We're building the
missing layer of
print embellishment.
V3R lets anyone see a finished embellishment before it ever reaches the press — every foil, metallic, varnish and special effect, rendered in real time against real materials. This is where we're taking it next.
Over thirty years, the roles in print quietly dissolved into one another — but the communication between them was never rebuilt. Embellishment suffers most, because the customer simply can't picture the result. V3R is the shared visual language that closes that gap.
Already real. Already in production.
V3R isn't a concept reel. It's a real-time rendering engine running in print shops now.
Real-time rendering
Custom rendering engines for metallics, foils, varnishes and holographic films live — spin, zoom and inspect any design instantly.
Fine Tune every effects
V3R enables you to match real materials and finishing, so what appears on screen behaves the way it will on the press.
Image and Video Export
Generate transparent PNG images for use with websites and markerting, or export a high resolution WebM video to send to clients for approval.
Tone curves
Per-layer tone curves let users fine-tune every separation to match their own press characteristics — production accuracy, not guesswork.
Press configurations
Capture a device's behaviour once and reapply it in a click — the beginning of treating V3R as a true production tool.
Live in the field
Running in real production sites across multiple continents, including digital cut-sheet houses on Ricoh Pro C7500, Xerox Iridesse, Duplo and Scodix.
Nine modules. One deliberate direction.
Each item below is real engineering, weighed on production value, not a wishlist. They're grouped by horizon — from what's being coded right now to the genuine research frontier we're choosing to push.
Save · Open · Job & Press Management In active development
The single largest engineering effort in V3R's history — and the spine the rest of this roadmap depends on. A complete job-management system: create clients, build and store jobs, save and reopen files, and configure presses once for one-click setup.
The principle is simple and total: save your file, and everything you did to it is remembered. Every setting, every tweak, every material, spot color and varnish parameter — captured and restored exactly as you left it.
Material Depth & Thickness
Render the physical weight of a stock, not just its surface. Aimed squarely at markets like premium gift cards, where board weight and thickness are part of the product — see the heft, not only the finish.
Dual-Sided Rendering
Today's pipeline renders the front face only. The next logical step is true two-sided rendering — and it's far harder than "add a back." It means running two complete rendering pipelines at once.
For split-separation workflows — devices like Duplo that take separate PDFs for CMYK and the spot/embellishment pass — that's effectively multiple orchestrated pipelines, front and back, all living inside the new job system.
V3R Preview — the free viewer Free app
A free companion app anyone can download. Package a fully-configured design, send it to a client or colleague, and they open it in the viewer to spin, zoom and inspect the finished piece — exactly as authored, every effect intact.
By design, it is a sealed viewer. Designs can be viewed but never exported or extracted — the author's work and the client's file stay protected. That's a deliberate guarantee, not a limitation.
Folds & Creasing
Beginning with the tri-fold — which sounds simple and isn't. It requires an angular fold-and-crease management system so users can define folds precisely and mock up the final, folded product, plus an animation system that shows the piece folding before your eyes.
3D Packaging Fold-Up
The dimensional sibling of folds: front, back, top, bottom, flaps and tucks folding into finished cartons and packaging. This is high-end mock-up territory — substantial work, and a natural home for embellishment on structural print.
Physically-Based Substrate Surfaces
True material surfaces rendered with physically-based shading and 3D depth mapping — linen, canvas, leather and textured stocks that behave like the real thing under light, with the option for users to bring their own surfaces.
STACK3R Integration Companion engine
The clearest proof that V3R is a platform, not a single app. STACK3R is a dedicated Khaos engine that slices artwork into tapered depth layers for multi-layer white printing — commonly used on large-format and flatbed devices like swissQprint to build true 3D depth.
It analyses an image, separates it into height-driven slices, and outputs a proprietary .stkr file that V3R imports as a single depth-mapped layer — closing the loop from separation engine to visualiser.
Holography & Cast-and-Cure Active R&D
The holy grail of embellishment visualisation. Every tool on the market today fakes holographics — static gradient blends set at fixed angles. But that is not how a hologram behaves, and we're not interested in faking it.
Khaos Prizm is our attempt to model genuine holographic and diffraction behaviour in code. It is an open research question — exceptionally hard, and honestly not yet proven to be fully solvable. That's precisely why it sits at the frontier rather than on a delivery date.
V3R is one piece of something larger.
Behind V3R sits a wider suite of proprietary Khaos engines, built to solve the production problems standard prepress tools can't. STACK3R is the first to surface publicly — driven by real customer demand for multi-layer white separation — and it feeds directly into V3R through a custom file pipeline.
More tools are in development. The point isn't the count; it's that we build the plumbing of the industry, then connect it.
If we can code it, we'll add it — but only if it serves the work.
V3R is built for both analogue and digital presses and finishing equipment. Customer requests shape the roadmap constantly, and new foils, textures and effects arrive between major modules. But every request is weighed on real-world value, so the tool stays sharp at what it's for rather than sprawling into everything.