3ds Max VRAY 5 Render Setup Tutorial | Settings Explained

hi everyone you asked me a lot why you see noise in your renders or why they don't have good quality i decided to make this video explaining to you which settings you should apply and what its setting means it took me a while to make this video because i had to study quite a lot and i really hope that you will find it useful and it was worth the effort if it will help you very please hit the like button and leave your comment you support me a lot when you do that in v-day 5 we basically use almost all the default settings so if you are using older versions i advise you to upgrade things are simpler now and more improved open 3ds max in order to use vray you must first select it as your renderer go to the menu rendering and choose render setup or click the f10 button at the top of the render setup window make sure production rendering mode is selected as the target and then choose vray 5 as the renderer if you only use vray as rendering kensing then you can set it as your default renderer to avoid repeating the above step every time you start a new project to do so go to the menu customize and choose customize ui and default switcher go to the initial settings for tool options and choose max.vray click set and restart 3ds max for the changes to take effect when using vray the rendering settings are split into 5 tabs common vray gi settings and render elements each tab consists of multiple rollouts with settings and in this video i am focusing on the settings that i think are the most important to control the quality of your image in combination with the time needed to produce the render let's start with the vray tab go to the global switches rollout in here we are interested in the hidden light setting by default this option is enabled and it means that the lights will be rendered regardless of whether they are hidden or not while when this option is disabled any lights that are hidden will not be included in the rendering let's see how this works in action i keep the hidden lights enabled i will go to my camera viewport select the led lights that i have placed below the cells right click and choose hide selection i will produce a crop render in this area you will notice that although the lights are hidden they still cast light but if i go to the render setup dialog box disable the hidden lights and do one more render now they no longer cast light my advice is to always have this option disabled especially if you're a beginner since while you're working on a project you might hide lights while you do your testing and you will get confused why you see illuminated areas where there are no lights let me now unhide my lights moving on to the image sampler anti-aliasing rollout an image sampler is an algorithm that calculates a pixel's color each pixel in a rendering can only have one color and for v-ray to determine the correct color it samples colors from different parts of the pixel itself and around it more specifically every time vray takes samples for a pixel all the samples are added together and over it out to get the result if we use small number of samples the result will not be accurate the left image shows a cropped render of the pendant where i have used a small number of samples while in the right image i have used many samples so what do we notice that when we use a few samples noise is present in our render while when we have many samples the render looks smooth and clean what does noise mean in the cgi field image noise is this grainy effect usually caused because the rendering enzyme uses a small number of samples so one would normally ask now since we get a clean render only when we are using many samples then why don't we do that from the very beginning and the answer is because of the rendering time needed it took only one minute for the left image to be rendered while the right render needed 23 minutes of course the rendering time is relevant to your computer specifications and in your computer the same render might need 2 minutes instead of 23 so what i want you to focus on here is the difference between the time needed in these two cases if i zoom in the pendant's headses we can see the pixels it consists of so what happens during the sampling process v-day will get one sample of the grey pixel one sample of the brown pixel and will average those two which means create a pixel which is a blend of half the gray color and half the brown color one of the purposes of sampling is also to improve anti-aliasing what anti-aliasing is when we draw a straight line using any software autocad photoshop 3ds max etc if this line is horizontal or vertical it appears as a perfect line but if this line is at an angle then you can see the pixels it consists of going back to our example anti-aliasing is basically the process of smoothing the edges of the pendant to make it look like curve how does v-ray smooths the edges by adding extra pixels when does it add extra pixels when you increase your samples let's go back in our render setup window vray offers two methods for image sampling the bucket and the progressive the progressive sampler renders the entire image progressively in passes like this in every pass you see here the image as a whole gets clearer and clearer while the bucket sampler subdivides the image into rectangular sections called buckets the buckets render the image piece by piece like this these are the buckets and every package gets fully clear before it moves on to the next one let's now see its image sampler more in depth let's select the progressive type and go to the progressive image sampler rollout the min and max of divs control the minimum and maximum number of samples that each pixel in the image receives i always keep the default values of 1 and 100 which is a good number of samples and i play around with the other two parameters the render time sets the rendering time in minutes when this number of minutes is reached the render stops no matter the level of noise at that point for instance i will set it to 1 minute and produce a render the render will be calculated for 1 minute and then it will stop and i will get this result the noise in the image is pretty high and now i will set the render time to 5 minutes to compare it to my previous render the noise level is reduced but it is still present in the render the more we increase the time the more passes will be added in the rendering process and so the cleaner the result will get vray has an extremely helpful feature called v-ray denoiser it detects areas where noise is present in the render and smooths them out to advertise the noiser go to render setup select the render elements tab and click the add button from the render elements window select vray denoiser and click ok i will produce another render once the rendering passes are completed you will see an additional process in the rendering window the denoising so now although we kept the five minutes of rendering time the result we get is smooth thanks to vray denoiser who smartly blurs out the noise if you set the render time to zero then you give preference to the noise threshold which controls the noise level in the image 0.005 is a good noise threshold and it usually removes the synth noise and gives a clean image but it can render for a long time depending on your computer if this is zero the entire image is sampled uniformly until either the maximum subdivision's value is reached or the render time limit is reached so basically v-ray gives priority to the first of those settings that will reach its standards i would recommend that during the testing phase where you will have to render multiple times to keep the rendering time low and the view with advert denoiser to speed up the process once you are ready for your final render increase the rendering time if you only have one time one hour to render then set the rendering time to 60 minutes set the noise to 0 and it will render for 1 hour in any case you can hit the stop button in the rendering window at any time and the render will be stopped before resolving completely now let's see the bucket sampler go to the image sampler anti-aliasing rollout select bucket and then go to the bucket image sampler rollout let me start by disabling the of divs and producer render disabling the max of divs basically means that we are disabling anti-aliasing and so all the objects will have staggered edges now enable back the maximum subdivisions the default value is set to 24 which is a good number of samples to produce a render without noise for my testing i usually set it to 4 to speed up the rendering process 24 usually requires a substantial amount of rendering time so even for my final renders i will start with 8 to see if i get a clean render or 12 and then i will go to 24. remember the image comparison we did at the very beginning of this video there i used four samples for the lefty mods and 24 for the right image and as we said the right image needed 23 minutes to calculate so imagine the time needed to render the whole viewport and not just this cropped area and if you're wondering this was for 4000 pixels for the whole viewport to sum up with the image sampler i personally now use the progressive method and that's because i can see a render very quickly and then let it refine for as long as necessary as additional passes are being computed for my draft renders i set minimum subdivisions to 1 maximum to 100 the render time to 5 minutes and noise threshold to 0.01 and i also add v-ray denoiser so i basically do 5-minute test renders but as we said earlier you can also set the render time to 0 and stop the rendering process at any time for my final renders i set minimum subdivisions to 1 maximum to 100 the render time to 0 and the noise threshold to 0.005 let me highlight it one more time you don't have to wait until the render stops by itself because with these settings it might take several hours you can stop the rendering process at any time you see that your image is clean and you are satisfied the advantage of the bucket sampler is that it requires less ram but the main disadvantage is that because it uses buckets if you stop the rendering process it will only clear the buckets that were calculated thus far so you can't really use that render to show it to your client but if you are a beginner and you find the progressive method may be complicated on when to stop the render then feel free to use the bucket sampler and set for your draft renders minimum subdivisions to 1 maximum to 4 and for your final renders make those values 1 and 12. as we said v-ray suggest that you should use 2nd 4 in the max of divisions and they are right because you will get a clean render with the 24 but i personally find it that it takes too much time to render so i prefer to use 8 or 2 elf in combination with v-ray denoiser i hope that i have made it clear how the image sampler works so let me move on to the gi tab zi stands for global illumination and is a group of algorithms that are used to add more realistic lighting to a 3d scene global illumination is basically the indirect illumination to understand how indirect lighting works go to the gi tab and open the global illumination rollout uncheck the enable gi and produce a render so what happened the scene got darker because now we only have direct illumination so we have the sunlight that comes in the room and hits this area we have the pendants that cast light over here and the led lights below the shelves this is the direct lighting when we enable the zi the indirect lighting the light spreads in the room by bouncing on the surfaces so part of the sunlight gets absorbed by the floor and another part bounces and hits the other surfaces in our scene this bouncing continues until all the light rays are absorbed the primary enzyme is used to compute the first light bounds and the secondary engine is used to compute any subsequent bounces i use here the default settings which are brute force for the primary enzyme and light cast for the secondary enzyme to be honest i used to set my primary enzyme to irradiance map because it is faster than brute force and less noisy but brute force is more accurate and unfortunately v-ray light mix works only with brute force and not irradiance map so i advise you to use brute force as your primary enzyme i do not adjust any of the settings here brute force is locked to 3 bounces while if you go to the light cast rollout you can play around with the subdivisions but 1000 is a good number both for your testing and your final renders if i go to the render elements tab i have already talked about vray denoiser i always use it to smooth out my result especially when i use a small number of samples i also use vray light mix please check the video i have prepared there to see how you can use very light mix that's all on the rendering settings in v-ray i hope that now you understand what it's setting means and how to adjust it thank you so much for watching i will see you all in my next video

Channel: Margarita Nikita

Views: 128,745

Keywords: archviz, cgi, render, rendering, training, tutorial, 3d, vray, autodesk, 3ds max, render setup, vray 5, chaos group, rendering settings

Id: -rPvPDScHcA

Length: 21min 53sec (1313 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 27 2020