My first Vray

[ABK]

Hi everyone,

 

After 6 years of mental ray I thought I'd give Vray a bit of a go.

I've attached an image of 'my first vray render'. Consider it's only 3 hours into 'vraying', and no compositing has been done yet - the background you can see is my HDRI.

There's a couple of things I could do with some advice on:

 

1. Is there a 'standard' for the gamma settings? This is rendered with a gamma of 1.25 but I remember reading people tend to push this up to ~1.6. the image is a bit hazy at the moment. should I up the gamma and the black multiplier?

 

2. Do people tend to use seperate dirt passes or use it integrated into the materials?

 

3. I've used an fstop of 2.0. This seems quite low. Is there a better way of lighting the image rather than just lowering the fstop?

 

4. Are there standard parameter settings for glass?

 

5. Is the vignetting a post effect? If so, are you best not using this and adding it in photoshop to your final composite?

 

6. Any other advice!

 

Cheers,

Antony

[remKa]

Hey,

 

your grass looks like a flat carpet, I suggest you to follow this tutorial to create a nice grass http://www.evermotion.org/tutorials/show/7930/grass-in-vray

 

For glass mtl (and many more), go on www.vray-materials.de

 

I let the pros answering to the other parts of your question

[jasondutoit]

I'll try answer a few of these...

 

1: I use a gamma of 2.2 (linear workflow). I set max to 2.2, as well as the colour pickers, but I leave the output at the default.

 

2: Its more flexible to render a seperate dirt pass and blend it in photoshop. Just set up your scene as you normally would, and when you want to render a dirt pass just put a vraylightmtl (with vraydirt in the diffuse) in the 'override material' slot in vray's global switches. Sounds confusing, but after you've done it once its really easy to set up. By doing this, you don't have to change your lighting or texture settings, so I tend to use it for test renders during the modelling phase.

 

3: You can use the f-stop (lower = brighter), ISO (higher = brighter) or shutter speed (lower = brighter). Some photographers post the camera settings of a particular shot (check out some photography forums/blogs), so use these as a reference for your vray settings. For instance, an outdoor scene like yours would probably have settings like F:8-16, iso 100-200, and a shutter speed of 1/250s. The beauty of this is that you can have one lighting setup but multiple camera's with different settings for interior and exterior renders.

 

4: check out the site mentioned by Remy, and reverse engineer the materials to see what the settings do!

 

5: Same as point 2...I'd personally rather do this in photoshop.

 

Hope that helps!