3ds Max 2015 Vray Render Settings

[Nancy Benigar]

The3ds Max Render Setup window hosts many V-Ray settings for both V-Ray and V-Ray GPU. Choosing the V-Ray GPU engine changes the available settings. For more information about the V-Ray GPU render settings, follow the link.

In V-Ray, the two tools that most greatly impact the balance of render quality vs. speed are the image sampler (under the V-Ray tab) and GI engine(s) (under the GI tab). Learning the basics of how these two features work will greatly enhance your ability to adjust settings in V-Ray and maximize image quality while keeping render times to a minimum. See the linked pages for explanations on how these features work.

Increasing both the quality and size of the render will also increase the render time so make sure to pick settings that are balanced with how fast your machine CPU/GPU is and your level of patience.

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Hello, Im sorry to be messaging you here, I have a hand in in two days and my Vray is taking ages to render. Average time is 2 hours.

I followed the instructions on the thread and changed up my settings a little bit, however i cannot change the disk Caching settings.

Two hours is not that long for a high quality render with V-Ray. Can you post some screenshots or upload your model so we can get a better idea of the level of detail and resolution you are working at?

I Followed your settings for v-ray as well, and for some reason my rendering scene is still not processing. It comes entirely brown and blurry when I do a normal render, and takes 24 hours for an interactive render and more, so I stopped it since I cannot spent so much time on a render since I have to submit a 12 soon. Can anyone help me please?

I am trying to write a plugin that works with the most recently rendered preview image in Maya. I mostly write tools and pipelines around Houdini, Nuke, and C4D, so moving around Maya has been somewhat difficult.

I need to be able to find the full output path for the currently active render setting. In most cases our artists render using VRay, however some do use software and mentalray, so I need to figure out which I am using first and foremost, then find the path, unless I am able to simply call the path to the currently active layer.

So far I am able to find and use most other values throughout the render settings, however the full output path to the image I am going to render for anything other than the default layer has evaded me.

Since I have been unable to find a variable holding that value, I have been trying to build the path from what I am able to find, such as the path to the current images dir for the project and the "File Name Prefix". There I run into the issue of the artists calling the render variables for their output; Scene, Layer, and such. I know how to find a few of them through other methods, so I may be able to translate if needed, but I feel there has to be a way to call their values and I simply do not know it.

I am currently doing a render in Vray 3DS Max for one of our projects for the on-site sign. The architect here wants a high res. image because people will be able to go up to the image to have a look.

Basically this needs to be done asap, as in yesterday. I have everything set-up but i am struggling to render it at a high res. in a adequate time frame. Currently I am rendering it on my home PC and its indicating 35-40 hours (64bit, windows 7, 6 core, 8GB RAM)

Do you have advice on the rendering settings?

OK, so where/how exactly do you add an environment map? I have a warehouse environment map jpeg I want to be reflected on all my glossy/reflective types of materials. Is this done under the Vray Settings - Environment tab? I've tried adding it to the "background - texture" and nothing happens. I've also tried adding it to the "Reflection - texture" and still nothing. Am I missing something here???

But yes, my scene is setup for an indoor scene Product Design using a dome light. I went into the Dome Light parameters dialog box, then selected the Parameters tab, then checked the Use Texture, and then selected an HDR image I have of the warehouse scene and it worked. I can now see my warehouse environment scene on all my glossy/shiny/chrome objects. The only issue is my scene got much darker because this changed my dome light settings to what the HDR is. So to get my light brightness back I just added a second dome light using a stock dome light settings. I think for now this will work to solve my reflections problem, so thank you!

Glad you got it working with a second dome. Though that may cause some other strange issues with them multiplying with each other, causing 'hot spots' in the renderings. Hard to say for sure, as it would depend on your scene and the dome light files. If increasing the intensity of the primary HDRI or EXR dome light is not enough, or not desired because of the effects it creates, you can also try adding more lights to your scene. I'm also struggling to get a realistic looking scene using only a high quality Dome light. Through a lot of trial and error, I've discovered that the only way to get it close is to add a Distant light. This makes it much easier to highlight the primary focus of the scene while still using the Dome light for extra GI effects without being overpowering.

Dome lights are a bit tricky to get to work as expected. One thing I have noticed is that when using a Dome light, the Environment Overrides no longer work as expected. Here is an example with the GI (Skylight) turned up to 200 with no effect on the scene that is being lit by only the Dome light.

V-Ray is working on releasing a new Adaptive Dome Light, which should really help make using them a lot more intuitive and user friendly. More info - -ray-first-look-smarter-rendering-with-the-new-adaptive-dome-light

Thank for for all the input! Since my last post I've decided against using the second dome light with the HDR image for reflections because it is acting a little funny. Currently I'm just using the stock Vray dome light at around .7 or .8 Default Scalar Intensity. Then I'll add a distant light & a cone light or two as needed to finish lighting the scene. I saw a couple videos recently about adding some light orange (warm) color tint to the lights to help get a more realistic image so I've started doing that and it seems to help a little bit. Also, I've seen where you can soften your lights shadows under the Parameters tab where it says Shadow Radius. I'm sure it probably adds some rendering time but I've been setting mine to like 1 or 2. I also changed the Penumbra Falloff to Smooth Cubic and Decay to Inverse Square - also from a video I saw about more realistic interior lighting. I like to turn all my image maps into vray materials and then adjust the vray material settings. Whenever possible I like to use the stock vray materials and slightly adjust as needed using that vray material editor thing, but I haven't really dove into that completely yet. Speaking of that vray material editor thing, I saw where you can download & add like scratches, dust, fingerprints etc. to materials along with bump maps and it makes your materials render out very realistic. But I haven't figured out exactly how to accomplish this yet in the material editor. Oh, one other thing I'll sometimes do now in vray is when I need to zoom in on an area to show a detail of something, I'll use that Focus Target Tool in the Vray Tools and click on an object where I want the camera to focus. This will add depth blur to the other objects in the scene the farther away they are and seems to just add a little more realism to the rendering. OK that's enough out of me I'm starting to write a book here haha. It's been a long learning process so far but hopefully the realism will improve for us all as we learn more about vray. I'm just hoping there will be more in depth videos soon that cover the vray plugin for formZ specifically.

Here's a link to a textures site I've come across that looks really promising. If you register you can download all the free textures and they also give you a few free credits to download a few more so choose wisely! They seem really detailed because all the textures come with displacement maps, bump maps, diffuse variation maps, normals, etc. to use in the vray materials editor to bring your textures to the realistic level. I just need to learn how to use all them in the editor haha..

Also - I have found that really bumping up the "multiplier" will add to the reflection of your HDR in glossy surfaces ... Play with the multiplier to get it to the level you want it ... I too have found that a "visible" dome light HDR will over rule any environment maps you might use ... You can also play with the multiplier on Dome Light and find interesting combinations of environment, and Dome light settings that affect reflections along the way... Like everything FormZ - there are multiple ways to accomplish the same thing ... When I first started messing with Vray for FormZ my mind wanted to know "exacts" - when this is set to "this" then "this" happens ... I have found when I relax and just try different things without worrying about the exact math I get results that are more compelling ...

A while back I was doing a GotoMeeting with David and we discussed the dome light issue. When the light did not show up as expected on my model he turned my film sensitivity (iso) up to about 25000. He said that the only thing that mattered on the camera setting was the EV value which he slid way to the right. Not sure I agree with that as I usually try to keep settings in realistic values.

CRF stands for "camera response function" and refers to how the irradiance arriving on image film/CCD, after passing through the lens, is transformed to actual pixel "brightness" values. The easiest and usual transformation that we apply is the simple brightness+gamma. But in practice, where photo cameras are involved, this transformation is much more complex and manufacturers themselves provide this transformation in the form of tabular data. What the above means is that, by using the specific real data provided by the manufacturer, we can enjoy realistic (non-linear) display of the results, as if the image was coming out of the specific photo camera. The camera is easily selectable from the drop down list.

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