Creating Believable Materials - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 193

1. In the SketchUp Materials dialog box, with the White_Tile_Hexagon ma-
terial selected, click on the Edit tab.
2. In the horizontal field, increase the size value to something like 4 foot 2
inches (we could also just type a value of 50 in here and let SketchUp con-
vert to feet and inches for us).
When we do this, because the two axes are linked together, the vertical value up-
dates automatically, giving us a bigger, more prominent floor pattern.
If, on the other hand, we drop this value all the way down to something like 10 inches,
we obviously get a much smaller and busier pattern going on. Do keep in mind that
small patterns such as this can cause a ray trace renderer such as V-Ray a lot of
extra work in terms of image sampling, which will naturally convert into longer render
times. Let's settle for a horizontal scale value of 18 inches (1 foot 6 inches) for the dif-
fuse map and then close the SketchUp Material editor window. We can also close
our geometry group by using the Close Group/Component command from the Edit
menu.
It would also be a good idea at this point to organize the materials we are adding to
the scene by naming them appropriately. To do this, perform the following steps:
1. Open up the V-Ray material editor and right-click on the
Tile_Hexagon_White material entry.
2. Choose the Rename Material option and add Floor_ at the beginning of
the material's existing name.
Making a color-mapping choice
Having made a start with our material creation in V-Ray, before we proceed further,
we have a fairly big decision that we need to make. Up to this point, our scene has
been set up and rendered using the Linear workflow option discussed in Chapter
4 , Lighting an Exterior Daytime Scene . However, as we demonstrated in that exer-
cise, this option has a huge impact on the way that light interacts with the surfaces
it comes into contact with, and nowhere can that be more clearly demonstrated than
with an interior setup such as the one we have here.
If we were to render our scene as it currently stands, we would produce what we see
on the left-hand side of the following image: