Months ago, I mentioned in a post that I when my Vray rendering is already good enough, I’ll do a step-by-step tutorial. Wait no more, it’s here!

Okay, okay, so I know I still have a lot to learn and I definitely don’t know Vray inside and out yet (don’t know if I ever will), but for the sake of blogging, I’ve gathered up some diligence to prepare this for you guys.

If you are liking what you are seeing in the GIF below (really hope you do), stay with me. I’ll share a comprehensive in-the-making of the Rustic Contemporary Interior Space I made especially for this post. For Vray newbies, I’m positive you can pick up a tip or two.

VRAY-FOR-SKETCHUP-TUTORIAL_MARICARDEDIOSSTEPS

For better discussion, I decided to split this tutorial into three parts: (also a way to buy myself more time haha)

1. Basic Illumination – Vray options in general can be overwhelming but guess what, you don’t have to know everything to produce something decent with it.  In this part, I’ll discuss some of the principles of Vray camera and environment settings that you’ll surprisingly find almost similar to photography. Unfortunately, I won’t delve into HDRI’s yet but I’ll give some sufficient tips on how to lighten up your scene.

2. Materials and Textures – Vray is known to produce photo-realistic outputs. Part 2 will discuss how to add reflection, bump, displacement and refraction to make your materials more real!

3. Post Processing – A good Vray render can be better with Photoshop. Part 3 will show basic steps on how to give your raw render more character.

All set? Here goes Part 1:

VRAY-TUTORIAL-PART1_1000

SKP

Why Override Materials?

If you were to do this from scratch, chances are, at this point, you still haven’t set your materials. Since I’m working backwards, I have hidden my materials so that the concentration is more on the illumination. Moreover, I strongly recommend overriding your materials while doing test renders of lighting to enormously reduce your render time.

By clicking the Render Button without changing anything else in the options editor, I got this:

1

2

The sun size is definitely up to you. By default, the value is 1.

34

How about we add some lights?

5

Omni Lights are useful when it comes to the general illumination of the room, it can aid the light coming from the window or it can be your main light source.

IES Lights are usually for ambient lighting. You can download free IES files here, it has a jpeg directory of what the lights look like when rendered.

……………………………………………….

There you have it, a very well lighted scene. If you think the brightness is too much, don’t worry, after we applied materials on all surfaces, the lighting will be just about right. If you are going for a bit dark and dramatic scene, feel free to change the values for each parameter using the principles discussed. 🙂

UP NEXT: PART 2: MATERIALS AND TEXTURES

up-nextSEE-ALSO