Every Gaussian splat the Lab has ever covered shared one dirty secret: the lighting was welded on. Scan a room at golden hour and that warm glow is fused into the data forever — drop the capture into a project lit for midnight and it looks like it teleported in from another universe. With V-Ray 7 Update 3 and now the real-time Chaos Vantage 3.3.0 (June 13, 2026), Chaos just cut the lighting loose.
The Story
Here’s the limitation nobody in the splat world likes to talk about. A Gaussian splat capture doesn’t store a scene the way a 3D model does. Each of its millions of little blobs bakes in the color it received at scan time — the sunlight, the bounce, the shadows, all frozen into the representation itself. That’s exactly why splats look so photoreal straight out of the scanner. It’s also why they’ve been almost useless as production assets. The instant you place a scanned environment next to modeled geometry with its own lights, the baked illumination fights everything around it. Splats have been gorgeous references and terrible set pieces.
V-Ray 7 Update 3 (shipped April 15, 2026 for 3ds Max, SketchUp and Rhino) was the first mainstream renderer to crack it. Its new Gaussian Splat Relighting lets the splats actually receive illumination from your scene lights, so a capture blends into a rendered set instead of clashing with it. A dedicated blend parameter dials how much the original baked lighting gives way to the new lighting, and your full V-Ray light rig — area lights, sun, the works — plays nicely with the splat. The same update also moved splat rendering onto the GPU (it was CPU-only before), added clipping volumes to crop a messy capture down to the part you want, and let you animate splat data.
The June news is that Chaos brought that same capability into Vantage 3.3.0 — its GPU-accelerated, real-time ray tracer. Vantage already imported radiance-field scenes and blended them with ray-traced 3D assets, materials and lights (that landed with Vantage 3 back in October 2025, alongside a material editor and USD/MaterialX support). Now you can relight a captured scene interactively, watching the sun swing and the mood shift across millions of splats live, instead of waiting on offline frames. Capture in V-Ray’s pipeline, explore and relight in Vantage — the loop is finally closed.
Why You Should Care
This is the moment AI-captured reality graduates from “cool scan” to “shot you can ship.” Radiance fields are a neural capture technology — the whole reason the Lab keeps coming back to them — but capture was only ever half the battle. Editing was the wall. Relighting is the single most-requested edit there is, because lighting is storytelling. An archviz artist can now scan a real plaza and present it at dawn, noon and dusk without rescanning. A VFX or virtual-production team can drop a captured location behind CG characters and make the two share one lighting setup. A game or previs artist can grab a real interior and bend its mood to the scene instead of building it from scratch.
And the AI thread runs deeper than the splats. The very same update introduced AI Mood Match: point it at a reference photograph and V-Ray automatically aligns your scene’s lighting and atmosphere to that image. Pair the two features and you can describe the look you want with a picture, let AI set the mood, then relight a real-world capture to land inside it. Capture with neural rendering, light with AI assistance — that’s the workflow Chaos is quietly assembling.
Try It / Follow Them
- Read the release: V-Ray 7, Update 3 on the Chaos blog covers relighting, GPU splats, clipping volumes and AI Mood Match.
- Grab a trial: V-Ray and Chaos Vantage both have free trials at chaos.com — Vantage is the place to feel the real-time relighting.
- Go deeper on splats: Radiance Fields tracks every move in the Gaussian splatting world, including the Vantage 3.3.0 and V-Ray relighting drops.
IK3D Lab Take
We’ve spent a year cheering every tool that made or captured splats — phones, drones, generators, browsers. This is the first one that really lets you direct them. Relighting sounds like a checkbox feature until you remember that baked lighting is the exact reason splats never made it past the moodboard in real productions. Cut that cord and a scan stops being a souvenir and becomes a location you can shoot at any hour. Is the blend perfect on every capture? Almost certainly not yet — heavy specular and hard shadows will fight relighting for a while. But the direction is unmistakable: the field is moving from “look what I scanned” to “look what I made with it,” and Chaos just planted a flag on the editing side of that line.
