TOPICS COVERED:

1. General Scene Set Up

2. Material Settings

3. HDRI for reflections only

4. Scene Environment

5. Texturing

V-Ray Global Switches

Since I'm using alot of displacement in this scene, I made sure displacement was checked.

As always, I disable default lights since they are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

You may want to setup a simple material to be used in the override material slot. This is useful for quickly testing lighting scenarios.

V-Ray Antialiasing and Global Illumination

The default Adaptive subdivision was used for the image sampler along with the area filter.

Make sure that GI is emabled by clicking the "On" checkbox.
-Reflective and refractive GI caustics are enabled.
- Post processing has been left default
- The Quasi-Monte Carlo + Light Cache combination was used for the GI engine.

V-Ray Environment Settings

I enabled GI Environment override and gave it a light yellow hue with a multiplier of 0.4.

I enabled reflection/refraction environment override and added a V-Ray HDRI map in the slot. By doing this I dont have to fill the entire scene with geometry for the reflective objects. By using HDRI for reflections only you can easily add interesting subtle reflections that otherwise would render black or white (depending on the color of the reflection environment override).

V-Ray Color Mapping Settings

- I enabled Sub-Pixel mapping
- I changed the gamma value to 1.2

V-Ray Camera Settings

Mostly default settings for the camera.

- Exposeure is enabled
- Vignetting is enabled
- F-Number was lowered to 2.5

Background Sky

For the background sky I created a plane, converted it to an editable poly and made a semi-circle out of it. I made sure that the edge of the plane was never in view of the camera. I then mapped a sky image from www.1000skies.com to the plane.

To make sure the sky was well lit I dropped an omni in the center of the scene and excluded all objects in the scene except for the sky plane.

Sky Plane V-Ray Properties

There are some specific V-Ray properties that we need to address regarding the sky plane. I disabled the following:

- Generate GI
- Receive GI
- Generate Caustics
- Receive Caustics
- Visible to GI

Visible in reflection and visible in refractions were enabled.

V-Ray Sun Settings

Pretty basic settings here.

- Multiplier was lowered to .008
- I excluded the sky plane from the v-ray sun

Window Diffuse Map

The goal here was to have an old worn looking store-front window.

Window Reflection/Refraction Map

This map was used to control the reflection and refraction of the window.

From a reflection standpoint, this map tells the V-Ray material to only have reflections in the areas shown in white.

From a reflection standpoint, this map tells the V-Ray material to only have refractions in the areas shown in white. If we were to leave this pure white, the window would look odd since the part we want to see (the paint/dirt) would get refracted.

Worn/Decaying Materials

One of my goals with this piece was to create worn surfaces that had some depth to them.

- To do this I started with an editable poly plane
- I divided the plane up so that there were many polys to work with

- Then I deleted random faces of the mesh

- Next I selected some random segments from the holes I just created and dragged them out away from the back surface.

- Then I would select individual verticies and position them randomly as I saw fit.

This method was tedious but I was able to get a nice damaged/worn look for the material under the canopy and on the wall.