Setting Up 3ds Max and V-Ray for Quick Test Renders

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This tutorial focuses on lighting and rendering with 3ds Max and V-Ray. In this segment will cover the process of setting up 3ds Max and V-Ray for quick test renders. Most of the workflow depicted in this tutorial, are aimed at intermediate and advanced users. This tutorial will cover setting up the units and 3ds Max preferences; load up the V-Ray rendering engine; and create V-Ray override material. This video doesn’t include project files, as it’s mainly to take users through some of the simple production methodologies. In this session, we’ll start by loading up the V-Ray rendering engine and understanding some of its core parameters and native lights. Before we start, let’s set up the scene by going to the customized tool bar and choosing preferences from the dropdown list. Inside our preference is a dialog. Open the gamma LUT and enable the gamma correction. Leave the gamma value to 2.2 and click OK. The next step is to go again to the customize tab and choose the unit setup option from the dropdown list. By default, the unit setup is set to generic, but for the purpose of this exercise, we will set it to a magic display instead. Then change the display metric system to meters. It’s worth noting that the display units do not affect the physical scale of the objects in the scene. It’s only for the display purposes. To affect the physical scale of the scene, simply click on the system unit setup button. By default, one unit is equal to one. If you want to increase the scale of the scene, you’d perhaps type in one is equal to two. As a rule of thumb, most users never tweak with these values unless the imported scene is smaller or bigger than usual. Click OK and OK again to close the dialog. To load up the V-Ray, let’s open the render set-up dialog by clicking on this button. In the comments tab, just scroll down under Assign Render. Click on its toggle. For this particular exercise, we’re using V-Ray 3.6. But if you have an earlier version, you should also be OK. Choose the version of V-Ray that you’re working with and click OK. Before we start creating lights, we need to be sure the render parameters are quite draft and quick to render. To do so, let’s start by opening the V-Ray tab. Under the global switches, most of these parameters are hidden by default. To view all its settings, simply click twice on this default button. As you can see, this is your typical visualization scene. We don’t have any lights. One of the first things we’re going to do to ensure the test run is that fast, you see as an override white material. This technique will allow us to quickly access the position and the effect of the light in the scene. So next, what we’re going to do, is to open the material editor there. So this is material; you’re going to call it override because this is the white material that we’re going to be using as an override of the scene. Obviously, for the areas where there’s glass, you can’t be included, otherwise, the light will not go through the glass. This segment is now concluded. What is important to set up units and 3ds Max preferences. It’s also crucial to load up V-Ray and create the override material.

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