Webinar: V-Ray Next for Rhino

hi my name is Corey hull and I'm a CG specialist here at Kaos Group today I will be presenting to you our next-generation renderer theory next for I know in this webinar session we'll discuss a host of brand new features in v-ray next that will help to improve your workflow enhance your grasshopper capabilities and speed up your renders to give you incredible results with no hassle together we'll explore the powerful new asset management system that makes working in your scene easier and more intuitive than ever before we'll also discuss how the new scene intelligent algorithms in v-ray next can speed up your workflow and get you faster render results GPU rendering is also more robust with powerful new production features and a major speed boost thanks to an overhaul under the hood in addition you can now use fury directly in grasshopper allowing you to keep your definitions parametric and even animate them with these features all combined you'll be able to do more in Rhino than ever before using v-ray next let's get started by exploring the new updated user interface and I'll show you how very next makes working in your scenes faster and more intuitive okay I've got an interior scene set up here in Rhino with a sideboard table against the wall and some art decor on the wall behind it to get started let's click on the v-ray icon to open up the v-ray asset editor where you'll manage all of your assets in v-ray the asset editor has been updated with new functionality and very next improve your workflow at the top of the asset editor you'll see that we have a row of icons that represent different categories in v-ray next icons we're currently viewing our blue whereas white icons indicate we are not viewing them but they contain some data and greyed out icons do not contain any data at the moment if I click on the lights category you'll see that I get a list of all the lights currently in my scene in this case I've got a Rhino document son by default in the textures tab I also have an environment sky next if I right-click on the new textures tab I'll get a drop-down list of different URI textures I can add to my scene similarly if I left click on a category with no data such as the new render elements tab I'll be presented a list of v-ray render elements to choose from now if I hold ctrl when I click I can add multiple render elements to my scene without closing the drop-down list once again if I click on the geometry tab we can choose to add very geometry to the scene for example of your a clipper you'll see we also can add different very lights from the lights tab as well as choose from a variety of Uri materials in the materials tab each drop down list displays v-ray features specific to that v-ray category making it simple to find exactly what you're looking for quickly in addition you can also hold ctrl and click on multiple categories to view a combination of them together if you press the shortcut ctrl a you can easily view them all at once we can also create materials textures and so on by clicking on the plus icon at the foot of the asset editor just like in previous versions of v-ray now let's open the left hand flyout menu where we can explore the v-ray materials library as well as the brand new creation menu if I click the drop-down arrow next to it you'll see the same category options are available here as well we can also easily search for specific assets for example if I type curve you'll see that I get the option to add a busier or spline curve next let's twirl up the create menu and explore the virion materials library if we click its drop down arrow you'll see we have a large list of different material categories to choose from again we can also search for specific materials note that the search also goes through all subfolders to show you all the relevant results together if I type flooring you'll see we get options for concrete floors wood laminate floors and so forth if I hold shift I can select a range of multiple floorings together and then right click to add them to my scene where they'll now appear in my materials category on the right similarly I can hold shift and select the range of floorings I just added and right click to delete them from my scene in very next you can also now load in a custom library by clicking on the folder icon on the bottom left here I'm gonna load in this custom library folder here containing a bunch of VR mat files I organized in advance you'll see that it has a variety of assets within it such as render elements lights materials and so on custom libraries can be used as templates and imported into other projects or even shared between colleagues using Network locations making it possible to have a single unified library for all the members of your team to access to add something to my scene for example this spotlight I can simply drag and drop it and you'll see the categories at the top of the asset editor update to display the lights as well now I can make changes to the spotlight like changing its intensity by clicking on this value and entering something new then if I want to save the changes to my custom library I can drag and drop it back into the library then simply click replace spotlight to replace the previous spotlight settings or click elsewhere to cancel I can also right-click on it to save as elsewhere which I'll demonstrate later next let's head over to the wall close-up view and take a look at how we can use fury next to easily modify textures using the new built-in color correction curves without any need for other software I'm gonna select the materials tab and then right click to add a new generic material let's double click on it to rename this material bricks which as the name suggests I'll used to create a brick material for this wall here if I select the wall I can simply right click on the bricks material and choose apply to selection to apply it okay now if we open the right hand flyout menu you'll see that we have a nice life swatch preview here of our material which will update to reflect any changes we make to the material dragging on the spar here I can easily resize it to find a comfortable size so I can get a good feel for how my material will look when rendered I can also click on this icon here to toggle between the basic and advanced material parameter settings to show you just how easy very next is to work with let's stay on the basic settings now I'd like to use a texture to create the brick material here so I'm gonna click on the diffuse texture swatch and load in a bitmap image I'll select the bricks diffuse file and right away you'll see we get a nice preview of the texture itself in the live swatch preview now if I click on this up arrow icon or press control in the up arrow key I'll go back up one level in the hierarchy to the brick materials parameters we could also click on the left pointing arrow or press control in the left arrow key to switch between a current and previously selected asset next since we're making a wall material we can change the live swatch display mode in this case I'll choose the wall close-up option now we've got a much better sense of how this material is actually going to appear in our scene here when we do a render later our goal here is to create bricks that look painted since we only have a diffuse map right now our result is looking pretty flat in fury next we can make modifications to turn this texture into a bump map using the new curve options first let's drag and drop the diffuse texture into the bump Maps texture swatch and choose copy so we can modify it separately if we choose paste as instance modifying the texture will update all instances of it automatically I'm also going to check off the diffuse texture since I want to use color instead of texture and don't actually need the diffuse for the look I'm going for and then let's start an interactive render so we can get a feel for how the material looks in our scene you'll see right away that we get a very fast and smooth preview thanks in part to the Nvidia a I did noiser which I'll share a bit more about with you later however you'll see that the brick bump mapping is opposite of what we need in v-ray next we can quickly fix this by using one of the curve options to do so I'll right-click on the bump map texture swatch and in the rapin submenu select the spline curve the rapid menu creates a new texture in the texture slot in this case the spline curve but puts the original texture the brick diffuse we copied over within the spline curve this makes it easy to plug one texture into another which is useful in this case for making color Corrections to our diffuse texture now here I have curved controls for the hue saturation and value parameters of the diffuse texture since we're making adjustments to control the bump map I'm going to drag the saturations control point down to the bottom right corner which will put the image in grayscale next in the value section I'm going to inverse the direction of the curve now as the preview loads you'll see that our bricks are protruding outwards in the correct direction towards us I'm also going to change the interpolation mode which offers us various ways to modify the curve shape between control points if we set the mode to spline you'll see that we can now use the control point to bend the curve and make the transition softer in order to make the detail on the bricks more subtle now let's press up to return back to the material parameters and then we're going to increase the bump amount to two this will also bring out more details than the bricks next in the reflection drop-down I can easily drag and drop a copy of the color corrected bump texture into the reflection color texture swatch I'll click the swatch to enter it and once again I can use the value curve and increase the contrast so that the mortar is not so reflective also lower the reflection glossiness to make the reflections blurry all right I'm gonna stop the interactive render now and before moving on give you a glimpse of the new asset tree preview in v-ray next for Rhino if I twirl down the arrow next to my bricks material description you'll see the two spline curve rap and textures we added as well as the bitmap for the diffuse color texture for the bricks these asset tree dropdowns are available for lights geometries render elements and textures as well providing a simple and unified way to visualize shader hierarchies throughout v-ray next I can even give every texture its own label just to help differentiate between the maps they also make it easy to navigate between textures much more quickly since you don't need to enter every texture slot manually in addition we can also drag and drop the textures from the asset tree view to copy and instance them between different materials and assets ok let's drag and drop the brick material into the left-hand flyout menu to save it to my custom library to use later on or in other projects now you've seen just how easy it is to create materials import and manage textures and modify them using curves than very next without ever needing to open up another software what's more thanks to the flexibility of the asset tree UI and the ability to share materials via custom libraries with other teams fury next will improve your material workflow so that you can work faster and collaborate on custom materials with ease all right now let's take a look at how we can create a metallic PBR material from scratch in v-ray next using the brand new metalness parameter with metalness very next is now compatible with PBR workflows that are popular in game engines and used with other texturing tools such as substance designer it also makes it easy to create realistic looking shaders right out of the box for common metals as well as import PBR texture maps from software like substance to create even more complex results I'll select the wall art in the background and right-click to apply the metallic material to it now let's start an interactive render so we can monitor how the changes we make affect the wall art decor as you can see the decor is currently a generic gray color but it doesn't look very metallic yet this is because in order to create the appearance of a metal we need to adjust the metalness parameter you can think of metalness as the state or on/off switch meaning materials can be considered either a nonmetal or a metal respectively shown as 0 or 1 on the slider intermediate values between 0 and 1 do not correspond to any physical material right now this materials metalness parameter is set to 0 so the wall art is rendering as a nonmetal the major advantage of using a PBR workflow is that we can easily create more complex results with fewer textures to start I'm going to right click on the color texture swatch and add in a diffuse bitmap which I created and exported beforehand in substance painter as it loads in you'll see it adds a more interesting white and gold color pattern to the image now let's go back up in the hierarchy and to get a better preview in the swatch I'm gonna change the display mode to wall close up now you'll see the material still doesn't look very metallic and we still need to adjust the metalness parameter to do so let's load in a metallic texture map I exported from substance which will tell v-ray which parts of the artwork are metallic and which parts are not now let's also change the color space from srgb to rendering space linear this will prevent any gamma correction for being applied to the texture file before shading which will make the result more accurate you can see that our material is starting to look more metallic but I need to remove the gray values in the map so we see less of the gray metal in the material the metalness texture map acts like a mask between metal and nonmetal values but gray values in the map exist somewhere in between meaning they do not correspond to a physical material to fix this let's put the texture inside a wrap in and this time select the Bezier curve to remove the gray values now let's make some adjustments first I'll change the mode from RGB to mono so we're working with grayscale next I'll click and create two control points here and make a sharp vertical line like this which forces each pixel to either be interpreted as black or white so that the artwork is interpreted only as metal or nonmetal with no values in between the vertical line acts as the threshold for interpreting a shade of grey as white or black or metallic or not if I position the vertical line to the right most shades of grey are interpreted as black making the artwork look less metallic moving to the left more shades of grey are interpreted as white making it appear more metallic let's position it somewhere in the middle here so that we get a nice balance let's return back up in the hierarchy now I'm gonna click the little pin icon here in the top left of the live swatch which will pin the live swatch preview to the current wall close-up preview perspective even while I'm making adjustments to textures next let's add in the roughness texture map to the roughness swatch the roughness parameter controls the sharpness of reflections with 0 producing mirror-like reflections and higher values creating blurry reflections once again I'll change the color space to linear and now you'll see in the render preview how the roughness helps to bring out the shiny metallic characteristics of the artwork now I can return back to the metallic material parameters again simply by clicking the metallically will up in the top left corner okay let's stop the interactive render and then we're going to turn on the bump in normal mapping for the material let's switch the mode to normal map and then load in a normal map texture to give the material even more depth and again I'll change the color space to linear which you should always do for normal Maps back up in the hierarchy I'm also going to bring down the amount just a bit to 0.7 which I found looks nice for this texture okay let's start the interactive render once more and see how the normal map improves our wall arts material you can see now that there's a lot more detail coming through making the surface appear more rough and lifelike however it's looking a bit too grimy now for my taste let's go back into the metalness bezier curve and slide the control points over to the right a bit so we bring down the gray values in our image all right I'm liking that much better now you've seen how to use the new metalness parameter in a PBR workflow to easily import texture maps from software such as substance and get strikingly detailed results let's stop the interactive render and then I'm going to rename our metallic material painting lastly let's drag and drop this material into my custom library so I will have it saved in case they want to use it again later you can also right-click and choose save as if you want to save your textures to another library you're not currently working with and if your colleagues are working in a shared library on the same network you can easily check for materials they have added or updated simply by right-clicking on a custom library and selecting refresh ok now let's move on to the next part of our scene here where we'll discuss the new lighting capabilities available in v-ray next you'll see that I've got a similar version to the previous scene we were working in except that I've added more furniture and I've already applied most of the materials we'll be using in the scene to start let's select the wall art now let's go ahead and apply the metallic wall art material we just created in the previous scene to the artwork in this one just like before click the folder icon to load in a custom library and then simply right-click on the wall art material to apply it now if I click on the materials tab and scroll down you'll see we have the wall art material in the project now back in the custom library I've also got the bricks material that we created in this case I'm not going to apply the bricks material we made since it was more for demonstration purposes just to give you a sense of how simple very next makes it to modify materials in your scenes however I do have some other materials here that I've created and modified in advance using the same workflow for example let's take a look at this floor concrete material here if I drop down the asset tree you'll see we've got several texture Maps listed for diffuse reflection glossiness and bump again the approach we used to create the bricks material earlier was the same for this one the diffuse bitmap was copied and color corrected using the new curves in v-ray next to create the reflection glossiness and bump okay let's move on to the Settings tab and switch on the denoise option and v-ray next we have integrated the new Nvidia AI denoiser which uses artificial intelligence to clean up renders very fast this makes it especially useful for interactive rendering so that you get feedback very rapidly as you fine-tune your image to use it simply drop down the denoiser settings and switch the engine over to the Nvidia II I didn't know sir you can also increase the update frequency parameter to 100 so that the denoise are updates as frequently as possible during rendering next let's head over to the render output drop down and take a look at the options we have here first I'm going to switch on the safe frame mode which will toggle on a visual frame overlay in the viewport this can help you to see if there's a difference in aspect ratio between the viewport and output image size next let's switch the aspect ratio over to the custom option in custom mode we can click on this chain icon to unlock the aspect ratio allowing me to input custom values for the image width and height this way we can experiment with the image size without needing to know the aspect ratio in advance I'm going to decrease the width of it here and then let's get ready to do an interactive render as the render preview begins to load you'll see now that the noise suddenly clears away as the a I didn't know sir kicks on and rapidly des noises the image with the power of the NVIDIA AI denoiser it's easier than ever to get a sense of your scene so you can make changes to it and get feedback very quickly alright and now that we've got a good feel for our scene here let's stop the render I'd like to switch over to the render camera to perspective here and then take a look at how managing v-ray objects has improved in v-ray next to start let's head over to the geometries tab and you'll see that we have geometry for our carpets separated into patches in this case consisting of six v-ray firs now in v-ray next we can have different setups and parameters and easily assign them to the geometry directly from the property panel in Rhino for example if I click on the carpet here and choose one of the meshes I can then go to the brand-new v-ray property panel rollout on the right and a sine of you refer to the geometry very quickly I'll do this for the rest of the geometries here forming the rug in the scene so you can see just how easy and simple this workflow is now in the new panel there's also a plus icon here this allows you to create a new fur whereas the pen icon allows you to edit the currently selected one also you'll see down below in the property panel that there resides several v-ray rollout controls for creating and editing of ear a clipper and v-ray mesh light as well okay let's return back to our previous render camera again now let's explore how we can use the brand-new v-ray lighting analysis render element to accurately measure and analyze the light levels in our scene here to add it click on the render element icon and select the lighting analysis as you can see in the lifes watch preview this render element provides the visual representation of the lighting intensity in the render it can also map either illuminance or luminance information and one of two display modes a false color gradient like we have here in the preview or grid overlay which positions distinct grid points over the frame we can also turn on the draw legend option to display a map legend of the false colors at the bottom of the render ok let's close the flyout menu and head to the v-ray settings so we can prepare to do a render I'm going to switch off interactive mode and then start a production render the lighting analysis render element is supposed to fect and it's most commonly used in a production workflow that said the lighting analysis will update during interactive rendering but it will only be accurate if the update frequency parameter is set to 100 all right now that the render is complete let's switch over to the lighting analysis render element you'll see that when we select it our scene is depicted in the false colors with blue representing low values and red representing high values the map legend at the bottom of the render also gives an approximate estimation of the lux values for the color spectrum in the gradient altogether the lighting analysis makes it easy to analyze daylight or artificial light sources in your scene with real-world values okay let's head back to the effects result now overall I'm happy with all the lighting in my scene looks but I'd like to know if there's any way to achieve these results faster let's now explore a brand new lighting feature in v-ray next that makes it possible to get significantly faster render results and also streamlines your workflow to start let's head over to the lights tab and take a look at how the scene here is lit so far you'll see that I've currently got a very popular lighting setup using a Rhino Sun with an environment sky this is our main source of light outside the window here but I've also got a portal light enabled to better light our interior let's take a look at the portal light for a moment here to understand better what it's used for in previous versions of v-ray a common workflow for lighting interior scenes has been to set up portal lights by checking this portal light simple checkbox on a viewer a rectangle light it will bring in light from the outside into an interior space by taking in the light color and intensity from the environment behind it now in v-ray next we've introduced the v-ray adaptive dome light which not only removes the need for setting up portal lights but it can also speed up your renders by up to seven times depending on the scene the best part is that it does so automatically by using a smart new adaptive sampling algorithm that figures out which portions of the environment to sample and which ones to ignore to demonstrate let's first delete the portal light here and then I'm going to rotate around the exterior so we can add a dome light in the scene I'll select the dumb light up here and then click somewhere outside to place it you'll first be prompted to load in an HDRI if you'd like to use image based lighting but otherwise you can just click cancel to place the light okay now let's return to our render camera perspective and select the dome light in the asset editor in the parameters on the right I can simply drag and drop the scenes environment sky texture into the texture HDR swatch and choose paste this instance I'll also just make sure to click the checkbox to enable it and we'll see the lighting adjusts in the live swatch preview next let's also switch the shape mode from hemisphere to sphere so that the projection of the HDR I goes below the horizon as you can see from the swatch preview this gives us a bit more light in the scene finally below you'll see the new adaptive check box enabled by default which is long you need to take advantage of adaptive sampling now the adaptive dome light will render the environment sky using the new adaptive algorithm along with the Rhino Sun alright let's go ahead and start an interactive render we'll see the NVIDIA AI denoiser kick in here to give us a nice clean preview and as you can see the light in the scene looks nice and full even without the portal light that we deleted earlier the adaptive dome light can save you a lot of time from setting up portals manually in your scenes and in some cases your images will render even faster okay now that you've seen a render with the adaptive dome light and the Rhino Sun let's drag and drop this HDR day texture I've already loaded into the scene into the texture HDR swatch here using an HDR eye we have nearly limitless possibilities for creating different lighting conditions in our scene let's also disable the Rhino son so that we're just rendering with the daytime HDR is our light source looking at our swatch preview we can see that the result will probably be too dark so I'm also going to increase the intensity of the dome light to 40 to ensure the HDR I produces enough light for our scene I have two images I already rendered in advance in the history here one with and one without the adaptive check box enabled if we do an a/b comparison you'll see that the adaptive dome image on the right rendered in roughly half the time of the image on the left or about two minutes and 11 seconds versus four minutes in two seconds and with no loss in quality okay now that you've seen how the adaptive dome light can improve your workflow and speed up your renders I'd like to walk you through lighting an evening interior scene using artificial lighting however before that let's jump over to an empty scene to demonstrate the new lighting improvements in very next Verano okay to get started here let's go ahead and create a new rectangle light if I select the light I can use the array command to create a few instances of it now if I select the instances and open up the asset editor you'll see that in v-ray next you can change the size and parameters of the lights directly from here and you'll see that the light size will update in the viewport as well to show you how flexible working with lights and very next is let's not make some changes to the size of individual lights if you scale the light in the viewport it won't affect the other lights and they will still remain an instance that way if you adjust the physical size of the whole light instance in the asset editor again it will still affect all of the lights together now you likely have already noticed that the live swatch displays a preview of the light source as well in v-ray next making changes to the lighting in your scene is now easier than ever because you can preview changes in directionality adjust the intensity and change the lights color all without even rendering your scene as you can see when I adjust these parameters the lifes watch updates very fast to give us a sense of how the light will appear in our scene just keep in mind that when you have very high values the swatch clamps the light in an intelligent way to prevent displaying a blown-out preview so it may not match exactly what you see in your render the live swatch preview applies not only to rectangle lights but also for all the other types of lights and v-ray next all together the live swatch preview and flexibility of making adjustments to lights and instance lights in the viewport makes very next incredibly intuitive and fast to work with now let's hop back over to a similar version of the interior scene we were working in before but this time with some additional artificial lights placed in it okay as I mentioned I'd like to have some artificial light sources where the hanging lights are and for the desk lamp in the scene to save time I'm going to enable a layer which contains the very lights already in place these include both standard sphere lights and rectangular lights which will make sure enabled in the asset editor now to make these more visible in the scene and emulate a realistic lighting scenario I'm going to change the HDRI to an evening one again I can simply drag and drop the HDR i night into the texture HDR swatch and we'll see it updates in the live swatch preview I'm also going to bring the intensity back down to 1 now as this is looking far too bright in the swatch since HDR eyes have texture intensities baked into the image itself they don't get clamped by v-ray so over Bright's watch previous like this can occur now let's go ahead and do a quick interactive render just to see how the scene looks right now now as the nvidia AI DiNozzo kicks in here you'll see right away that the scene is looking too dark let's step the render and see what we can do to fix this in past versions of v-ray our options would be to either manually tweak the dome light intensity or just the camera exposure and then re render again and iterate until we find something that works well for the scene in v-ray next we've introduced new automatic features that make it much easier to handle situations like this quickly such as the automatic exposure and auto white balance controls to enable these simply head to the settings tab and in the camera drop down you'll see we have two new auto buttons next to the exposure and white balance settings note that these features will be greyed out until we disable interactive rendering as they're only available for production rendering I'll go ahead and disable interactive mode and then enable the automatic exposure setting first so we can see what that does for us now let's start another render you okay as you can now see with the quick preview we've got a lot more light coming into the scene and everything looks properly exposed however the color temperature seems a bit off to me because the HDR appears to be tinted to get rid of that easily we can use the auto white balance feature for comparison I'm first going to draw a render region on the right and then enable the auto button across from the white balance in the settings now let's do another render together the auto exposure and auto white balance make for incredibly useful tools to get great-looking results quickly for example when you have an interior scene and a few cameras set up to capture different angles these settings provide an easy way to make sure all your shots have a consistent look and feel to them okay now let's draw another render region on the left if you use the auto exposure but still find the render looks too bright or too dark for your taste you can easily make corrections using the compensation slider below higher values will make the results brighter and vice-versa in this case I'd like to make the render a bit darker so let's try another render with the compensation set to negative one you'll see that the image renders a bit darker on the left this time and in addition to improving your still images the auto exposure and auto white balance will work in animations as well now that you've seen how these settings can be used to speed up your workflow let's go ahead and prepare our settings for final production rendering I'm going to increase the render quality to high and let's also switch the denoiser setting back to the default v-ray denoiser we recommend the v-ray denoiser for production rendering because it delivers more accurate results next let's fold up the camera settings and take a look at the render output I'm going to lock the image width and height so that our custom aspect ratio remains the same and then I'm going to increase the output size so that I'm rendering at 1020 by 1500 pixels alright and now we're ready to do a production render in order to render this even faster than I could on my local machine we can also now try out our brand new push button cloud rendering service chaos cloud which is compatible with very next for Rhino you'll see now that my browser has opened up and I'm taken to the chaos cloud website where I can give my job a name and finalize my settings every job submitted to the cloud also needs to be allocated to a project folder we can either choose from an existing project or create a new one before submitting you can also see your settings like the render mode and file format and you can even make tweaks to a few other settings such as the aspect ratio otherwise when ready we can simply click Submit to start rendering the job on the cloud will see the job uploading automatically and once we have seen success the job will be scheduled for rendering now I can click on View job to monitor its progress right from my browser here we can see a nice preview of the job as it renders progressively on the right we can also monitor its status as well as review details such as the total render time so far as you can see chaos cloud is seamlessly integrated into very next Verano to make things simple it doesn't require any technical knowledge such as setting up virtual machines or manually uploading any assets so it saves you time while delivering super fast results in addition you can even render animations on the cloud as well now you'll see up on the top right that I also have options for canceling or pausing the job as well also if you need to do any changes to the scene and then render the project again fury will upload only the changes to keep your upload times to the absolute minimum necessary and save you time we can also click on the image itself to inspect the preview of it while it renders next let's also explore the left-hand toolbar menu of the cloud the project section contains all of the jobs I've submitted to the chaos cloud meanwhile the queue contains all the active jobs that are rendering as well as any paused or queued render jobs completed jobs will not appear here but can be found in their respective project folder note that you can have up to 10,000 submitted render jobs at once and up to a hundred active jobs to rendering simultaneously all additional jobs will be queued until the preceding job finishes ok now let's go ahead and open up two completed renders from my scene that I did in advance just so you can see the final result as you can see the new KS cloud is an incredibly convenient and straightforward solution for getting high-quality production renders done fast with no hassle you can not only harness the power of a supercomputer but you'll be free to use your own machine in the mean time so you can keep working on your other projects without interruption or even monitor your jobs progress while you're on the go moving on let's explore what's new and very next for grasshopper here I have prepared a simple exterior scene in grasshopper on the right I have some referenced meshes already connected to via a geometry components and a v-ray camera all connected to a v-ray render component this should look familiar if you've used previous versions of view for grasshopper to get started let's right-click on the v-ray render component to start a render next let's head over to the v-ray material components in very next for grasshopper there are four different types of very material components you can choose from the material simple component which has generic parameters like diffuse reflection glossiness and so forth the material preset component which lets you choose from preset options as well as the option to set a color for the preset using a swatch there is also the material from project component which lets us load a material that currently exists in the Rhino project and lastly there is the material from file component which allows you to load in viewer mat files and apply them to grasshopper geometry next let's move on to the lights we have two groups of v-ray light components in very next for grasshopper light rigs and lights note that lights are only meant to be connected to a light rig you can have multiple lights connected to one light rig but only one light rig can be connected to the render node the dome light rig can be used with HDR ice by loading them into its texture input if I plug it into the render component you'll see that we get a nice image based lighting result in our preview next we have the light rig simple component when I connect it to the render component it looks similar to the default Rhino lighting setup but has more configurable options to adjust the lighting it also gives us the option to rotate the angle of the light the last light rig is the light rig Sun system which works like the sunlight in Rhino and changes appearance based on the sun's position in the sky it provides all the basic Sun parameters so you would expect to find as well such as intensity and so forth and using the Sun position input you can control the position of the Sun to simulate a daytime time lapse using an animated point we also have the very light components these are similar to the very lights in Rhino such as the sphere light or rectangle light in v-ray next for grasshopper we've also added a new light component the light directional it is similar to sunlight but with the option to change the color and the shadow softness which can be used to achieve a stylized or schematic look for your render we can also set multiple point origins with our light components to create lights at those points next we have the v-ray camera component which is used to set up a camera position and control camera settings in v-ray next for grasshopper we've introduced new settings to toggle on and control the camera exposure just like a physical camera for example I can adjust the ISO to affect the brightness of the image which can also be used for creating light studies okay let's stop the render and move on to the last component of this session the v-ray render and project component this allows you to render the input grasshopper scene geometries and lights to your active Rhino scene this way you can combine your grasshopper geometry and Rhino geometry without baking saving you time let's connect the components and then in the asset browser I'll click render note that you should double check that all of your viewer a geometry components have materials connected to them otherwise geometries with no input materials will not be rendered okay as you can see in the preview the rock formation from my Rhino project is now rendering along the geometry from grasshopper now that you've seen an overview of the v-ray components and v-ray next for grasshopper let's explore some more advanced v-ray components that you can use to create even more interesting results alright I've now opened up a scene here with some very powerful v-ray components that have already set up to show you in the viewer a geometry group here you'll see that we have the very instant sir and the v-ray proxy mesh and in the render group we have the v-ray timeline now let's start a render to see what we have here in the scene already you'll see as the render loads that have got a bunch of v-ray proxy objects from a vr mesh file to create some tetrapods in the water I've also got a v-ray camera node connected to the render node so we can have a good view of the proxies in the render now the v-ray proxy mesh can be used to load in viera mesh proxy geometry which is a very specific file that holds geometry on disk and loads it only during render time this can be used to load in a single object or multiple instances based on multiple plane inputs you can also scale your objects randomly using multiple scale factors but I've only used one scale factor to keep things uniform veeery for grass hopper makes it easy to quickly iterate scattered proxies across your scenes for example I will enter a value of 50 here in this objects count slider that looks a bit better but let's increase the count to something like 140 to make them appear more jumbled and clump together like tetrapods in the real world all right now that looks much better now you can also use the v-ray proxy mesh component to assign different colours to the proxies for example here I have created a V or a material preset with a gradient node for the color input let's attach the preset node to the material input of the v-ray proxy mesh node as the interactive render updates you'll see that I have set up the scatter definition in such a way that it will map the gradient colors respectively to the geometry and if a proxy mesh contains multiple material IDs you can simply connect multiple materials to the input making it easy to manage another useful note is the v-ray instance or node which can also be used as a scatterer with the option to randomly position rotate and scale geometry the real power of the VRA instance err is that it can be used to scatter hundreds of grasshopper meshes during render time without rendering them in the viewport so it keeps the graph evaluation very fast note that you should also try to avoid duplicating transform components because this can lead to overlapping geometry okay now before I move on to show you the v-ray timeline node I'm going to disable the v-ray proxy mesh node next let's also switch to a different v-ray camera node with a better view of the structures facade which we are then going to animate I'll let this clear up for a second so you can see what we're working with all right over here we have the brand-new v-ray timeline note which can be used to animate geometry and definitions and render those animations in v-ray next for grasshopper when you create the timeline note the default number of frames is 30 but we can use a number slider to increase the animation length to set the number of frames we like in this case I have already connected a number slider and increase the number of frames to 240 now if you'd like to render a specific range of your animation and not the whole thing you can use the start and end inputs in the timeline node if I create two number sliders and connect them to the corresponding inputs you'll see that a dark gray section appears on the timeline indicating the new animation range we can also preview the animation or the selected range section of any animated geometry by right-clicking on the timeline and selecting one of the to play options play or play range let's play the range we just created note that we won't see any rendering happening since I haven't connected the timeline node to any geometry yet okay since I'm going to render the entire timeline range in a bit we won't need the number sliders for the range so let's remove them now you'll see that the v-ray timeline node has three outputs the first one is the timeline output which you connect to the v-ray render node when your animation is ready for production rendering the other two outputs are used for animating grasshopper definitions let's create a panel here and see what these two outputs give us first I will connect the frame output to the panel node now you'll see as I move the timeline slider the frame output gives us the exact frame the slider is at this output can be useful for animating different definition parameters in v-ray for grasshopper similarly we can connect the fraction output and you'll see that this output gives you a fraction of the whole timeline based on the sliders position expressed in a floating-point number range from 0 to 1 for example when I move the slider closer to the middle of the timeline the fraction output value is close to 0.5 and when I move the timeline slider to 0 the fraction output is 0 both the frame and fraction outputs can be used or even remapped for Anna definitions depending on your needs okay now that you've seen all these outputs behave let's delete the panel note next I have created in advance a grasshopper definition container for the parametric facade with an attractor point map to a curve which controls the size of the perforations any valid floating-point number from zero to one fed into the attractor positions input will affect the size of the perforations on the building if we connect the fraction output of the timeline component into the attractor point input the attractors position will change and alter the size of the perforations as the fraction amount increases let's connect the components now and I'll show you how this works now you'll see that the very timeline plays the role of a number slider for the size of the perforations if I move the timeline slider somewhere else the attractor point moves causing the façades perforation pattern size to change this also allows me to easily preview what our animation will look like at a specific frame then when I'm ready to do a production render rendering the timeline will allow me to render an entire animation of the perforations in grasshopper alright now that we've gotten familiar with the v-ray timeline let's stop the interactive render and do a production render of the whole animation before switching to production rendering let's make sure that we have connected the timeline output to the timeline input of the v-ray render node this way very for grasshopper we'll know that it has to render an animation and how many frames to render next I'm going to switch the mode from progressive to production and the sampler type to bucket so we can utilize the GPU better very next for grasshopper now supports GPU bucket rendering just as very next Verano does but we'll discuss this in other new GPU features in more detail later next I'm going to right click on the output image input and choose extract parameter this will create a node where we can specify the destination of the animation this is a crucial step because if we don't choose the location for our animation the rendered frames will not be saved anywhere which would mean we have to render them again double click on the node and it will prompt you for a location as you can see I've already set a location in advance for the frames I'll give it a name like facade animation and save it in the JPEG format all right let's right-click on the v-ray render node and you'll see that we now have the render animation option let's go ahead and select it and you'll see that v-ray starts to render the frames since our animation is 240 frames this will require around a few hours to render so I'm going to stop the render short and show you the already rendered animation I did in advance I'll also show you some other additional example Clips done with the help of the timeline node so you'll have a sense of the many different ways you can use it to create animations to your desire okay and now you've seen how using the power of very next for grasshopper you can animate definitions as well as sunlight and cameras to create stunning looking animations GPU rendering and v-ray next Verano has never been more powerful thanks to the new multi kernel GPU architecture fury next for Rhino is now twice as fast on average than before this makes it easier than ever to get a quick preview while making changes to your scene so you can make decisions faster and get stunning looking images to demonstrate let's jump into a similar scene to the one we used in grasshopper but with some more details included first in the asset editor let's make sure our render engine is set to GPU I'm also going to enable interactive rendering so that we can get a fast preview of the scene next let's enable the noising and switch to the Nvidia AI to noiser so we can get a smooth preview as quickly as possible now let's start the interactive render you'll see we have a nice and foggy looking scene here but the sky looks a little too simplistic right now in the lights tab let's enable the adaptive dome light by clicking on the icon and observe how this changes the preview now we can see an HDRI sky texture appearing in the background giving us some nice clouds and additional lighting in the scene next I'll enable the interior lamps so we can get some light inside our building here again you'll see how quickly the a I do now sir works to clean up the image and in combination with the GPU is capable of giving us a very fast and smooth preview of our lights I'm going to zoom in a little bit on our scene here you'll see that the interactive render updates very quickly even when moving around in our scene this makes it incredibly easy to make adjustments to my camera position and find a different angle for my render since thanks to the GPU I don't have to wait for long for a good preview of my image alright I'm going to return to my render camera now as you'll likely have already noticed we're all surrendering our scene with various aerial perspective volumetric effect on GPU in v-ray next we now support using the environment fog on GPU as well which we can use to create more advanced atmospheric effects like godrays all utilizing the GPUs speed advantage over CPU rendering for example on the right I'd like to create some streaks of light using some of the light sources I have already positioned in the scene let's stop the interactive render and I'll show you how these lights are set up in the viewport and then how we can use the environment fog to create the Gadre effect on GPU as you can see these light sources are just standard rectangular lamps that point at the building from an angle above using the environment fog these soft light beams can add an incredible sense of realism to our final result to demonstrate let's return to our render camera again and then open up the render settings here I can switch the volumetric environment over to the v-ray environment fog which gives us powerful and flexible controls for simulating a variety of fog or atmospheric dust conditions in the affected by drop-down let's also select which seem light sources will affect the fog you'll see the dome light is already selected but let's also scroll down and select the three rectangle lights as well to create the god rays the affected by drop-down is especially useful when you have certain lights affecting specific objects in the scene and you want to be able to control which specific group of lights effect the fog all right you'll see now that the scene has a nice thick layer of fog and the overall tone is much cooler to achieve the final result I'm looking for I'm going to tweak a few of the settings here let's start with the height this parameter here controls the ceiling height of the fog layer if we increase the height to 10,000 you'll see that the scene becomes much darker since the fog reaches higher up into the sky and blocks more light from the dome light however on the bright side I like that the god rays are much more visible here coming from our rectangle lights to make the fog less dense let's increase the distance to 60,000 which will increase its transparency now we can still see the light beam streaking down thanks to the increased height but the scene is also now more visible overall thanks to the increased distance I'll let this clear up for a moment here so you can get a sense of the final look and I'm liking that much better okay now let's go ahead and prepare to do a production render first I'm gonna switch the denoiser back over to the default viewer a denoiser next I'll switch off interactive mode and the progressive mode toggle so that we will render using the bucket sampling method on GPU bucket rendering is the new GPU feature that can help to improve your swarm rendering performance and cut down on network traffic while slightly decreasing memory usage and I'll give this a moment to get started here and there you go you'll now see the buckets appear which will render the image and portions on GPU and help to improve your rendering performance to save some time I'm going to go ahead and stop the render now and open up a completed render I did earlier for you to see let's just open up the history tab here and enable the VfB history and then we can load in our final bucket rendered image on GPU ok let's close the history now and click on this icon here to open up the lens effects tab in v-ray next we've updated the lens effects and redesigned the UI to make the controls easier to use now you can apply your own customized camera lens effects like blooming glare to your renders using a few simple parameters if we click the bloom glare checkbox the effect will be enabled when looking at the final effects result channel to demonstrate how these parameters work let's increase the intensity first and you'll see right away that the lights on and inside the building pop out and shine more visibly next if we increase the size you'll see that the diagonal light will bleed outwards more increasing the glow effect as well which you can especially see around the street lamps on the left now to have more fine-tuned control over the output you'll see down here that we have a few mode options to choose from for example right now we're set to generate only the final image with lens effects but we can also generate the lens effects as its own render element I'm going to do both now we can switch to the glare render element to see the lens effects with a nice isolated preview of how they're affecting our image we can even make changes while we're here for example if I change the bloom parameter this will affect the blend amount of how much bloom versus glare is applied higher values mean more bloom and less glare while lower values may and vice-versa switching back to the final result again you'll see that we also have options like adjusting the number of visible blades streaking outwards from the lights okay I'm going to adjust these settings down a bit now to something a bit more subtle for my final image and as a last quick comparison check you can turn off and on again the bloom and glare effect just to compare how the settings impact the final image okay now we have completed our final production render on GPU with v-ray next for Rhino while also incorporating the updated lens effects we also support some additional brand new GPU features in v-ray next including dispersion and VR scans on GPU together these features can drastically improve the design workflow for creating objects like jewelry for example using the Ab a parameter on the v-ray material you can control the dispersion amount to emulate how light separates into colors as it passes through transparent objects like diamonds this means your renders will look even more realistic while also taking advantage of the GPUs additional speed in fact these earring renders shown here use both dispersion and VR scans to achieve incredible realism and the v-ray vr scan library contains than a thousand photo-realistic material scans which you can apply to your models to create stunningly realistic renders on GPU as seen here with this Bluetooth speaker on a table VR scans provide a nearly effortless way to enhance the realism of your product designs with ease each VR scan is generated by capturing thousands of images of a real-life material sample enabling you to recreate the look and feel of real-world materials and use the GPU to render them at blazing fast speeds all right now you've seen how very next smart new tools and intuitive UI improvements can make rendering easier and faster than ever before the new GPU production features such as environment fog and B are scant support as well as scene intelligent tools like the adaptive dome light and auto exposure and white balance make it possible to work faster and get interactive feedback quickly in addition Theory next for grasshopper enables you to use v-ray directly without exporting back to Rhino so you'll save time without the need for baking plus with the new v-ray timeline node you can create stunning looking animations while taking advantage of grasshoppers procedural power and benefits altogether very next spouts new features make working in rhino and grasshopper easier and more flexible with a speed boost out-of-the-box that gets you results faster than ever if you'd like to try out very next for Rhino please visit our website chaos group comm for more information and to download a free trial and if you have any further questions please feel free to check out our Doc's page for additional information about these new features for the latest updates click subscribe on our youtube channel KS group TV for more videos about new products and releases thank you for joining me for this webinar session and i hope to see you next time

Channel: ChaosTV

Views: 40,400

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Id: uUi2cHrcbKo

Length: 59min 49sec (3589 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2019