VRay for 3ds Max Tutorials

Universal V-Ray 1.5 Settings

General
Setting the V-Ray renderer
Notes

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General

The "universal" settings comprise a set of settings that we have found to work very well for still
images in many situations. Please note that these settings are not optimal, in the sense that with
enough tweaking, you can probably get similar quality with faster render times. The beauty of
these settings though, is that they require almost no tweaking and you are guaranteed to get a
good result in the end.

The advantages of these settings are:

• very little parameters for controlling render quality vs speed (essentially,

only the Noise threshold);
• they work for a very large number of scenes;
• they typically produce high-quality results.

Of course, there is a disadvantage: the scene may render quite slow. With tweaking, you may get
faster results.

These settings work, because the high AA subdivs essentially cause all the sampling to be
performed by the image sampler. It will take as many samples per pixel as required to achieve
the specified noise threshold. In many ways, this is similar to PPT (progressive path tracing), but
is done on a per-bucket basis and the number of samples is adaptive for each pixel.
Setting the V-Ray renderer

1. Set V-Ray as the current rendering engine (with the default V-Ray settings).

2. In the Image sampler rollout, switch the image sampler Type to Adaptive DMC. Set the Max.
subdivs to 100 (one hundred). Leave the Min. subdivs to 1.

4. In the Indirect illumination rollout, Turn GI on, set the Primary GI engine to Brute force. Do
not change the Subdivs. Set the Secondary GI engine to Light cache.

5. In the Light cache rollout, set the light cache Interpolation samples to 5.

6. In the Color mapping rollout, make sure that the Clamp output and Sub-pixel mapping options
are off.

7. In the DMC sampler rollout, set the Adaptive amount parameter to 1.0. Typically you will also
need to adjust the Noise threshold as the default may produce too much noise. A good value is,
for example, 0.005.

8. You can also control the noise directly from the Image sampler rollout, if you uncheck the Use
DMC sample thresh. parameter, and adjust the Clr. thresh instead (e.g. to 0.005).

Notes

• Leave all subdivs anywhere at their default values. They won't have any effect anyways -
the 100 AA subdivs will almost certainly override everything else.

• Avoid using sharpening AA filters. They can make the noise more apparent.