Chaos unlocks real-time rendering for everyone – no Unreal Engine 5 needed

Chaos is about to shake up virtual production and real-time rendering, and it’s not just for V-Ray users. Announced ahead of SIGGRAPH 2025, the real-time pioneers are adding native support for USD, MaterialX, and Gaussian Splats to Chaos Arena, with Vantage support coming soon. The headline? You no longer need a V-Ray license to use these tools, a major shift that could change how 3D artists, filmmakers, and indie teams approach previz and production.

It also positions Chaos Arena as a compelling alternative to traditional pipelines built around game engines like Unreal Engine 5 and Unity, while significantly reducing the technical overhead of bringing assets from DCC (Digital Content Creators) tools like Blender and Houdini to the screen.

“We’re removing the biggest bottleneck in virtual production,” said Chaos Director of Special Projects at Chaos Lab, Chris Nichols as we sit down to discuss the news. “For years, teams have had to rebuild or rewire assets every time they moved between tools. Now, with support for open standards, they can bring their best 3D renders into real-time environments with no remakes, no workarounds.”

Real-time realism, no game engine required

USD and MaterialX support enable teams to take production-ready assets, from the best 3D modelling software like Blender, Houdini, Maya, or KitBash3D, and drop them directly into Arena. With full path tracing and ray-traced lighting, this opens the door to a true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) workflow: what you see in previz is what you'll get on screen.

But it’s the wider accessibility that’s likely to grab headlines. “For us, this isn’t about building a walled garden,” explained Chris. “It’s about giving artists and filmmakers the tools they already know, and letting them create without friction. There are so many incredible generalist 3D artists out there who’ve been boxed out because they didn’t specialise in game engines. That’s changing.”

Chris continues: “Now you can run a tracked camera inside Vantage, live render it, and even combine it with blue screen footage. I’ve been doing it in my apartment. You can do virtual production in your living room, test your scenes before renting an LED wall, and know it works.”

This kind of workflow, plugging virtual cameras into Vantage, adding Gaussian Splats from Lidar or photogrammetry, and compositing in real time, dramatically levels the playing field. From indie filmmakers to major studios, the barriers of entry are lower than ever.

No more asset rebuilds

What makes this announcement particularly disruptive is how Chaos is responding to a long-standing issue: fragmented pipelines. While game engines have increasingly courted filmmakers in recent years, especially during the hype-fuelled push for the 'metaverse', Chaos has taken a more grounded approach.

“The thing is, we’re not chasing trends,” Chris tells me. “We’re not building tools to support games or the metaverse. We’re building what users ask for. We’re here for filmmakers and artists, not platforms.”

By building around open standards, the Arena/Vantage ecosystem becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for 3D production, translating and unifying tools so teams can focus on visuals, not workflows. From MaterialX shaders to KitBash3D's USD assets via Cargo, everything simply drops in.

This also gives a big nod to the growing community of artists and creators using the best laptops for 3D modelling and cloud rendering platforms to create on the go. With Chaos stripping out the need for specialist GPU farms or locked-in software, the next generation of filmmakers may never need to learn Unreal Engine just to get a decent previz.

New features

News of USD, MaterialX and Gaussian Splats coming to Chaos Vantage and Arena is the headline but Chaos has more announcements coming at SIGGRAPH 2025:

• OpenVDB Volume Rendering: Real-time volumetric effects in both Arena and Vantage
• Material Parameter Controls: Fine-tune surfaces on the fly during look dev
• Virtual Camera Setups: Native tracking inside Vantage — no Arena required
• Gaussian Splats: Add photorealism from real-world scans with ray-traced lighting

These will be available in upcoming beta releases, first in Vantage, with rapid rollout to Arena soon after. “Arena users are usually more experimental,” Chris says. “So we’ll get these features in their hands fast.”

The implications are huge. As real-time rendering continues to blur the line between pre-production and final pixels, Chaos is showing what a post-game-engine world might look like: one where artists use the best 3D software for their needs, not the one dictated by a licensing model or a trend.

Chaos has a demo of a neon-lit cyberpunk club, built entirely from KitBash3D assets and rendered in Arena with just a few clicks, coming to SIGGRAPH. If this is anything to go by, we’re entering an era where the only limit is your imagination, not your pipeline.

For more news, visit the Chaos SIGGRAPH 2025 sessions page, which includes a talk from Nick Marshall, Associate VFX supervisor, and Anton Borisov, CG generalist at ILM, on how Chaos tools were used in the year's breakout vampire movie, Sinners.