VRay - Learning Advice

Keith01

Hi everyone,

So I'm beginning to learn VRay for 3DS Max. I would love some advice in relation to the new workflow to VRay.

By "new", I mean a few of the tutorials I'm watching, work with, what some would call the "Old School" way of working with VRay.

As by default now local sub divisions by material is switched off and VRay now seems to take more control of the sub divisions. 

Should I still be changing the material sub divisions or keep the 'Use local subdivions' ticked off?

I'm very much a beginner to this so sorry if I've misunderstood anything. I just don't want to learn the old school way as I feel I may pick up bad habits.

Any advice on this would be great. 

Thanks,
Keith

musashidan

Vray has changed a lot in recent years and even though I've since switched to Arnold I used Vray for a long time before that. Are you using Vray Next?

I would recommend looking for newer tutorials as the older workflow was unnecessarily complicated when juggling sampling.

'use local subdivs' is a global sampling multiplier so should be used with caution as cranking this up can skyrocket your render times. The best workflow for you just starting out is to set up multiple render passes: diffuse/direct/indirect/AA/specular/etc and then adjust sampling settings to reduce noise accordingly. Lights/GI/Materials sampling needs to be balanced out for a noise vs rendertimes tradeoff. Of course, these days, with AI denoising becoming more popular the workflow has changed again. However, as you're just learning you should concentrate on understanding AA/camera samples and scene samples(direct/indirect lights/materials/shadows/etc)

Brrute force pathtracing is inherently physically accurate and all we are doing is tweaking sampling to reduce noise.

Keith01

Thanks so much for the reply. I'll definitely take all that on board. 

I feel that I'm just putting it at universal settings at Min 1, max 100 and a threshold of 0.01. Then from there just setting the time to unlimited until I'm happy with the quality. So if I see that at 5 minutes its good I just then set the max render time at that. But surely there's more to controlling render time and quality than that way.

So without the local subdivs I feel I'm not optimizing my render at all. But I'm sure the more I dive in and study more recent tutorials I'll find how to control the render times and such.

I'll definitely look into "adjust sampling settings ". And also DeNoise AI.

Thanks again. 

oglu

The new vray works more like this. Change nothing vray does handle it for you.

I use it every day for 8 years now and i have no clue how to change settings in the last version cause i dont have to. 
It does work out of the box.

Do you have any specific questions?