V-ray: where to start?

Hi guys,

Perhaps some of you came here from Max environment and perhaps you have experiences with V-ray. As for me, I started my 3D life with Blender and now I’d like to extend my knowledge a bit further. I miss noiseless caustics in Blender as well as noiseless interior scenes (althoug there are some improvement with cycles lately) I decided to try out V-ray, so I grabbed the 2.75 blender with v-ray exporter, downloaded the v-ray demo and…

I got completely lost. There are almost no tutorials on how to make anything in V-ray-blender and the settings are so complex that I feel I got lost in Minotaur’s labyrinth. Maybe you have some idea where to start (v-ray - render tandem if possible), or prhaps someone of you would like to make tutorial for beginner like me. :slight_smile: Somebody out there to help? :slight_smile:

Thanks

There is documentation:- http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VFBlender/V-Ray+for+Blender

There is a dedicated forum:- http://forums.chaosgroup.com/forumdisplay.php?177-V-Ray-for-Blender

Thx. I know about both of these sites. As for forum, it is far from “popular”, there are som new posts now and then, but most of the galleries, or even tutorials are for previous versions that was without node setups.

Documentation is somewhat useful, but still it’s very much about theory and as I said, there are so many settings in V-ray that trying out everything is pain in the a… :frowning:

I know your feelings very well, so many settings and no good examples how to do things and I was the same situation like you, eyes needed better results than brute force noise machine results.
I watched 3dmax/Maya Vray tutorials because render settings are almost exactly the same, but 3dmax Dome light is Blender Hemi light etc.

ps. now I can do this kind of renders, time 6m01s. http://puu.sh/jVkdd/edf46ae95d.png
Scene source: http://store.chocofur.com/house-breukelen-3d-scene

Thx for the links. The render looks really good and render time is awesome. That’s something where I aim :slight_smile: I originally wanted to study imported materials, however I cant import them for some reason. Can you import *.vismat files?

(This is the error message I get):

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Program Files\Blender 2.75 (With V-Ray Additions)\2.75\scripts\addons\vb30
odes\operators\import_file.py”, line 295, in execute
return ImportMaterials(context, self.filepath, self.base_material, self.use_fake_user)
File “C:\Program Files\Blender 2.75 (With V-Ray Additions)\2.75\scripts\addons\vb30
odes\operators\import_file.py”, line 158, in ImportMaterials
vrsceneDict = ParseVrmat(filePath)
File “C:\Program Files\Blender 2.75 (With V-Ray Additions)\2.75\scripts\addons\vb30\vray_tools\VrmatParser.py”, line 62, in ParseVrmat
tree = ElementTree.parse(filepath)
File “C:\Program Files\Blender 2.75 (With V-Ray Additions)\2.75\python\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py”, line 1187, in parse
tree.parse(source, parser)
File “C:\Program Files\Blender 2.75 (With V-Ray Additions)\2.75\python\lib\xml\etree\ElementTree.py”, line 598, in parse
self._root = parser._parse_whole(source)
xml.etree.ElementTree.ParseError: not well-formed (invalid token): line 1, column 0

location: <unknown location>:-1

I can use vismat format but Vray for Blender supports only .xml format, not binary.
http://puu.sh/k028j/6e0664df1d.jpg

Have not been to the forum for years but the support was great.

Oh vray for blender… erm…

If you said vray for any other software, I’d be able to help but eh…

All I can say is,

Everything you can do in vray for 3ds max, you can do in vray for blender/c4d/etc

I too find Vray for Blender lacks tutorials and documentation, the basic docs you need to start. I’m using it more and more, not mastering it yet but feel much more comfortable now after experimenting with it a bit and asking a couple of things to bdancer on vray forum.

In my signature there is a link to a thread i’ve started to share tests, everybody is invited to share their one too of course, tips and tricks are welcome too.

Understanding to manage nodes was the most obscure thing i’ve encountered. Main thing to get is lets say you have a scene with Cycles materials, if you switch to vray you must press the ‘+’ button in the material panel called ‘Shading Tree’ (Properties editor), this way you’ll get a basic node based vray material to start with.

http://www.pasteall.org/pic/show.php?id=92809

@Marcog

Oh it’s all neat!

Actually, do NOT look up “vray for blender tutorials”

Look up “vray tutorials”

vray is vray in all applications(except C4D, the settings there are a bit different)

All the tricks, all the parameters, are still the same

Yes settings are the same, i was speaking more about Vray for Blender UI which can be hard and confusing even if one already knows Vray for max etc…

Hey MarcoG_ita, actually I was hoping you stop by and I am glad. I’ve seen some of your rnders and they actually look pretty cool, both of them V-ray and Cycles. I am certainly going to check your tests :slight_smile:

@salamun hi, thanks. What are you not able to do right now? Vray render settings or using it in Blender, its interface? (materials, textures, lights etc…)
Just ask and we could help out.

As other said, render settings are pretty much just like Vray for 3dsMax. What are you willing to render? Interiors, exteriors, product viz, VFX, motion graphics…depending on what you’re aiming for there are some known good settings over the internet.

Quick examples…for interiors, GI -> the good old combo Irradiance Map + Light Cache…Globals -> Color Mapping -> gamma 2.2, Exponential Mode for me its pretty nice. DMC -> Adaptive DMC / Filter type -> Gaussian: 1.5 size (personal preference).

These are just generic settings to get a starting point with a typical scene, just as example.

Thank you marcoG_ita. Well I am quite slow with my rendering knowledge buildup, as 3D is only hobby for me (morover I have 2 months old son so there are lots of father duties :)). So my progress is really slow.

Well, first I thought render settings can’t be that difficult, but they are. Maybe not that difficult, but at least lots of parameters of differnet kind. I will keep your basic settings at my hand and try them. Materials are another story. It seems even more difficult. For me it’s not very intuitive as cycles is but I will get to it at some point :slight_smile:

As for V-ray rendering - I only want to use it where cycles havs some drawbacks - mostly interior scenes and scenes with caustics. Other than that - I am quite happy with cycles so far. However there are many undiscovered lands of cycles which I have to discover yet.

And once again, thanks a lot for your helping hand. I will certainly ask, when I will need something and hopefully will not be too intrusive at the same time :slight_smile:

Cheers

I want to chime in also and say the lack of intro-level tutorials for V-Ray Blender is discouraging. I simply want to see what it looks like in the viewport and what the workflow is like with Blender in order to make a purchasing decision but there isn’t a single video showing this properly. It’s crazy! I’m actually leaning toward Octane because someone made a great vid showing how they work in Blender with Octane and I can visualize myself working that way.

This is precisely why I don’t use any 3rd party renderer for Blender

I haven’t used V-ray (for Blender) since it went to nodes, but I have purchased it and used it for some time before that. The beginning was hard. Really hard. Largely because I came from using BI, Yafaray, Luxrender, etc and going from those to V-ray is a huge step up in complexity (and power).

You may have noticed I am not really caring about the “for Blender” part, and I am going to reiterate what some others have said, V-ray is V-ray, just because its in Blender doesn’t mean you have to search for Blender-centric tutorials. In the end, my advice is to just play around with it, look for tutorials for V-ray in general (not V-ray-for-Blender), and realize that you probably won’t be creating decent renders for weeks to months.

I would also like to point out that V-ray is insanely powerful with all of the settings it gives you, but that is because it is largely a production renderer capable of optimization for different scenes. Most people neither need nor will use most of the settings available, so don’t feel bad if you don’t understand most of them.

can anyonepoint out how to use fog in vraymtl?
I have read http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VFBlender/Fog+Gizmo, but still got puzzled.
The fact that node ports with different colors can be linked togethor (like this in http://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/VFBlender/Fog+Gizmo) makes it difficult to judge how to get correct node link.

Hi! I am new here and I am new using Blender. But I know pretty well VRay (I used it with 3DSMax)…

Fog in VRay is not connected with materials but is an environmental effect, so you can’t use it with vraymtl but you must have a ‘World’ node with an ‘Effect container’ connected and then a ‘fog’ node…


I am using VRay to render fire&smoke in blender and searching online I’ve found only a simple image from bdancer with the basic shader settings. But I’ve found that with those settings I can’t render smoke&fire well, so I modified those settings and I came to a basic shader setting that can correctly render flames and smoke with VRay in Blender.
The result of my render is this.
And the setting of the shader is this.
I have separate the smoke form the fire and assigned to anyone of them a ‘fog’ node, driven, in density, by the ‘Out density’ of the ‘Voxel data’ for the smoke and the ‘Out flame’ for the fire. Two gradient ramps drive the color and the emission of the ‘fog’.


So it can be more clear how to use fog in VRay. Note that there isn’t a vray material, but it is an environmental effect.