Intro to V-Ray for 3ds Max: Learn from an Official Mentor

Vray Render Settings

In this section we are going to discuss

-what Global Illumination is

-how to create some render presets to use in your projects going forward.

and how to use the Vray Render History to compare renders and render times.

Global Illumination

When a light hits an object it doesn't just stop.

It bounces off of that surface and keeps on bouncing.

The light picks up color information from that object and keeps bouncing.

This creates Indirect Illumination.

Vray uses the irradiance Map to calculate the Indirect Illumination.

We use this as the main way to fill our scenes with light.

This is an example of an image with only direct light from a light and this is an example with Global Illumination turned on.

How to turn on Global Illumination

To turn on Indirect Illumination lets open up the render settings (F10) and go to GI.

GI should be on by default.

What we want to do is set up some draft settings. This will produce rougher, but quicker results.

Before we begin click on V-Ray and confirm it is on Bucket.

Irradiance Map

Lets change this primary engine to Irradience Map and change the preset to low.

Light Cache

We will use Light Cache as the secondary engine. This dictates what happens after the light hits a surface for the first time.

Light Cache produces good results and is pretty quick too.

Lets bring the light cache subdivs down to 300. So we can get some quick results for our draft settings.

Show Calc Phase.

In both of these you will notice I have show calc. phase turned on.

Lets turn these off and run a render to demonstrate what they do.

I like to keep that on so we can see that everything is working in the calculation phases rather than waiting for the final render and realising that the camera is behind a wall or that there is a problem.

Prepasses

As we are rendering you will notice the pre pass task.

The number off pre passes is dictated by the Min and Max rate in the Irradiance map.

So on the low setting we had 2 passes

If we switch this to medium we have 3 passes

and high we have 4 passes.

As you may have guessed the more passes the better the final image.

Saving our Render Settings

Lets turn our preset back to Low. Now we have our Draft Settings we can save them so we can load them in other scenes.

To do this all we need to do is head up to here and click the drop down next to Preset.

Go to save. Name it Draft and hit save. On the Select Presets Categories we only want to save the V-Ray Next settings.

If we save the other ones they will start effecting the render size and change the environment, which we don't want.

Saving High render settings

Let change the preset to High and the Light Cache Subdivs to 1000 and hit render.

Lets Save this Preset as High with only Vray selected.

History

I quickly want to show you the Render History inside the Vray Frame buffer.

If you click on this H down here you will get a new side bar. Turn it on here.

In the history settings you can choose the path where the images will save. I have mine set to desktop.

Render the with the High settings on.

If you hit save you will see the current render added to the history along with some other details such as time taken.

Load up the Draft settings and render it.

With the top render selected I am going to hit A and then if I select the second render I will hit B

Then when we hit this A/B button we can compare the renders.

You can also double click on each image to view it.

So that is how Global Illumination works, how you can save render presets and use the Vray Frame Buffer History.