BASIC VRAY RENDER SETTING

BASIC VRAY RENDER SETTING Before you start This tutorial will explain very briefly many of the Vray 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. It's 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 Vray. The Vray version I used for this tutorial is 1.47.03. 1. Set Vray as the production renderer Open the render settings dialog, go to the current renderer rollout and click the assign button for production renderer. Choose Vray from the list. 2. Extra rollouts! After Vray has been set as the main renderer, you'll notice a lot of new rollouts. Every rollout with "Vray:" in front of its name is filled with Vray render settings The next steps will each cover one rollout in general. 3. Vray frame buffer When enabled, the Vray frame buffer replaces the Max virtual frame buffer. The Vray frame buffer has much more options to post process images and lots of other interesting settings. In this rollout you can control the size of it by disabling the 'get resolution from max' checkbox. Rendering to Vray raw image file enables you to render very high resolution images, without eating up all the available RAM. The use of the Vray frame buffer is for advanced Vray users only. Don't bother using it when you're new to Vray. 4. Vray global switches Here you can control and override many of Vray's settings, mainly used to speed up test rendering. You can turn off all displacement, lights, default max lights, hidden lights and shadows by just unticking the appropriate checkbox! The "don't render final image" button is used to let Vray only compute the GI (irradiance map for example) without actually rendering the image. Forget this for now :-) Turn all reflections and refractions in the scene on or off by unticking the checkbox. Very usefull for testing purposes. The max depth controls the depth of the reflection/refraction (the number of times a ray can reflect/refract before it is being ignored in the raytracing process). You can also turn off al maps, all filtering of maps etc Glossy effects are for example blurry reflections or refractions. Turning them off greatly improves rendertime, very neat while doing testrenders. Override material can be used to give every object in the scene the same material. Secondary ray bias: please refer to the manual. 5. Image sampler (Antialiasing) In Vray, you can choose between 3 types of image samplers to compute the anti aliasing of the image. This controls how sharp and smooth your image will be, and has a huge effect on rendertimes! Fixed rate is very predicatble, but slow in many cases. Use this one if there are a lot of glossy materials, area shadows, motion blur etc Higher subdivs means better quality, higher rendertimes. Adaptive QMC is my favourite. As its name already indicates, it's an adaptive sampler, it will adapt its calculation to the situation. It will compare the quality of the computed pixel by some thresholds, and decide if it's good enough or if there's more calculation needed. This samplers quality is controlled by the QMC rollout (further down in the rollouts). Use adaptive QMC if you have many glossies, area shadows, motion blur etc in your scene, and if you want maximum control over the speed vs quality of the image. It takes some time to get a grip on it, but once you get it, you have full control over Vray with just a few clicks. Adaptive subdivision is also an adaptive method. Altough 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. 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 filter can be changed if you have problems with fine textures or fine 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 by simply turning the filter off! A few filters 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) 6. Indirect illumination (GI) This rollout controls the main options for the GI (= bounced light). Like most GI renderers, Vray makes a difference between first and secondary bounces. A simple spotlight will cast direct light. This light hits an object and will be absorbed a bit, but the rest bounces back into the scene. This is the first bounce. This first bounce will probably hit another object and will bounce again (second bounce) and so on untill no energy is left. The direct light and first bounce will have the largest impact on the lighting look, because this bounced light has still a lot of energy. So these need to be computed very accurately to create realistic lighting. The secondary bounces are usually less important (a lot of the light energy is already absorbed, there's less impact on the visual result), so approximisations can be rougher here. (interior scenes are an exception, the secondary bounces become important too) You can choose between different ways of computing first and second bounces, and adjust the strength of them (multipliers). Post processing options can desaturate the GI light, or its contrast. Caustics are light patterns formed by refracted/reflected light. GI caustics are caustics created by refracted/reflected GI light (light bounces). The standard first and secondary bounces don't take the reflective/refractive material properties into account, only the diffuse properties. You need to turn them on or off with the two appropriate checkboxes. An example of very visible reflective caustics is the light pattern you will see if you put a spotlight on a chrome ring lying on a table. Refractive caustics are generated for example by a glass sphere, which bundles all light that passes through it, creating a very bright spot underneath it. Note that when you want GI light to pass trough transparent objects, you must set 'refractive GI' caustics ON! Remember that caustics is only a name for refracted/reflected light. Because light coming from a max spotlight for example is direct light and not GI light, you also have the ability in Vray to render these direct light caustics. 7. Irradiance map / Quasi monte carlo / photon mapping / light cache Depending on the method for first and secondary bounces you have chosen, the above rollouts will appear. They are all ways of calculating GI bounces. Each have their specific advantages and uses. I will explain these in a seperate tutorial as this is too complicated for this basic settings overview. For now, remember that all these methods are ways to approximate GI lighting. GI calculations are very time consuming, that's why methods are invented to speed things up by using approximate values. 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 Vraylight settings. If I find 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/reflective 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 9. Environment Vray 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, it's actually treated as first bounce, that's 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 reflection/refraction environment. No matter what the max environment is, your objects will always reflect/refract this Vray 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. 10. QMC Sampler The QMC sampler can be seen as a global quality control center. It controls all paramters that have anything to do with Quasi Monte Carlo calculations like adaptive QMC AA, QMC GI, Irradiance map, Glossy effects, area shadows, Motion Blur and Depth of field. The most important parameter is the noise threshold, this controls the accuracy of al the calculations. The highest quality setting is 0.001, but this of course requires the longest rendertime. The global subdivs multiplier can be used to lower/increase all subdivision parameters in the scene (Irradiance map, QMC GI, glossies, area shadows, Motion Blur, Depth of field, ). This is very usefull for fast testrenders. 11. Color mapping Color mapping can be used to kinda post process an image within Vray. Please refer to the manual for more information about the different types. 12. Camera You can choose different camera types instead of the default standard Max camera, for example fish eye lense, spherical camera, cylindrical etc Please refer to the manual for more information about these different camera types. Depth of field is an effect caused by the diameter of the diafragma opening of the camera. Objects that are out of focus will become blurred. The further away from focus and the bigger the diafragma, 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 rendertimes 13. Default displacement These parameters control the default Vraydisplacement settings. More on displacement can be found in the online manual, with lots of illustrations. 14. System Another rollout that controls all kinds of general parameters. Raycaster parameters are used to control the amount of memory Vray uses for a specific scene. In 99% of all cases you don't 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 1 image with different PC's. "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 usefull to print rendertimes and such on the rendered image. Objects and lights settings control Vray specific properties for scene objects and lights. You can turn off/on 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 Vray 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. . BASIC VRAY RENDER SETTING Before you start This tutorial will explain very briefly many of the Vray render settings. A very basic 3D Studio Max knowledge is needed. 1.47.03. 1. Set Vray as the production renderer Open the render settings dialog, go to the current renderer rollout and click the assign button for production renderer. Choose Vray from the list. 2 rollouts! After Vray has been set as the main renderer, you'll notice a lot of new rollouts. Every rollout with " ;Vray: " in front of its name is filled with Vray render settings The