An in-depth tutorial on optimizing V-Ray to deliver the
highest quality renders with the fastest render times.

V-ray Settings
Critical Vray Settings
Vray Settings For Revit
Vray Settings

The Universal V-Ray Settings were designed to make V-Ray accessible and easy for users who don't care about render optimization or learning how V-Ray works under the hood. It's simply a method to put V-Ray on auto-pilot. It allows a user to control all render quality by adjusting only one setting - the noise threshold. Vray render Interior Settings. VeraW March 24, 2021, 3:39pm #1. I’m currently working on my first render with Vray 42002 for SketchUp 2020 but struggling with good results at the moment. Already checked a few tutorials and websites, but I have the feeling my scene is quite complicated since there are a lot of windows with. V-Ray Next: Basic Render Settings, Render Elements and Frame Buffer SettingsGet access to all my professional arch viz training HERE: https://www.learnarchvi.

v1.3

- August 2014

v1.0 - December 16 2013 - Public Release.

v1.1 - December 22 2013 - Improved the layout of the Optimization Procedure section, and added a note about GI controlling VRayHairMtl's reflection/refraction quality.

v1.2 - February 01 2014 - Added information about Specular Highlights, and elaborated Global Illumination methods in the Optimization Procedure.

v1.3 - August 18 2014 - Updated the Optimization Procedure section to no longer rely on the 'Default Lights' setting, which sometimes created issues for indoor scenes.

This tutorial attempts to cover the process of optimizing your V-Ray render settings to get the best possible render quality and fastest render time for a given scene.

There's often a lot of confusion surrounding V-Ray's sampling methods and what 'ideal' settings are. Many times you'll see artists adopt the 'Universal V-Ray Settings' of having the Image Sampler (Anti-Aliasing, or AA) Max Subdivs value set very high (like 50 or 100), and then simply lowering the noise threshold value until the render becomes clean enough - thinking that it's the best / fastest that V-Ray can do. But with a bit of understanding of how V-Ray works under the hood, you can achieve a higher quality result WITH faster render times - in some extreme cases ranging between 3x faster to 13x faster than the universal settings.

We'll first cover some of the underlying concepts behind how ray tracing and V-Ray's sampling works. Then we'll go over an example scene to demonstrate exactly how a render can be optimized to be faster and cleaner. Then we'll learn how to identify the different sources of noise a scene can have. And finally I'll provide a step-by-step procedure to optimize any scene to render with an ideal balance of quality and speed.

If you already know the underlying concepts and just want the technical step-by-step procedure, click here to skip right to it.

When a render begins, rays are first sent out from our camera and into the scene to gather information about the geometry that will be visible in the final image. These rays originating from the camera are called Primary Rays (also called Camera Rays or Eye Rays) and are controlled by V-Ray's Image Sampler (also known as Anti-Aliasing or AA).

Whenever a Primary Ray intersects with geometry in the scene, additional rays get sent out from that point of intersection into the rest of the scene to gather information about things like Lighting, Shadows, Global Illumination (GI), Reflection, Refraction, Sub-surface Scattering (SSS), etc. These additional rays are called Secondary Rays and are controlled by V-Ray's DMC Sampler.

Figure 01

A simplified diagram of raytracing:
Primary Rays are sent out from the camera into the scene, intersect with geometry, and send out various Secondary Rays to further sample the scene.

From this point forward, we'll simply refer to 'Rays' as 'Samples' - because that's what the purpose of a Ray is - to take a Sample of a scene to gather information about what's going on in it. So basically Rays = Samples.

In order to accurately figure out what's going on in a scene, many Primary and Secondary Samples are needed to be taken. The more a scene gets sampled, the more information V-Ray is able to gather about the scene, and the higher quality the resulting render will be - which means less Noise in the render. This is because Noise is caused by a lack of information. Noise present in a render means that V-Ray wasn't able to gather enough information about what's going on in a scene. So in order to reduce noise, you need to provide V-Ray with more information - and to provide V-Ray with more information, you need to take more samples.

The amount of Primary Samples sent out into the scene is mainly controlled by the Min Subdivs, Max Subdivs, and Color Threshold settings of the Image Sampler. The amount of Secondary Samples sent out into the scene is mainly controlled by the Subdivs settings from individual Lights / Global Illumination / Materials in the scene, and the Noise Threshold setting of the DMC Sampler. (Noise Threshold is named Adaptive Threshold in V-Ray for Maya)

So to recap the important terms:

Ray =	Sample
Primary Samples =	The samples controlled by V-Ray's Image Sampler (also known as Anti-Aliasing or AA), which is specialized in sampling a scene's Geometry, Textures, Depth of Field, and Motion Blur.
Secondary Samples =	The samples controlled by V-Ray's DMC Sampler, which is specialized in sampling a scene's Lighting, Global Illumination (GI), Shadows, Material Reflection & Refraction, and Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS).
Noise =	A lack of information.
Subdivs =	The square root of the actual number of Samples. So Subdivs² = Samples. For example: 8 Subdivs = 64 Samples. (8² = 64)

In this tutorial we'll learn how to best utilize these Primary and Secondary Samples to get the highest quality render (lowest amounts of Noise) in the fastest amount of time.

The SampleRate render element is one of the most important tools we'll be using to help us optimize our renders. It's V-Ray way of showing us exactly what the Image Sampler (AA) is doing at any given pixel. It does this by assigning a certain color for each pixel in the render according to how many Primary Samples (AA) are being taken at that pixel (which can be seen by viewing the SampleRate render element).

A Blue-ish color means a low amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel.
A Green-ish color means a medium amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel.
A Red-ish color means a high amount of the available Primary Samples (AA) was taken at the pixel.

Figure 02

The SampleRate render element (right), showing how many of the available Primary Samples are being taken at any pixel of the render (left).

So for a scene with the Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min and 10max Subdivs (meaning 1min and 100max Primary Samples):

A Blue pixel means that 1 Primary Sample was taken
A Green pixel means that 50 Primary Samples were taken
A Red pixel means that 100 Primary Samples were taken.

And for a scene with the Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min and 100max Subdivs (meaning 1min and 10000max Primary Samples):

A Blue pixel means that 1 Primary Sample was taken
A Green pixel means that 5000 Primary Samples were taken
A Red pixel means that 10000 Primary Samples were taken.

For this tutorial, we'll be working with a simple test scene consisting of: A plane with a few spheres on top, various simple materials (including diffuse, glossy reflection, glossy refraction, and SSS), 2 areas lights, and a domelight with an HDRI. Global Illumination is enabled and set to Brute Force + Light Cache. This scene file can be downloaded HERE.

We'll begin with a baseline render with the following render settings:

Image Sampler (AA) set to 1min & 8max Subdivs.
Lights, GI, and Materials all set to the default of 8 Subdivs.
Noise Th

An in-depth tutorial on optimizing V-Ray to deliver thehighest quality renders with the fastest render times.

v1.3

- August 2014

An in-depth tutorial on optimizing V-Ray to deliver the
highest quality renders with the fastest render times.

V-ray Settings