What's happening ladies and gentlemen,
this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations.
Today I'm going to show you the new features in Vray 5 for Sketchup.
Let's get started
First let's download Vray 5.
You can go to chaosgroup.com
and click here to join the Vray 5 for Sketchup beta.
I'll leave the link in the description box below as well.
After you click on it,
you can sign in or sign up if you don't have a Chaosgroup account yet.
When you can choose to apply for the beta as a business, student, educator, or individual.
After that, you can download and install V-Ray 5.
Now let's get into the new features
1. Improved Sun and Sky Model
In Vray 5, the sun and sky model has been improved,
you can select the new sky model here.
There is also a new custom orientation control that has been added.
This will allow you to override the shadows settings in Sketchup
which makes it a lot easier to control the sun angle
without changing the orientation of your Sketchup model.
As you can see, the improved sun and sky model is a lot more accurate,
which will allow you to create more realistic renders,
especially during sunrise and sunset.
I personally really like the addition of the custom orientation control, it is just a lot more intuitive to control the sun light.
it is just a lot more intuitive to control the sun light.
But you can always switch back to using Sketchup Shadows by turning this off if you like.
2. Light Gen
On your Vray Light Toolbar,
there is a new button called Light Gen or Light Generator
which is a new V-Ray tool
that automatically generates thumbnails of your SketchUp scene
where each one presents a unique lighting scenario.
After you launch it, you can choose either Exterior or Interior.
When you multiply these two values, you will get the number of variants.
And finally you can choose the thumbnail size.
I will leave it at the default value.
When you're ready, click here to start generating the thumbnails.
It will take a while depending on the number of variants and the speed of your computer.
After it's done, you can see the thumbnails with different lighting scenarios.
When you click on one of them, the lighting will change accordingly and you can see it updates in the lighting tab.
Just choose whichever you like the most and you’re ready to render.
For exterior, you also have the option to use HDR for the lighting.
Here you can choose the number of unique styles, variations, the seed value and the thumbnail size.
The HDR option is super powerful as you can see,
because V-Ray automatically creates a lot of realistic skies options for your scene.
As you can see, the new Light Gen tool is a great way to quickly find the best lighting that fits your style
without having to spend hours on test rendering.
Also there's an option to save the Light Gen variations
so you can load them again later which can save a lot of time.
Pretty cool huh?
3. Light Mix
Another feature related to lighting is the new Light Mix feature
which allows you to adjust the lights in your scene even after you render.
First, open up the Asset Editor, and go to the Render Elements Tab.
Then you can right click and add a Light Mix render element.
If you expand the right flyout panel,
you can choose whether you want to group the lights individually, which is similar to this list here.
Or you can group by instances , layers, and light IDs.
I will just leave it as individual lights for now.
Now you can render your scene as normal.
When your render is finished,
you will see a list of layers on the right side of the Vray Frame Buffer window in the compositing section.
Now select the Source: LightMix layer and you will see all the lights within this mix.
This is where you can see the true power of the light mix feature by turning on and off each light,
you can see that the scene updates immediately.
You can also interactively adjust the brightness of each light
by dragging these arrows up and down
or type in a specific value.
Another cool feature is that you can click here to change the color of your light.
You can see that not only does it change the light but also changes how the light affects the surrounding objects.
When adjusting the light mix, you should consider saving the preset to a file in case you need it later.
This will allow you to create different lighting scenarios very easily.
And in the future you can use this button to load the lightmix preset.
If there are multiple lightmix presets in one folder then V-Ray will automatically load all the presets here
Once you're done adjusting the LightMix settings
You can export the image as normal.
Or you can send your Light Mix To Composite.
This will break them into layers which you can use to composite further using the new Vray Frame Buffer Window.
This takes me to the next new feature.
4. New V-Ray Frame Buffer
In V-Ray 5, the V-Ray Frame Buffer has been redesigned
and now has a lot more powerful features such as built-in compositing.
For example, we can add a Hue and Saturation adjustment layer to one of the lights to change its color.
This is non-destruction and can easily be moved to a different layer.
Another thing we can do is add one of our render elements as a layer.
I will add the Extra Tex layer that I have inserted a Dirt map which I can use to add Ambient Occlusion.
Normally this process has to be done in other photo editing softwares like Photoshop
but now you can easily do it inside of the new V-Ray Frame Buffer, this is why it's so powerful.
And those are just a few things that you can do with the new V-Ray Frame Buffer,
I will make a more in-depth tutorial on this later.
And finally, my favorite and also the biggest new feature in V-Ray 5 is V-Ray Vision
which is basically V-Ray in Realtime.
You can start it by clicking this button here on the V-Ray toolbar.
It will take a while to load your scene, depending on the size of your model and the speed of your computer.
First I will place this window and the sketchup window side by side like so to make it easier to see.
Here you will see a completely new window that looks a bit like V-Ray interactive render but it's a lot faster.
You can see that V-Ray Vision is syncing with Sketchup but the views don't match perfectly.
So you can go up here and change to a different resolution mode
This one will match the aspect ratio setting which you set in the Render Output.
If you change it in the V-Ray settings, it will update in V-Ray Vision.
The next mode will match the scene resolution which you can change here and it will be updated in V-Ray Vision
And the third option is Fit in window.
I usually like to use the Match Aspect Ratio mode, and set it to 1 by 1 aspect ratio,
then also turn on the Safe Frame, this will ensure that the two viewports will match perfectly.
As you have already seen, Vray Vision syncs with Sketchup so you can move your Sketchup scene and Vision will sync with it.
But you can also navigate in the Vray Vision window using the left mouse button to orbit the model,
dragging the right mouse will allow you to zoom in and out,
and dragging the middle mouse will let you pan the model.
You can also change from Orbit Mode to Fly Mode with this button or by pressing Tab on your keyboard.
While in Fly Mode, you can move around with WASD,
and move up and down with E and Q
You can also move faster by holding down the space bar while moving.
Or you can adjust the fly speed in the settings with this slider, or type in a specific value.
There are also other settings such as Auto Exposure and Exposure Value Compensation to adjust the optimal brightness for your scene.
To adjust the lighting of your scene in V-Ray Vision, you can use the Sketchup Shadows settings.
Or you can also hold Shift and Drag the left mouse button left and right to change the sun's azimuth,
and drag up and down to change the altitude.
Shift and right mouse will let you adjust the sun's intensity.
However, you need to turn of Auto Exposure to make it work correctly.
There are many more shortcuts that you can use, which you can see here.
As you can see V-Ray Vision can help you visualize designs in real-time while working in SketchUp.
Note that V-Ray Vision is very new so there are still some limitations
but this is a super exciting thing that ChaosGroup is working on, and I expect great improvements in the future.
Anyway, those are the top 5 features in V-Ray 5 beta,
like I mentioned before, I will probably do a more in-depth tutorial for each of these new features in the future.
That's all for today guys, leave a like if you enjoyed the video.
Comment below if you have any suggestions.
Stay inspired guys, and I'll see you
next time ;)