Max transparency Levels

[helloneumann]

Hi everyone.

My first time posting to the forum. The company i work for just switched over to vray and I am working on setting up our workflow. So far got to say, I am loving Vray.

As we have been setting up our workflow I have run into an issue when setting up our shadow planes.

Our solution for shadow planes is to turn off primary visibility for all the asset geometry, and our shadow plane has its primary visibility on. This worked well, but I was getting black where the transparency level wasnt high enough. Since we have many layers of geo I needed to turn up the Max Transparency Levels above the default of 50. For a catch all solution i set it to 150, which worked, but i am guessing is very high. However since its just calculating shadows, the render time only increased by a second.

I guess I am looking for a little more info on how Max Transparency Levels is working under the hood, and how this setting relates to render times. It seems like a powerful setting and in some older posts people talk about how it increased their render times a lot. Now i am curious if its still an issue.

link to the doc on the setting
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ials+Overrides

Sorry for the long post. Thank you to any one that can shed some light.

[tashko.zashev]

This parameter can be used to control the ray-tracing depth for transparent materials/objects. Usually lower values speed-up the rendering process without affecting the final render image too much when rendering trees for an example. We found that the default value works best for most scenarios but there is occasions where it should be increased. Probably you have reached one of them, so play with it until you are satisfied with the result.

I've prepared a few renders to illustrate how this parameter affects the ray-tracing.