- Hey guys, Alex here
from SketchUp School. Welcome to another Office Hours. (grains scattering) (slurping) Today's SketchUp question and it's one of the most common
ones we hear all the time. What are the best V-Ray settings? (upbeat music) Well, I'm about to let
you in on a little known hidden combination of render settings that will immediately transform
any Soso rendering results into stunning professional... Nah, I'm just messing with you. A lot of people who
struggle to get the results they're after in V-Ray for SketchUp, hope that all they're missing
is a perfect combination of elusive settings that
will take their okay rendering result and
suddenly make it great. But unfortunately, there's no magic wand
that will do this for you. Keeping that in mind,
today, I will walk you through the settings that I do recommend to design professionals using
V-Ray and talk about why. But first let me stress,
the most important factors that go into making an amazing rendering are not the V-Ray settings. There are a bunch of other
things you need to get right in order to create a great
render-ready SketchUp model. And once you've done all those the V-Ray settings are
just the icing on the cake. How do you do that? A good place to start would be checking out the videos on our V-Ray
for SketchUp playlist. Once you've followed the best practices for setting up your SketchUp
model that we cover there then you're ready to start
talking about V-Ray settings. So what are V-Ray settings? In the V-Ray asset editor
under the gear icon, this is where your V-Ray settings live. There are two main ways
you'll want to have them set depending on what you're
doing in SketchUp. The first is for when you're
still working on your model such as setting up lights,
materials, and objects. While doing that, I
recommend under engine, if you're on a Mac, leave this set to CPU. If you've got a PC with
a modern NVIDIA GPU, go ahead and set this to CUDA. Then click the three dots on the right and make sure both CPU
and GPU are checked. This will allow your
computer to use the power of both the CPU and GPU while rendering. If you have an NVIDIA RTX
GPU, then set this to RTX. Unfortunately, Mac users can't
harness their GPU and V-Ray. Now, if you're not sure
about all this GPU talk or you're not sure how to find out whether you have an
NVIDIA GPU, no worries. You could just set this to CPU for now. We don't have time to cover all the why and the how in this video, but just know that this setting will affect the speed of your rendering and not the quality. And if you're looking for more info on CPU and GPU combinations for rendering, check out our Office Hours about the best computer
setups for SketchUp. I've added a link in the cards. For interactive, leave this switch off. For progressive switch this on. This option will show you a progressively loading
preview of your rendering, which can be a real time saver as you work on on your model. Since often you'll see things that clearly need to be fixed early in
the progressive preview instead of waiting for the
entire render preview to finish. For quality, set it to
low for a slower computer or for more complex files
with high polygon counts and high resolution materials. You can notch it up to low plus or medium for faster computers or simple files. And for render output,
a good place to start is between 600 to 800 pixels
for your bigger dimension. Whether that's width for
landscape or hype for portrait. You can play with a bigger size but just know that will slow
down your render preview time. These core settings should
give you a good sense of how your final image will look as you continue to make
adjustments and refine your scene without slowing you
down so much as you wait for previews to load. Then when you're ready
to switch your settings to create a final rendering,
here's what I recommend. For engine, we'll stick
with the same choice you made for previews. Keep interactive turned off,
then turn progressive off. This puts you in bucket mode which is the best option
for final renderings. Set your quality to high. High plus will slow down your render time and the difference in quality is often pretty hard to detect, so I just stick with the high setting. Turn the denoiser on and leave
it on the V-Ray denoiser. There are other options, but V-Rays is a great default option. This will help clean up small
bits of graininess or noise that can appear in certain situations. For render output, be sure
to specify the dimensions for the biggest size it will be shown. Whether that's on a screen or for print to keep the details crisp and clear. And lastly, don't forget
to turn on save image and set the name and where
to save your final rendering. And those are the only V-Ray settings you really need to mess with. If you've done everything up front to set up a great
render-ready SketchUp model then these settings will
give you great results. But wait, what about that
little right flyout menu? Is that where the magic
settings are hiding? As you get more advanced at rendering you can play with these advanced settings and you may find some helpful
depending on the situation. But if you've struggled to
create quality renderings from the basic settings
we've just gone over, there's nothing in this
menu that will help you. So just close that menu and ignore it. Close it. Just, just close it. Last thing. Say you followed everything but you've still got this
nagging feeling like, this looks good, but something about it isn't as awesome as some
of the other renderings I've seen out there. Well, it may be the case
that what you're aiming for isn't something that can be achieved through V-Ray settings alone, but was actually achieved
through post-production. What's that? Post-production is the final
and often very crucial step of editing your finished rendering using either the V-Ray frame buffer or another application like Photoshop, but that's a huge topic and
it's one for another video. All right, now that you know,
my take on V-Ray settings, let us know how your rendering projects are looking in the comments below. And if you've got a SketchUp question you'd like me to cover
in a future Office Hours, send me a message or drop
it in the comments as well. Don't forget to like and subscribe and until next time happy sketching. (bright music)
