Installing V-Ray
This tutorial will show you how to install the V-Ray for Maya Standalone version, how to setup the license-server and how to use the exporter-script. After a brief overview over the different sections of the script and its interface, learn the basic setups for Irradiance-Map and Light cache.  Although there are a couple of other rendering methods in V-Ray, the combination of Irradiance-Map and Light cache is the most common one and gives blazingly fast and good results.  Both methods provide lots of possibilities to tweak render-settings and to find the best compromise between speed and quality.  Light cache is perfect to get an idea of the final look of your scene in just seconds.  This tutorial uses very simple example scenes, so you can quickly and easily reproduce the test-renderings of this video.

Settings

The V-Ray/Blender exporter-script allows you to use Blender interface to control the basic light-settings, material-setups, mirror / transparency settings and world-backgrounds.  You will barely notice that you are working with a script. If there is the need to add special settings to objects, lamps or world-settings that cannot be accessed in Blender, there is an extra section in the script where you can do just that.  As an example, you will learn how to use HDRI Maps to add reflections and light your scene as well as how to eliminate noise in the renderings by adjusting the lamp-settings.

Materials

After the basic introduction the tutorial shows a basic workflow for how an architectural rendering could look like. Assign materials, unwrap the mesh and apply textures in Blender, similar to the Blender Internal renderer. Use Blender Äôs sun-lamp for fast and easily changes to the mood of your image completely by simulating the times of day with the V-Ray-Sun and V-Ray-Sky. During the tutorial learn some important tips and tricks for some special extras, like dynamic linking of V-Ray-renderings to Blender Äôs built-in compositor or region-rendering for super-fast previews of your scene.

Will it blend?

If course only test-renderings and simple demo scenes are a bit boring, so we decided to add the blend file from the title image as a special little bonus to the tutorial.  Because what could be better as an example-scene for a Blender-tutorial than a Blender?  The last chapter gives an overview on the scene-setup, the materials and the render settings.  Check out the settings for glass material, smooth plastic with blurry reflections and translucent materials. This introduction for Blender-to-V-Ray-connection keeps you and your CPUs busy until we come up with the next, advanced tutorial for V-Ray and Blender.

About the Author

Sebastian König is a German 3D-artist who is working as a freelancer and CG-instructor for several years now. During his studies for Education of Art he discovered the joy of modeling and creating 3D-Animations with Blender and hasn't stopped since.  Being a passionate Blender-User he has been teaching Blender at the University of Art and Design Halle/Germany.  He has been working for various studios and companies as a 3D-Artist and freelancer.  During the dozens of projects and jobs he completed with Blender he got a profound knowledge of almost every aspect of this great Open-Source 3D-application.