Lesson 4

The forth lesson covers the wide range of materials and textures that come with V-Ray

• Library Materials – we will see how to fine tune the materials in the V-Ray Materials Library to
match our needs
• New Materials – we demonstrate how to setup some of the most commonly used shaders like
plastics, metals, glass etc.
• Procedural Textures – we will discover some of the procedural textures that come with V-Ray
and see how they can be useful.
• Displacement – we will use displacement mapping to further enhance the way our shaders look
• Export materials to library – we will see how to save and reuse or share materials that we’ve
created

Each section is annotated in the video. You can find scene files with the same names in the Lesson 4
folder. These were made so that you can start at any one of these stages and follow the steps in the
video to the end.

Library Materials
V-Ray for Sketchup comes with an extensive materials library that can be used directly. Since some of
the materials use textures it is necessary for the user to manually set up the tiling of the texture by
either adjusting its size or changing the UV tiling as seen in the video. All materials in the V-Ray
materials library can be edited which allows us to start with a material that is similar to what we need
and then further adjust it to meet our needs.

New Materials
In this section, we will shade our scene starting from scratch and using the Generic V-Ray material.
This is the standard V-Ray Material which allows us to create a wide range of physically accurate
shaders. You can use textures to control most of its settings like diffuse, reflection, refraction,
glossiness etc. and add bump and displacement mapping. We will create materials like Paint, Metal
and Glass and in the process, we you will be able to see how the main parameters of the Generic
material work. The commonly used parameters are:

• Diffuse – this is the diffuse color of the material and it is used to create flat non-reflective like
walls or carpets. Note that most materials in the real world however have at least a bit of
reflectivity
• Reflect – specifies the reflection color of a material. Can be used to create reflective materials
like metals.
 • Use Fresnel – when this checkbox is enabled the reflections depend on the angle at which we
are viewing the surface. This is used in simulating materials that have a thin transparent coat
that also reflects, like plastics or varnished wood. Additionally, most refractive objects like glass
reflect light in this manner. The effect of this parameter also depends on the Index of Refraction
– IOR of a material, which is a physically measured value of how light is refracted by a material.
• Reflection Glossiness – controls the sharpness of the reflection. A value of 1.0 means perfectly
clear reflections (like a mirror). Lower values make the reflections blurrier.
• Refract – specifies the color of the refractions. Note that in order to create materials like glass
you also need to have Fresnel reflections enabled.
• Fog color – this parameter specifies the color of a refractive object inside its volume. It allows us
to simulate the effect where thick refractive objects look less transparent than thin ones.
• Glossiness – specifies the sharpness of refractions. A value of 1.0 means perfect clear glass
refractions and lower values make the refractions look blurrier i.e. frosted glass.

Some of the parameters like Diffuse, Reflect and Refraction are controlled by a color swatch. It is a
good idea to avoid setting those to completely black or completely white as this is not physically
accurate. Setting the Diffuse or Reflect to completely black means that the object reflects no light at all
(it is a black hole) and setting those parameters to completely white means that the object reflects all
the light back to the environment which is again impossible. Additionally, if you set the Diffuse to
completely white this may lead to slow render times when GI with Light Cache is used. You may use
black for Reflect and Refract if you want to create a material that is completely diffuse. But those
parameters should never be pure white even for very reflective or refractive materials

The Emissive material is used to shade objects which are supposed to emit light i.e. phone or tv
screens, lights with a complex shape etc. The material settings are pretty straight forward but it is
important to note that objects with this material do not shine direct light into the scene. This means
that if we want the objects to illuminate the scene we require GI with very high settings

• Emissive Color – Specifies the color of the light. A texture can be specified as well.
• Intensity – Controls the strength of the light.

The Two Sided material is used to simulate thin translucent materials like paper, fabric, thin leaves etc.
The effect of the material can be seen only when we have a direct light source behind the geometry and
the geometry doesn’t have a volume i.e. it is a plane. The settings are very intuitive:

• Front – Sets the material to be used for front faces as defined by the object normals.
• Back – Sets the material to be used for back side faces as defined by the object normals.
• Translucency – Controls the transparency of the material. By default, this color is black (0.0),
which means that only the Front material will be visible. Setting this color closer to white makes
the material more transparent – more of the Back material is visible.
 • Multiply By Front – When enabled, the Translucency is multiplied by the Front material.

Procedural Textures
This section covers the usage of procedural textures to control some of the parameters of the V-Ray
Material. Procedural textures are textures that are generated using a mathematical description or
algorithm.

The Color Correction Map allows us to color correct a texture (bit map or procedural) inside SketchUp.
This can be useful when we need to fine tune the colors of a texture and we do not want to constantly
switch between photoshop and SketchUp. Using V-Ray Interactive rendering and the color correct
texture we can quickly get the result we need.

The Noise texture is commonly used in CG. It allows us to add some randomness to a parameter. In
this case we use it as a bump map to add small detail to the wall. Bump mapping is a shading
technique to fake small bumps and dents on the surface of our geometry.

Displacement
In this section, we use Displacement mapping instead of Bump mapping. The difference between the
two is that bump mapping is a shading effect - it changes the surface normals of the shaded point so
that it looks as if there are dents and bumps but the original geometry remains unchanged. This is
clearly visible if you look at the geometry at a steep angle, you will see that the surface is actually flat.
Displacement on the other hand subdivides the original mesh into much finer mesh and then displaces
the new faces based on the texture. This creates brand new geometry. The effect is much more
accurate and looks much better than bump mapping but it is also harder to calculate as it requires
more RAM (to store the new geometry) and more raytracing for all the new faces in the scene.

Export Materials To A Library