Water pool and Caustics Tutorial

First of all big thanks to Deo Saputra for sharing to us the materials on this tutorial.There are very few tutorials when it comes to caustics and we believe you will really get from this one.. Enjoy reading it.






1. important Set Up Global Illumination Environment: Use Text Sky Map with the following settings




Photon Radius: Used to control the caustics' radius. This value depends on the size of the scene.
Caustics Subdivision: This parameter controls the amount of photons that VRAY traces to estimate caustics. Large numbers means better quality but more memory needed, thus slowing down the calculation process.




2. Caustics Parameters




Maximum Photons: This is the maximum number of photons that will be considered when rendering the caustics effect on a surface. Smaller values cause less photons to be used and the caustics will be sharper, but perhaps noisier. Larger values produce smoother, but blurrier caustics. The special value of 0 means that V-Ray will use all the photons that it can find inside the search area.
Multiplier: this allows you to control the brightness of the photon map
Search distance. It allows you to specify the photon search distance manually. * Keep in mind that this value depends on the size of your scene. Lower values will speed up the rendering but may produce more noisy results. Larger values will slow down the rendering but may produce smoother results.

3. The Water Material

Reflection Layer



IOR value



Diffuse Layer



Refraction Layer



Fog Color



Displacement Map



You can download the Vismat together with the Texture HERE

Vray Options











Here is the Final Render using the material.

Tip:  Be sure that the face of the water is not negative face. You might also want to apply the material on both side of your water surface.

How to Series No.3_ Loading and Packing Vismats

Here is my How to series entry No.3 which will show how to pack and load the vismat file. Vismat is the root file use by VRAY SketchUp with materials.

Part 1: Packing the Vismat material.

Packing is the word use when you want to save the vismat file and want to share it with others or just for reusing it in the other files. Here is how... Let me share you this mug scene in SketchUp.  In this scene I created three different materials and they are already applied in the mugs. The materials are the same materials on the rendered image above.
 


To pack the material, all you have to do is to open the material editor. Select the VRAY Material. In the image below the "Metal Flake" material was selected.



Then right click mouse. Select "Pack Material"



Now you can specify the name and file type. I love to zip it when I am sharing it with others. 



Here is the Zip File it has two files: the vismat and the texture I used in the file.



Part 2: Loading the Vismat File.

This is pretty easy. All you have to do is to go to the material editor, right click mouse and choose load material.

 Browse the location of the material you want to load. Click Open.



The material will be added to your material editor and usually it will appear at the bottom.



You can apply now this material to the scene. One piece of advise, use the SketchUp Paint bucket tool to apply this material. It is faster..

One of the good thing to know is that once the material is chosen in the material editor, this material is automatically chosen in SketchUp too. Therefore you can use the paint bucket tool with ease.


DO NOT USE the apply material selection tool in VRAY it's very slow comparing to the paint bucket tool in SketchUp.



Here the material is applied to the selection using the paint bucket tool.

Visopt Series 2013 No.2

See this visopt shared by John Erick Bernal with this exterior render. Thanks John for sharing your visopt which is our second entry with this year 2013. Download HERE.

How to Series No.2_Loading Visopt Files

Here is our How to Series entry No.2: How to load Visopt by yours truly, Nomeradona.

Tutorial: Adding color to Native SU texture in Vray SketchUp

Introduction: The way Sketchup edits the color of its native texture and the way VRAY SU work is different. Editing the color of the native SU material inside SU does not guarantee that VRAY SU recognizes it. VRAY SU will still use the original bitmap material use by SketchUp.

Here is an explanation from Onel Pabico on workaround how you want to do it in VRAY SU.

Tutorial: Modeling simple drainage

Here is a simple modeling simple drainage tutorial from Chen Menes. Thanks Chen for this one.