7/18/2011

Using Vray With Cinema 4D to Create Photorealistic 3D Images

By Frank Parker


Vray is a render plugin that can be used with many different 3D Software packages. Vray can stimulate light when it is combined with a virtual camera and an advanced material developer. Materials can be customised to produce any type of surface that will react to light in a very life-like way.

Using Vray with a 3D software will replace the original render engine and material editor letting the most extreme high quality of renders to be created.

Vray for Cinema4D uses 'Tags' which are applied to lights, cameras and geometry within the 3D environment. These Tags are mini managers which give the user a multitude of extra options and settings and tell the 3D package which elements are lights or cameras etc. The camera tag for example allows the virtual camera to act as an SLR camera. The camera Tag includes iso settings, F-stop, shutter speed and vignetting effects etc, etc. Light tags allow the lights to behave more realistically and include 'Physical sun and sky' with a multitude of settings which can create very realistic lighting effects.

The Vray bridge rendering dialogue box can be a bit intimidating to new users compared to other rendering engines on the market which rely on a less customisable setup. It is on the complicated side but once mastered, extremely impressive results can be achieved. The render settings dialogue requires an understanding of complex terminology, and a lot of time to begin to understand how all the settings effect the images produced. An understanding of photography is helpful with the camera settings and an understanding of image editing will speed the learning process.

Vray's main advantage over the many other rendering engines on the market is it's fast render times. It uses global illumination and raytracing to produce spectacular images in a fraction of the time. It also includes the feature of 'network rendering' which allows vray to connect to other computers over a network and utilise their processors to render the image faster. Each processor is allocated a 'bucket' which is a small area of the image which is being processed, 4 processors equals 4 buckets, so connecting to say 5 other quadcore pc's over a network means that the image has 24 buckets processing it at the same time. This obviously means much faster render times, so when the deadlines are looming vray can help you meet them.




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