2 Best Ways of V-Ray settings For Sketchup – Today’s SketchUp question and it’s one of the most common ones we hear all the time. What are the best V-Ray settings? Well, I’m about to let you in on a little known hidden combination of render settings that will immediately transform any Soso rendering results into stunning professional.
Nah, I’m just messing with you. A lot of people who struggle to get the results they’re after in V-Ray for SketchUp, hope that all they’re missing is a perfect combination of elusive settings that will take their okay rendering result and suddenly make it great.
But unfortunately, there’s no magic wand that will do this for you.
Table of Contents
2 Best Ways of V-Ray Settings For Sketchup
Keeping that in mind, today, I will walk you through the settings that I do recommend to design professionals using V-Ray and talk about why. But first let me stress, the most important factors that go into making an amazing rendering are not the V-Ray settings. There are a bunch of other things you need to get right in order to create a great render-ready SketchUp model.
And once you’ve done all those the V-Ray settings are just the icing on the cake. How do you do that?
Read : 10 Best Ways to Rendering Large Sketchup Files Using Vray
A good place to start would be checking out the article on our V-Ray for SketchUp categories. Once you’ve followed the best practices for setting up your SketchUp model that we cover there then you’re ready to start talking about V-Ray settings. So what are V-Ray settings? In the V-Ray asset editor under the gear icon, this is where your V-Ray settings live. There are two main ways you’ll want to have them set depending on what you’re doing in SketchUp.
Still working on your model
The first is for when you’re still working on your model such as setting up lights, materials, and objects. While doing that, I recommend under engine, if you’re on a Mac, leave this set to CPU. If you’ve got a PC with a modern NVIDIA GPU, go ahead and set this to CUDA. Then click the three dots on the right and make sure both CPU and GPU are checked. This will allow your computer to use the power of both the CPU and GPU while rendering.
If you have an NVIDIA RTX GPU, then set this to RTX.
Unfortunately, Mac users can’t harness their GPU and V-Ray. Now, if you’re not sure about all this GPU talk or you’re not sure how to find out whether you have an NVIDIA GPU, no worries. You could just set this to CPU for now. We don’t have time to cover all the why and the how in this article, but just know that this setting will affect the speed of your rendering and not the quality.
And if you’re looking for more info on CPU and GPU combinations for rendering, check out our Office Hours about the best computer setups for SketchUp.
I’ve added a link in the cards. For interactive, leave this switch off. For progressive switch this on. This option will show you a progressively loading preview of your rendering, which can be a real time saver as you work on on your model.
Since often you’ll see things that clearly need to be fixed early in the progressive preview instead of waiting for the entire render preview to finish. For quality, set it to low for a slower computer or for more complex files with high polygon counts and high resolution materials.
Read : Top 7 Key Steps to Rendering Exteriors with Vray for SketchUp
You can notch it up to low plus or medium for faster computers or simple files. And for render output, a good place to start is between 600 to 800 pixels for your bigger dimension. Whether that’s width for landscape or hype for portrait.
You can play with a bigger size but just know that will slow down your render preview time. These core settings should give you a good sense of how your final image will look as you continue to make adjustments and refine your scene without slowing you down so much as you wait for previews to load.
Ready for Final Rendering
Then when you’re ready to switch your settings to create a final rendering, here’s what I recommend. For engine, we’ll stick with the same choice you made for previews. Keep interactive turned off, then turn progressive off.
This puts you in bucket mode which is the best option for final renderings. Set your quality to high. High plus will slow down your render time and the difference in quality is often pretty hard to detect, so I just stick with the high setting. Turn the denoiser on and leave it on the V-Ray denoiser. There are other options, but V-Rays setting is a great default option.
This will help clean up small bits of graininess or noise that can appear in certain situations. For render output, be sure to specify the dimensions for the biggest size it will be shown. Whether that’s on a screen or for print to keep the details crisp and clear. And lastly, don’t forget to turn on save image and set the name and where to save your final rendering.
And those are the only V-Ray settings you really need to mess with.
If you’ve done everything up front to set up a great render-ready SketchUp model then these settings will give you great results. But wait, what about that little right flyout menu? Is that where the magic settings are hiding? As you get more advanced at rendering you can play with these advanced settings and you may find some helpful depending on the situation. But if you’ve struggled to create quality renderings from the basic settings we’ve just gone over, there’s nothing in this menu that will help you.
So just close that menu and ignore it. Close it. Just, just close it. Last thing. Say you followed everything but you’ve still got this nagging feeling like, this looks good, but something about it isn’t as awesome as some of the other renderings I’ve seen out there.
Well, it may be the case that what you’re aiming for isn’t something that can be achieved through V-Ray settings alone, but was actually achieved through post-production. What’s that? Post-production is the final and often very crucial step of editing your finished rendering using either the V-Ray frame buffer or another application like Photoshop, but that’s a huge topic and it’s one for another article.
And that’s it! Congratulations! You’ve established it through the entire schedule! Did you learn something new in this 2 Best Ways Of V-Ray Settings For Sketchup article? Do me a speedy spare and tell us which tip you liked “the world’s largest” in the comments below right now.
