From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

Creating diffuse surfaces

From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

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Creating diffuse surfaces

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- [Instructor] In this first video of our chapter looking up creating basic materials in V-Ray Next for SketchUp, we're going to focus initially on creating just the diffuse of base color properties for a tabletop material. With the steps that we use here, being able to be applied to the creation of diffuse properties for any surface that we have in our scene. At this moment in time then, if we just open up the asset editor, we can see in the materials tab that all we have are some generic gray materials that have been applied to objects in the scene. The diffuse, or base color properties here are being handled by the controls found in the diffuse roll-out of the materials properties where a left-click on the color swatch gives us the ability to alter the surface color being used. If we swap our medium gray for a nice, bright green then. We immediately see as we render that we now have bright green geometry just as we would probably have expected. Let's just reset that using a gray value of 0.75 though because I don't actually want to make changes to any existing materials in the scene as what I would rather do is create a new generic material and then use that to change the color of our tabletop geometry. Now we could, of course, create a new material from right here inside the asset editor as shown in the previous chapter, but let's assume for the moment that we are actually a SketchUp user who either A, likes to use the default materials that install with the application or that B, we already have access to an existing, perhaps even, extensive SketchUp material library that we want to continue using. We're going to take this approach so that we can demonstrate a very nice feature of the V-Ray for SketchUp Engine in connection with SketchUp Zone material types. To do that let's open up the SketchUp materials roll-out in the default tray on the right-hand side of the UI where we see quite a range of SketchUp materials that can be used to add surface color and/or patterns to a model. The cool thing here being that we don't need to think of these as just SkethUp materials when using V-Ray as our render engine. To show what I mean let's drill down to the surface-level of our tabletop group by means of two double and then one single left mouse clicks. After which we can jump into one of the material sections in the SketchUp materials roll-out such as asphalt and concrete. From where we can select any of the materials that we want and so let's come to the polished concrete new option and if we then right click and tell SketchUp to add this to the model, we instantly see in the asset editor that we have now created a brand new V-Ray generic material that has the polished concrete new bitmap applied to the map channel for the diffuse color option. Let's just drill down into that a little though and in the texture placement roll-out set the U and V repeat values to two and two. After which, we can right click on the material entry in the active list, apply it to the selected geometry in the scene and then after closing up the groups go ahead and take a render. Now, of course, no other material properties, such as bump maps or reflectivity have been altered or added at this point and so what we get is a fairly bland-looking initial result. If we are happy to use SketchUp's default materials as a starting point for surface colors, though. Or have, perhaps as mentioned, already built up a library of our own SketchUp materials over time, I'm sure you will agree that this is a very nice way in which we can jumpstart the creation of realistic materials in V-Ray. With some basic diffuse properties added to our material then, let's take a look next at improving the realism a little by demonstrating how we would go about adding both reflectivity and bump mapping into the current mix as well.

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