come to life in real-world contexts, giving planners and cities a faster path to decision-making.
• Real Estate and Community Engagement: Renderings grounded in familiar landscapes build trust and clarity, helping the public and stakeholders understand impact at a glance.
• Education and Research: Urban design studios and architecture programs can shortcut weeks of GIS prep, replacing it with a direct, visual-first approach to site analysis.

At the core of all these example scenarios include simply better communication, faster approvals and a more accurate and intuitive grasp of design intent.

Performance, Vision, Action

Performance

Technically, behind the scenes, the Cesium integration is powered by the company’s 3D Tiles technology, an open standard Cesium created for efficient, high-fidelity streaming. Even the largest datasets, including photogrammetric city models, remain highly responsive within D5 Render, with zero need for heavy preprocessing or sacrifices in visual quality.

Users setup a Cesium access token through D5 for Teams, and then users can instantly start streaming terrain, imagery, and detailed city tiles—no GIS background required.

Vision

Both companies see this partnership as representational of a shift in the world of how architecture and geospatial intelligence work together. It marks a change in vision of how AEC visualization workflows get achieved.

“By bringing Cesium’s real-world data into D5, we’re giving architects a new lens to tell their stories—one that scales from a building to an entire city,” said a D5 Render spokesperson. “This isn’t just about visualization—it’s about designing with context, clarity, and confidence.”

Action

Users can deploy the Cesium integration today as it is now available in D5 Render 2.11 as part of D5 Render for Teams. Those users can get started simply, by connecting a Cesium account, stream in the datasets you need and begin placing your designs into their real-world contexts.

To learn more about Cesium visit them here. To learn more about the Cesium integration with D5 Render visit here.

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