Creating Believable Materials - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 198

Using the V-Ray Standard material
With the alterations in place and having already examined how we can take an exist-
ing SketchUp material and easily make use of it in V-Ray, let's spend a little more time
to examine the workings of the V-Ray Standard material that we created just a while
ago.
In V-Ray for SketchUp, the Standard material has typically been the best option avail-
able for creating realistic looking surface types. And even though with the Version 2.0
release we have some very welcome material additions, this strongly held position
hasn't really changed at all.
In terms of how the material works, if we just take a look at the options for our floor
material in the V-Ray material editor, you can see that it comes by default with three
rollouts—each housing a number of options. These are only the defaults and not the
complete set of controls available for this material. There are in fact a wealth of op-
tions and parameters that can be added to this material as and when they are needed.
To do that, we need to perform the following steps:
1. Right-click on a material in the editor list, in this instance, the
Floor_Tile_Hexagon_White material.
2. If we hover our mouse cursor over the Create Layer entry in the menu, we
get an add layer flyout.
The idea here is to select the type of controls that we want to add to the material and
then apply them as a new layer. A few of the choices available are as follows:
• Emissive : This control allows us to add lighting capabilities to the material.
• Reflection : This control brings a whole host of reflectivity controls into play.
• Diffuse : This control means that we can have more than one diffuse layer
contributing to the properties of a material.
VRayBRDF is the new kid on the block for V-Ray 2.0. This multi-function layer adds
Diffuse, Reflection, Refraction, Translucency, and Bidirectional Reflectance Distribu-
tion Function (BRDF) controls and is pretty much a material in and of itself.