Chaos recently announced their impressive momentum toward creating a comprehensive visualization ecosystem. Within the past year, in response to growing demand for more easily accessible 3D, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) technology, the company merged with Enscape, a leading provider of real-time rendering and virtual reality technology. It also acquired Cylindo, a leading 3D furniture product visualization platform for commerce, and CGarchitect, an open online community for architectural visualization. The newly combined company now serves as global leader in visualization, providing technology, tools, and community for participants across the entire design spectrum, from architects and designers to 3D artists and manufacturers.
Chaos also announced new leadership hires to support its growth. Michael Tritschler, formerly at Siemens Digital Industries Software, has been appointed chief financial officer of Chaos. Tobias Espig, formerly at Google, has recently joined the company as chief marketing officer.
“We are committed to making visualization software and workflows accessible to everyone involved in the design process and we are proud of our momentum. By merging complementary technologies and expertise, we are able to unite stakeholders in the design process, remove barriers, and provide the tools needed to quickly, easily, and collaboratively bring ideas to life. Doing so, we are creating the world’s largest 3D visualization company and helping to define the future of our industry,” said Chaos CEO Christian Lang.
To remove a challenging bottleneck in architectural design visualization and enable stronger collaboration through a unified visualization workflow, the company created the first stages of product integration with the launch of V-Ray 6 for SketchUp and V-Ray 6 for Rhino. With V-Ray now compatible with Enscape, architects and designers can deliver complete design intent that 3D artists can immediately build on to take visualizations to the next level.
The company is working to bring this compatibility to other modeling software, with V-Ray for Revit coming soon. It will continue to enhance design workflows for stakeholders, empowering designers and artists to readily leverage the cloud and freely exchange data across tools, such as from V-Ray back to Enscape. Improved collaboration will provide numerous benefits, including enabling artists to assist designers with materials and custom modeling and providing designers access to an extensive library of commercial and brand content.
“For years, design and visualization have worked in a vacuum. Designers would work in Enscape, technical artists would work in V-Ray, and it was painfully difficult to transition from one to the other. Connecting Enscape and V-Ray means we finally have a full visual pipeline where it is easy to transition from the iterative design process to a fully editable marketing visualization without losing valuable design information. This is one of the most exciting developments to have happened since I started in architectural visualization almost a decade ago,” said Voxl.Vision owner and creative director Ted Vitale.
In addition to the V-Ray and Enscape integration, the company expanded its existing product portfolio, including today’s launch of Cylindo Studio, a self-service product visualization tool allowing users to create 4K quality lifestyle imagery in a virtual photo studio. Cylindo Studio is easy to use and requires no prior 3D knowledge allowing creative teams to efficiently generate 3D images at scale. Other product launches and updates include Enscape for Mac, Enscape 3.3 and Enscape 3.4 for Windows, V-Ray 6 for 3ds Max, V-Ray 6 for Maya, V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D, Corona 8 and Corona 9 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, and updates to the Cylindo platform.
Within the past year, Chaos also launched an Innovation Lab, a dedicated initiative to encourage Chaos employees around the world to share ideas and research in rendering and related technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI) and neural networks, that can aid in technology advancement.
Led by Chaos co-founder Vladimir Koylazov and a team of mentors, the Innovation Lab will partner with academic institutions and other research and development hubs in graphic technologies to test new concepts and contribute to the long-term vision of Chaos’ products and the future of the industry.
“Our products and solutions have been successful because they have consistently offered innovative and efficient ways for our users to design and visualize. Technology is developing very quickly and our goal is to continue providing the right tools, technologies, and expertise so that architects, designers, and artists can be more effective and creative,” said Koylazov.
The company also holds an annual hackathon that brings together software developers to discover and test new ideas for rendering technologies. This year’s Chaos Rendathon event was held in Prague with the participation of employees from various global offices.