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Vray Basic material settings
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Before you start The basic material settings tutorial explains almost all material parameters of the Vray material. If you are new to Vray, please read the basic render settings tutorial first, so you can start this tutorial in the correct way. Also make sure you have basic 3DS Max skills, since Vray is a 3D Studio Max plugin, it relies on Max's functions a lot too. The Vray version I used for this tutorial is 1.47.03.
1. Set render settings Open the render settings dialog and do the following: - set Vray as the renderer - output size to 480360px - global switches: turn off default lights - image sampler to adaptive QMC - antialising filter "mitchell-netravali" - indirect illumination ON - Secondary bounces multiplier to 0,85 - Irradiance map settings: - "low" preset - hsph subdivs = 30 - environment: - skylight pure white color - reflection/refraction pure white, 1,2 multiplier - system: render region division 5050 px
2. Create a testscene Keep it simple. A teapot is a good object for test renders, because of its shape. That's why it was one of the first 3d objects out there! Make two teapots on a larger plane if you want to follow this tutorial as close as possible.
3. Open the material editor Open the material editor by pressing "m" on the keyboard.
4. Load a Vraymaterial Press the "standard" button in the material editor and select VRayMtl from the list. Double click or drag and drop it into one of the material slots.
5. Rename and color Rename the material "teapot1". The first parameter in the material is the diffuse slot. This is the main color of the material. The square next to it is a map slot, you can load bitmaps or other kind of maps here to texture the material. For now, simply make the color swatch a light orange color.
6. Second material Repeat the previous steps to make a very light grey material. Rename this material "groundplane" and assign it to the groundplane and small teapot. You should have something like in the image on the right.
7. First render Hit render! Your image should look similar to mine, if you have set all render properties as in step 1. Make sure default lights are turned off!!!
8. Reflections Select the orange material in the material editor. Below the diffuse slot are the reflection options of the material. The color swatch next to 'reflect' is the main reflection control. Black means there is no reflection at all, white means the material will become 100% reflective. If you make it red for example, the reflections will be tinted red. First try a medium grey colour.
9. Render Hit render. Notice the teapot becomes very reflective. Try a very dark grey, and very light grey too to see the difference.
10. Max depth Set the reflection color to pure white, and set the max depth parameter to 1 and hit render. You will notice that many areas turn black. The max depth controls how many times a ray can reflect before the calculation stops. Max depth of 1 means only 1 reflection can take place. 2 means a reflection of a reflection can exist and so on...
11. Exit color Leave max depth at 1 and change the exit color to red. Assign this material also to the small teapot. Render again. Now all reflections of reflections turn red instead of black. The max depth is a way to lower rendertimes in scenes with lots of reflective objects. But by lowering the reflections, the exit color will likely come into play. Sometimes it is therefore usefull to change this to another color than black, something more appropriate for the scene for example.
12. Max depth Reset the exit color to black and play with the max depth parameter untill most of the black areas dissappear. Usually you shouldn't go higher than 10. Higher numbers will only waist valuable rendertime for no visual improvement.
13. Fresnel reflections Fresnel reflection is a phenomenon that happens on almost all reflective surfaces. Parts of the surface that point directly at you will reflect less than parts of the surface facing towards you under a greater angle. The amount of the effect is controlled by the IOR of the material. You can find this in the refraction parameters. In real life, the fresnell effect is always linked to this IOR. In Vray however, you can unlink them, setting a different IOR for reflection as for refraction. To do this, click the small L next to the fresnell checkbox. The fresnell IOR box will become available.
14. Fresnel reflections Leave the fresnell IOR at 1.6 and hit render. Notice the middle of the tepot has weaker reflections than the sides. This is the fresnel effect. Lower the fresnel IOR to increase the effect. The lower you go, the less it will reflect in the middle. If you go really high, it will be the same as turning fresnel off (>25).
15. Teapot 2 material Duplicate the orange material, rename it teapot 2 and assign it to the small teapot. Change the diffuse color to a dark red.
16. Reflection glossiness Select the orange material. Change the reflection color back to a medium grey. Turn off fresnell reflections. Change the reflection glossiness from 1.0 to 0.8.
17. Reflection glossiness Hit render. The reflections are very blurry now. This is the effect you get on real objects from very small bumps in the surface. To create this effect in 3D, you could also put a very fine bumpmap in the bumpmap slot. But by using the glossiness parameter instead, rendering will be a lot faster. Play with the glossiness value to see what it does. Glossiness means 'shinyness', so glossiness=1.0 is 100% shiny, lower values are non glossy or blurry reflections. There is much confusion about this, many people will mix up the term glossy with blurry.
18. Smoother blurry reflections The subdivs value beneath the refl glossiness controls the smoothness of the blurry reflections. Change it to 20 and render. The result is much smoother. Note that 8 subdivs means 88=64 samples, 20 subdivs means 2020=400 samples. Doubling the subdivs will take +-4 times longer to render! Make sure you have the AA sampler at adaptive QMC when using high subdivs values!! If you want to use adaptive subdivision AA, you can get away with much lower subdivs values (3 to 10). The adaptive AA smooths outs lots of the noise from the low subdivs. If you have lots of blurry reflections in the scene, adaptive QMC will always be faster.
19. QMC settings: smooth the blurry reflections even more If you want the noise to be even smoother, increasing the subdivs will not always help. Don't go higher than 40 trying to reduce the noise. A better solution can be found in the QMC sampler settings. Open the render settings dialog and go to the QMC sampler rollout. Change the noise threshold to 0.001 and render again. The noise will be completely gone now, but at the cost of longer rendertimes. The QMC sampler settings give you an easy way to speed up test renders, by simply increasing the noise threshold to for example 0.05. Note that the QMC sampler settings will also affect irradiance map calculation and DOF, MB, Area shadows, etc... So reducing noise th will not only improve glossy effects, but also the GI quality etc... For now, change the noise threshold back to 0.005. While we're here, go to the system rollout and enable the Vray stamp (delete all text except the rendertime part). You will see speed differences better that way.
20. Highlight glossiness You probably know 'highlights' from the default max materials. Well, these highlights are nothing more than fake blurry reflections. A highlight is actually a reflection of a bright lightsource. In previous versions of Vray, there was no way to render these fake highlights with Vraymaterials. At popular demand, the developers brought fake highlights to the Vraymaterial. Note that these highlights will only appear if you use lights in your scene. The skylight will not generate highlights.
21. Create a spotlight To see the effect of highlight glossiness, create a max spotlight directed at the two teapots. Turn down the skylight multiplier to 0.0 for this test. We don't want any light to come from the sky. In the spotlight settings, turn on shadows and choose Vray shadows in the shadow type list.
22. Render Render the scene. The white part on the teapot is the highlight glossiness, the fake blurry reflection. A max spotlight is invisible to the camera and to reflections, but with this highlight glossiness parameter you can make it visible in reflections.
23. Highlight glossiness linked By default, highlight glossiness setting is linkes to the refl glossiness parameter. this means that when you use refl glossiness and you have lights in the scene, the highlight glossiness will appear too.
24. Unlink it! Press the L button next to the highlight glossiness parameter. The highlight glossiness value becomes visible and is set to 1.0 Hit render.... the highlight is gone! A value of 1.0 means no highlight glossiness (like 1.0 for blurry reflection means no blurry reflection).
25. Highlight glossiness only? If you want only the highlight glossiness to appear, and not the reflection glossiness, you will have to use a little trick. Logically you would think that 1.0 for refl gloss will turn them off. This is true, but reflections will still appear, only sharp. Mixing sharp reflections with highlight glossiness creates weird unrealistic materials. Just try it. Set highlight gloss to 0.75 and refl gloss to 1.0 and hit render. Although you may like this material, it is not realistic. It is reflecting the light source in a blurry way, and the rest of the environment in a sharp way! That's impossible in real life, as reflections don't make a difference between lights or whatever other objects.
26. Turn off reflections So to be able to render highlight gloss only, you need to turn off reflections for the material. This is possible in Vray, but the setting is hidden in the options rollout of the Vraymaterial. Deselect 'trace reflections' and render again. Note that now the material has only the fake glossy reflections. This material looks like a standard max material with some hightlights on it. This is an unrealistic material, because it reflects the light source, but not the rest of the environment.
27. Map slots Next to all reflection parameters is a map slot. This means you can control reflection color, refl glossiness, highlight glossiness and fresnel value by a map. For example the reflection slot. Click it and choose "checker" from the list. Make it visible in the viewport so you can see if it maps the object correctly. Set all other reflection settings back to default (medium grey, no fresnel, all glossy=1.0, trace reflections on). Delete the spotlight and set skylight back to 1.0. Hit render. You will get something like in my example. All black parts of the map will be non reflective, all white parts are 100% reflective. Try the same map in the other slots too. But take care, white for glossiness means a value of 1.0, so not blurry, and black means very blurry (value 0.0 for glossy).
28. Use interpolation There is one checkbox left in the reflection parameters that I didn't explain. The 'use interpolation' checkbox. This can be used to speed up the calculation of glossy reflections. It works more or less the same way as the Irradiance map for calculating GI. When you check this box, you can adjust interploation settings in one of the other Vraymaterial rollouts. I will not explain these settings, because I don't recommend using the interpolation for glossy reflections. They rarely look good, and when you want quality, they take almost as long as the standard glossy reflections. If you want to know more about interpolation, please refer to the manual.
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