Vray For Modo 3.5.2.01 MAC OS X
Evelin Mceachron
Our V-Ray plugin works as a V-Ray scene exporter (to .vrscene file). That means, when using our Modo plugin with the Beam it up V-Ray option, your main modo+V-Ray scene will be exported using V-Ray standalone. Please keep in mind that certain plugins like NPR Kit or similar may not work correctly in V-Ray standalone rendering due to inherent .vrscene limitations. We strongly suggest rendering a small resolution test first when using additional plugins.
We use Corona almost exclusively at The Boundary, but after so many years of using vray I still follow development closely and use it for things that corona cant do. In converting an old project, 152 Elizabeth Street to corona, I thought it would be a good time to write a blog post on the differences between the two rendering engines and also to see how much Vray has improved since I used it to render this project in 2014/15.
Here is a 100% crop between the two versions. My previous settings were 1-100 subdivs and a noise threshold of 0.007, probably had subdivs on materials too (seems so weird to have to think about things like that after using corona for 2 years). I can't see any real difference here so not sure why anyone in arch viz would deviate from the defaults in vray these days.
After 20 minutes, corona did seem to deal with noise better, especially in the concrete and ceiling areas. The displaced carpet looks way better in vray, despite increasing the quality of displacement in corona from 2px to 1px. Overall I'd say they are pretty similar in terms of quality.
Universal Settings. I prefer working in vray universal settings mode, so to do most of my testing I am switching over to that set-up. Of course it takes a lot longer to render, but it will help me to optimise the scene. I will switch to Irradiance map later on to show how it compares.
A bit of artistic license here, but I decided to rotate the sky so that the sun was coming in the window. I also adjusted the vrayphysicalcamera exposure to allow for the increased amount of light coming in. The vrayHDRi loader works slightly differently to the max bitmap loader, this is a handy visual reminder that I have stuck to the bottom of my monitor at all times:
The cool thing with vray's color mapping is that even if you are rendering to 32 bit exrs (or 16 bit images) and dont want to burn in the gamma, you can still make use of reinhard burn to speed up your renders. In this example the slow one is set up using strict linear workflow (well actually reinhard burn 1.0 which is the same thing) and the quick one is reinhard burn 0.05 but with the mode changed to 'NONE (don't apply anything)'. This means vray internally uses a burn of 0.05 for adaptation, but doesn't mess around with the rgb values in your image. In the examples below the fast one is noticeably noiser, but the difference in speed is huge so you could easily reduce the noise and still be a lot quicker.
A lot of people still use irradiance map for primary GI, if so, adjusting the subdivs of the vraydomelight definitely helped remove noise and didn't increase the render time by much. I guessed a value of 128. Remember that in the weird world of adaptive DMC higher figures can sometimes mean lower render times, so experiment to see at what point higher no longer means faster.
6. Insert the hdri in a Filter shader and set the gamma to 1.0 (or 0.75 if you wan't to boost the strength of the sun like this tutorial)7. Add a vrayphysicalcamera tag to your camera in order to control exposure, depth of field etc.
If you use the vrayHDRi map (which I now prefer as you can adjust the rotation in degress) then it's a simple matter of changing the gamma from 1 to something lower. Through trial and error I have found 0.75 to be a good compromise. Any lower and there is a risk the sky can become too saturated and contrasty. Something between 0.75 and 1 should suit most skies.
I normally use them in a vray dome light, and load them using the bitmap loader. I like to keep the multiplier of the dome light at 1 and adjust the output of the bitmap to control the intensity of the exr/hdr sky. If you use a physical camera approach then you can usually keep the output value at 1, if not, you might need to lower it as far as 0.005.
The snow material came from a vray.info video on new vray 2.0 features and is a blend of a vraysss2 material and a vraycarpaint material. This results in a subtle SSS effect and also nice snowy sparkles from the carpaint material. Admittedly you never appreciate the complexity on my finished renders, but it does look nice up close! Snow material set up:
I used vrayenvfog with a mesh as a gizmo to keep the fog away from the actual houses (didn't want fog inside!) and a fog distance of 450 metres. No maps controlling density, colour or emission. The fog is set to scatter GI as it looked nicer and there wasnt much difference in render time. If I had gone for a darker time of day, having the interior lights interact with the fog outside the windows would have been really interesting, maybe next time!
Colour balance was very important in this scene, and was something I experimented with right up to the final renders. Initially I had a very neutral colour balance, with slightly warm interior lights, but eventually I grew to like the blueish tint more and more. Being able to change kelvin values on lights and on the camera makes this process very intuitive in vray. I appreciate being able to think about these things in photographic terms rather than tweaking rgb values. I set the vrayphysicalcamera white balance to 4200K which gave a nice blue tint, then I had to push the interior lighting down to 3100K so that they still looked warm.
I used vray lens effects for the bloom and glare, which worked out really well I think. It's best to experiment with the values on interactive mode till you get something you like. Bear in mind that you really need bright light sources if you want seductive looking glare. My interior spotlights had vraylightmaterials applied to them and the float value (right click and hold on the vrayFB to inspect rgb/float values) was often up around 5-20.
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