Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will set up the different passes that we need for the final shot using V-Ray's render elements. To do that, just go ahead and open the render settings and under Render Elements, you'll see all the render elements that V-Ray has to offer. And if you're familiar with Mental Ray, these under Mental Ray are called passes, but in V-Ray, they're called render elements. But they do exactly the same thing as in Mental Ray, so to create different passes like a reflection, a specular, a diffuse, and so on. I will not go into detail on how to create each one of them and how to adjust the settings of those. I strongly recommend checking out the course that Digital Tutor has to offer on utilizing render elements in V-Ray for Maya, because they go into detail on how to use each one of them and the different settings that you could get with the render element. Now let's go ahead and add a couple of render elements that we need to do some post work on the final image. For this scene, I'm going to be using the reflection. I'm going to be needing the reflection pass, the self-illumination, and the specular. To add these and make these active, what you have to do is just select the pass you want or the render element that you want and double-click on it. This will add it to the active render element list. If you want to add a couple, just select reflection-- for this scene, I'm going to need reflection and self-illumination-- Control and select another one, and just scroll down and click Add. As you can see, it goes ahead and adds reflection, self illumination, and specular. So let's go ahead and see these render elements. So to do that, we go ahead under V-Ray common and scroll down and make sure you have Use Relay Frame Buffer checked on. What this will do is we will do a test render, but not into the render view. It will use V-Ray's render view, which is called V-Ray Frame Buffer. And to do that, just go ahead and hit Render, Render, and Render Camera. What this will do, it well hide the render view, and it will start rendering in the V-Ray Frame Buffer. Once the render is done, in the V-Ray Frame Buffer in the top left corner, you're going to see what it says, RGB Color. If you click on that, it will open up a drop-down menu. And here you can see the render elements that we added-- the reflect, the self-illumination, and the specular. So we go back to the render elements, into the Render settings, here we see the reflection, the self-illumination, and the specular. Now go ahead and select one of them. You'll see this is the reflect pass, and this is the self-illumination pass or render element, and the specular path. You can barely see the specular, but it is there. And the self-illumination, here's why we added that V-Ray [? live ?] material to the nucleus and the [INAUDIBLE], just so in post, we can add some nice glow to the small dots and the vines on the nucleus. Now before we go ahead and render the final image, I'll just go ahead and tweak the settings for V-Ray so we can get a noiseless image and we can get a really good high quality so we can do some post processing work in Photoshop. To do that, go ahead and go to the V-Ray tab and under Image Sampler, just make sure you have where it says Sampler Type, have Adaptive DMC on. I'm going to go ahead and tweak this, but I'm not going to go into detail on what each setting means or what each setting does. But I highly recommend going and checking out the course that Digital Tutor has to offer, which is called Introduction to V-Ray for Maya. They are going to go over all the settings that the V-Ray render has to offer, understanding the image sampler, and working with the V-Ray lights and working with the shaders. Because there is no perfect recipe for the render settings, and each scene has different requests and each scene, depending on the shaders and depending on the light, and depending on the look that you're going, you have to tweak the scene to fit the look that you're going for. Now let's head back into the render settings. For the Adaptive DMC, I'm going for a minimum subdivision of 1 and a maximum subdivision of 10. This will get the nice detail and result from the light and the shaders, and we get rid of the noise that's appearing on the nucleus shader and on the cell membrane. On this threshold, I'm going to make sure I'm going to tweak this down. The lower you go with this threshold, the higher the quality begins, and you won't see any noise into the scene. But this will also raise the time of your render. So make sure you tweak this to get the look that you're going for. Because you might not need this low, maybe you will need much lower, and so on. So it really depends on each scene. Now go into the indirect illumination. I'm going to go ahead and check for Global Illumination on. Make sure you have refractive-- because refractive caustic is on by default-- just make sure you have refractive caustics off-- one, because we don't need it for this scene. We don't have any refractive materials on this one. And the second reason is that refractive caustics usually add some very bad artifacts to the render. For the rest, I'm going to just leave it as default and I'm not going to tweak anything else. One thing we have to do, just make sure, before we start rendering the [? high ?] image, is make sure the image format is PNG. And if we scroll down, make sure the renderable camera is only render camera, or whatever you went ahead and named the camera that you want to render from. You see that we have another camera here. V-Ray lets you render a couple of cameras at the same time, especially when doing a batch rendering. You can do a batch rendering with V-Ray exactly as you would do with Mental Ray. Now just go ahead and delete the other one, because I don't want the V-Ray to render the perspective. Just delete that. For the presets of resolution, I'm going for an HD 180. But for this video, I'm going to keep it to 600 x 480 just so we can get the faster rendering and so I can show you how to save all the render elements before starting post processing in Photoshop. Now we have everything set. Let's go ahead and render this image. And in the V-Ray Frame Buffer, just click on the small teapot. So once we have the render done, just make sure you have all the render elements and you're happy with the result and the quality of the image. With a full HD1, it might take around 10 to 25 minutes, depending on the machine, to render the big image. So now let's go ahead and save this. And to save this image, you can go ahead and click on the floppy disk, but this will save only the beauty image. So the save all the render elements, just make sure you're clicking on the multiple floppy disks. So if you click on that, going to go ahead and name this the cell. And just hit Save. Now if I just close this up, minimize, in the render elements of the cell, here are all the elements that we just rendered and are ready to start doing some post work in Photoshop. In the next lesson, we will go ahead and composite the render elements in Photoshop and then create our final image.