V-Ray Material Fundamentals in Maya - Part 1

hey everyone today we're gonna be covering the fundamentals and basics of very materials in Maya using v-ray next we'll be covering several parameters on the most-used shader and v-ray in Maya known simply as the array material the outcome of this satori will help you understand how to manipulate these settings to create basic material types like plastic rubber metal and glass like you seen the sample renders in front of you with that let's go ahead and get started alright so here we are in Maya so quick intro to the scene I just have a simple backdrop and I have this cool-looking shader ball if you're interested in grabbing this shader ball look up mastering CGI with Grant Warwick and you should be able to download that online alright so we have this scene set up and we have a couple of simple lights v-ray rectangle lights that I've just created using this here so just to make sure you're able to follow along I'm using gonna be using the v-ray tab here and you can see that I can create lights however big that I need to if you're interested in the basics of lighting go ahead and take a look at one of my previous tutorials on lighting in theory alright so I have these two lights set up and if I go ahead and do a simple render actually before that let's look at our render settings I'm using full 1024 for resolution for our image sample I'm using progressive and for GI I'm using irradiance map with low settings which you can change here irradiance map and then our secondary is light cache and if you jump down I just set light cache to 500 to iterate faster and I can go ahead now and do a quick render so if I go ahead and render you see that it's we're starting to get light in our scene which is great but at the same time it's still pretty flat and ideally you're gonna want something with a bit more light to be able to see you know the the material details and how it interacts with in the environment so a good way to do this in combination with using these v-ray lights is that you can use environment override so if I go to overrides here and the render settings and enable and override or override environment you can see that now it gives me a list of options so just by enabling that you can see that GI texture is set to this kind of this light blue and it's going to go ahead and essentially create this background environment or this GI environment is that light white which is good but it's still not giving us a lot to for reflections so what I typically like to do is under reflection texture go ahead and select a color math option and scroll down to file and enable file now we're gonna put in an HDR image so what I'm gonna do is grab this HDR that I've already downloaded and if you're interested in downloading this this is simply from HDR I Haven you can go to HDR eyes studio and then you can grab one of these guys here I believe I use studio small - and yep I go ahead and open and then now what that's gonna do is give me the reflections from the HDR but still use that GI texture so now when I go ahead and render let's see what happens all right great so with this basic material you can see that now we're starting to get some more response to the light I'll go ahead and stop that you can kind of see the difference it's gonna be really helpful when we start adding different material types alright great so that's the lighting and render settings so let's just go ahead and jump right into materials now so what I'm gonna do if you don't if you're following along with a different model just simply select your model and hold right click and then you can just do assign new material now here's the material that we want to create we want to create a v-ray material so go ahead and select that and then now it's it's gone ahead and assigned this new favorite material so I can call this you know main material all right now of course while we're adding this I typically like to use the hypershade here so it's this little circle icon in our at the top here to go ahead and click and open on my second monitor and I can go ahead and drag that over here so now we can see that we have we're looking for main material here and this is the new one that we've created and to see this down here select the material and then output connections great so now we have the main material here and so we can start modifying the properties that we have here so as as we're going through right we can start changing these parameters so the first thing I want to take a look at right now is the diffuse color as the name implies this is just gonna change our base color and one thing that Maya has which is really nice is you can change this from Hardware in the hypershade to v-ray so if I go ahead and change that you can see now you might hear your fans kick on and whatnot this is gonna be using GPU rendering to render this in the viewport which makes it really nice to iterate so I can go ahead and change this to any color that I want see this yellow here and this is going to change this base color all right so of course you can do any mixture if I want to drop the saturation the hue or the value and then change the hue here okay so this is our base diffuse color then we have right here amount now just in case if you're following along and you see something else different here keep in mind you have to toggle between this view here right so this is look their view which might have defaulted there and if you hit this this is gonna switch to attribute editor view what you see here so I can just hit ctrl a to bounce in the attribute editor so if you're looking this in Debu you can switch those kind of back and forth but if you want what I'm seeing here you want to make sure you actually editor of you now then you have the amount now that's the amount of diffuse color as you change this you can see that it's essentially kind of multiplying that color and I typically leave this up 1 if I ever really want to change the saturation of the color I just do that and the set here and just you know use whatever I need to in the HSV or RGB then you have opacity mode now opacity mode is not refraction so you typically use this for a cutout right so you can see that it's starting to fade but we're getting no refraction so just to show a quick example of this if I go here now to the main material and let's say I'm over here and I go to 2d textures and we have checker here so if I click checker you can see that the checker has been added so I just simply left click and then we can go back to main material and middle Mouse drag this over opacity math now what this is going to do it's going to kind of start cutting things out anything that's white will stay will up here anything that's black will be cut out so if I go over here to this place 2d texture I can change the tiling and whatnot to ten by ten so you can kind of see what's happening and you can start to see through the checker here now we're not gonna be messing too much with opacity but that's I just want to make sure to cover that property so I can go ahead and just delete those nodes now and make sure to set opacity back to pure white all right so we're just going to jump down here roughness mode is default zero now if you're working with kind of like more dusty or chalk like materials you're gonna want to crank this up to a roughness of one now keep in mind this is not the same roughness as down here which we're gonna get to so go ahead and just leave this at the default zero so you can kind of see that the difference here as you're changing these settings and then we have self illumination under basic parameters which self illumination is going to make the objects appear to glow from within so if I set this maybe to you know this kind of green material it's essentially going to be self illuminated all right now by default is not gonna cast any light but this is good for like if you have like lampshades or you know anything that you know like a light bulb or something like that that's gonna make it look like it's lit from within so for now we'll just go ahead and set that back to black and then continue to scroll down now here is where things get a lot more interesting all right so now we have our reflection properties okay now the first thing is not gonna get too in-depth about this but your brdf type which brdf is bi-directional reflectance distribution function and all that means is how does the material handle reflections okay by default always make sure to use ggx okay so these are different logarithms and-and-and functions you want to stick with G GX which is the latest and greatest newest way of calculating light so if I actually increase reflection color here to white now we start to get something that looks a little bit interesting so we hadn't have this green material here and you can start to see the reflections coming through now if I change this to something like a fog it might be subtle but I'll go ahead and actually drop this glossiness so you can kind of see a little bit of the difference between these between these so you can start to see the difference between how it handles specular reflections so for now there's fog there's blend which is a little bit more blurry and then you have Ward which is typically used for metallic but like I said always stick with ggx it just gives you better detail and is more physically accurate okay so I'm gonna crank this back up and we have this reflection color so at any time if I wanted to change this base material so like I said if I wanted a blue plastic I think what it's kind of this blue here drop the saturation a little bit and value and maybe we gonna get something won't get something kind of like this great so we have this blue here and then now we have the reflection color notice what happens when I start scrubbing this down the reflection the highlights are going to start becoming this less of a pure white so more gray until I get all the way down here and then ultimately to black okay so it's very flat at this point but the second you kick this on it's going to start giving you reflection highlights alright so if I go ahead and set this to pure white and then I typically leave I always leave a mount at one and then for glossiness that's where it's going to you dictate how shiny or matte right so we have glossiness which is super shiny or rough which is the opposite of glossiness so if I drop this all the way down you can see that it basically turned back to having no reflections whatsoever I typically never have to go lower than 0.4 0.5 as you can see here this we still get a lot of good highlights here at like point six point four and then just know that the lower this does the more sampling that the v-ray has to do to get softer and cleaner reflections okay so I'll go ahead and actually set this so you can see if I set it back to one pure shiny plastic which is great and if I set this to maybe point six point seven we start to get more of a matte plastic and then even lower maybe 0.4 0.5 we start to get something like um a matte rubber all right so so far so good now well what if I want to start working with metallic objects well what you used to have to do and you can watch as I do this is disable luck for now I you are and set the Fornell IOR to something like ten okay well it gives you a good result but it isn't a hundred percent physically accurate well what veera has done now is included a metalness properly property which is in now in the rain-x so what that means is well let me go ahead and set this diffuse color of this object to white so here we have this pure white object and if I go down to metalness let me take this from zero I just move that all the way to one and take a look at that now it's a little bit hard to see it's kind of this really matte or rough metal let's go ahead and set this back to reflection bossiness to one now you can see that this is a pure metal chrome like material which is great so we don't have to crank up for now I you are too too high to get that value and the metalness is giving us the exact result that we want now keep keep in mind you want to kind of treat this like a boolean almost so whenever you're not whenever you want a metal object set this to one no matte not metal or plastic set it to zero so you can see that it's plastic and what that's typically called is dielectric and non die electrical conductors and what I mean by that if I go ahead and go to V Ray's blog here they have a really good post on understanding metalness so you can see dielectrics are you know like marble porcelain glass wood paper and conductive zorn on dielectrics are typically gonna be your metal objects so you're gonna have kind of like this gold brass you know yeah anything that's metal copper all that good stuff so that's a good way to kind of think about it so if I go ahead and set this back to one you can see now I have the kind of shiny and then if I wanted to lower the glossiness to get something that looks oh you know a little bit more you know not perfect like chrome you can do that here and if you want to be even more physically accurate or accurate you can start to see how you can go get the base diffuse color from this blog post as well as reflection color so if you wanted something like cold you can actually type in the base color you know of two 43201 104 here so I'll just move that over to the left and I can go to base color here and I can type in change this actually to RGB 255 and just type in these values of 243 201 and 104 and that's gonna kind of give us this gold look here and we can even plug in this IOR value for gold which is 1.35 which is the index of refraction okay so what you want to do is disable a lot for now IOR and this essentially is the intensity that things are refractive at extreme angles okay so we have one point three five there and then the reflection color is going to be still set to pure white so if I go ahead actually now and do a quick render of this and it's just verifying what viewport I'm gonna Mouse here do a quick render now we're getting this kind of cool-looking gold and if I wanted to I can crank up the reflection glossiness to you know something like a high point nine and it starts to look a lot more like gold okay so that's great and if I wanted a plastic I can just set this back metalness back down to zero I can go to this diffuse color and I had one of my blues here so I'll just set it back there really doesn't matter just you can change the color and go ahead and render that and then now you can see that we start to get this blue plastic again great so things are look good and you can notice the difference between kind of this cold metal and this blue plastic always changing these core properties here and then if we want to get and create something like glass well let me go ahead and just set this material I will set this back to let's just set it to white so a nice little trick is if you drag this all the way left and then all the way right it'll set it back to black and white okay and reflection glossiness I will set the fernell IOR back to 1.6 and then enable lock for now our to refraction now you are alright so now here we are down at refraction okay now to get a glass material we're going to increase the color of reflect refraction color to white so let's go ahead and start doing that so notice what starts to happen it starts to become more refractive and if I do it all the way up until it gets pure white you can see great we've now got glass so if I go ahead and actually I'm just gonna set IP art here you notice when you do that here it stops doing that in the hypershade which is which is great okay I'm gonna actually just move my hover shade here and use the attribute editor to do some work okay so now that we have this refraction color alright now you can actually drop the sign out the amount the glossiness here to kind of give it more of this kind of foggy look for this or this foggy or frosted look I should say okay notice that the reflections are still coming in a really crisp which is this here and then what's being impacted is the refraction so keep in mind these are two separate values now if you wanted the reflection to also be foggy and frosted while you go ahead and just drop that in the reflection as well alright so I'm gonna kind of keep this a reflection one I'll go ahead and keep refraction at one so kind of renders a little bit faster and well what if we want to change this to kind of like a green or purple or blue vase well notice if you go to refraction color and try to change that it's nothing's gonna actually change or it's not going to give you the result that you want right because what's happening is lights kind of coming in and it's actually bouncing the opposite color here all right so instead what you do is you change the fog color so I go ahead let's say if I want this to be again a purple or blue well let me go ahead and scroll this up now you can see that we can go ahead and start changing this color now and it starts to update in our eye IPR which is great so we kind of got this blue now we've kind of got this slight blue it's looking really dark blue well that's where the fog multiplier is gonna come in so I can go ahead now and start dragging this down quite a bit lower and it's really sensitive maybe I'll just need to type in a value so I'll go ahead and type in a value of 0.01 so you can see now we start to gets really cool looking blue effect and if I even go a little bit lighter 0.05 it starts to work out really well so keep in mind you know your refraction iur or your index of refraction is going to give you different results depending on the material type now for refraction IOR if I set this to one that essentially becomes air okay so as you increase this you know water is like 1.3 glass is 1.6 you're gonna get different effects and it's going to impact how it refracts light okay now there are of course things like subsurface scattering which I won't typically get in I won't get into today since we're just going on basics and as well as the dispersion okay now dispersion actually if I just go ahead and enable the stick I'll go what happens this is really really great for caustics but just keep in mind it's it actually calculating the light race what it's doing is the lights coming in it's being dispersed so it's breaking it up like a prism bouncing it and then it comes back out until it cleans up and that just will give you more realistic results and better caustics but render times are going to be significantly longer all right great so let me go ahead and actually I can just set this back to white and I'm gonna set my refraction color back to black which will kind of reset this material okay so we've went ahead and covered all of these core properties the next thing I want to look into is quickly it's the anisotropy so if I go here and set this back to a metallic value of 1 and I drop the refract reflection glossiness to about point eight seven five something like that the anisotropy is gonna allow us to kind of get that more machined or brushed look and if I increase this value to something like 0.8 so I'll go ahead and just type in anisotropy at 0.8 and then I can set the anisotropy rotation to something like 90 and this is degrees so you can start to see what happens here and this will just give you control and change the rotations on the metallic properties you can of course change it depending on the access so you have x axis the y axis and the z axis all right so that's going to give you some good results when you're changing metallic and it's a trophy value so I'll go ahead and set this kind of back to zero here and that's it that back to zero okay so I just want to cover the basic material properties today and then in the next video I'm actually going to cover in detail on how to start plugging in textures to get more advanced and more detailed materials all right so if you have any questions on the process be sure to leave a comment down below and like and subscribe always appreciate it okay thanks everyone take care

Channel: On Mars 3D

Views: 25,074

Keywords: Maya, V-Ray, Materials, Shading, CGI, Tutorial

Id: IiUDHxZh_BA

Length: 24min 24sec (1464 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020