Help - Getting started with Vray-Blender ...again

[afecelis]

Hi everyone,

I used the blender-vray integration back in 2008, when it was just starting as Andrei's hobby project. I captured some basic tutorials that got posted on blendernation about installation and basic usage but I never got to use it again. Now, back in 2017, I had the fortune of acquiring vray standalone + blender and I'm totally lost as it's a completely different beast now! It has matured a lot, and it has become a totally pro-app inside of blender.
After reading the documentation available, going through some tutorials on YouTube and searching in the forums I was able to get a grip of the new workflow. The node material system is pretty nice and similar to Cycles', however there are still many things where I could use a helping hand.

The following image is the (untouched) result of the last couple of days trying to learn the ins and outs of Vray-blender:
http://www.telardigital.com/afecelis...ray_result.jpg

This is the untouched result rendered in cycles:
http://www.telardigital.com/afecelis...les_result.jpg

And this is the scene exported from blender as collada .dae and rendered in Vray 3 for sketchup, using prebuilt material settings for the architectural glass, and grass object:
http://www.telardigital.com/afecelis...t_sketchup.jpg

My questions will be based on them. I hope you guys can take a look.

Here we go:
1. A tutorial on youtube about material creation recommends deleting the standard material node and adding a single material node plus a VRayMtl. This is how I created all my materials. Is this ok? Or should the standard material node be used instead?

2. Is this the proper way to set up a backround hdri environment?
http://www.telardigital.com/afecelis...background.jpg

3. How do you rotate the hdri?
4. Can you mix the hdri background with a sunlight? Why is the sunlight a 1m radius "tube" spotlight? If you want it to affect the whole scene do you just make its radius bigger?
5. If you check the cycles version you'll notice environment reflections on the windows. The sketchup vray version also has them, but not the blender version. I guess this is due to not having a proper architectural glass material created. I created a basic glass material with 1.35 of IOR by following the tutorials. How do you create a proper arch-glass material?
6. If you check the sketchup version, you'll notice I used the grass object by simply clicking the grass mesh and assigning it. Is there something similar in vray blender or do we have to use particles for grass?
7. The cycles version has trees with alpha-mapped leaves and DOF in the camera. How do you set up a black and white opacity map for leaves in Vray-blender? I've seen some posts on 2-sided materials. I'll try to mimmick the modo node setup but I'll appreciate it if anyone has already done it in blender.
About the camera options for DOF, they're pretty straightforward. I already got it working here:

http://www.telardigital.com/afecelis...ums/test01.jpg

8. When working on interior renders, how do you set up portals? Is it with area lights?
9. How do you disable alpha when saving the image as png (to get the clouds in the background). Right now I'm saving as jpg to do it, but I'd like to use a lossless format like png.
10. How do you set up ies lights?

hmmmmmm, I gues that's about it!

Thanks a lot to everyone. I hope to be ready and posting some more interesting stuff soon.

regards,

Alvaro

[andybot_cg]

Hi Alvaro,

You could check out this thread and the example files I shared to help you get more up to speed. https://forums.chaosgroup.com/showth...to-share/page3 (last page has an updated file taking into account vray 3.5 changes)

For environment lighting, I would suggest using a dome light. The rotation of the dome light object in the scene sets the map rotation. You can also enable reflections, etc in the settings panel for the light. If you use the Blender sun object, change it from direct to sun mode to get the vray options.

Best,

Andy

[afecelis]

Whoah! Thanks a lot Andy.

I had already run into that thread but I hadn't downloaded the scene you shared. Indeed it's the best way to learn, I'm going to check it out right away.
I get the feeling many users of vray-blender are jumping aboard from other programs and are already seasoned Vray users who are familiar with all its features and technicalities. I think there's a big hole in documentation/sample scenes/tutorials/materials to get a newbie user started from scratch. The good thing is that the community is indeed very welcoming and sharing.

regards, I'll keep on posting my questions and examples here.

Alvaro

Ps. I also just found Bdancer's github wiki. He's got some pretty nice example nodes
https://github.com/bdancer/vb30/wiki

[afecelis]

Hi guys,

Thanks to Andy's help and guidance and various tips gathered from the forums I was able to advance a bit more and replicate most of the settings I use in cycles:

-hdri environment using a dome light: check! (lighting of the scene is a lot better now)
-hdri rotation: check!
-correct sun lamp usage: check!
-reflections on windows/glass material: check!

I still got lots of info to check, but so far I'm very happy with how things work in this new version.

Pending stuff:
-leaf alpha material: I'm checking the double sided material for this and trying to mimmick several nodes from other versions (max/modo)
-for interiors: ies lights and portals, but I still haven't worked on an interior.
-grass object: I don't know if this is done with proxies in blender.

Thanks to everyone for all the help.

[afecelis]

-leaf alpha transparency: check!
-camera DOF: check!
-happy happy happy: check!



Thought render times with the trees went skyrocket-high Is there a way to render trees without having such a big impact on render time?

Thanks for all the help.

Alvaro

[afecelis]

I just tried rendering with GPU/Cuda:


Render times were considerably faster, materials didn't change so drastically as with other cpu/gpu examples but on GPU camera DOF is not working.
One more question, how can I ensure VB30 is using the 2 videocards I got?

thanks!
Alvaro