Some basic Vray questions always overlooked....

[jason_cafferty]

Hi All,

Having come over to Vray 5 after a few years of using Thea render I have a couple of new user questions that don't seem to be covered in all the youtube and online guides etc.

1. rendering with all the effects of lighting from Dome lights etc. but not having any background appear in PNG exports. In Thea you ticked alpha channel in "its" channel list and then PDF exports did this.
2. Increasing the amount of passes Vray performs in final renders.

I've upgraded to a 3090FE but haven't actually done any renders on Vray yet as I am finishing up some existing projects that were started in Thea and they need finishing that way. I have however trawled many resources and feel 100% ready to crack on using Vray once they are done with the exception of the above 2 queries.

As a final footnote, most of my work involves taking building models with no roof and making rendered floorplans. Any pointers as to how best to achieve the lighting of these in Vray? In Thea I used a subdued HDRi in its form of dome light with the odd fill ight where needed and rendered out in PNG via Alpha to get just a floorplan and no background.

[nikoleta.garkova]

Hi jason_cafferty

Apologies for the delay.
In regards to your questions:

1. If you wish to omit the background from an HDRI used in your Dome Light, simply turn on the Invisible parameter in the Dome Light's options (see screenshot). That way the image will render with all the information from the Dome Light's texture but without the background.
2. That would generally depend on the Render Settings; increasing, for example, the Noise Threshold would produce more passes/increase in render time. It would be a good idea to use the Render Quality presets, which will control the rendered image quality by changing the Raytrace and Global Illumination settings. If any of the controlled settings is manually modified and no longer corresponds to the current quality preset value, the Custom quality is automatically selected (see screenshot). You can have a look at our very detailed and informative article on Render Settings Explained - Quality vs. Render Time

Hope that would help. If you've got any additional queries, don't hesitate to ask.

[jason_cafferty]

Thanks for that.