Quality Control - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 304

Improving our materials
The final quality control tweaks to be made in our scene will be on the materials them-
selves. This, for now, is our last opportunity to evaluate and adjust any aspect of the
materials in the scene that we are not completely happy with.
Now, ideally, we would want to make this final set of evaluations from each of the
render views we have set up in the scene. However, as these renders have become
quite time consuming to create, we will make use of only the Wide Shot scene in this
instance.
In order to correctly evaluate how our materials are looking and behaving, we will
need to render without using our saved GI solutions. This will allow us to gauge how
much color bleed the materials are throwing into the scene, and so subsequently, how
much (if any) in-scene adjustments will need to be made. To set that up, we will per-
form the following steps:
1. In the Irradiance map rollout of the option editor, come down to the Mode
section and choose the Single frame option from the dropdown.
2. Then, we need to repeat these same steps in the Light cache rollout.
We would also do well to make use of some of the diagnostic tools that V-Ray 2.0
makes available to us, such as the Sample Rate VFB channel. This can help us
understand which parts of our scene are making the Image sampler controls work
overly hard. Now, although V-Ray for 3ds Max and Maya's render elements system is
more complete than the extra VFB channels that we have access to in SketchUp, the
workflow here couldn't be simpler. So, to add our diagnostic channel, let's perform the
following steps:
1. Open up the VFB channels rollout in the option editor and then left-click on
the channel lists scroll bar to make it active.
2. When we click, we should see the RGB color and Alpha options become
highlighted. This tells us that they are going to be included as channels in the
final render. To add others from the list, all we need to do is scroll down the list
and then left-click to add channels as we go.
3. In this instance, let's click to add the Sample Rate channel, and then finally,
we can come up to the V-Ray toolbar and hit the render button.