Where to learn V-Ray

[chriskiser]

Good morning.

 

I am interested in learning Vray. I have some experience with vray materials from a previous job and I would like to learn more about vray as a whole. I've seen a few site that's offer online courses and was curious if anyone here had experience with any of them and could recommend a good place to learn.

 

Any advice you can provide would be helpful. Thanks.

[jasonstewart]

I am a beginner/mid level user but I think the forums are probably the best resource for learning the most current techniques. There is great information both here and over at the Chaos Group forums. With how good the "Universal Method" works in Vray 3.0 its easy to get started and then you can play around when you have time. You do have to kind of check the forums daily and just read everything that comes up, there is great information hidden in some threads that are seemingly uninteresting sometimes.

 

I do have some tutorials that I have purchased or that are free or have free portions:

Viscorbel: His tutorials are generally quite well done but I feel like sometimes he will say "input xxx into this box" without explaining why. That always bugs me.

Grant Warwick Mastering Vray: Grant explains all the settings in great detail but I feel like a lot of the material stuff is not really that helpful in ArchViz.

Evermotion: Similar to Viscorbel, not as much detailed information about why you are doing these things but will give you a decent start.

 

I don't know, tutorials/courses can be hit or miss. I find that the biggest problem is that you end up with a cheat sheet of settings that you just input because they said to and if something comes out wrong you don't always know how to fix it. Some are obviously better than others, I would say any of the ones I have listed are worth looking into unfortunately experience will still be necessary to be efficient. The other problem I have with most tutorials/courses is that you get a good look at one persons workflow and that may not necessarily work well for you.

 

I have not done any of the CGArchitect training. With so many free tutorials out there (making of write ups, Viscorbels free tutorials, Grant Warwicks free stuff, Ronen Bekerman's blog, Peter Guthrie's blog, etc.) I almost feel like sampling those first is probably what you should do. If you really like the content and presentation of information from one person you can get some of their paid tutorials.

 

I hope that helps, I am sure some of the more experienced members will be along shortly to give some other recommendations. Also, it seems you may have experience in another rendering engine. While the knowledge may not be directly applicable to vray the general concepts will probably be very similar.

[chriskiser]

Jason,

 

Thank you very much for that info. I will definitely check out those sources you mentioned.