Veras 4 was the loud release. The engine moved to the Nano Banana 2 generation, Design Lock and Image as Input landed, and the demos got noticeably cleaner. The 4.4 and 4.5 updates that followed are the quiet ones, and they're easy to skim past, because nothing in them changes how a finished render looks. What they change is everything around the render: how you select a part of the scene, how you edit just that part, how you reorient a source image, how you hand the result to a client. Chaos has spent these releases on workflow, and for a practice that runs Veras every week, that's arguably the more useful place to spend.
We went through the release notes and mapped each addition to where it would actually show up in a working day. Most of them aren't features you'll talk about. They're features you'll stop noticing the absence of, which is its own kind of win.
Selection grew up: Modify, Replace, and Smart Selection
The most consequential changes here are about selection, the act of telling Veras which part of the image you want it to touch. In earlier workflows, editing one element without disturbing the rest was the fiddly part. These releases attack that directly.
Chaos added two Render Selection Modes for the Nano Banana engine. The company describes Modify as a mode that "preserves the underlying geometry and better understands what needs to be edited," which is the one you reach for when you want to change a dimension, a material, or a finish on a selected area without redrawing it. Replace, by contrast, "discards the selection and comes up with a fresh new idea" — the do-over, for when you want to reimagine an area entirely. The mental model is clean: Modify is the scalpel, Replace is the blank slate.
Sitting on top of that is Smart Selection, an AI-driven workflow that lets you select by category, by object, by material, or with a custom prompt. Chaos notes that "recent prompts are saved with thumbnails so you can re-use selections across renders," which is the kind of small persistence detail that matters when you're running the same edit across a set. Notably, Chaos lists Smart Selection as available across Enscape, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Vectorworks, Archicad, Forma, and the web app — not a web-only feature.
Modify edits a selected area while preserving geometry; Replace discards it for a fresh idea. Smart Selection picks by category, object, material, or prompt and saves recent selections with thumbnails. Listed across Enscape, Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Vectorworks, Archicad, Forma, and web.
Where it earns its keep
This is the part of the release that touches the most billable hours. Client review almost always comes back as targeted asks: change that cladding, warm up that one room, swap the paving. Modify means you can act on those without re-rolling the whole image and re-checking everything else for drift. Replace means when a reviewer says "this corner isn't working, try something else," you can isolate the corner and explore it without losing the rest. That's a genuine reduction in the per-edit overhead that used to make iterative client work tedious in prompt-driven tools.
The win isn't a better render. It's editing one thing and trusting that the other ninety-nine didn't move.
The supporting cast that quietly saves time
Beyond selection, 4.4 and 4.5 add a cluster of smaller features. None is a headline on its own; together they smooth a lot of the friction that surrounds a render.
Rotate Image lets you reorient a source image in 3D space by adjusting pitch, yaw, and roll, then "generate a fresh render from the rotated viewpoint." Chaos frames it as a way to create video from multiple frames without needing a 3D model — useful when your input is a single image rather than live geometry. Remove Background "replaces the background of any source image with transparency," exporting a transparent PNG for compositing, which is a real time-saver if you drop renders into boards or marketing layouts. New Sketch Tools overhaul the drawing toolbar with dedicated Freehand, Line, and Curve buttons, full undo/redo, and per-pixel selection precision. And Upload History lets you cycle through manually-uploaded images with prev/next arrows instead of re-importing each time.
There are convenience touches too: Describe Source Image (powered by the Florence 2 model) generates Short, Medium, or Long image descriptions, and a Cloud Storage Usage bar shows consumption in real time with warning states. Individually minor. Collectively, they're the difference between a tool that fights you and one that gets out of the way.
Sharing got real: galleries you can actually hand over
The feature most likely to change how you collaborate is Share Gallery Items. Chaos describes shareable links that require no account to view, where "recipients can clone shared items into their own gallery in one click," plus a Shares panel for managing links, revoking access, and tracking analytics. For anyone who has emailed a zip of renders and lost the thread, an account-free, revocable, trackable share link is a small piece of infrastructure that matters more than it sounds.
It's also a quiet signal about where Veras sees itself: not just a render generator, but a place where review and handoff happen. The analytics piece in particular suggests Chaos wants the gallery to be where the conversation with a client lives, not a dead end you export out of.
How the two releases stack up against Veras 4
| Dimension | Veras 4 (the engine release) | Veras 4.4 / 4.5 (these releases) |
|---|---|---|
| Headline | New engine, Design Lock, Image as Input | Selection, editing, sharing |
| Changes render quality? | Yes, noticeably cleaner output | No, quality is unchanged |
| Changes daily workflow? | Somewhat, via control features | Substantially, via friction removal |
| Best for | Trusting AI near a client | Iterating fast once you do |
| Marketing volume | Loud | Quiet |
The honest framing is that Veras 4 made AI rendering trustworthy enough to put in front of a client, and 4.4 plus 4.5 make it faster to work once it's there. If Design Lock was about defending the design, these releases are about defending your time. Read together with our take on Design Lock and Image as Input, the arc is clear: Chaos is filling in the workflow around a control story it already established.
Our take: boring releases are the good kind
We're usually wary of incremental point releases dressed up as news, and on paper that's exactly what this is. But there's a version of "boring" that's actually the most valuable thing a mature tool can ship: removing the small, repeated friction that a power user hits forty times a day. Modify versus Replace is a genuinely good design decision. Smart Selection with saved, thumbnailed prompts is the kind of detail that only comes from watching real users. Account-free, revocable share links solve a problem every studio has. None of it will make a sizzle reel, and that's the point.
The caveat we'd flag: these are reported from Chaos's own release notes, and rollout across every host plugin isn't always simultaneous. Chaos lists Smart Selection broadly across Revit, SketchUp, Rhino and the rest, but if a specific feature is load-bearing for your pipeline, confirm it's live in your exact build before you plan a deadline around it. Features can land on the web app ahead of the plugins.
So: not a release you need to read a thread about. A release you'll feel the first week you use it, in the form of edits that used to take three rolls and now take one, and renders you hand off with a link instead of an attachment. That's a fair trade for "nothing new to look at."
If you run Veras this week
Pick a render with one element a client flagged, and edit only that element using Modify — then check whether the rest of the scene held. That single test tells you most of what these releases are worth on your work. Try Replace on an area you've been unhappy with rather than re-rolling the whole image, and use Smart Selection to grab by material the next time you want to swap a finish everywhere it appears. Then share a set with a client over a gallery link instead of a zip and see whether the cloning and analytics change the conversation.
We test new AI rendering features on real project work and publish the honest version, including the boring releases that actually matter. Join the studio newsletter for weekly field notes, or read our take on Veras 4's Design Lock and Image as Input for the control story these releases build on.
Reported from Chaos's published Veras 4.4 and 4.5 release notes, with feature names and quoted descriptions drawn from that source. Workflow framing reflects Vista Studios' experience running Veras on live projects; we have not independently benchmarked every listed feature across all host plugins. No affiliate relationship with Chaos or Veras.