Best Vray Tutorials
Hey designers, Looking for a way to get the best renders? You’ve come to the right place.
With the title in mind, this tutorial about adjusting VRay Settings aka ‘the Options menu values’.
Learn how to create stunning renders now by browsing our impressive selection of free V-Ray for Rhino tutorials.These tutorials are directly from Chaos Group to ensure you're receiving quality, reliable content. Vray 3.6 is great. It's changed my workflow for.
If you ever wandered through that menu, you will find that all options are adjustable numerically, hence the ‘values’.
Not to bore you with details; in short, these options are responsible for the way your work is rendered (Details, shadow, light, brightness, etc.).
Note that I am using VRay 2.0 for SketchUp, other versions may vary a little bit, but not entirely different.
The Default Options in VRay for SketchUp are set up so that certain elements of VRay are already good to go. This is great because certain aspects that are specific to VRay are already configured with the proper settings. Other values are adjusted according to version, machine model, graphics card, and personal preference.
For VRay Light Settings you can go Here.
The most important thing when rendering are the options associated with Light and How Light Reacts and Bounces off Certain Objects and Materials, like: Indirect Illumination, Irradiance Map, Camera, Environment, and Light Cache. You’ll need to pay extra attention to those.
For adding a VRay Sky you can go Here.
- 800×600:
- Min/Max: -3/1
- 1600×1200:
- Min/Max: -5/-2
- 3200×2400:
- Min/Max: -6/-3
- 6400×4800:
- Min/Max: -7/-4
One more thing to know about Irradiance Map is that the smaller the values in Min/Max, the higher the quality of the render, and the slower it gets. The higher the values of the Min/Max, the lower the quality of the render, and the faster it gets.
But, the values above should be fine for you, it gives me good quality at a reasonable render time, so it should do that for you too.
Vray For Rhino Tutorial
- Wood (Grainy Surface)
- Metal (Polished Surface)
- Glass (Translucent)
- Stone (Rough texture)
- Plastic (Glossy Surface)
- Ceramic (Mirror Surface)
- Enamel (Shiney Surface)
- Fabric (Soft Texture)
Best Vray Tutorials
- A couple of close ups to the materials for details:
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In this tutorial I will go through a simple, yet effective way to setup a lighting rig using 3ds max and vray.
Before we begin we need to setup the lwf.
Go to “Customize”, “Preferences” and click the “gamma and lut” tab.
Check “Enable gamma /lut correction”, type 2.2 in the field next to “Gamma”.
Under “Materials and Colors” check both “Affect Color Selectors” and “Affect Material Editor”.
Don’t forget that for every texture that you use you need to override it’s gamma like in the screenshot bellow:
If you need a more in depth explanation regarding linear workflow, check out my lwf tutorial that I have posted some time ago. However, the steps above pretty much cover the essential.
1) Click the “create” button and select “cameras”. From the drop down menu select “vray” and click on “vray physical camera”. You can now create and place the camera wherever you want in the scene.
2) Now we will create the sun. Click again on “create” and choose “lights”. Again, from the drop down menu select vray and click on Vray sun. You can now place the sun and it’s target in your scene.
When you will be asked if you would like to “automatically add a Vray Sky environment map”, click “yes”.
The position of the sun source is directly related to the time of the day. Bellow are 2 examples of renderings with different sun positions (while keeping the rest of the settings identical).
VraySun parameters
1) -turbidity
This parameter affects the color of the sky and overall atmosphere in a way the dust affects atmosphere. A higher turbidity value simulates a larger amount of dust and makes the rendering look more yellowish. See examples bellow:
2) -ozone – ranges from 0 to 1. Lower values are supposed to make the sunlight look more orange, while higher values should make it bluish. I always prefer to leave this as default.
3) -vray sun size multiplier – a value of “0” produces very sharp shadows, while higher values makes them softer.
4) -shadow subdivisions – if you are using a higher value for the vray sun size you will need to increase the shadow subdivisions as well, otherwise the samples will be visible.
5) -Intensity multiplier – needless to say that higher values results in higher sunlight intensity
Having this said, the settings that I usually use for creating a day rendering are:
-intensity 1
-turbidity 4
-size multiplier 5
-shadow subdivisions 9
If you don’t like the vray physical camera, you can use a standard one as well, but you need to decrease the intensity to somewhere around 0.01
Bellow is a rendering that was done using the settings above.
As you can see, at the moment it looks a bit dark and washed out. You can either play with the curve in vray virtual frame buffer, or start tweaking the vray camera settings.
Vray camera parameters
I always prefer to further adjust the image from the vray camera parameters.
There are 3 main parameters that affect the lighting/atmosphere: F-number, shutter speed, and film speed.
1) F-number
This parameter determines the width of the camera aperture and therefore it affects exposure. Higher values produce darker images, while lower values brightens the images
2)Shutter speed
This parameter determines the amount of time the film is exposed to the light. It is calculated in “inverse seconds” therefore higher values produce darker images.
3) Film speed
This parameter determines how sensitive the film is to the light. Higher values produce lighter images, but the downside is that the higher the sensibility the more “grainy” the image will look.
For daylight exterior renderings it is recommended to keep this at 100.
There are several other parameters that you can touch (like custom white balance, vignetting, etc) but you can have more control if you do this in photoshop.
In conclusion, even though there are no “universal settings” for the vray camera, whenever I do an exterior daylight rendering I start with the following settings, and depending on the scene I may need to tweak them a little further.
F-number – 7
Shutter speed – 120
Film speed – 100
Rest of the parameters – default.
Bellow is the rendering done using these parameters.
In the next part of this tutorial we will talk about image based lighting, so stay tuned.