V-Ray 5 for SketchUp — The Power of V-Ray 5 webinar

hi my name is corey and i'm a cg specialist here at chaos group today i'm very happy to introduce you to our latest render engine vray 5 for sketchup together we will explore the incredible new features available in vray 5 that help you to work faster get beautiful looking images with less effort enhance your materials and textures with greater realism and go further than ever in post-production using the incredible new built-in compositing capabilities in vray 5. to start we'll begin by exploring the brand new v-ray vision viewer v-revision is a real-time rasterizer meaning it functions like a game engine to calculate 3d images and animations v-ray vision is built right into v-ray 5 so that you can get real-time feedback as you work in your scenes and even save images or animations from the vision viewer or when you're ready seamlessly switch to v-ray for production rendering next we'll introduce you to the redesigned v-ray frame buffer in v-ray 5 which is where you can see your renders as well as manage your post-processing and then we will take a look at the improved sky in vray 5 and use it with the new light chin tool to automatically generate tons of lighting scenarios for our scene as well as using customized hdr images to get stunning looking skies without any additional effort we'll also explore several updates to shading workflows ranging from new shader layers such as the coat and gene parameters that simplify your workflow for adding realism to your materials to the updated material library which now incorporates the new shader layers and uses updated high resolution textures and more additionally we'll look at the new built-in randomization options such as the updated multi-sub texture which now offers hue saturation and gamma variation controls as well as the new uvw placement texture which offers randomization parameters such as the powerful stochastic piling method finally we'll explore the new light mix and compositing options which make it possible to make drastic changes to your image's lighting even after doing a production render with the addition of a powerful layer-based compositor you can even make fine-tuned adjustments to your image ranging from adjusting curve values and blending modes for specific render elements to adding color corrections such as filmic tone mapping to make your image pop let's go ahead and jump into a scene i've prepared here in advance to showcase these powerful new features let's get started by first taking a look at the new v-ray vision viewer v-ray vision is a lightweight real-time viewer that is smoothly integrated into v-ray 5 for sketchup it functions like a game engine under the hood using 3d rasterization to get you lightning fast previews without ever having to leave the v-ray ecosystem now you can adjust your lights move your camera and shade your scene with real-time feedback allowing you to set up your scenes very quickly we can test materials in the design process explore designs play with lighting scenarios and even walk around and navigate within your scenes in real time if getting fast results is the highest priority you can even use vray vision to export images and export animations to get a rendered preview of your camera in motion to open up the vision viewer we can simply click on the vray vision icon up here in the tools panel you'll see that it opens in a separate window which you can position on your screen wherever you'd like let's first take a look at some of the controls up top here at the top left we have the live link icon which indicates if the live link with fire is currently active and opens up the live link panel where some live session options can be changed when live link is enabled it means that any changes you make in your sketchup scene will be automatically updated and displayed in the vision viewer next we have a folder icon for loading in vr scene files into the viewer next to that we have the info icon which displays useful information such as a handy list of shortcuts after that we have the resolution modes which we can toggle between fit and window which matches the window size and aspect ratio and match scene aspect which matches the aspect ratio from the v-ray render settings though the size of the image is still determined by the window size next we have the camera navigation mode which lets us use the tab key to toggle between the standard orbit mode and fly mode which enables me to fly around the scene like in a game engine using the wasd qe keys and left clicking and dragging to look around you can hold down shift to temporarily increase the movement speed as well next we have the option to enable or disable auto exposure of course we also have a settings panel which allows us to tweak various controls from auto exposure to movement speed and sensitivity you can check out our docs page for more detailed information about these different settings we also have a color corrections panel this gives us access to the type of tone mapping applied to the image as well as standard color correction controls such as exposure contrast and so forth finally we have the save options which let us manage everything from the file format to the output resolution to whether we want to explore an animation and so forth alright let's move on and do a little exploration of our scene here you can see that by simply clicking and dragging while moving the mouse around i'm able to orbit and rotate my perspective meanwhile clicking the middle mouse button and dragging lets me move my position now i'd like to demonstrate how i can make changes in sketchup's viewport as i work while getting real-time feedback in the viewer thanks to v-ray vision's live link to sketchup now that i've got the vision viewer and sketchup lined up side by side let's take a look at how working in my sketchup scene looks in vision to start we can just do some basic modeling here in sketchup and you'll see that it updates right away here in the vision viewer i can navigate around in sketchup and my changes are updated and fully lit and shaded with real-time feedback in the viewer great now that i have some simple geometry here to work with let's start applying some materials from the v-ray asset editor for example i can try out some different brick materials to see what works well for the scene's geometry next i've already prepared some additional geometry in advance for this section so let's go ahead and unhide these curtains here i'm also going to place some trees in the scene here and let's also add in a person okay great now that you've seen how we can work to make some quick changes with modeling shading and assembling a scene using vision's live link let's unhide some additional geometry in the scene before we move on to explore lighting for example i'm going to unhide this geometry here and you'll see that if we switch back to vision it will show up right away since i've already prepared most of this scene in advance let's go ahead and unhide the rest of the geometry here in sketchup and i'll show you how that updates back in vision great now let's take a look at tweaking the sunlight using vision i'll first make sure we have our sunlight enabled here in sketchup and then let's head over to vision to make some further changes to it we can easily make changes to the sunlight direction envision by holding shift and using the left mouse button to control its altitude when going up and down and we can control its azimuth when dragging left and right you'll see that as i do this the sign light adjusts in our scene right away allowing us to find an ideal position for our camera with real-time feedback in fact you can even hold shift and drag the right mouse button to adjust the sun's intensity up and down also at any time you can press f5 to reset the sun position and the lighting changes so as to match the original scene state this is because v-ray vision is a viewer so any changes you make in vision will not affect the sketchup scene now let's disable the sun for a moment and instead enable a dome light i have set up in advance you'll see that in vision we can also get a preview of the dome light as well so you have plenty of ways you can light your scene and get real-time feedback let's open up the right-hand fly-out menu and make some tweaks to the dome light's horizontal rotation parameter back in vision you'll see that we can see the rotation happening as well allowing me to quickly make artistic decisions about how to light the scene without needing to wait for a preview also note that when you have the automatic ibl sun option enabled in the vision settings vision will automatically add a directional light based on the brightest spot in the hdr image you're using to help you get a more accurate lighting preview however this option has no effect if the project sun is enabled and it is not recommended if an hdr without a visible sun is used right let's disable the dome light and switch to the final dome light i have set up here for my scene i'm also going to enable some additional artificial lights that i already set up here in advance and let's see how that all looks okay great so far so good now you can see our vision is able to support various lighting scenarios ranging from bright and sunny days to dome lights with evening skies and a large number of artificial lights in the scene alright since i'm liking how this scene looks let's explore how we can work with the camera animation using v-ray vision back in sketchup i'm first going to enable the animation toggle in the asset editor settings i've already set up a straightforward camera animation in sketchup so now all we have to do is go back to vision and press the play button to see a preview of it now you can see that we're getting a nice and smooth camera animation in vision i think that this looks pretty good so let's do an export so that i could use this to send to a client for example simply clicking on the save icon i can specify an output file path now all i have to do is enable the export animation checkbox and it will render out as an animation sequence at the frames per second value we set below simply press export to start the process and you can watch the resulting preview as it's exporting alright now you've seen a preview of the incredible power of rendering with v-ray vision and how it can both enhance and speed up your workflow with real-time feedback as you develop your scenes note that whenever you're finished working on your scene with vision you can at any time select the vray 5 render engine of your choice and render out a high quality ray traced image or animation this means you get both the speed advantages of real-time feedback with the option to switch to rendering a fully raytraced production image let's move forward now to explore some of the other new features available in vray 5. okay let's now take a look at the new v-ray frame buffer in vray 5. the new v-ray frame buffer has been redesigned to not only enhance your render experience but also offer powerful new functionality that lets you go beyond rendering let's go ahead and open it up with an image i've rendered in advance so i can give you a tour alright i've got the vfb open here with an image from one of the scenes we'll be exploring a bit further later on to start let's take a look at these icons at the top right here which serve as our main render controls these closely resemble the render controls from vray next but are redesigned here you'll find the option to save an image out of the vfb and then next to that is the clear icon which clears the contents of the frame buffer next we have the option to toggle on rendering based on the proximity to the mouse and then we have the render region mode which enables us to draw out a specific region of the image that we'd like to render lastly we have the interactive render button which lets us interactively make changes to our scene while rendering the stop render button and finally we have the production render button next on the top left here we have a few drop down menus such as the file menu for saving and loading rendered image channels other menus for accessing the render and follow mouse buttons a view menu for accessing display color space controls and lastly the vfb settings which we'll take a look at in a moment down here on the left we can double click on this handle here to open up the history panel here we can store a history of rendered images with their post-production corrections and do ap comparisons between images however to use it we'll first need to enable the history in the vfb settings menu simply head over to the history tab check on enabled and then specify a history folder path to save your history images to you can use your project folder or add a custom path to a different folder as well in this case i'll just paste the folder path i copied in advance here finally click save and close to save your changes to the vfb settings now the icons up at the top of the history tab become available to use i'm going to click on the green plus icon here which will save the image i have rendered currently to the vfb history you'll see as i hover over the images that i'm given some information about their render times as well and if i right click on a saved image here i can add a note to the saved render as well as choose from options such as loading in post processing layers from a saved image next let's click the a b icon here which you'll see enables us to do an a b comparison between images you'll see we have a few different options here for formatting as well as the abcd option to compare up to four images simultaneously also note that down below the toolbar gives us pixel value and coordinate information based on where our mouse is hovering over the image alright now let's head over to the right side of the bfb and click on the handle here to open up this tab over here we have the new layer panel editor available in vray 5. here we have the ability to manage all of our post effects right inside of the vfb leveraging the power of a layer tree based editor for doing color corrections as well as light mixing which we'll cover later on for a quick overview of the layer editor you'll see that these color correction layers correspond to the image that i have already loaded in here for example we have controls for white balance curves corrections filmic tone mapping exposure settings and more to add a new layer for color corrections you can simply click on the green plus icon or create layer button and then select from the suite of color corrections and tools for adjusting the image for example let's click on the filmic tone map which contains different types of mapping curves and gamma corrections for affecting the image and you'll see right away that it is added to the top of our layer tree we'll cover how the layer editor functions in more detail later on but for a basic understanding you'll see that each layer has properties below which we can adjust to fine-tune the look of our image for example i can lower the opacity of the filmic tone map correction we added to adjust its visibility the filmic tone map also has different preset types which each affect the image by altering the overall light and dynamic range there are also further parameters below for some preset types to customize the tone mapping these controls allow you to adjust the dark spots highlights and midtones for the image which you can experiment with to find a look that suits your preference in this case i'll leave the type on ampus and tweak the opacity which you'll see affects the overall contrast and dynamic range of the image alright now that you've seen up the properties for this particular layer can be tweaked let's head back up to the top for a moment to glance over the other icons available here we can delete the selected layer and next to that we have options for saving and loading in layer tree presets as well as an undo button we'll demonstrate how these presets can be used in more detail later on lastly we have the stats tab which gives us helpful information about the scene in our devices such as performance and memory tracking data depending on the scene in the rendering mode alright now that you've seen an overview of the new vray 5 vfb let's head over into a new sketchup scene and take a look at some exciting new tools for lighting that can get you stunning looking images and speed up your workflow in vray 5 we have introduced several new lighting tools to enhance your workflow first let's take a look at some improvements we've made for working with the vray sun and sky system we have implemented a new custom sun orientation parameter in sketchup which offers a straightforward widget to override the sketchup sunlight angle and easily orient the sun in the scene whereas in previous versions of vray for sketchup you would control the sun by the date and time in the sketchup shadows panel now directly inside the asset editor you'll have control over the sun's horizontal and vertical angles let's first start an interactive render to get a sense of our scene at the moment you'll see that we have some nice sunlight coming in from the right let's see how we can use the new custom sun orientation controls to quickly make some changes to our scene's lighting back in the asset editor i'll open up the flyout panel to the right and you'll see here that we can toggle on the custom orientation parameters we can click on these two icons here to adjust the vertical angle and then the horizontal angle respectively you'll see right away that the swatch preview interactively updates as well giving us some helpful visual feedback let's head back over to the vfb to see how these changes affect the lighting in our scene great let's try making a few more changes just to see how some different sun positions look in the scene we can also type in manually the exact horizontal angle and vertical angle that we need there we go now you can see how easy it is to find interesting looking sun angles all thanks to the handy new orientation controls and the v-ray asset editor in vray 5 we've also introduced the new improved sun and sky currently we're using the v-ray sky procedural texture with the hosek method which i think for this scene is creating a slightly too yellowish result for my taste now we can take advantage of the new improved sky model which is an analytical sky model that offers striking sunrises and sunsets it can be especially useful when you do not want the sun to be positioned completely above the horizon to switch modes simply go to the sunlight settings in the asset editor and scroll down to the sky drop down here we can switch our sky model to improve which you'll see once again updates in our light swatch to give us a preview right away back in the vfb you'll see that the improved sky makes a striking difference to the lighting for our sunset here there is a rich spectrum of colors and the sun glows with a vibrant orange and reddish hue in fact if you make adjustments to the position and size multiplier of the sun the sun will automatically adjust its colors accordingly for example to show a large dark red sunset depending on its position these simple yet dynamic controls can create a wide variety of eye-catching and diverse lighting scenarios to play with in this case i'm happy with how this looks so let's move on to explore another exciting new feature in vray 5 which takes advantage of the versatility and dynamic potential of the new improved sky right out of the box all right i've opened up another exterior scene here with a nice open sky so that we can further explore different lighting scenarios in vray 5 we've introduced a new tool called the vray light gin which automatically generates a bunch of different lighting scenarios and variations for you with just a few clicks it enables you to achieve various lighting conditions using either the v-ray sun and sky system or hdr images to easily illuminate exteriors or interiors with natural light the resulting lighting scenarios are then presented to you as thumbnails which offer up to hundreds of lighting variations that you can apply to your scenes without any manual work required the great thing about the light gin is that it's incredibly easy to use while giving you a multitude of beautiful looking options to choose from the camera's exposure is automatically stored as well for each thumbnail so you can select your desired lighting scenario and then continue to render interactively and add artificial lights without any hassle to demonstrate how it works let's open up the right-hand fly-out menu so that we can see the sunlight's orientation parameters and then let's head up to the toolbar to click on the light gen icon you'll see that the light gen menu appears and asks us to choose between generating lighting scenarios for an interior or an exterior scene the interior option performs a pre-pass analysis stage before generating taking into account openings such as windows and doorways rather than generating completely random sun angles it determines which light angles might be the most interesting for the sunlight to come in through while the interior analysis uses just natural sunlight from the v-ray sun and sky in the exterior mode you'll see that we also have the ability to generate scenarios using hdr images we have heavily modified these hdris to improve their results removing the ground from the images and editing them so that they closely imitate physically accurate light emission as well as match the v-ray physical sun and sky intensities as much as possible this means that you'll get fairly accurate exposure and light levels when using the light gen you can also even use the hdr images independently by applying them to any regular dome light in your scene alright in this case let's stick with the exterior mode and take a look at the sun and sky parameters below you'll see that we get some straightforward controls for the number of variations we want to generate related to the sun's position in the sky such as the altitude and azimuth for example if we set this to 4x4 variations we'll generate 16 different thumbnails i'm going to increase these settings to their maximum which you'll see below means that we will generate 162 variants note that we can also change the size of the thumbnails that are generated as well with a smaller thumbnail size making results easier to calculate i'll leave that as it is for now okay let's go ahead and press the generate button and see what we get you'll see right away that it begins calculating and generating various thumbnail previews for us with different lighting conditions with just the click of a button we're now going to have hundreds of different lighting combinations to choose from all using the stunning v-ray sun and sky system since you've seen now how this process works let's skip ahead to load in some thumbnails i've already generated in advance at any time we can press the stop button here to abort the light gen from calculating any further once you've stopped a calculation or when a generation process completes you can press save to save the thumbnail set as a dot light set file which we can then load in at another time to access these exact same thumbnails in this case though let's press the load button and i'm going to load in a set of already generated thumbnails here okay now you'll see as i scroll down here that we have hundreds of lighting scenarios to choose from for our scene to select a lighting scenario simply click on a thumbnail and you'll see on the right that the sunlight's custom orientation parameters update to match the thumbnail settings giving us the freedom to position the sun anywhere without being restricted by the geolocation from sketchup next if we start an interactive render we can see how the new lighting conditions look and there we go we've got a nice and clean looking blue sky with some soft shadows in the foreground from the trees let's tap the interactive render for now and prepare to generate another set of thumbnails we can simply click on the reset button here at the bottom of the light gen ui to return back to the setup window now let's switch the light source over to the hdr mode you'll see that the controls are very similar to the sun and sky mode with the ability to set the number of hdr image styles to use as well as a parameter for the number of variations or rotations to generate per hdr image i'll leave these settings at the maximum again which will generate 630 variants for us in addition we can also choose a seed which sets the random variation of each hdr i'll leave the seed at its current value note that a seed of negative 1 disables the randomization altogether now once again we can simply press generate and watch as the different lighting scenarios automatically appear for us this time using a variety of hdr images okay let's once again press the stop button so we can load in a dot light set file containing the hdr thumbnails i generated in advance note that when using the hdr option it will add a dome light asset called light gen dome which you can select and then further tweak in the v-ray asset editor later as i mentioned earlier we can also easily swap out hdris manually by simply selecting the dome light and loading in a different hdr file in the bitmap settings note that if you'd like to save a light set file yourself you can simply press the save button here and give your file a name in this case let's just press the reset button again here and then i'll press load to bring in the thumbnails i already generated with hdris and you'll see right away that we have a ton of hdr image thumbnails to choose from for our scene let's pause a moment and head to the settings tab and take a look down in the camera settings at the exposure value parameter this controls the sensitivity of the camera to the scene lighting levels you'll see now as i click on an hdr thumbnail in the light gen the exposure value setting automatically updates to an appropriate new value in order to correctly expose the image when we press render to demonstrate let's go ahead and start an interactive render and you'll see right away here that we're getting a very striking result thanks to the leicester's hdr image and automatically adjusted exposure value without any need to tweak settings we've gotten not only one hdr lit image here but i've also got hundreds more to choose from if this one doesn't suit my needs let's scroll down on our list of generated thumbnails and find an image with a completely different mood and see how it looks i like the look of this thumbnail here so let's try it out you'll see that once i select it the interactive render updates right away in the vfb okay that's looking pretty nice let's take a look at one more lighting scenario just to see how much variety we can get out of these different light gen results now you can see just what an incredibly dramatic difference in the tone and mood of your scene you can get simply from choosing different lighting results and pressing render from rich glowing sunset skies to clear sunny days to overcast mornings or blue overcast evenings the variety of combinations and possibilities you can get from the light chin are incredibly vast and powerful and you don't have to stop here in fact we could easily use one of the legends results as a starting point and then take the image further in a new and exciting direction adding some artificial lights or further tweaking the results to our satisfaction overall the v-ray light chin gives you an incredibly powerful tool which makes it easy to quickly generate hundreds of impressive lighting scenarios without needing to spend any time tweaking settings you can simply click the generate button sit back and let v-ray take care of the work for you so that you can focus on the artistic aspects of creating beautiful looking images alright now that we've explored the new lighting tools in vray 5 let's switch gears and take a look at some of the new shading features that can speed up your workflow and give you even more realistic looking materials in particular i'd first like to show you some important updates that we have made to the vray generic material let's take a look at this scene i've prepared here containing some lemons and a serving plate on a countertop i'd like to show you how we can use the new vira generic material to make this serving tray look more convincing for a quick background if you're familiar with previous versions of v-ray for sketchup you may recall that we had a separate vray generic material and also a pbr material for when you were using pbr textures such as metalness and roughness texture maps in vray 5 we have merged the pbr material parameters into the vray generic material so that you can now use one straightforward shader for all your generic material needs this means you can now utilize metalness and roughness maps while also taking advantage of all the other v-ray generic material parameters that were not previously accessible in the pbr material to demonstrate how the new vray generic material works in a simple pbr workflow let's head down to the metalness parameter i'd like this material to be metallic so let's increase this slider from zero to one the metalness slider acts as an on off switch since physically based materials are either considered a non-metal or a metal represented as 0 or 1 respectively using the slider now i'd also like to switch the surface control parameter from used glossiness to use roughness the surface control modifies the behavior of all material parameters controlling the surface smoothness the reason we have two options is because there are different workflows that interpret surface smoothness one way or another in short roughness is simply the inverse of glossiness and roughness texture maps are commonly used in pbr workflows once we've switched modes you'll see that the reflection glossiness parameter above has switched to reflection roughness now this reflection roughness parameter controls the sharpness of reflections with a value of 1 creating rough diffuse reflection while a value of 0 creates perfectly smooth mirror-like reflections you'll see now as i move the slider down to 0.05 that the preview swatch updates to show the material becoming much more reflective with just a bit of blurriness in the vfb we'll see the results here as the serving plate material becomes much smoother looking alright that's looking much better and more realistic now you've seen how we can create a simple metallic material following a pbr workflow all using the vray generic material in vray 5. next let's move on to set up a different material in the same scene here and explore how to work with the new coat layer parameter in vray 5 we have implemented a new coat layer for the vray generic material which makes it easy to add a shiny polished character to your materials for example it removes the need for material layering when you want to add a coat layer on top of a metallic-based surface now it is much simpler to create a variety of materials such as metallic paint carbon with coating certain types of plastics varnish to wood and more this can significantly speed up your shading workflow and in addition you can get even faster render results using the code parameters than with traditional methods such as using a blend material to demonstrate i've already selected the paint blurry white material here in the scene so let's go ahead and twirl down the code parameters for it you'll see here that we have several different parameters for controlling the appearance of the coat in our scene the coat amount simply specifies the blending weight of the coat layer a value of zero means no coat layer while higher values blend the coat gradually the coat color determines the coat layer's color and the coat glossiness controls the sharpness of reflections with a value of 1 being perfect glass-like reflections also note that when you have the generic material surface control option set to use roughness the coat glossiness will be called the coat roughness and its effect will be the inverse lastly the coat ior specifies the index of refraction for the coat layer or how much the light is bent as it enters the coat since i'm trying to enable a nice looking coat here for the table beneath the lemons let's just slide the coat amount from 0 to 1 and see how that looks and there you go we're immediately getting some nice looking reflections in the coat layer now you can see just how quickly you can get a nice looking coat layer in vray 5 and how easy it is to experiment without any need for complex blend materials we could always further tweak the other coat parameters below but i'm liking how this looks already so let's move on to take a look at another new material layer the sheen layer okay i'm now in a scene facing a piece of cloth on a couch using the new sheen layer within the vray generic material we can easily create fabric materials with a realistic cloth-like appearance the sheen parameters act as a top reflective layer on the diffuse color resulting in a falloff effect for cloth with straightforward controls that enables us to create materials such as satin or velvet let's go ahead and start the interactive render here to see what the cloth material looks like without any of the sheen parameters enabled as the image clears up you'll see that the cloth looks okay but it's missing that additional falloff effect that makes it appear like a textile material let's head back to our materials and selecting the fabric i'm going to open up the right hand out menu to look at the scene's settings now you'll notice that the sheen drop down menu is not immediately visible here and that is because we'll need to toggle on the advanced settings option here now we'll see the sheen drop down appear so let's take a look at its parameters the sheen has two straightforward controls built in enabling you to alter the sheen's color with black disabling the sheen effect altogether meanwhile the sheen glossiness controls the sharpness of the reflections a value of 1 means all of the light reaches the diffuse color therefore diminishing the sheen's visibility whereas when the glossiness value is lower the sheen effect appears more pronounced also once again note that when you have the generic material surface control option set to used roughness the sheen glossiness will be called the sheen roughness and its effect will be the inverse in order to get a more realistic looking sheen color we can actually copy the existing diffuse color texture from the swatch above and paste that into the sheen color texture slot i'll paste it as a copy so that we can make further color corrections to it to make it brighter without affecting the original diffuse color texture to do so let's right-click on the texture swatch again and this time head to the wrap-in menu the wrap-in options will place the existing texture within a new one and then plug the new texture into the original slot so that we can easily make changes to the existing texture in this case i'll select the color correction wrap and texture so that we can lighten up the texture a bit now in the color correction parameters let's head down to the brightness setting and increase it up to something like 0.36 you'll see in the preview swatch now that the texture color is a much lighter grayish blue color great now let's head back to the material settings and bring the sheen glossiness down a decent amount to something like 0.2 in order to reflect more light now you'll see in the previous watch that our fabric is showing a fairly pronounced sheen effect let's head over to the vfb now to see how it looks in our scene there we go i'm liking how that looks thanks to the fact that we copied the fabric's diffuse texture color over we've been able to add a realistic looking sheen color that makes our fabric appear much more like cloth with a gentle falloff effect alright now let's move on to take a look at several new randomization parameters we've introduced in vray 5 which make creating realistic looking materials easier than ever ok i've switched to a different camera here now focusing on the wooden floor in the scene in vray 5 for sketchup we've introduced a new set of randomization parameters for the multi-sub texture now it is possible to easily create color variations while keeping the number of textures used low and in the process speeding up your workflow let's go ahead and demonstrate how it works by adding some randomization to the wooden floor to start i've already selected the wood material here in the asset editor so now let's right-click on the diffuse colors texture swatch and then head to the wrap-in menu here we can select the multi-sub texture to place our diffuse color's texture inside of the multi-sub and make tweaks to the diffuse the v-ray multi-sub texture distributes multiple textures to many objects via one single material based on specified ids or a random distribution first you'll need to set the get id from mode to establish what id to use to feed the multi-sub-textured data to the material you'll see that we have options such as the face material id where v-ray considers the face ids when feeding the color or texture data to the materials as well as object ids or several random buy modes for assigning random colors based on an id type in this case let's choose the random by face material id mode which assigns random colors based on the material ids of the object's faces now we'll see the new randomization parameters exposed these are the hue saturation and gamma variation parameters as well as a seed for changing the randomization pattern each of their input values are a percentage of the hue saturation value or gamma range to start let's try increasing the hue just a bit to see how that affects our image as a general note you usually won't need to set these values very high or they can start to overpower the image so i'll increase these gently you'll see right away here that the hue variation has kicked in as the wood flooring now shows several reddish hue colors popping out let's bring back the hue just a bit and then increase the saturation variation parameter next now you'll see that we're getting some interesting variation in the saturation across the different wooden floorboards which helps to make the flooring appear much more natural looking next let's also increase the gamma variation just a tiny bit to see how that impacts the flooring now you can see right away just how much influence these variation parameters can have on the overall look of your materials however i think the effect is a bit too strong for my taste so let's bring back the gamma to something very subtle like .01 there we go now our floorboards have a much richer set of color hues and more contrast making them feel much more realistic rather than uniform with just a few small tweaks to the hue saturation and gamma variation parameters we've been able to add randomization to our scene and create a more dynamic and realistic looking floor without any need for complex shader setups now you can see all the multi-sub textures powerful randomization controls make it easier than ever to make your textures more interesting less repetitive and more realistic as a result next let's explore another way to add randomization to the textures in your scene this time using the new uvw placement texture alright as you can see here i've switched to a different camera which gives us a nice view of this leather couch material here however as you may have already noticed there is a pretty distinct and repetitive tiling pattern visible here on the leather let's see if we can use the new uvw placement texture in vray 5 to randomize this pattern and help to make the leather look more authentic in the asset editor you'll see that we've already got a bitmap texture loaded into the diffuse color for our generic v-ray material as you can see in the swatch preview the texture pattern is even more visible here so let's see what we can do to make it less apparent first let's drop down the texture placement menu and take a look at its parameters in vray 5 we can now switch the type to the new mapping source option which will let us use an external uv placement source for the texture placement if we then simply click on its texture swatch we can add the new uvw placement texture to it for an overview the v-ray uvw placement texture operates as a custom mapping source that can be shared between different textures it is equipped with randomization parameters that allow randomizing the texture placement based on different ids names and so forth the v-ray uvw placement texture also has additional controls for the amount and method of randomization to start let's increase the repeat uv amount which increases the number of times the texture is repeated in the 0 to 1 uv square and click the chain icon to lock the u and v values together now our texture is repeated more frequently which will help it to match with the previous texture placement method when we add randomization so let's head to the randomization drop down below you'll see that we have a bunch of randomization options here to choose from and in this case i'd like to use the new stochastic tiling method which changes the mapping based on the uv tile and can be used for patterns that have repetition in this case let's leave the other tiling values at their defaults and let's see what impact this has on our render and there you go now you can see how just by adding the uvw placement texture and enabling the stahastic tiling option we've removed the visible pattern from our texture also note that when you enable stahastic tiling you'll see that the tile blend slider becomes available to use below which lets you control the amount of edge blending between adjacent tiles you can play with this parameter together with the various u and v offset parameters below or the uv rotation to restrict the angle of the rotation of the stochastic tiling and create interesting blending results that can suit a variety of needs however even with just the default stochastic tiling values our leather couch material already looks much more realistic without any need for overlaying multiple textures now let's move on to take a look at the updated material library in vray 5 to see how it has been improved and how it can help to speed up your workflow you'll find the updated vray 5 preset material library in the left-hand fly-out menu of the asset editor rather than having to download the entire library during the installer process you will instead be presented with the option to download the preset material library the first time you open this panel after installing vray 5 for sketchup once the download is complete the library assets remain permanently available in addition if you have other vray products also installed on the system such as vray 5 for rhino or vray 5 for 3ds max the asset files will be shared between them so that the assets are not redownloaded more than once as you have seen vray5 has introduced several shader updates such as the cote machine layers pbr parameters the new randomization controls and more as a result we have updated the entire built-in material library to make sure these new material parameters are utilized the quality of most materials has been increased as well with higher resolution texture maps having replaced the old 1k texture maps for example let's select a material here and take a look at its parameters i'm going to select this wall paint stucco material and drag it into our scenes materials now if we head to its diffuse color texture you'll see that in the texture placement tab there is a uvw placement mapping source already set up with randomization using stochastic tiling enabled by default for another example we can head to the fabric category and let's import this fabric purple material into our scene now if we switch to its advanced settings you'll see that the sheen parameters have been used in order to give our fabric an even more realistic looking appearance now you can take advantage of these new features as well as easily customize the preset materials further to suit your needs you can even analyze how these are constructed and learn more about creating your own materials altogether the updated material library utilizes the incredibly powerful new features available in vray 5 to get you stunning looking preset materials so that you can get shading quickly with a higher level of quality and realism than ever before alright i've now switched over to a camera angle of a table here showing an architectural maquette let's now take a look at the new contour controls which can be used to help make renders look like scale models as well as to create stylized images in previous versions of v-ray you would typically need to create contours using a time-consuming shader setup with the vire tune material now in vray 5 you can simply add or remove contours as an attribute to any shader without any need for reassigning materials in addition contours can also be assigned and controlled globally so that you can easily apply contours to your entire scene to demonstrate how to use the contours on a material i've selected the material here for the walls of the maquette house to add contours we can simply click the add attribute icon here and then select the contour option you'll see right away that this adds the contours menu drop down below as well as updates the swatch preview above with black outlines since the default contour's line color is black in the drop down you'll see that we have a decent number of parameters we can tweak to create a look that suits our needs in this case the parameters that i think are most useful for getting started are the line color and the width i'm going to leave the line color black since i think this works well here but let's head down to the width parameter to adjust the width of the outlines i'm going to increase the width here to something a bit larger and more visible you'll see how this changes the appearance of the lines in the previous watch above let's see how this looks if we start an interactive render for our scene and you'll see that simply by adding the contour attribute to our material and increasing the width we've now given our maquette model a far more interesting appearance thanks to the addition of the stylized contour lines of course there are some other parameters you can tweak even further such as enabling the inner line controls drop down so that you can have granular control over the appearance of the inner and outer lines what if i'd like to apply contours to my entire scene in this case we can switch to using the global contour controls instead if we head to the settings panel in the asset editor you'll find the global contour controls toggle is in the right hand fly-out menu when we toggle them on and then start an interactive render you'll see that we're now getting contour lines applied to the entire scene rather than just the maquette model just like when you apply the contours to a single shader you'll find some similar parameters available for tweaking their appearance in the global settings in this case i'm going to leave these settings as they are all together now you've seen how with the new controls applying contours to your entire scene is as easy as clicking on a toggle in addition you can easily add contours to existing materials and tweak their appearance using an assortment of intuitive parameters without any need to spend time reassigning shaders okay now that you've seen the upgrades we've made to the shaders and the improved workflows in vray 5 let's get ready to dive into post-production and discuss light mixing and compositing i've opened up our final render here so let's explore a crucial step before we can do light mixing in vray 5. for a quick background when a light mix render element is added before rendering the intensity and color of the lights and light emitting materials can be changed directly from the vfb both during and after rendering this means lights can be enabled and disabled using the lightmix controls all in one convenient location rather than having to navigate to individual light parameters and since you don't need to re-render your final output to make tweaks to your lighting you can easily experiment with a wide variety of moods and lighting styles all using a single rendered image to set up your scene for light mixing you'll simply need to open the asset editor and add the lightmix render element then in the right-hand fly-out menu just make sure that you've set the group by perimeter to the mode of your choice in order to specify how to group the lighting information for example in this case i'd like to have my lights grouped together as layers so that the lighting information for each layer is stored in a separate channel and there you go now that you've added the lightmix render element you can proceed with your production render setup and any other render elements you'd like to use just as you would normally from here and then when you're ready go ahead and press render alright to get started the first thing we'll want to do here is make sure the source layer is selected and then in the properties here we will see the option to switch to the light mix mode right away when i select it you'll see that the properties update to show a bunch of different lights in our scene again since we set our group by mode to layers these light channels here represent all the layers of lights that i had in the scene to start let's press the checkbox next to the all button which will turn off all of the lights in our image now we can begin to build up our image's lighting from scratch and work with each layer of lights one by one until we have created an ideal lighting scenario in this case let's head down to the rest channel which contains all of the lights that do not fit into the other groups or individual channels plus the atmospheric effects as you can see this channel contains the atmospheric fog in our scene next let's enable the light dome which will naturally display the dome light and its sky in the background now let's enable the lights a channel these are a layer of lights that are mostly in the interiors of the houses here let's also enable the lights b channel which is another set of lights that are mostly in the interiors as well now that we have some light to work with i'd like to make some tweaks i'll start by increasing the multiplier value here for the light's b channel increasing the multiplier will make the lights look brighter and decreasing it will make them look dimmer that's helping to make these lights pop and give our scene a bit more contrast next let's enable the light's exterior which are some artificial exterior lights this time let's click on its color swatch and make some changes to the hue of the lights you'll see as i drag around in the color picker that the lights update in nearly real time as well to give us a nice preview of the changes we're making as we test out different colors i think i'll go for a darker yellow color here to complement the evening sky colors i like how that's looking now let's also increase the multiplier for the light's exterior to make our scene brighten up a bit more like a well-lit neighborhood next let's enable the light c these are again mostly interior lights nearby and there we go that's already looking quite interesting just with these few tweaks we've made so far let's also enable the self illumination option this will enable the city lights in the background they're definitely not bright enough though so let's increase the multiplier a decent amount say from 1 to 30. now that's looking much better ok i think i'm pretty happy with my lighting setup here so let's head up to the layers section and select the lens effects for the scene let's now enable the lens effects in the properties below alright that's coming on a bit too strong for my taste so let's dial back the opacity a bit here to something around 0.4 and there we go now you've seen that we can do some quick tweaks using light mixing in order to give our scene a much more dynamic and contrasty look and feel without any need to re-render the image next let's take a look at how we can do some compositing in the new layer editor to take our rendered image even further alright now that we're done light mixing we can either choose to switch over to the composite mode and leave our light mix changes behind or we can press the 2 composite button here which will send our changes from the light mix to the compositor for further refinement in this case let's press the 2 composite button and continue to work with the tweaks we made during light mixing to take our image even further up in the layer editor you'll see that beneath the source composite layer we have a folder containing all of our light mix changes as render elements in case we'd like to make any further adjustments to those layers let's go ahead and twirl up this folder here and explore how we can do some color corrections on a single render element as well as our whole image here as i mentioned briefly earlier the new layer tree based editing system allows us to do all sorts of nuanced color corrections as well as set blending modes and even combined render elements right here in the vfb the layer system applies corrections from the bottom to the top meaning layers on top of the stack are considered in the foreground and the result of all layers below it is considered the background to start doing some color corrections i'm going to right-click on the source composite layer and in the new layer menu select render element this will put a render element layer above our lightmix folder which you'll see by default is set to the rgb color element but we can choose whichever render element we want to do some color corrections on let's switch this to the atmosphere render element so that we can make it brighter since the render element's blend mode is already set to add this will help the atmosphere effect to stand out a bit next if we right-click on the atmosphere layer we can apply color corrections directly to it for example let's select the curves correction now you'll see that a curves layer has appeared above the atmosphere with a downward pointing arrow next to it this indicates that the curves layer is being applied only to its parent which is the atmosphere layer rather than the entire image this means that we can make isolated color corrections to the atmosphere without affecting any other layers the curves allow you to remap the image colors using a bezier curve as well as save and load acv curve files from adobe photoshop to demonstrate let's click somewhere in the curve editor to create a point now i can click on the point and drag it to reposition it somewhere as well as tweak the handles to affect the shape of the curve you'll see that the image is updating as we make adjustments as well so that we can see the effect of our changes and there we go i'm liking how that looks okay now that you've seen how editing a layer using the curve editor works you've got the fundamental idea of compositing in the vfb and making changes to different render layers you can also move on from here to further refine your image for example to apply color corrections to the entire image as well like we did earlier using the filmic tone map lastly i'd also like to show you how layer tree presets work in vray 5. when you have made changes to your image using the layer editor you can click on this icon up here to save your corrections as a layer tree preset file if you save a layer tree preset with composite corrections you can also use the preset with another image so long as the image is rendered with the exact same render elements that are saved with the preset you can also easily save universal presets that exclude any composite or light mix corrections if you only add and or modify layers above the source layer in the editor next if you'd like to load in a preset you can open the vfb settings and head to the layers tab here we can set the presets path which will allow us quick access to whatever layer tree preset files have been saved at this location i'll paste the path i've set up in advance and make sure to hit save and close now if i click on this icon here i'll get quick access to the custom layer presets i've placed in that folder location you'll see here that i've prepared a few presets in advance and i can hover my mouse over them to take a look at them you'll see as each preset loads that the different color corrections i've saved can have a dramatic impact on the mood and appearance of the image this will give you an idea of the many different capabilities of working with the light mixer and compositor in the new vray 5 vfb with only a single render you can now go beyond rendering and easily make changes using the powerful suite of color correction controls blending modes and ability to tweak specific render elements to get stunning looking images all within vray 5. lastly when you're all done compositing and happy with your image just don't forget to save your render out of the vfb by clicking on the save icon in addition we now support an experimental out of core gpu render mode this means you can render on gpu even if your scene exceeds your gpu vram limit note that since this is currently an experimental feature this option is only available for cuda enabled gpus and is not yet supported for rtx in vra5 we updated the dirt textures functionality with additional parameters it now employs both ambient and inner occlusion modes so that you can shade open corners instead of crevices with the occluded color as a result you can easily create procedural weathered streaks and dirt and crevices to create even more realistic and grimy looking materials the very generic material now has a built-in bump layer implemented there is no longer any need to add bump attributes to a material you can simply use the built-in bump parameter section instead in addition the new bump offers better shader performance than before when using the v-ray denoiser you can enable the effect all channels option which now reduces blurriness for objects seen through glass when using denoising 2d displacement is also now supported on gpu and offers an advantage in that it preserves all the details in the displacement map provided that the object has valid uv coordinates the v-ray ruby api has also been redesigned and extended it streamlines third-party extensions development and ensures long-term support for scripts using it documentation for the new api has been added to the installation folder and can be found in the v-ray for sketchup extension menu in the api documentation ok now you've seen how in vra5 you will have access to many powerful new features that can speed up your workflow and get you more realistic looking results with less effort and you can even go beyond rendering with the new layer based compositor and suite of color correction tools available right out of the box in addition v-ray vision brings real-time rendering to vray for sketchup now you can work in your scenes in real time and even save images or animations beer a5 also introduces new features to make lighting your scenes easier than ever from the improved sun and sky system to the lighting scenarios you can automatically generate with the nuviri light chin the possibilities are nearly endless to unleash your creative potential we have also introduced several new randomization parameters in vray 5 that make it easier than ever to create realistic looking materials the new multi-sub textures hue saturation and gamma can help you to add some variation to your textures meanwhile the uvw placement texture offers flexible controls to remove repetitive patterns lastly the redesigned fury frame buffer boasts a sleek new interface and offers a powerful and intuitive new layer editor to manage your color corrections in addition the new light mix and compositing modes make it possible to go beyond rendering and handle all your post-processing needs all within vray 5. if you'd like to try out vray 5 for sketchup please visit our website chaosgroup.com for more information and to download a free trial if you have any further questions please feel free to check out our docs page for additional information about these new features as well and for the latest updates please click subscribe on our youtube channel chaos group tv so that you can keep up to date with our latest new products and releases thank you for joining me for this webinar session and i hope to see you next time you

Channel: ChaosTV

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Id: ceDV8tMohUI

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020