The Chaos Group has released a new version of V-Ray into public beta, offering some great new features for SketchUp users like dome lights, a real-time viewport renderer, and a totally new material library. One of the biggest features, however, is a clever workaround for SketchUp’s native 32-bit limitations.

One challenge facing the Chaos Group team in preparing this update is that SketchUp remains a 32-bit program in an era when most CAD and digital content software has migrated to 64-bit processing. Users who expect to create large complex visualizations from their SketchUp models sometimes have a rude awakening.

To help users cope with working in a 32-bit environment, Chaos Group introduces V-Ray Proxies in this release. V-Ray Proxies take advantage of repeated geometry elements in the SketchUp model to more quickly render large and complex scenes. V-Ray Proxy objects are dynamically loaded and unloaded at render time, saving RAM resources.

via GraphicSpeak » Chaos Group puts latest V-Ray for SketchUp in open beta.