Hello and welcome to another V-Ray feature short demonstration. In this
video we'll go over the V-Ray Edges Texture and its different uses. The V-Ray Edges Texture
is a procedural texture that generates colored lines along the edges
of a polygonal mesh object. The parts of the texture that do not contain lines are
transparent, making the textureeasy to overlay on an arbitrary color. Let's take a
closer look at the V-Ray Edges Texture.
The scene has some relatively low poly objects.Notice the sharp, unbeveled
edges of the object.
Let's start V-Ray RT, so we can render interactively. The light setup is a V-Ray
Sun and Sky system.
You can learn more about how to set it up in another V-Ray short demonstration.
A material override is used with a dark grey material that has reflectivity and
glossiness less than 1.
This way if any bevels are present they can be easily identified.
Let's plug in VRayEdgesTex in the diffuse slot.
The edges of all mesh objects appear in white. This color can be adjusted from
the color switch.
By default, only polygon edges are rendered. The Hidden edges option shows the edges
of the triangles that make up every polygon.
There is also an option that shows any subdivided triangles, that result from
Displacement and Render- time subdivision. In this case there are no subdivided
triangles. The thickness of the lines came to specified in World units or in
...Pixels.
A great feature of theV-Ray Edges Texture is that when plugged into the
bump slot of a material, it will render the sharp edges as beveled. As of
version 3.3 of V-Ray for 3ds Max, this feature has been modified to render
Raytraced rounded corners.
This means that several new effects can be achieved. For example, V-Ray Edges Texture
can detect intersecting polygons and generate a rounded corner at the
point of intersection.
By default, this effect is visible only if the intersecting polygons belong to the
same object. Like these beams here.
Disabling this option detects intersections by all objects with
material that has that VRayEdgesTex plugged in.
However, in this case we don’t need rounded corners between different
objects.
Currently, all intersections and edges are rounded at render time. And as we can see
here, there are some intersections that are not desired.These are all concave corners
and can be disabled from being rounded by this drop-down. Of course, the other
way around can be used as needed.
Finally, let’s adjust the size of the round corners.
Let's use a larger one...
...or a bit smaller one
This way the highlights clearly show the effect. In this case, the override
material has quite low glossiness value.
This means that the reflections on it are very blurry and will contribute quite
less to the shading.
So, a good optimization is to turn the “Trace reflections” off.
Now let’s remove the material override and see how the VRayEdgesTex
can contribute greatly to the final look of the shaders. In this short video
tutorial, we have covered how the V-Ray Edges Texture can be used to generate
outlines and rounded corners at render time. I hope you have found this video
useful and helpful. Make sure you check out more V-Ray featured videos. Thanks for watching.