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Before you start

This tutorial is a brief overview of what you will be able to do with Vray, one of the most popular rendering plugins for 3D Studio Max.

The Vray version used to create this tutorial is Vray 1.50.00. This is the version that requires the hardware lock (dongle) as a licensing system. Please do not email me with questions about this tutorial if you are not using this Vray version, since the answer to your question is most likely that you're using a different version.

Make sure you have basic 3D Studio Max knowledge too, I will not explain every little detail so you have to know how to use Max. For example things like the material editor, creating and manipulating objects, modifiers etc should all be familiar.

What is Vray?

As you probably already know, Vray is a render plugin. It's a plugin, which means that it adds a lot of functionality to an existing program. Vray's features mainly aim at creating photorealistic images, together with improving rendering speed. Currently, Vray exist for 3D Studio Max, Maya and Rhinoceros 3D. This tutorial is made with Vray for Max, but the plugins for the other packages are generally very similar.

Most of Vray's features can be found in Max's render settings dialog, but many smaller items are distributed across the complete program. For example Vray adds its own materials, light types, a fur generator, a toon style effect, a displacement modifier, etc...

Vray is created by Chaosgroup, a European company based in Bulgaria. Click here to visit their website.

Vray Features

You can read all of Vray's features on the official Chaosgroup website. I will list some of the most important ones in the next paragraphs.

Vray Features - Full scene antialiasing

Antialising is directly related to image quality. It deals with smoothing out object edges, texture details, blurry reflections, area shadows etc... Take a look at the image on the righ to see the difference between antialiasing and no antialiasing.

Changing antialiasing settings have a huge effect on rendertimes, it can bring a render from 5 seconds to a few hours by altering a setting from 0.1 to 0.001.

With only a few settings you get full control over the complete image, which makes this perfect for changing from a quick preview render to a high quality final image.

Vray Features - Advanced materials

As I already said, Vray adds its own material types to 3DS Max. You have the choice between a normal Vray material, the vraylight material, VrayBlend material, Vray2sided material, VrayfastSSS and the vraymaterial wrapper. You can create every material you can imagine with just these types (or combination of these types or in combination with Max's texture maps).

The normal Vray material is the one you will be using most. With only this type you can create anything like glass, plastics, metals, wood, and so on.

The images on the right show a few of the many possibilities with Vray materials, created in just a few seconds. The top image is some kind of brushed metal, in the second one I turn two teapots into light emitters, and the third one is blurry transparant plastic or glass object.

Vray Features - Displacement mapping

Displacement mapping is mostly used to add fine detail to your object at rendertime. You can use any kind of map for the displacement, and vray will 'displace' your mesh according to the grayscale info in the map. For example black pixels will not be displaced, white pixels will have the highest displacement. This is similar as with bump maps, but with displacement the actual mesh is displaced, so even at the edges of your object you can see the 'bumps'. You can even use displacement to turn a flat plane into a rough mountain landscape!

The image on the right is the same object as the glass one from the previous step, but it is displaced with a cellular map. So without any modeling at all, the object suddenly becomes extremely detailed.

Vray Features - Physically accurate global illumination

Global illumination is one of Vray's strongest points, which is why many archviz people are using it. It's a term used for the correct calculation of how light behaves in the real world. When light hits objects, it gets partially absorbed, and partially bounced off again. In traditional renderers, this behavior is not calculated. When you add a light, it casts light onto the other objects and that's it, everything that is in shadow will be black (see first image on the right).

So you have to add more lights to brighten up these dark parts etc... In Vray, because light bounces of surfaces, the shadowed parts are not completly black, some of the bounced light will reach these parts to brighten it up. This makes up for extremely realistic lighting. The second image is with global illumination turned on. Notice that the light hits the teapot and floor, bounces of and illuminates each other. It even reveales some small teapots that were not visible at all in the first image!

You have the choice between various methods of calculating the global illumination, depending on the quality and speed you're after, or if it's a still or an animation you're creating.

Calculating global illumination is very heavy on the CPU, but Vray has loads of clever optimizations built in to speed things up. You have full control over the speed vs quality trade off.

Vray Features - Depth of field

Vray can also mimic real world camera properties, one of these is depth of field. Objects out of focus will become more blurry, and of course like everything else, you have full control over every property that defines the DOF. Vray even has a special camera, that will give you the same options as in real world camera's so you can control the image exposure and DOF with things like shutter speed, film ISO, aperture etc...

Vray Features - Fur generator

Vray fur is a special object type which lets you place fur strands on any type of geometry. The fur is not heavy on the viewport as it is generated at rendertime (like with the displacement map). Fur can be used for thins like hair, grass, cool looking trees, rugs or even a cactus.