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author:
Wouter Wynen
INTRODUCTION
This tutorial will explain very briey many of the V-Ray render settings. A very basic 3D Studio Max knowledge is needed to be able to follow the tutorial. For more info on each topic, please refer to the online manual. Its also a good thing if you have a basic understanding of rendering in general. Terms like Global Illumination, raytracing, antialiasing, displacement and so on should sound familiar before you start working with V-Ray. The V-Ray version I used for this tutorial is 1.47.03.
2. Extra rollouts!
After V-Ray has been set as the main renderer, youll notice a lot of new rollouts. Every rollout with V-Ray in front of its name is lled with V-Ray render settings... The next steps will each cover one rollout in general.
You can also turn off all maps, all ltering of maps etc... Glossy effects are for example blurry reections or refractions. Turning them off greatly improves render time, very neat while doing test renders. Override material can be used to give every object in the scene the same material. Secondary ray bias: please refer to the manual.
Some testing will be needed to understand the differences between the 3 samplers. The online documents have very good explanations on this topic, with lots of examples showing all differences. The anti aliasing lter can be changed if you have problems with ne textures or ne details in the scene. Every sampler has its own characteristics, but it is not the goal of this tutorial to explain them all. In many cases you can get away with simply turning the lter off! A few lters I use often: - none - Mitchell-Netravali: smooth result, good controls - Catmull-Rom: very sharp (a bit like the result of unsharp mask in Photoshop) - soften with radius around 2.5 (smooth and fast) Adaptive subdivision is also an adaptive method. Although very fast is many cases, it can get very slow with lots of glossy effects in the scene. It also uses more RAM memory while rendering. Use this sampler if you have large smooth areas in your scene (for example an interior with large white walls). The min/max rates control the quality, 0/2 are good values, -2/-1 are good for very fast test renders.
Caustics are light patterns formed by refracted/reected light. GI caustics are caustics created by refracted/ reected GI light (light bounces). The standard rst and secondary bounces dont take the reective/refractive material properties into account, only the diffuse properties. You need to turn them on
8. Caustics
Remember the direct light caustics from step 6? Well, here you can turn them on or off, and control some parameters. To get nice direct light caustics, you will also need to make adjustments in the V-Ray light settings. If I nd the time, I will make a direct caustics tutorial too! A simple trick to eliminate the need for direct light caustics, is simply not to use direct lights. With only GI light, you tick refractive/reective GI caustics in the Indirect Illumination rollout and all caustics will be calculated according to your GI settings! Of course it is not always possible to use only GI light...
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9. Environment
V-Ray allows you to override the Max environment with these controls. Use the skylight to light the scene with a skylight. If you put a map in the slot behind it, the color swatch is neglected and instead, the map is used to light the scene. You need to enable GI for the skylight to become visible. The skylight is not a direct light, its actually treated as rst bounce, thats why GI is needed to make the skylight visible. Note that if GI is enabled, skylight is turned off and you have put a color in the Max background, that color will be used as skylight! The other swatch controls the reection/ refraction environment. No matter what the max environment is, your objects will always reect/refract this V-Ray override. You can also put a map in there like with the skylight option. *Note that these settings will not show up in the background of the render. Use the Max environment setting for this.
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12. Camera
You can choose different camera types instead of the default standard Max camera, for example sh eye lens, spherical camera, cylindrical etc... Please refer to the manual for more information about these different camera types. Depth of eld is an effect caused by the diameter of the diaphragm opening of the camera. Objects that are out of focus will become blurred. The further away from focus and the bigger the diaphragm, the more the object will be blurred. Motion blur is the blur that you get when objects move very fast, or when the camera is moving. Both of these effects are raytraced, not faked with some fancy tricks, so they have a big impact on render times...
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14. System
Another rollout that controls all kinds of general parameters. Raycaster parameters are used to control the amount of memory V-Ray uses for a specic scene. In 99% of all cases you dont need to touch these! Render region division X and Y control the width and height of a render bucket. For small render resolutions, you can lower these, for high resolutions you can increase these. Good values are squares between 32 and 128px. Region sequence alters the order in which the buckets get rendered. Distributed rendering is the process of rendering one image with different PCs. Previous render controls how the previous render in the frame buffer is overwritten by the new buckets. Default geometry static/dynamic: refer to the manual.
Frame stamp is useful to print render times and such on the rendered image. Objects and lights settings control V-Ray specic properties for scene objects and lights. You can turn on/off all kinds of things locally for each object in the scene. Presets can save all or some render settings for easy and quick switching between for example test settings or high quality settings. The V-Ray log is the small window that appears while rendering, giving you some textual feedback about the rendering process. The level controls how much feedback is printed inside the box.
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