Any tutorials that touch and the very basics of Vray rendering?

[jun_tange]

Hi all - I'm a jewellery designer and I've been using Rhinoceros and Vray for the past year.
I'm self-taught and managed through Rhino; I can make most rings, piercings, pendants what have you, for any design I wanted to make and had quite a bunch manufactured.

Vray has been there to simply pre-visualize what the end-product would look like. So it did not have to look hyper phohot-realistic, as long as it gave me and the client a fair idea.

But now, I'm actually curious, especially with importance of Social Media marketing and whatnot, to get "nice" product photos out there. Not just the ones manufactured, but my design that is still stored digitally.

I've scoured through the web, YouTube and all but I cannot find any tutorial (paid or free) that starts from the basics.
It's all "right, so you apply this HDR map and adjust the bump to...and adjust to VFB to..." and I'm there going "HDR map? what's that? what does applying do? can a HDR map be any image like jpeg or png? Is there a way to dictate how it's applied?" and it gets worse as tutorials get into details.

Unfortunately, I've been disinterested in photography as well (I like to draw, rather than snap) so all these "exposures" "White-balance" "F value" "Gamma value" just confuses me, however many times I read descriptions on the net - playing around, I still don't see the differences between say Gamma and exposure (they both just make the image look washed out and brighter....to my eye)

My diamonds don't look that realistic, it looks like a CZ or some such and it needs more dispersion and depth, but I cannot figure out what to do.
Sorry it's probably longer than it should be to make my point; I am equipped with dots of information and I don't have the basics to connect these dots to make sense of it.

I'm happy to pay if need be, but I don't want it to go to waste - does anyone know, or recommend a tutorial for Vray that gives solid explanation on the basics? Like a user guide, an onboarding orientation.

Help and advice would be much appreciated. Thank you!

[fixeighted]

I think you're in the right place already, so I'll suggest starting a test project and posting the results of what you commonly set up.
In that way you can concentrate on one specific scene and develop it with advice gained from other people here. That way you should be able to cover
things like upping the realism of materials, choosing the ideal lighting conditions, getting good camera angles and figuring out the camera options.

Since your focus is jewellery you may find that once you have a basic studio setup, i.e. a backdrop, lights and a camera, then you can mostly keep
that and just drop in other objects and have little more to adjust other than light positions/values and camera settings.

Luckily for you, renderers aren't as scary as they used to be and mostly you'll end up with great results for minimal effort these days

[jun_tange]

Hi there, thanks a lot for getting back to me.
Didn't know I can do that, I thought I'd get people annoyed after a couple questions asking for specific advice without a collective basic ideas.
I'll start doing that to learn then.

[fixeighted]

Nah it's fine, there's a very helpful and extremely knowledgeable bunch here who I'm sure would be glad to help, including the
various forum mods

[seandunderdale]

Youtube is perhaps the main resource, and back that up with google searches to dig deeper into concepts. There are tonnes of good videos breaking down the difference between gamma and exposure at a basic level...example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV2Kf4v9YLQ&t=221s, same goes for HDRIs....example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MASbLjQ9S_Y

There is so much free content on youtube that it shouldnt be hard to find explanations for the basic terms and definitions, and if you get stuck on a particular term, google that and drill down via more websites. Also, the Vray docs have more and more examples and image comparisons showing what each feature does.

If youre starting from scratch, it can seem overwhelming. What you will find is that by the time you are comfortable with your chosen software, you tune out well over 50% of it. These packages are built to do everything, but most people dont do everything, and once you become used to the tools you need everyday, it is a lot less daunting.