V-Ray - Studio Lighting (3ds Max)

The method of studio lighting.
For the rendering used Vray 1.5rc3, the latest version of the program.
This famous chair called "Corbusier" was modeled in 3ds max 9.
With the knowledge of this tutorial you will be able to present your models in a more ambitious way than before.. and especially helpful for guys into 3d architectural modeling...... ;)

The main parts of the tutorial are :
-Making the environment
-Placing the lights
-Setting up Vray for tests
-Shaders
-Setting up Vray for final rendering
-Postwork in Photoshop

MAKING THE ENVIRONMENT
The environment is pretty much simple.
Place a plane under the model and set 3 for the Length segsments and set 2 for the Width segments.
Convert it to editable poly with right click on the plane and choosing "convert to:".
The next step is selecting the two edges behind the chair and pull them up while pressing the shift button...
With this way create a shape around the model like in the third picture.

 

 

 

We will use a Turbosmooth modofier on the plane, but to controll the way of smoothing
we have to chamfer a few edges before.

 

Now we are able to use the turbosmooth with 2 Iterations.

PLACING THE LIGHTS - This topic is the heart of the studio lighting. We will use 3 vraylights with different strength, postion and color. This three attribute will determine the mood and the individuality of your render. So place a vraylight from left view, with the given settings.

Now change to top view ,copy the light and mirror it to the X axle.
Place it to the right side of the plane and use the given settings.
The third light will be placed later, after the test renderings.

 

Create a Target Camera from top view with 35mm lens, and set it up as you see.

 

All right,choose vray as your primary renderer.
Make a vray material with a light grey diffuse color, R:170/G:170/B:170.
Put this material to the "override mtl" slot in the Global Switches tab.

Now all the objects in the scene will have this material, so this function is great to test lighting with a clay render.
Later we will turn this function off.
Hit F9 and lets see what we got here.

So this is what we have without any settings.
No illumination,or any kind of sampling except the standard one.
Now we need to set up vray for test renderings.
It is time to move to the next topic.

SETTING UP VRAY FOR TESTS

To test the illumination in the scene we need to set up vray with low values. These are only tests ,so we only want a quick feedback from the lighting. First of all change the image aspect ratio to 1.8 in the Common tab. Go to camera view and turn on the"Safe Frame" option.
Safe Frame will help you to place youre camera to the right position and it is also helps to notice unwanted parts in the view.

Now here comes the capital part of the Renderer tab settings.

Here is a short explanation of the settings above:
Default lights: turn it off ,we do not want any light, except the vray ones.
Adaptive QMC: A faster image sampling method than Adaptive subdivision.
Mitchell-Netravali: With this antialiasing filter edges will be sharp but not crisp.
Irradiance map + Light cache: the mostly used GI combination.
HSph subdiv: (GI samples) lower it to speed up the rendering process.
Show calc phase: The rendering process will be visualized, so if are not happy with the effect you don't have to wait until the effective rendering.
Subdivision: The subdiv. of lightcache controls the number of traced paths... The actual number of the traced paths is the square of the adjusted number. So with 500subdiv. 250.000 paths will be traced.
Exponential: With this type of colormapping ,colors will be saturated so you can avoid burnouts on the surfaces.
Dark multiplier: This controls the "Sternth" or the multiplier of dark colors.
Render region division: set it to 32x32 ,smaller bucket size less ram will needed.
with samller bucket size a faster feedback can be achieved.
All right, lets see the render with the mentioned settings.

It is much better than the first one.
The scene is much more brighter, light is smoother and there are no burnouts.
Because of the low quality settings there are GI artifacts ,noise and blurry lines.
However ,these settings provide us a very efficent way of testing.
Lets play with the colors to break the dull feeling of the render.
Change the color of the vray light on the right to R:255/G:180/B:80.
This warm orange color will take care of the monotonic lighting.

At this point if you are satisfied with the result you can go to the next step.
Creating and understanding shaders is the following topic.

SHADERS
In this scene i used four or five shaders.
Plasctic,Chrome,Leather,White fabric, and the white background of course.
Turn off the "override mtl" function in the Global Switches tab.
Lets take a quick look at the settings.

Diffuse: This controls the color of the material.
Reflect: Pure white means 100%reflections ,black means 0% reflections.
Refl. Glossiness: Controls the blurryness of reflection 1 means perfect mirror-like reflections, lower values produce blurry reflections.
Subdivision: This controls the quality of glossy reflections, higher values increase rendertime lower values produce noisy effect. For testing /5-8/ final rendering /15-35 or higher if necesarry.
Freshnel reflections: If you check it that means the strength of the reflection will depend on the viewing angle of the surface. In nature water and glass is reflecting in this manner. The strength of the reflection depends on the Freshnel IOR too.
All right lets see the shaders in action...:)

need a little more light from above the chair, so lets put that third vraylight to its place.

It is important to uncheck the "Affect Specular" slot, we don't want any specular reflection from that light, only diffuse light.

As we can see the bounced light reaches to the bottom of the chair too.
Now the lighting and the shaders are finished so lets move on to the next topic.
I will discuss the settings of the final rendering.

SETTING UP VRAY FOR FINAL RENDERING 

At this ponit of the workflow it is very important to find the balance between speed and quality.
I will talk about the settings globaly, because some problems can't be solved with only changing the value of an option.
So lets see the Renderer tab in this light :)

-Change the resoultion to 900x500
-Set the Adaptive rQMC image samplers min dubdiv to 2. Now thinner lines can be rendered correctly.
-Change the preset of the Irradiance map to Medium from Low.
Set 50 to the HSph subdiv to achive higher quality GI. -Use value 1200 for the Light cache subdiv.
Change the Sample size to 0,006 ,now small details will be more visible.
Use value 1000 to the Pre-filter option to reduce noise.
We have a lot of glossi rays so check the "Use light cache for glossi rays" option./it will speed up rendering/
For the Filter use the "None" possibility.
-At the rQMC sampler use value 0,005 for noise treshold.
Set the Global subdivs multiplier to 4 ,it will increase samling quality everywhere in the scene.
-You can find the Light properties in System>Lights settings.
Changing the diffuse subdivision of the lights wil effect the number of the traced photons.
-Change all the vraylights subdivison to 15 or 20 to avoid noisy parts.
-Change all the materials subdivs to 20 in the Reflection section.
With these settings the rendertime will increase a lot according to test render settings.

Now hit F9 and wait until the calculation finishes.

This is the final rendering, no noise ,artifacts or any nerve-racking rendering trouble.
A picture would not be complete without the postwork so lets move on.

POSTWORK (in Photoshop) 
Launch photoshop, and load in the image. Because of the saturated colors of the exponential colormapping type.
We need to add more character to the colors and play with the levels to achieve better contrast.
Go to Image>Adjustments>Color balance

Than Image>Adjustments>Levels

And here comes the finished picture.