With our lighting setups firmly in place, it's now time to move on to adding some life to our rendered images using V-Ray's extremely powerful material creation tools. Of course, typically speaking, when phrases such as adding life to a shot are used in connection with 3D rendering, people may tend to think of adding motion to the shot—possibly in the form of animated characters. To a visualization artist, however, the life and vitality of an image will oftentimes be found (or lost) in the creation of the scene materials themselves.
For this and other reasons, we will, over the next couple of chapters, discuss the creation and set up of scene materials and their surface properties.
In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:
Using existing SketchUp materials in V-Ray
The V-Ray Standard material
The new VRayBRDF layer / V-Ray material
Bitmap textures in materials
The
.vrmatand.vismatpreset formats