Ray3

Ray3 is Luma AI's flagship video model, released September 2025 and billed as the first 'reasoning video model' — it evaluates motion consistency, lighting logic, and physics before delivering output rather than generating frames and hoping they work. The January 2026 Ray3.14 update brought native 1080p generation, roughly 4x faster time-to-first-frame, and 3x lower per-second pricing, aimed at making AI video viable for campaign-scale production work. Ray3 Modify (December 2025) is a companion workflow that conditions generation on real actor footage, preserving timing, motion, and emotional intent while letting directors change environments, wardrobe, and cinematography — effectively AI-assisted reshoots. Luma's models are available through the Dream Machine platform and API, used by entertainment studios and ad agencies, with the company backed by a16z, Amazon, NVIDIA, and others.

Worth knowing: Ray3 is a closed commercial model — no open weights, and costs scale with usage, so heavy experimentation gets expensive despite the per-second pricing improvements. '4K' output comes from Luma's HiFi AI-enhanced render pipeline, not native 4K generation. Character consistency across long sequences and multi-shot narratives remains a weak point versus careful manual editing, and the reasoning step adds latency compared to simpler one-shot generators.

Sign up at Luma's Dream Machine platform; subscription tiers or pay-per-use API. API access via Luma's developer docs.