From the course: V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Essential Training

Mat updates: Fog and translucency

From the course: V-Ray 5 for 3ds Max Essential Training

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Mat updates: Fog and translucency

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- [Instructor] If I am being totally honest, I would have to say that my favorite material for general use inside three DS max has for a long time now being the physical material that was introduced way back when the art or art renderer was being tried out as a replacement for mental Ray. One of the big reasons for that opinion is down to how ridiculously easy it is to create both refractive and translucent effects with it. Well, with the 5.1 update in V-Ray things have become pretty much just as easy when using the V-Ray material as well. This being due to changes in how both the fog color for refractive effects and SSS for translucency controls work. Taking a look at the fog color option first of all then, let's from inside the camp, 005 view, open up the max material editor and then sample the material from the Doug statue into the working tap, which we should find right at the front of the tap list. Straight away, we can give the material a make over here using the glass preset from the dropdown list. Which if we go ahead and then render should look like this. Do note here that if we still have the white balance sound hue saturation layers enabled in the V-Ray frame buffer, then now would probably be a good time to disable them. Now it did use to be the case that if we wanted to turn this material into a colored glass, say something in the orangy red range, then all we would need to do is change the fog color, alter the fog multiplayer and fog bias options to suit and we were done. These days though, whilst we still have the fog color option, the multiplier and bias controls have been replaced by a fog depth parameter that in my honest opinion, makes the whole process much more intuitive as it essentially controls how far into the object light can travel before it produces the specified fog color. Using higher values here, will reduce the color effect of the fog, making the material more transparent whilst smaller values, so more limited light penetration make the material more opaque and so more strongly colored. Essentially then, these work the opposite way around to how the older controls worked. Using the default depth of one with our deep orange color then, this is the result that we would get. Which is a pretty even spread of light throughout the volume of the mesh with thinner areas being clearly lighter in color. With values of 0.1 and then 10 however, we see very different results regarding how the color is being distributed inside the meshes volume. Where things get really interesting inside the update though, is in connection with the translucency modes that we now have available, which are these volumetric and subsurface scattering options. For instance, if I switched to the volumetric option here, and then after resetting the depth value to one, take another render as well as taking quite a bit longer to complete the resulting render clearly shows that things are working very differently in the material now. Using the subsurface scattering amount for instance, if I just engage IPR mode in the frame before window, we can now blend between the purely refractive and subsurface scattered properties of the material that we have. And by lowering the depth amount, we can increase the opacity of the material and so add more of the chosen fog color into the mix. Do also keep in mind of course, that the general reflection and most importantly, refraction controls of the material will still play a big part regarding how these new translucency modes end up looking. In comparison to volumetric, the subsurface scattering mode produces a much more typical subsurface scattering effect with the controls even switching over to a perhaps more familiar looking set of options. In fact, if we go ahead and perform a little experiment here, we can perhaps show how all of these are working. And so, let's first of all, set both the reflection and refraction properties for the material to zero and after setting the diffuse color to pure blue set the scatter color radius to white and the subsurface scattering color itself to pure red. With the scale and subsurface amount options, both being set to one. In the material preview now, we can see that our current render would give us a pure red or fully subsurface scattered material. If we then set the subsurface amount to zero, we would get a pure blue or completely opaque diffuse material. If we set that back to one on the other hand, and then set the scatter radius color so that it has no red component in it whatsoever, we see that all we get now is a completely black return. This is because the scatter radius controls how far into the volume of a mesh each of the red, green and blue light wave components can travel. And so with all of the red wave lens blocked, our pure red SSS color has no wavelengths that it can contribute and so it gives us a pure black return. Finally, with the radius color set back to white, we can use the scale value to determine the file strength of the sub surface effect. With a value of five, making the thinner areas of the geometry appear quite a bit lighter in color as the light rays are allowed to penetrate much more deeply now.

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