3ds Max Vray Settings

[Ogier Dudley]

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.

Screen Shot 2021-02-01 at 7.04.37 AM17441558 209 KB

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.

Basically it's a bunch of preset settings of many different real cameras. For example, It was easy to use the drop down list and find a vintage camera for adding that look and feel to the rendering. It made it really easy to quickly compare them since it was done instantly inside the rendering window after the rendering was already complete.

It would be great if VRay offered a drop down list of preset camera settings like this. As Is, VRay requires a much more indepth knowledge of camera language and photography technique. I tend to leave the VRay camera at the default settings because it just seems to work for most of my scenes that way. Some alternative quick settings would be nice to try though.

I agree with you on how Thea approached the camera settings and I would also add that the one thing I miss most about Maxwell was the Multilight function. The ability to change light settings with sliders AFTER the render was complete. You could adjust anything including the emitters and create a day scene and then night in seconds. I have no idea how hard it would be to incorporate either of these into V-ray but I am sure they have looked into it in the past. Or they should have. Fortunately V-ray is so amazingly fast that I can create multiple lighting set ups and still get results in a fraction of the time it would take Maxwell.

On a Machine B, we open the same file produced by machine A from the server, to do the simplest thing on earth, just pressing the render command and see exactly the same results as in Machine A. It looks like this is not possible. Lights do not even appear in the vray asset editor, although they do appear in the scene.

We then try to export a VRScene from Machine A, importing it back to Machine B, but what we get is a duplication of the objects from the original file, also badly meshed on the screen, showed as a block. The program asks even for a proxy position insertion point. Therefore we have, effectively, two identical objects and the result look similar.

This is exactly how it is designed to work. Basically you can add a complete render ready scene file into another file or render it directly using the batch render tool. The mesh is just a preview mesh to keep viewport speed high. In general the insertion point is just 0

3a8082e126