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Vray 3.0 Interface : Explained

In this tutorial, we go about explaining every single Chaos Group V-ray 3.0 setting in detail. With this tutorial you will have a much great understand of the V-ray rendering engine. Its a great read for beginner and pros alike!

If you are having trouble configuring V-ray, optimizing your V-ray render times, or have a huge scene where the render time is just taking too long, then have a look at this free tutorial :
Lets get started!

Assign Vray Render

If you just received Vray or are new to max, remember you need to set Vray as the current renderer before you can access its settings.
1. Open the render scene dialog box.
2. Expand the Assign Renderer rollout.
3. Click the box for the Production render shown in red.
4. Select Vray from the list.

VRAY Frame Buffer

The Vray frame buffer is a cool feature of Vray. Basically it allows you to render your images in a different window other than the default rendered frame window of 3DS MAX. Also it has some features that the rendered frame window does not.

VRAY Frame Buffer

VRAY Global Switches

Lots of important things here. By checking or un-checking the boxes you can easily enable or disable many of Vray’s key features.
Note: I often use this section to globally control displacement, lighting and the override material.
To assign an override material simply drag a Vray material into the box that says None.

Vray global

VRAY Image Sampler

Here you can choose the type of Image Sampler as well as the type of anti-aliasing filter.
Note: For the most part I use the default settings here (Adaptive Subdivision with area filter)

VRAY Image Sampler

VRAY Caustics

Vray Global Illumination (GI)

This is where all the magic happens. I typically will use the default Irradiance Map (IR Map) for primary bounces and light Cache for secondary bounces.
Notice you also have some options for post processing and GI caustics.

Global Illumination

Vray Irradiance Map (IR MAP)

The IR map is one of the methods VRAY uses to calculate global illumination. You can pick from any of the pre-defined presets or manually enter settings for a custon IR map.
Suggested IR map settings
Test Renders:
Min Rate: -5
Max Rate: -3
HSph subdivs: 30
Interp samples: 25
Production Renders:
High preset is usually good enough for me usually.
Mode: For stills, single frame is fine but for animations, Add to current map or Incremental add to current map works well and speeds up the IR map calculation.
Under options I like to have show calc phase checked just so I can visually see the IR map calculation.
Note: If you plan to not use an IR map in your GI calculation, these settings wil not be available. For example if you have QMC for primary and Light cache for secondary, this rollout will be replace with a QMC settings rollout followed by a LC settings rollout.
VRAY Caustics
Use this area to control the VRAY caustics in your scene.
Caustics In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface.

VRAY Irradiance Map

light cache

VRAY Environment

This is definitely an important rollout. It your environment is to high it can cause your scene to look washed out. Too low can cause it to look dull. I find that .3 works well in most cases of course that all depends on your scene.
Note: Environment light does not pass though geometry unless the geometry is transparent.
If you want to use HDRI lighting simply drag the V-ray HDRI from the material editor into the open slots (none buttons)

VRAY Environment

Vray Camera

Here you have global control over all the V-ray settings.

vray camera

Vray System

There are lots of useful options in this rollout. For the most part I stick with the default settings.
Notable Settings:
Render region division: changes the bucket size. (the box that draws the pixels at render time)
Region sequence: The path the buckets take when rendering the image. I prefer top to bottom but there are many options.
Frame Stamp: enabling this automatically embeds useful information at the bottom of your image such as V-ray version, filename, frame #, render time etc.
Object Settings: use this to enable or disable Vray features for specific pieces of geometry.
Note: this can also be accessed by selecting geometry, right clicking in the viewport and choosing V-ray properties.

Well that explains almost every important V-ray settings panel.
We hope you learned from this tutorial or found it useful.

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Vray Tips

Vray tips before you start to learn Vray

Vrender rendering company services1. “Correct” geometry

It is necessary to stick to some rules in the process of modeling in order that your rendering scene took less time and you received better results. Otherwise, you may face a number of challenges like undesirable artifacts in the final image.

Use the smallest possible number of polygons. Every extra polygon increases the file size of the scene, wastes the RAM and video card resources to its display, and requires more time to render the scene.

vray mesh normal

Polygons’ structure must be “correct”. Ideally, all polygons must be squares. This result in following: do not use the standard “boolean” object, because after its application you receive many polygons-triangles with very sharp angle.

There should be no open edges. If the geometry is not closed, i.e., the net contains holes, Vray will take into account the internal space when calculating lighting, which will increase the rendering time. There will also be dark spaces in the grid gaps (shadows).

Polygons must not overlap or coincide with each other, as Vray does not understand which of the polygons are considered basic and should be colored and which must be put on the background. As a result, it mixes colors (materials) of both (all) grounds with an unpredictable result.

vray mesh 3d rendering

If possible, use single objects. Vray more accurately calculates the shadows in places of fracture of grounds if these grounds belong to the same object, and all the vertices are weld.

Convert all the geometry in the editable poly. Get rid of the long hierarchies of modifiers. Each modifier uses memory, and therefore increases the time spent on rendering and calculating the result of the geometry’s change and display of totals and time for rendering.

2. Proper lighting

Always try to use systems of physical lighting, close to the real one, such as Daylight System (system of day lighting), as well as a bunch of VRaySun and VRaySky. Use HDRI to simulate immersion of objects in the environment, as the light sources in interiors use photometric with IES profiles. This will add realism to the scene, as in this case, the actual algorithms for calculating the light information will be used during rendering. Don’t forget about the gamma correction of the image! When gamma is equal to 2.2, colors in 3ds Max will be displayed correctly.

3. Textures

The texture size must correspond to the size of the model on final rendering. Use the textures with higher resolution only if you paint the big picture with a close-up. If the texture is assigned to the small object at the background, it may be small.

If possible, use one texture for different materials, changing its in color and tone as required, in the Output tab.

When using a large number of high-resolution textures, your scene can be very slow and rendered long. In the worst case, Vray can just give up to paint it.

To enhance the realism, Bump maps (with irregularities) and Specular (mirror reflections) must be added to materials, because in reality, each object has its relief and reflectivity. There will not be a problem to create these cards from the original texture – superficial knowledge of Adobe Photoshop will be enough.

4. The scale of the scene

To receive renderings of decent quality, scale units in the scene are of paramount importance. Most often, the work in centimeters is the best solution. This allows not only creating more accurate models, but also helps in calculating the lighting and reflections.

vray render tips

5. Visualization options

To calculate the Indirect Illumination, use a bunch of Irradiance Map + Light Cache. This is much faster than using a bunch of Irradiance Map + Brute Force (set by default). The resulting image is less “noisy” and is painted much faster, if in the light sources of VrayLight type are selected with “Store with Irradiance Map” option.

Good shadow quality can be achieved by setting the number of sub-divs in VRay’s lights settings to 15-25. In addition, always use VRay physical camera, with the help of which you can receive the full control over the presentation of light on the scene.

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