BASICS OF THE V-RAY RENDER SETTINGS

author:

Wouter Wynen

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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.

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

1. Set V-Ray as the production renderer

Open the render settings dialog. Then, go to the current renderer rollout and click the assign button for production renderer. Choose V-Ray from the list.

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.

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

3.V-Ray frame buffer

When enabled, the V-Ray frame buffer replaces the Max virtual frame buffer. The V-Ray frame buffer has many 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 check box. Rendering to V-Ray raw image le enables you to render very high resolution images, without eating up all the available RAM. The use of the V-Ray frame buffer is for advanced V-Ray users only. Dont bother using it when youre new to V-Ray.

4.V-Ray global switches

Here you can control and override many of V-rays settings, mainly used to speed up test rendering. You can turn off all displacement, lights, default max lights, hidden lights and shadows by just unchecking the appropriate check box! The dont render nal image button is used to let V-Ray only compute the GI (irradiance map for example) without actually rendering the image. Forget this for now :-) Turn all reections and refractions in the scene on or off by unchecking the check box. Very useful for testing purposes. The max depth controls the depth of the reection/refraction (the number of times a ray can reect/refract before it is being ignored in the raytracing process).
Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

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.

5. Image sampler (Antialiasing)

In V-Ray, 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 render times! Fixed rate is very predictable, 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 render times. Adaptive QMC is my favorite. As its name already indicates, it is 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 its good enough or if there are 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 V-Ray with just a few clicks.

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.

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

6. Indirect illumination (GI)

This rollout controls the main options for the GI (bounced light). Like most GI renderers,V-Ray makes a difference between rst 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 rst bounce. This rst bounce will probably hit another object and will bounce again (second bounce) and so on until no energy is left. The direct light and rst 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, theres less impact on the visual result), so approximations can be rougher here (interior scenes are an exception, the secondary bounces become important too). You can choose between different ways of computing rst and second bounces, and adjust the strength of them (multipliers). Post processing options can desaturate the GI light, or its contrast. Remember that caustics is only a name for refracted/reected light. Because light coming from a max spotlight, for example, is direct light and not GI light, you also have the ability in V-ray to render these direct light caustics. or off with the two appropriate check boxes. An example of very visible reective 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!

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

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

7. Irradiance map / Quasi-Monte Carlo / photon mapping / light cache

Depending on the method for rst and secondary bounces you have chosen, the above rollouts will appear. They are all ways of calculating GI bounces. Each have their specic advantages and uses. I will explain these in a separate 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, thats 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 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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Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

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.

10. QMC Sampler

The QMC sampler can be seen as a global quality control center. It controls all parameters 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 eld. 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 render time. 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 eld,...). This is very useful for fast test renders.

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

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11. Color mapping

Color mapping can be used to post process an image within V-Ray. 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 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...

13. Default displacement

These parameters control the default V-Ray displacement settings. More on displacement can be found in the online manual, with lots of illustrations.

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Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

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.

Basics of the V-Ray Render Settings

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