4 Ways to make your V-Ray Materials more REALISTIC

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you 4 ways to enhance your materials in V-Ray. Let's get started. 1. Velvet Material In V-Ray 5, you can easily create micro fiber fabric materials such as velvet and satin using the new Sheen options. Here I have a chair with a normal fabric material applied to it. Let's start the interactive render to see how it looks. To use the Sheen options, first click here to toggle the advanced settings. Now scroll down to the Sheen options. Here you will see the Sheen Color and the Sheen Glossiness. You can choose the color for the Sheen layer using the color picker here. I will set it to a light blue color in this case. For the Sheen Glossiness, a value of 1 means that the Sheen effect is not visible. On the other hand, if the value is lower, then the Sheen effect is more noticeable. I will set it to 0.8. And that looks good. For a more realistic looking Sheen color, let's copy our diffuse map and paste it here in the Sheen color. Now right click and wrap it in a color correction texture. Then we can use it to brighten up the texture. Now let's compare the before and after. You can see that it looks more like a fabric material now. One trick that we can use to further enhance this material is by importing a grunge map to the Sheen Glossiness slot. As you can see, with the grunge map, this fabric material now looks more like velvet. You can also adjust the grunge map further so that there's more contrast on the velvet material. You can choose whether you want a subtle or a more pronounced effect. And here's the comparison before and after. It can look even better under different lighting. Also, remember to save this material after you're done so you can use it later. 2. Editing Cosmos assets materials Since update 1 of Vray 5, a new feature has been added to Vray called Chaos Cosmos, which is a library of 3D assets that you can use for free. These are render-ready assets which already have materials applied to them so you can just drop them in and click render. As you can see, Chaos Cosmos is super convenient. Another cool thing about these assets is that you can change the materials of the objects if you like. To do that, first select the object and you will see it in the asset editor. Now click the right arrow to expand the right flyout panel to see more options. You can see that there's no options to adjust the materials here, so we need to click on Merge. And now the object will be merged into the scene, you will see its materials have been imported. To edit one of these materials, click on this button and it will take you to the materials settings. Here you can freely edit any of the maps. For example, you can wrap the diffuse map in a color correction texture to change the color of it. You can go to the materials tab to see all of the materials in the scene. And again, you can change them however you like. If you want to use a completely different material for the object, just import it to your scene. Here I'm importing a velvet material that we just created. Now go to the geometry tab and select the 3D asset. Then I can go down and click the leather material, then select the new material I just imported. There we go, now you can take advantage of all of these amazing assets in KSCosmos while having the option to customize their materials. The possibilities are endless. 3. Contours In Vray 5, you can easily add lineworks or contours to your scene with a single click. You can do that by going to settings in the asset editor and in the right flyer panel, scroll down to find contours and turn them on. You can see in the interactive render that the objects in our scene now have contour lines. There are several parameters that you can use to customize the contours such as line color, opacity, width, etc. There are also other settings down here such as no inner edges which removes all of the inner edges of the objects and only keep the outer edges. You can also control the inner lines separately. To turn it on, you have to disable this option. The inner line control will allow you to control the color and the width of the inner lines. Alternatively, if you want to add contours to a specific material, then you can click here and add a contour attribute. Now you can use these settings down here to adjust the linework for this specific material. Here you will see the similar settings that you saw in the global contour settings. And note that these settings here will override the global contour settings. This is extremely useful for highlighting an object in your diagram. Another thing that you can do is to use a material override. This will give you a black and white diagram. Then you can also add some ambient occlusion if you like. If you want more emphasis on an object, you can select that object's material and go down here then disable this option so that Vray doesn't override its material. As you can see, the new contour settings and material attributes are great for creating architectural diagrams. 4. Dirt Material In Vray 5, the dirt material has been improved to have procedural streaks which makes it more realistic. Here I have a generic material applied to this object. I'll click here and add a dirt material. The dirt material is similar to ambient occlusion where you can adjust the radius and distribution amount. To make it easier to see in the render, I will add a diffuse render element and restart my render. Then in the drop down menu, I can select the diffuse channel, and as you can see, it's a lot easier now to see how the dirt material is affecting my render. To add streaks to the dirt material, go down and enable Streaks Ambient. For it to work, we will need to adjust the direction bias. We want the streaks to go downward, so we need to increase the bias in the Z axis. There we go, now we can adjust the streak size however we like. After that, we can go back to the RGB channel to see the effect, and that looks good. For the next step, I will add a concrete material to the scene. Then I'll apply it to this object. Since this material already has a diffuse map, we need to wrap it in a mixed operator texture, so we can add a dirt texture on top of it. But since we already created a dirt texture in the other material, I can go back here, and copy the dirt texture, then paste it here. Now we need to change the operator mode to Multiply, and the dirt material will be overlaid on top of the concrete material. There we go, that looks good. And remember that you can always go back and make adjustments if you need. And those were some tips to enhance your materials in Vray and Sketchup. If you're looking for more tutorials on Vray, I will suggest you take a look at this class on Skillshare, who is also the sponsor of today's video. Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in creative skills like design, illustration, and many more. The Premium Membership will get you unlimited access so you can join any classes and communities you like. But as part of this sponsorship, Skillshare has set up a 1 month free trial for the first 1000 people who join, so you can take all of their classes completely for free. If that's something you're interested in, then go see this link here. I will also leave a link to a few useful classes that I took. One of them is Learn Sketchup and Vray Beginning to Advance by Dinesh Patel. This is a comprehensive class with 4 parts that walks you through step by step on how to build a house in Sketchup and then render with Vray. If you're looking for a similar tutorial but for a different software, then there's a class called Create Photorealistic Interior Renders with 3ds Max and Vray by Jake Denham. There are also many more classes and communities that you can explore. Again, the first 1000 people who use this link will join Skillshare today for free. Anyway, that's all for today guys. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video, comment below and let me know if you have any questions. Stay inspired guys, and I'll see you, next time.