V-RAY MATERIAL

SETTINGS
author:
Wouter Wynen

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V-RAY MATERIAL SETTINGS
by:
Wouter Wynen

February 2006
INTRODUCTION
The basic material settings tutorial explains almost all mate-
rial 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.

The vray version I used for this tutorial is 1.47.03.

V-Ray Material Settings 5

1. Set render settings
Open the render settings dialog and do the following:
- set vray as the renderer
- output size to 480*360px
- 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 50*50 px

2. Create a test scene

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 pos-
sible..

6 V-Ray Material Settings

3. Open the material editor
Open the material editor by pressing “m” on the
keyboard.

4. Load a V-ray material

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 mate-
rial 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.

V-Ray Material Settings 7

6. Second material
I Repeat the previous steps to make a very
light grey material. Rename this material
“groundplane” and assign it to the ground-
plane and small teapot.You should have
something like in the image on the left.

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 V-Ray Material Settings

8. Reflections
Select the orange material in the mate-
rial 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 color.

9. Render
Hit render. Notice the teapot becomes very reflective.

Try a very dark grey, and very light grey too to see the difference.

V-Ray Material Settings 9

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 con-
trols 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 reflec-
tion can exist and so on...

10 V-Ray Material Settings

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 reflec-

tions 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 there-
fore usefull to change this to
another color than black, some-
thing more appropriate for the
scene for example.

12. Max depth

Reset the exit color to black and play with the max depth param-
eter 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.

V-Ray Material Settings 11

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).

12 V-Ray Material Settings

15. Teapot 2

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.

V-Ray Material Settings 13

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 glossi-

ness=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 glossi-
ness controls the smoothness of the blurry
reflections. Change it to 20 and render. The
result is much smoother.

Note that 8 subdivs means 8*8=64 sam-

ples, 20 subdivs means 20*20=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 subdivi-
sion AA, you can get away with much lower
subdivs values (3 to 10). The adaptive AA
smooths outs much of the noise from
the low subdivs. If you have many blurry
reflections in the scene, adaptive QMC will
always be faster.

14 V-Ray Material Settings

19. QMC settings: smooth the blurry reflections even more
If you want the noise to ing the noise threshold
be even smoother, in- to for example 0.05. Note
creasing the subdivs will that the QMC sampler
not always help. Don’t go settings will also affect
higher than 40 trying to irradiance map calcula-
reduce the noise. A bet- tion and DOF, MB, Area
ter solution can be found shadows, etc... So reduc-
in the QMC sampler set- ing noise th will not only
tings. improve glossy effects,
but also the GI quality
Open the render set- etc...
tings dialog and go to
the QMC sampler rollout. For now, change the
Change the noise thresh- noise threshold back to
old to 0.001 and render 0.005. While we’re here,
again. The noise will be go to the system roll-
completely gone now, out and enable the vray
but at the cost of longer stamp (delete all text
rendertimes. except the rendertime
part).You will see speed
The QMC sampler set- differences better that
tings give you an easy way.
way to speed up test ren-
ders, by simply increas-

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 high-
lights to the vraymaterial.

Note that these highlights will only appear if you use

lights in your scene. The skylight will not generate
highlights.

V-Ray Material Settings 15

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 vis-
ible in reflections.

16 V-Ray Material Settings

23. Highlight glossiness linked

By default, highlight glossiness setting is linked

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 high-

light glossiness (like 1.0 for
blurry reflection means no
blurry reflection).

V-Ray Material Settings 17

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. Mix-
ing sharp reflections with high-
light glossiness creates weird
unrealistic materials. Just try it.
Set highlight gloss to 0.75 and
refl gloss to 1.0 and hit render.

Altough 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 differ-
ence between lights or what-
ever 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.

18 V-Ray Material Settings

27. Map slots

Next to all reflection spotlight and set skylight

parameters is a map slot. back to 1.0.
This means you can con-
trol reflection color, refl Hit render.
glossiness, highlight glossi-
ness and fresnel value by You will get something
a map. like in my example. All
black parts of the map
For example the reflec- will be non reflective, all
tion slot. Click it and white parts are 100%
choose “checker” from reflective.
the list. Make it visible in
the viewport so you can Try the same map in the
see if it maps the object other slots too. But take
correctly. care, white for glossi-
ness means a value of 1.0,
Set all other reflection so not blurry, and black
settings back to default means very blurry (value
(medium grey, no fresnel, 0.0 for glossy).
all glossy=1.0, trace re-
flections on). Delete the

V-Ray Material Settings 19

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.

The next section is about refraction

20 V-Ray Material Settings

1. Start a new scene
Open 3d studio max and start a new scene.
Open the render settings dialog and do the following:
- set vray as the renderer
- output size to 480*360px
- 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 = 20
- environment:
- skylight pure white color
- reflection/refraction pure black, 1.0 multiplier
- system:
- render region division 50*50 px
- frame stamp: delete all except the rendertime part

2. Create the testscene

I suggest using the same kind of
object as I did. A max teapot is
not good now because the mesh
has holes in it, it’s not ‘watertight’
and you don’t want that on re-
fractive objects. I made this modi-
fied torus knot because it will be
an interesting shape to test with,
because of all the curves and
thin/thick areas.

If you want, use the exact same

settings as I did.

V-Ray Material Settings 21

3. Create materials

Make a medium dark blue vray-

material for the groundplane, and
a very light grey vraymaterial for
the torus knot and assign them
to the corresponding objects.

Hit render, you should get some-

thing like my example on the left.

4. Refraction parameters
Go to the white mate- IOR (index of refrac-
rial and take a look at tion) of the material. A
the refraction param- high IOR means a lot of
eters. Refraction refers bending, IOR=1.0 means
too light rays getting the rays will not bend.
bent when going from
one medium to another. The vray material has all
For example light travels options available to cre-
through air, then hits ate any kind of refractive
a glass object and the material. As you can see,
ray gets bent under a many options are similar
certain angle. Then this to the reflection param-
ray will travel further eters.
through the glass, and
eventually will leave it at First, change the refract
a certain point, getting color to a medium grey
bent again. color.

How much a ray gets

bent depends on the

22 V-Ray Material Settings

5. Refraction color
Render the image.You will notice the object has a trans-
parent look. The grey refraction color means it’s about
50% transparent.

6. Diffuse color
Change the diffuse to black and render again. The result is pretty
straightforward.

V-Ray Material Settings 23

7. Refraction color
Change the refraction color to pure white
and render. The result looks weird...

Because now the object is 100% transpar-

ent, the diffuse color has no effect at all
anymore. The black regions are rays that
get refracted to the environment color,
which is black.

8. Adjust reflections
The previous step looks weird, because usually materials with
such refractive properties are also reflective. If you set the
reflection to pure white, and check fresnel reflections, the ma-
terial looks a lot better. The material you created now is the
basic setup for clear glass in vray.

24 V-Ray Material Settings

9. Create an environment
The rendering looks very boring, because the only thing
to refract/reflect is the groundplane and the black envi-
ronment color.

Create a large, thin box and position it more or less like

I did.

10.VrayLightMtl

The goal is to turn this

box into a light source.
An easy way to do this,
is by using the special
VrayLightMaterial. Click
the get material button
and choose VrayLightMtl
from the list. Assign the
material to the box and
set the multiplier to 8.0

V-Ray Material Settings 25

11. Adjust skylight

Hit render. It’s way too

bright, because our sky-
light is still active. Set the
skylight multiplier to 0.0
and render again. If it’s
too bright or too dark,
you need to play with the
vraylightmaterial multiplier
until it looks ok.

You can clearly see tha the

light is coming from our
big box now, and the light
source also reflects in the
torus knot. The contrast
between very bright light
and black environment is
very good for rendering
glass or metal like objects.

26 V-Ray Material Settings

12. Refractive GI caustics

The light coming from the tive GI caustics. and set the preset to custom.
box is not direct light as with Change the min/max rate to
a max spotlight. It is actually You’ll see the shadows are -4/-2 to speed up rendering.
treated as first bounce GI (just much darker. The GI light is Note that the GI will be more
like the vray skylight). If you now unable to pass trough the blurred now, but since we’re
would turn off GI and render, transparent object (there are only testing, it doesn’t matter.
there will be no light at all. no GI caustics). Caustics are
noting more than refracted/re- There will be more on caustics
Because of this, it is important flected light. later on in the tutorial. For
that you leave the refractive GI now remember that you need
caustics in the indirect illumi- To continue, turn refractive to enable the GI caustics if you
nation rollout ON. Try render- GI caustics On again. Also go want GI to pass trough trans-
ing this scene without refrac- to the irradiance map rollout parent objects.

V-Ray Material Settings 27

13. Max depth

Increase the max depth parameter in the

glass material to 10, both for reflections
and refractions.You’ll notice a bit more
variation in reflection/refraction. In some
cases increasing the max depth really
helps to make your glass more realistic.
It doesn’t matter much here because our
environment is also black, just like the exit
color when max depth is reached. In col-
ored environments the max depth effect
will be more noticable.

To continue, reset the max depth to 5

14. Options: reflect on backside

Go to the options rollout of the glass ma-

terial, and turn on the ‘reflect on backside’
option. This will allow the inside of the
surface to also reflect the environment.
When rendering glass, you should leave
this option turned on, it generates very
nice and realistic inner reflections. This
also increases rendertime of course...

To continue the tutorial, turn it OFF again.

28 V-Ray Material Settings

15. Glossiness
The glossiness parameter is similar to the one for reflec-
tions. It’s use is to blur the refractions. This is one of the
most time consuming settings, rendertimes will go really
high if you use high subdivs...

Try a value of 0.8 with 8 subdivs.You’ll see that the

blurry refractions are very noisy due to the low subdivs.
But you get the idea.

Turn the glossiness back to 1.0

V-Ray Material Settings 29

16. Index Of Refraction
Set the IOR to 1.0 and render. The torus is gone! This is
because no rays get bent with this IOR value. Because
fresnell IOR is linked to the refraction IOR, this is also
set to 1.0, which means the object becomes non reflec-
tive too. The refraction color is pure white, so the rays
don’t become tinted either! All this makes the torus
dissappear.

17. IOR
Unlink the fresnel IOR, so that its value is set to 1.6 again.
Hit render.

The thing you see now is purely created by reflections.

18. IOR
Set the refraction IOR to 1.1 and render again.

Each material has its own IOR value. Typical glass values
are around 1.6. Do a google search for other common
used material IOR’s.

Render a few tests with different IOR values.

Reset the IOR to 1.6 to continue.

30 V-Ray Material Settings

19. Exit color
Like with reflection, there’s also an exit
color for refractions. After a ray has re-
fracted the max depth number of times,
this exit color will come in to play. tick the
checkbox and give it a flashy green color.
Hit render.You can clearly see what parts
of the image go over the max depth num-
ber (5).

Make the exit color black again.

20. Fog color

The fog color is used to tint the refractions with a certain
color. Thicker areas will become darker (more colored) than
thinner areas. Try a light red color for fog and render.

The material is very dark, but the thinner parts show some
transparancy.

The fog color and fog multiplier are actually an absortion

control. The light looses its energy while traveling through
the material. The longer it travels, the more energy will be
absorbed by the object. That’s why thinner parts will remain
lighter than the thicker parts.

V-Ray Material Settings 31

21. Fog multiplier
Change the fog multiplier to 0.05 and render again. The fog effect
is much weaker now, letting more light pass through, resulting in a
lighter material.

You should experiment with different fog

color/multiplier ratios. For example a light
but very saturated color with high multiplier,
or a dark unsaturated color with a very low
multiplier.You can get very different effects
by playing with this relationship.

22. Refraction color

You probably equally coloured The saturation
think, what’s (the dark areas of the color has
the use of the are refractions a huge impact
refraction color of the black envi- on the look of
then?? ronment!). the refraction.
A very dark
Well, set fog I usually use pure saturated color
options back white for refract will look very
to default, and color and play similar to a very
choose a red only with the dark unsaturated
refract color. Hit fog options. But color in the
render. experiment with color swatch, but
different refract it will be com-
The glass is color/fog set- pletely different
coloured too, tings to see what when used for
but without they do. Remem- refract color or
the absorbtion ber, dark refract fog color. Just
effect. Thin and color means less try it!
thik areas are transparency.

32 V-Ray Material Settings

23. IOR=1.0 mixed with fog

Adjust refraction settings to the ones on

the right. By mixing an IOR of 1.0 with fog
color, you get a waxy kind of material.

24. Glossiness + IOR=1.0 + fog

Adjust the glossiness to 0.75 and the sub-

divs to 16 and render again. The material
looks a bit like reflective wax.

Turn glossiness to 1.0 again and IOR to 1.6

before continuing.

V-Ray Material Settings 33

25. Affect shadows
An important option we didn’t touch yet, it the affect
shadows checkbox. It will have no effect in our test
scene because there is no direct light, only GI light. The
affect shadows options is only used with direct light
rays.

Therefore, we will replace the light box with a Vray

Arealight. Go to the create panel and choose lights,
and from the dropdown menu choose Vray.

25.Vraylight
Click and drag in a viewport to create the vray rect-
angular light. Make the size the same as our box, and
position it in the same way. After that, hide the box.
Set the vraylight settings as in the image on the right
(click to enlarge). The multiplier should be equal to
the multiplier of the vraylightmaterial you used on
the lightbox.

We now created a lightsource exactly the same as

the lightbox, but it will cast raytraced area shadows.

26. Affect shadows

In the glass material, turn ON affect shadows and hit
render.

The image should look like mine. As you can see, it

casts green shadows. This is because the affect shad-
ows option and fog color is used.

Rendertime increases because the shadows are

raytraced.

34 V-Ray Material Settings

27. Affect shadows OFF
Turn affect shadows OFF and render
again. Notice the shadows are differ-
ent now. This is because the GI caus-
tics come back into play. This image
is the physically correct one! When
you have the affect shadow option
turned ON, no refractive GI caustics
are computed for that material, they
are automatically turned off by V-ray.
The affect shadow option is nothing
more than a ‘fake caustics’ option. So
imagine that when using the affect
shadow option, refractive caustics
would not be turned off automatical-
ly, you would get a fake caustic effect
AND a real GI caustic effect on top
of each other! That’s why vray au-
tomatically turns off GI caustics for
materials that have the affect shadow
option turned on. THIS IS VERY IM-
PORTANT TO UNDERSTAND!

Use the affect shadows option when

you want light to pass trough re-
fractive objects, and you don’t want
to enable refractive GI caustics, or
when you don’t use GI at all, or
when you’re using Max lights. Max
lights will never produce refractive
GI caustics! So if you want the light
of max lights to pass trough refrac-
tive objects, you MUST use the affect
shadow option.

The second image on the right

is rendered with an omni light as
the only lightsource, and the affect
shadows option is turned off. Notice
the black shadows, no light passes
through the material.

V-Ray Material Settings 35

The third image has affect in your objects. Max lights
shadows turned on. There are invisible to camera and
is a fake caustic effect but reflection/refraction.
it’s nowhere near physically
correct. So to summarize:
1. If you use only object
Note that the vray light is a lights and vraylights and you
special light. Altough it casts want caustics:
direct light just like max - enable GI caustics
lights do, they do produce - use good quality GI
GI caustics (max lights settings to make sure the
don’t!). Normally only first caustics look sharp.
bounce GI light (like the
light coming from skylight 2. If you use max lights and
and object lights like our you want the light to pass
lightbox) produces GI through refractive materials:
caustics. - use the affect shadow
option for a fake caustic
If you want real caustics effect
when using max lights, you - OR enable caustics in
need to enable caustics in the caustics rollout and play
the caustics rollout (=pho- with the settings for photon
ton mapped caustics). Don’t mapped caustics.
do this right now, these
caustics controls need a 3. If you use vraylights and
tutorial of their own... Just you want photon mapped
remember that you can get caustics:
nice caustics effects by us- - Disable affect shadows
ing GI and vraylights much - Disable GI caustics
easier. - Enable caustics in the
caustics rollout and play
That is why I prefer using with the settings.
the lightbox or vraylight
over the max lights.You
simply check the GI caustics
option and you don’t have
to care about other caustic
settings all over the place!
Drawback is that you need
to have good GI settings
for the caustics to be sharp,
resulting in longer render-
times. Another advantage
of vraylights or objectlights
is that they reflect/refract

36 V-Ray Material Settings

28. Final material
Use the material settings as in the image on the right. I low-
ered the fog multiplier a bit, and upped the max depth values
both to 8.

29. Final image setup

In the irradiance map settings, change everything as in the
image on the right. Also go to the QMC sampler rollout and
change noise threshold to 0.001 for maximum quality.

V-Ray Material Settings 37

30. Final image
Render the image, it should look something like mine.

Notice the nice caustics and area shadows, controlled by the

IR map settings. No caustics were enabled in hard to find
places, no time consuming raytraced shadows were needed.

31. Comparison with QMC GI

As a test, I rendered As you can see,
the image with QMC in the areas with
GI instead of irradi- much lighting detail,
ance map for first the QMC GI image
bounce. QMC GI is looks better (=more
not an approximate physically correct)
method like IR map than the IR map
with its undersam- one. But it takes 10
pling algorithm. QMC minutes compared
GI calculates the GI to 1m24s for the IR
without compromise, map version... If you
every light sample want more detailed
gets equal attention. GI with IR map, you
So it’s a good test to need to edit some of
compare how well the IR map settings.
the GI with IR map is
computed.

38 V-Ray Material Settings

32. Better IR map settings
This last image is rendered with optimized IR map settings. As
you can see, this comes very close to the QMC GI example,
but without any noise on the floor. I will explain how to opti-
mize the IR map settings in an upcoming tutorial.

V-Ray Material Settings 39

 This is a new section

1. Translucency

Transparent materials like clear glass or water will let

light travel through it undistorted (except for the bend-
ing due to the IOR). Translucent materials will scatter
the light when traveling through it. For example stained
glass, wax, grapes, etc...
Stained glass can be made with vray by using the refrac-
tion glossiness parameter, but wax or grapes for exam-
ple will need the translucent controls. When to use the
translucent controls or not, is a but unclear.

Usually translucency is used for really opaque materi-

als in which light can penetrate a certain distance, if it’s
strong enough. Examples are wax, human skin, orange
juice, milk etc...You cannot see through these materi-
als, but light will be able to go through it partially and
scatter around. For example when you hold a strong
flashlight under your hand, the other side will turn red
(blood!) and you can see where your bones are located
because they block the light.

40 V-Ray Material Settings

2. Translucency in Vray
Because the translucency controls are a bit
strange in behavior, I will not try to explain
them... More technical explanations can be found
in the online documents, and I believe the vray
team is working on a translucency tutorial...

You can get very similar results with extremely

different combinations of settings, but when
seen under changing lighting conditions, they will
react very differently.

The translucency controls also depend on the

refraction glossiness and fog settings. They work
together, and especially the fog color is a very
sensitive setting that will have a very drastic ef-
fect on the material. One thing you should never
do, is using colors that have one of their compo-
nents set to 255!!!

I usually leave the translucency color pure white,

the refracion color a grayscale value and then
control the material color with the diffuse and
fog color. Then with the fog multiplier and trans-
lucency light multiplier create various effects of
light passing through.

3. Skin
Here’s a skin material that you can use
to study the settings. Play with it and try
to understand what effect each param-
eter has on the final look. Note that
because of the use of both reflection
and refraction glossiness, this material
will render very slowly, especially with
these high subdivs values.

V-Ray Material Settings 41

4. Reset all settings from the previous page
In the end of the previous page, all settings were
changed for the final image. We need to set it back to
test render values now.

Open the render settings dialog and do the following:

- output size to 480*360px
- 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 = 20
- environment:
- skylight pure white color
- reflection/refraction pure black, 1.0 multiplier
- system:
- render region division 50*50 px
- frame stamp: delete all except the rendertime part

5. Create a chrome material

Create a new vraymaterial and adjust the settings as in

the image on the right. This is a basic chrome material
setup. Assign this material to the torus knot object and
do a quick test render. It should look like my testimage.

Now change the reflection glossiness to 0.7 before you

continue.

42 V-Ray Material Settings

6. BRDF
In this rollout you can
choose between blinn, phong
or ward shader. The effect of
these three types is noticable
the most when using glossy
reflections. Render the scene
with the three different shad-
ers. The settings affect how
the highlights will look like.

Ward is commonly used for

metallic materials.

7. Anisotropy

Anisotropic reflections are reflections

stretched in some direction.You see this
often on brushed metals, for example the
bottom of cooking pans. The anisotropy set-
ting controls the shape of the highlight.

The torus knot is not the best example, but

you’ll get the point.

Change the anisotropy setting to -0.6 and

render the image. There’s also a huge dif-
ference between phong/blinn/ward here.
Try some other values too (like +0.6 for
example).

The XYZ axis option allows you to change

the direction of the reflections, or you can
use a mapping channel instead. The rotation
parameter rotates the reflections...

V-Ray Material Settings 43

8. Options rollout First set anisotropy We used this option
to 0.0 again, and already on page 2
also refl glossiness of this tutorial. If
to 1.0. turned on, reflec-
tions for back facing
Trace reflections surfaces will be
and trace refrac- computed too.
tions is pretty
simple, they simple Use irradiance map:
turn of calculation if you turn this off,
of either two. the irradiance map
will not be used
The cutoff param- on this material.
eter is a treshold Instead, the GI on
value for vray to this material will
trace reflections be computed with
any further or not. QMC GI. This can
Try a value of 0,7 be usefull if the ir-
on the current im- radiance map blurs
age. Increasing the out small shadow
threshold can speed details on certain
9. Maps rollout up rendering when objects.
you are using lots
The maps rollout sums Displacement is like of reflections in the Treat glossy rays as
up all different texture bump, but instead of fake scene. GI rays: please refer
maps. Almost all maps rendering it, the actual to the manual.
can be accessed in the mesh is deformed to Double sided: please Energy preservation
basic parameters rollout create the irregularities. refer to the manual. mode: please refer
(the small squares next Refer to the manual for to the manual.
to the parameters), but extensive tutorials and Reflect on backside.
some will appear only examples about displace-
here. ment.

These are the last four Opacity is the same as

maps: bump, displace, you are used to in stan-
opacity and environment. dard max materials.

Bump allows you to ren- Environment slot allows

der irregularities in the you to use different re-
surface by using a map. flect/refract environment
Dark areas in the map for each material.
are ‘low’ areas, bright
areas are ‘high’ areas.

44 V-Ray Material Settings

10. Reflect/refract interpolation
These rollouts contain parameters to control reflect/re-
fract interpolation. These are only needed if you ticked
the ‘use interpolation’ checkbox in the basic parameters
rollout. I don’t recommend using interpolation for glossy
effects. If you do want to use them, please refer to the
manual for more detailed information.

V-Ray Material Settings 45

46 V-Ray Material Settings
About the author

Wouter Wynen has studied product development for

5 years at the university in Antwerp, Belgium. During
these years, his intrest in 3D modeling and visualisation
grew more and more. In the end, it even overpowered
the intrest in product design.

After graduation, he founded the company Aversis, of-

fering 3D viz & webdesign services.

V-Ray Material Settings 47

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