This course, taught by Daniel Buck, runs through the basics of V-Ray, from lights, to shaders, to render settings and a few optimization tips. Buck’s professional career has been vehicle related, so the course will focus more on vehicle related things than other things, since that’s his specialty. He will, however, present basic principals so that the knowledge gained applies to other things, not just purely vehicle related issues.
Buck will assume that course participants have at least basic knowledge of Maya, and preferably some knowledge of lighting and shaders in general. No advanced knowledge of any other rendering software is necessary, but for those that do, Buck will go through a few areas where V-Ray differs from other rendering software. He will be using Maya during the term, but operations are very similar between 3dsMax and Maya. It renders identically, and all the options and settings are very similar…the differences are in how you apply properties and find the settings.
The course will focus on the creation and manipulation of lights and shaders, as well as some basic V-Ray settings. It won’t get into to much of the technical nuts and bolts of V-Ray, just giving practical approaches to using the renderer. Ultimately the content will involve setting up a scene where we are creating shaders and lighting for a vehicle. Global illumination will not be covered very much in this lesson, as the main focus will be lights and shaders, as well as touching on basic render settings.
Class 1: Intro to Vray. I’ll give a bit of information on Vray, go through the basic Vray settings, and we’ll get ourselves familiar with how Vray is setup.
Class 2: Working with lights. We’ll look at the basic vray lights, their main settings, and where they function best. Sphere light, rectangle light, and dome light.
Class 3: A closer look at lights in Vray, how to use HDR files and flat texture files into dome and rectangle lights, a quick look at IES lights and the sun & sky system in Vray. Lastly, a look at the cutoff threshold of the lights, as a way to optimize the calculation of the lights.
Class 4: Basic VRay Shader overview, looking at the VRayMtl. Spending most of the time on reflection/refraction (as this is a big part of the VRayMtl), and how VRay handles specular highlights and various aspects of reflections/refractions. Also a quick look at how to control reflections by using maps to break up reflection strength and glossiness.
Class 5: A look at the VRayBlendMtl, and a few ways of blending shaders together to create more complex shaders, we’ll look at creating a car paint shader, as well as blending to create a few other types of looks, and then finally a bit of optimizing on the shaders reflection tracing, and how far it can actually be taken.
Class 6: Additional vray shaders. We’ll look at some of the other vray shaders and textures, such as the the vray dirt, light Mtl, and the fastSSS2 shader.
Class 7: Looking at utilities in VRay, including object properties, subdivision, displacement, as well as multi-matte and extra tex render elements. Ways to provide mattes and utility textures for compositing.
Class 8: Shaders for vehicle project. For this lesson, we’ll start creating some of the main shaders for our vehicle project. We’ll look at rubbers, plastics, glass, chrome, and car paint.
Class 9: General car/model geometry setup for rendering, things to avoid and how to fix them. Making sure glass objects have proper geometry thickness, and making sure normals are facing the correct direction. Quickly touching on using imbedded matte channels through refractions.
Class 10: Final vehicle project lighting and shaders setup. Here we’ll be doing final tweaks to our lighting and shaders for a better look, as well as running through a few ways to optimize the render settings, lights, and shaders.
