V-Ray Tutorials

This series of videos will guide you through the process of creating realistic renders using V-Ray for 3ds Max. While rendering is an extremely powerful method for enhancing an artist's work, the process can be very confusing for not only beginners but also for advanced users. This course will help simplify the process. We'll begin by learning how to prepare the assets for rendering and continue all the way through to performing post-work on the final render. After completing this tutorial, we'll have a much better understanding of the overall process involved with rendering a realistic character in V-Ray for 3ds Max, as well gaining many valuable tips and tricks for more specific topics like skin shading and linear workflow, which in the end will help the artist add new levels of realism and life to their own work.

In this course, we will create a large scale arch-viz project using V-Ray. We go from start to finish, modeling to final while learning the principles of V-Ray along the way. Learning how to set up global illumination, creating proxies and learning their benefits, V-Ray's material system and other important aspects of V-Ray which in the end will give you the knowledge to go and create your own realistic renders using V-Ray.

Using Render Elements, we can quickly render our scenes out in multiple passes, which can be re-assembled in an external compositing application. The advantage to rendering in multiple passes is that we gain a much greater level of control over the final image result. This course will teach you how to fully utilize many of the Render Elements available in V-Ray, such as the separation lights, shadows, reflections and highlights into individual passes, as well as how to properly reassemble your passes in an external compositing application. We will also learn how to render specific materials and textures out to their own Render Elements as well as many other topics and workflows designed to help you become a stronger, more efficient rendering artist with V-Ray.

The ability to set up realistic lighting for an interior environment is a skill that is highly sought after in the CG industry. Problems to overcome, arise with every digital set. So we will be covering a lot of very common issues that you will want to be aware of such as using V-Ray lights to create physically-accurate light behavior, achieving realistic light bouncing in our scene, optimizing our render speed, using V-Ray materials to simulate a variety of surface types, using an external image-editing application to add some finishing touches to our renders, as well as many other tips, tricks, and techniques that will help you become a stronger, more effective rendering artist in V-Ray.

These Hypershade nodes can be used to create a variety of effects and many of these nodes provide us a number of additional controls over our V-Ray renders. For example, we will be taking an in-depth look at a number of nodes that can be used individually or used together to create a variety of surface material types that obey real-world laws of optics. We will also learn a variety of methods for adding volumetric effects to our renders, creating subsurface scattering materials, using geometry as a direct illumination source, along with many other lessons dedicated to the various V-Ray nodes found in Maya's Hypershade.

Using the V-Ray rendering engine, we can create highly realistic renders inside of Maya, but understanding how to properly use the rendering features of V-Ray is of critical importance. In these lessons we will explore many tools and concepts of V-Ray such as the various methods for simulating global illumination and understanding when each of these methods should be used. We will also look at the specialized V-Ray lights and how to properly use these lights in order to achieve a high degree of realism. We will also learn how to utilize the V-Ray Sun and Sky to create realistic outdoor lighting, we will learn how to utilize some of the specialized V-Ray materials, how to render our images into multiple passes, and exploring many additional rendering features found in V-Ray.