Creating Believable Materials - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 200

that it currently has no available options or slots for adding bump or displacement
maps to a material.
As our floor material will need some reflection properties, let's click on the Reflection
entry in the flyout menu so as to add a Reflection layer to the material.
Knowing your right-click menu commands
One thing that you will have noticed while accessing the Create Layer option is that
V-Ray materials have a number of options or commands available that can only be
accessed by means of the right-click functionality.
Up near the top of the right-click menu for instance, we have the Save and Pack
options. These are two slightly different commands that can be used to create stan-
dalone V-Ray material files that can be saved, exchanged, transported, and then im-
ported into versions of V-Ray for SketchUp, Rhino, and with the 3.0 release of V-Ray,
3ds Max and Maya also.
The difference between the Save and Pack functions is seen in that the Save option
creates only a .vrmat or .vismat file, which contains only a material definition that
includes information such as diffuse color, reflection, and refraction values. In con-
trast, the Pack option actually creates a ZIP file archive that can contain not only
the .vrmat or .vismat material definition file, but also any bitmap files that may
be being used by the material. This bundles up everything into one neat, tidy, and
transportable package for us.
Beside these options, the right-click menu gives us access to important material con-
trols such as the mechanism by which we apply and remove them from objects in
the scene, as well as giving us the ability to organize them properly using options
such as the Rename command. The important thing here isn't to try and memorize
everything found in the right-click menu, but rather to remember that the menu is
there and available for use whenever we work with V-Ray materials in our scene.
Let's move things forward with our floor material and work with some of the paramet-
ers that have been added by using our new Reflection layer.