hello and welcome to today's intro to vray webinar it looks like most everyone is logged in so we're going to go ahead and get started just a quick reminder all attendees are in listen only mode so if you have any questions please put them into the chat window and we'll get to as many as we can after today's demonstration uh just some quick introductions U my name is Daniel Monahan I'm the regional head of sales for the chaos groups in the United States and Canada and with me I have Jordan Zara Jordan is a CG specialist here at chaos Jordan I are both super excited to be here today to talk to you about vray and why it's a really must-have tool for any designer's 3D workflow now today's presentation is an intro webinar um the content that we prepared is it's perfect for a new trial user or anyone who's new to VR and we're going to cover a lot of ground in this webinar but we're not going to go any we're not going to go particularly deep into any one subject or we're not going to get too technical however if there is something in this webinar that you would like to see that you'd like to take a deeper dive in please let us know and drop your topic in the chat and we'll be more than happy to follow up with you afterwards for those of you who are new to the chaos group um just very quickly the chaos group we started 25 years ago as a rendering plugin for Studio Max since that time we've quickly gained popularity we now support nine of the most popular modeling programs and have gone on to become the world's leading computer visualization company our software is used by really companies across the world in a in a V variety of different Industries including architecture engineering construction media and entertainment automotive and product design as well as e-commerce now January last year the chaos announced a real exciting merger with n scape the world's best real-time rendering plugin and more recently it acquired a celindo a leader in 3D product visualization for the furniture industry this new combined chaos company is now arguably the largest pure visualization company in the world now that's important and it's not important because we're the largest but because you now have one companies who solely focused on helping you solve your viz workflow problems and as a viz pure viz software company we're not tied to any modeling program or really even tied to any specific rendering technology so the company is really in a very unique position to not only to connect the viz workflows but really to unite the entire industry one way we're connecting the viz workflow is with a new endscreen endscreen scene into vray for added realism allowing you to take your real-time renderings from good to great now to learn more about this and how we're connecting real time and photorealistic rendering please leave a comment in the chat and I'll be sure to follow up so why rendering what's making computer visualization a mission critical tool for any design text stack well it wasn't so long ago that models were crafted out of wood or clay and scenes were manually staged with Real World objects and photography was the norm today computer modeling has replaced most physical modeling and more and more the scenes you see in print and TV and on the web and in movies they're not real places but they're created digitally as designers 3D content and 3D modeling it's ubiquitous every day millions of new 3D models are created and each one needs to be rendered and visualized this is where chaos and our Flagship rendering program VR fits in when we think about computer visualization a good analogy is a digital camera in fact many firms are using VR to replace Photography in their visualization workflow saving time and money now in the real world light travels through space interacting with objects in the environment and their physical properties our eyes perceive this light and interpret visual information including color and shape depth and movement however in modeling programs like SketchUp and Revit and Rhino physical light doesn't exist and objects are displayed with schematic representation of materialss now while the default lighting color and materials in these programs can help you perceive volumes and geometries while modeling the results are not very realistic and they're missing key information that can help us make more informed decisions and more easily communicate our design intent by adding a rendering program like vray to your modeling workflow we can turn our design models into realistic images that are virtually indistinguishable from The Real World now when most people think about renderings they typically think about that one image at the end of the design process that you know that one image that perfectly showcases the project but in reality rendering is there to support us through the entire design process from start to finish in early phases rendering allows us to quickly explore the interaction between space and light and materials and it lets us see what the construction will look like so we can easily identify and solve problems early in the design process and we can help accurately communicate our designs especially to clients who are not trained in Reading 2D drawings with vray we can quickly get the buy and we need and move decisions forward faster later in design rendering can help convey the exact design details we need they let us quickly explore options and make informed decisions based on the visual feedback rendering makes sure that everyone on the design team has a clear understanding of our design intent which can reduce errors and omissions and of course rendering can be use to help sell the job a good rendering creates emotion as well as conveys information they're mandatory for presentations brochures websites really helping us to showcase our designs in the best possible light so why vray what makes vray so special well quite simply it's quality and realism vray is the fastest and easiest way to create a truly photorealistic image images that are virtually indistinguishable from those captured by a camera unlike other rendering software VR is what we call a physically based rendering program it leverages the latest in Ray tracing technology and advanced algorithms to accurately simulate complex lighting scenarios while other rendering programs simplify or what we call fake the lighting v-ray takes into consideration how the light bounces around a scene and how that light interacts with objects and the materials in the environment before actually decaying and it lets the designer really dial in and tune each scene so they can quickly achieve the exact look they're going for this accurate representation of light and the fine level of control is really what separates vray and allows you to create such high quality visuals in fact the quality and innovation in V has been recognized by by both the Academy of Motion Pictures and the Academy of Arts and television and science it's this quality that has made VR the industry standard for both AR Architects Brands and visual effect Studios another advantage of vray is its flexibility um VR is a plugin and it works inside your favorite CAD or DCC tools and as a plug-in it seamlessly integrates into your modeling programs interface and its workflows in fact a good way to think of VR is as a live viewport into the model not a separate rendering application with VR you don't have to leave your design software to render it's simply an extension of the modeling program you use every day another important benefit of VR is the cosmos asset Library having access to the right entourage is important to establish context scale and realism while also adding visual interest and depth with VR you have access to over 4,500 ready too assets plus an unlimited amounts of 3D content content coming from popular websites like CG Trader tibo squid and and render people and for those projects that need it you could even create your own custom assets so your options for Entourage are are really Limitless lastly while VR is fast and easy to use it's built to handle incredibly large models and complex scenes scenes that are a real challenge for other rendering programs vray is optimized to take advantage of multiple processor cores and servers and it scales to work across any number of machines so you can build your own render Farms or you can free up your local machines and sub your renderings out to the chaos Cloud rendering service so with that I'd like to turn the presentation over to Jordan and ask him to give us a quick demo of vay so we can see these benefits in action Jordan thank you Dan hello my name is Yan and I'm a CG artist at chaos today we're going to explore how the Vay render engine can Aid you in creating communicating and presenting your designs we will go through the process of shading lighting and rendering your SketchUp models with vray then see how we can post-process our final image to give it a finishing touches if you have just installed vay for SketchUp and run it for the first time you will notice that there are a few new toolbars these are V dedicated toolbars where you will find all the tools you have at your disposal in the first toolbar you have access to rendering settings V material and asset library and the frame buffer where V will visualize the rendering process and you will be able to postprocess your images the second toolbar is where you will find all the different types of Lights you can create after you select an icon just clicking the viewport then move the mouse to determine the size and click again to final I we've just created our first plain light if you have any experience with photography you can think of it as a soft box the more commonly used ones are the plain light which we already have sphere lights which are great for simulating light bulbs spot and IES lights and finally the dome light which is used to simulate real life environments in the next tool bar are listed geometry objects that are specific for V the most commonly used are the V proxy which we use to load very complex objects like trees into our scene and the scattering tool we will explore these tools further once we open up a project the last toolbar has utility options regarding how vray objects are displayed in the viewport tools that help you better project textures onto your objects or completely remove their material information let's go back one step and explore V assd editor from the first toolbar here we can explore everything vray related in our scene and edit its properties at the top you can see icons some of which are white and some are gray white means there are vay objects in this category and gray means it's empty the blue icon means the category is currently selected and we can see what is in it below by right clicking you can also create objects in this category let's go to the Cog wheel where we can find the render set settings where we can choose different quality presets post-processing options like the noising camera settings and render resolution if you open the right hand fly out menu we can see a list with more advanced options for example on the left we can adjust our camera exposure with just a n slider while on the right we have access to things like ISO shutter speed and aperture size we can find Advanced options for any vray object as well as a pre review where we can see how the changes we make take effect once we are happy with a V object or a material we can open the leftand fly out menu and save it in a custom asset library that can be shared with anyone now that we are familiar with the interface of vray let's jump into a project I have the basic shapes for a house design I'm working on and I want to figure out if the volumes work well together or not we can directly start rendering with vray and explore what our project looks like with realistic lighting the first thing that I notice is that the render is a bit slow and there are some textures that I've assigned but don't want for this part of my work the first thing I'm going to address is that I want all my rendering to happen on my graphics card rather than my CPU as I have a much better GPU this Choice depends entirely on the hardware you have I will stick with that choice throughout the whole project after that I want to enable the noising and choose the Nvidia Aid noiser as it is very quick which makes it perfect for preview renderers also I'll make sure that the the noising pass is constantly updated to take care of the textures we can either remove them completely using the utilities toolbar or we can just enable the override material this will give us a generic Shader for everything using the color we specify or just pick a material we have in the scene already now when we start interactive rendering everything is is much more Snappy and the image is cleaned up almost instantly also you can notice that there already is a source of light in fact there is a sky and a sun lamp in our scene that are enabled by default with vay you can control them from the SketchUp Shadows roll out or go to the V asset editor and make use of the controls there which in my opinion are much more intuitive as you are controlling the angle of the Shadows directly from here let's try to find a good angle for our light so that the shape shape of the model is more readable that way I can make better decisions about what the final volumes of this design need to be something that we can do at this stage is also take care of those Overexposed highlights in our image to do that we can simply apply a fumic tone map in the Vay frame buffer this will take care of the Overexposed areas in our image and introduce some contrast for the overall look which makes it quite nicer from the get goal even though vray can be used in this stage of the design process keep in mind that the main goal of rendering with vray is photo realistic results if you have access to other tools of the chaos family like andscape or Vantage you might have a better experience using those instead of vay we can also use this phase to pick out some interesting viewpoints just set the viewport to something that you like and click on the plus button in the scene tab this will save a vay camera from that location let's jump into a further stage of the project where we have figure out the shapes and overall design of this house and we can start texturing it and explore different options for materials and colors to create a material in V we need to go to the asset browser select the materials Tab and right click on its icon from the drop- down menu we can see that there are quite a few options available they all have their uses some more common than others to make things easier here is the most commonly used one the V standard material with it you can create most real life surfaces like plastic wood Metals glass and water the main parameters are diffuse which determines the overall color of the material after that we have Reflections which will determine how much of the environment will be reflected on the surface of the material one important parameter is also the reflection glossiness where lower values will give you a rough surface and higher values will will make the material look more polished next we have refraction which is used to create materials like glass water and some acrylic Plastics playing with the refraction roughness will give us a frosted look and will blur what we see through the object now that we have gone through the basics let's create the material for the roof metal sheets I'll start with giving it a dark diffused color some metals have a slight thin to them so I'll add just a touch of blue I also want strong Reflections so I'll give them the maximum value and slightly blur them by lowering the glossiness to give the Finishing Touch we should specify to V that we are rendering a metal surface by bringing the metalness slider to one instead of zero that already looks good but there is one more thing we can do and that is to make use of textures we can plug an image texture into almost any value of the V material for this Shader I have prepared a glossiness texture which will introduce some variation in the roughness of our surface just like in real life metals of course creating your own materials can be fun but it is rarely necessary let's open up vay's asset Library we call it chaos Cosmos as you can find anything you might need in here there is a great assortment of 3D models varying from interior furniture and decoration to exterior plants vehicles and buildings you can also browse through hdri textures for your environment lighting but right now we need some materials the way to use chaos Cosmos is just like what you want in your scene click the small download button and when the download is complete drag and drop it inside of the scene for the driveway I need a nice asphalt material so let's search for that and download the one I like then we can apply it to the driveway geometry if we go back to the asset editor and check out the different material options we have there are a few other quite useful the two-sided material helps us create translucent materials like curtains paper and leaves the blend material is used to mix two different materials that way we can create interesting effects like scuffed paint or wet surfaces the emissive material just emits light into our scene just like the wire of a light bulb learning material creation is a long process and there are a lot to cover but on the bright side you can search chaos Cosmos for any material you might need and after importing it in your scene just take a look at how it was built if you want to create your own version or you can simply edit that material using things like core corrections to change the diffuse or overall color of the material let's jump to a further stage of the project where we have developed most of the materials and we need to make the scene more lively by building the environment around the house for this step I will rely entirely on Kel Cosmos first I want to make the place look like someone is already living here so let's search for a vehicle to place in the driveway or maybe two placing such objects can really make your image more appealing to the viewer the next thing I notice is that there really isn't any vegetation and we have to fix that I'm going to look for a few different types of trees once we place them in the scene having variety will make the image look more natural another thing I notice is that the grass loan doesn't look that good if we use just a texture we're going to need to make actual grass let's look for that in Cosmos as well I'm going to download a few different patches of the same type of grass just to bring in some more variety now we can drag and drop drop them into the scene we need to scatter them across the lone surface let's select it and go to the geometry tab from here we need the icon called V scatter this creates a scattering object connected with the model of the grass loan all we are left to do is specify the objects to scatter from the as editor let's find the V scatter we created in the object Tab and select it also you can rename it for convenience here we can add guests those will be the objects that we'll be scattering select the grass models and click add guests we can introduce a bit of Randomness so that we get a more natural look if we tweak the maximum rotation value back to zero we can see that now it really looks like the same patch of grass being scattered as we are seeing it only from one side let's bring that back to 360 and this will make sure that every scattered instance is rotated randomly between 0 and 360° the default values for scale already bring some variety to the grass field but maybe if we exaggerate the effect things will look better we can also scale everything globally using the scale multiplier but in this case we wouldn't be needing that now let's go back to the top of the scatter parameters and in the density di in a larger number that better FS of the grass Lo this value will be depending on the look you're going for and the objects you're using okay we've achieved a good density for the grass but now our viewport is too cluttered we can change the representation method for our guests to dots or nonone instead of the boxes that we are seeing now okay that's a lot better using the same approach I've already created a few other scatter objects for the forest behind the house and the spruce trees along the fence in the AR once we're happy with the environment we can move on to refining the lighting in our scene this is one of the most important parts to create a photorealistic render there are two main approaches to lighting architecture scenes in vay the first one we're going to take a look at is using the Sun and Sky system in V we already mentioned that we can control the azimut and rotation of the sun to recreate almost any time of day so let's take a look at what else we can tweak further down there is a cloud section let's enable that these are procedurally generated clouds that we can control with the parameters below the things that influence their appearance the most are the density variety and thickness changing those values can give you almost any result you're looking for you can also recreate high altitude clouds by tweaking the serus amount the other approach is using HDR Panorama images the these are images that contain a 360° photo of an environment that you can get from the Internet or from Kel Cosmos to use them we need to create a dome light from the light toolbar and place it in the scene then feed the Panorama image into the texture slot of the dome light to control the direction of the light we can go into the texture parameters just make sure that mapping is set to spherical and twg the horizontal rotation this will rotate the image along the vertical axis sometimes figuring out the lighting can be a tough job and everybody gets a creative block from time to time lucky for us V can help us with that too let's click on the light gen icon in the lights tool bar select that we want to light on exterior and pick the method we want to use bring the variations number up and click on generate what the LI gen tool does is come up with all sorts of different lighting scenarios to choose from for your scene while you don't have to do anything once the generation is complete you have a variety of options to choose from to pick one just double click on its thumbnail once we've created a whole set of options we can save them from the save button for later use or share them with colleagues we can use the same tool to generate lighting scenarios using HDR Panorama images too I've already pre-calculated and saved the set so I'm going to directly load it and pick a thumbnail that I like from the batch if we take a look at the asset editor we can see another dome light created called light gen Dome where we can find the HDR texture used for this lighting setup that way we can further tweak things if you want using the texture rotation as Dan mentioned in his introduction we can think of vay as a digital camera inside our 3D modeling application this means we can take full control of things like the iso and shoter speed which we are using to take our images from the advanced settings but if you're not very familiar with those terms you can always use the simplified version in the camera row out bringing the exposure values to the left will make your image darker while bringing it to the right will make it brighter also we can tweak the white balance this value compensates for any warm or cold te you are getting in the scene from your lights of course just like with any other camera you can switch those settings to Auto and let V determine the values for you that way even if I switch from an exterior shot to Interior the exposure and white balance will always be perfect just like with real life cameras we can save things in focus and things that are out of focus and blurry for that we need to use the depth of field setting and use using the Crosshair next to the focus source to pick where we want to focus the camera to the focus amount will tell vay how much to blur the objects outside of focus range once we're happy with our model lighting and cameras we can start preparing the post- production of our render even before it is done let's focus on the vfb and open its right hand fly out menu here we've already added a filic toe map but on top of that we can do much more for example we can change the white balance and exposure for this image I'd like to add a curves adjustment and slightly increase the contrast by tweaking the handles until we have a subtle s-shaped curve also we can slightly sharpen the image from the sharpen and blur option keeping effects like this subtle is very important I'm going to use very low values below one for the sharpen amount and the sharpen radius I don't want any blur so I will set it to zero now that we're done with the post-processing part we can go for a final highquality render from the render settings in the as editor let's just drag the quality slider to high and switch from nvidia's AI noiser to the v noiser as it is more accurate especially with high quality renders this will make sure we get a perfectly clean image then from the render output we can set a specific result resolution the default is full HD but for this render I'll set it to 4K you can also pick different aspect ratios if they will look better for your project and what's left is to click on the render button and let V do it thing of course if you don't have a very powerful computer to render with you can always turn to Kel's Cloud click on the icon in the rendering toolbar and the chaos Cloud page will load in a second here here you can create a new project and name it then check if you've set the right settings you can also overwrite some like the resolution then just click submit and Kos Cloud will take over the rendering part the cool thing is you can continue working on your machine while your image is being rendered on the cloud once it's done just save it to a location on your computer and we are done with that I'd like to give the floor back to Dan thank you Jordan that was great now if anyone has any questions about what Jordan showed off please put your questions in the chat now while Jordan showed off a smaller residential project in SketchUp the same Concepts he showed can be applied to any modeling program and really applied to rendering anything anything from inspired architecture to that money product shot to compelling commercials and even fulllength feature movies or other worlds that we can only imagine now for those of you who have never used V we would love for you to try it you can download a 30-day free trial from our website and we'll be here every step of the way to help get you up and running quickly with that I'd like to thank you for joining us today I hope you found the information valuable and you're leaving with some new insights and actionable takeaways