VRay Materials

[RyanSpaulding]

Hey guys...new to VRay....a bit confused..

 

What is the difference in using specific vray materials vs. normal bitmaps? Do I NEED vray materials?

[Brian Smith]

You can use bitmaps with VRay materials just like standard materials but the same scene with VRay materials renders faster than with standard materials. How much depends on a lot of things but it is definitely noticeable, especially when using GI, which is the real reason we all use VRay.

[ipdesigner]

*i agree with Brian, it does makes a difference with the speed and also splotches occur on standard map if you render it on vray(this happens eventually if you render the again the scanline to vray) just play with the settings it is more easier either than the standard one.

[Christopher Nichols]

Vray materials make a huge difference especially if you use opacity. Use ALL vray materials and if you want simple opacities use refraction with an IOR of 1.0. I helped a friend out with this and his render times went from 6 hours to 17 mins. Even a one standard material on a small object in a corner can make a difference. That is because it is a raytracer and it takes into account the whole scene.

[chuck]

So if I have cars/trees (some are 3ds's) that are premapped with bitmaps I should remap them with vray mats? The xfrog trees I have take a really long time to render because of all the opacity maps...

Chuck

[Brian Smith]

It depends on several things, such as how much time will it take, how long will your final product take to render (ie number of frames and each frame render time), as well as where they are in the scene. A much more complex way to handle it, but a favorite of veteran users would be to render in layers. For example render your structures (all with VRay materials) and then render the extraneous things like RPCs separately (without VRay materials applied).

[skogskalle]

chuck - I recently used xfrog trees on a project. if you use the standard materials they come with youll get horrible rendertimes... but if you make your own vray mats and set the filtering of all opacitymaps to "none", and set the blur value of both diffuse and opacitymaps to 0,01 you can easily cut the rendertimes in half, or more. The trees will look exactly the same and it wont take more than 5 min to convert the standard mats to vray...