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Graduated Architect living in Brussels, I'm specialized in the field of architectural visualization.
This blog covers mainly non-professional CG work, architectural rendering, WIPs, photography, CG materials & methods, tutorials, render theories etc.
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Fog Bias parameter test in Vray Material

I did notice this new parameter  since the 1.5 Service Pack 1, and decided to make some test. Actually, this parameter does exactly what I need… but it’s quite hard to explain and an image will be clearer than thousands of word :

Let’s say that it quickens the darkening of the fog inside the material, like if it become exponential when the bias is set below 0. If you lower the bias too much, it’ll darken too fast and you’ll have to lower the multiplier accordingly.

The good point of the test is that it doesn’t involve any glossiness nor transluency, the rendering times were relatively low and the shadows of the object just perfect ;)

Here are the results of the test, I did start with THIS base material

Ok, it’s completely black now. Let’s see if we can have something going to pitch balck but more progressively while dividing the multiplier by 10

It seems to work ! Some further test with more extreme values

And the last one goes from almost clear to completely balck without excessive variations of thickness. Once again, chaosgroup gave us here a tool to fine tune some incredibly useful materials. Fitting perfectly in the VRay pipeline ! Congrats ;)

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Comments

Comment from pp
Time: September 17, 2008, 9:08 am

Very interesting tutorial.
thanks a lot!!

Comment from MetAtroN
Time: February 12, 2009, 11:19 am

Almost got same results :> I don’t know why colors on my renders are somehow faded, not as sharp as on your renders and with fog bias at -3 I don’t get any colors at all :( I assume it’s due to different scene/lights setup?
Here is my render:
http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii193/merraton/06.jpg

Comment from pixel
Time: April 4, 2009, 11:00 pm

Thnaks for your comments,

That seems good Metatron, I think i’ve contrasted a bit the renders in photoshop after the render in LWF, always a bit washed out. Maybe the light setup add more color in my renders (sun & sky actually)

Comment from peakyfreak80
Time: September 18, 2009, 4:12 pm

Great little test you did here. Found it through the ChaosGroup forums. I’m actually doing a demo of VrayRT here in Chicago and, if you don’t mind, I was going to use this as one of the test scenes. It really is one of those settings in Vray that is highly intimidating, but once you understand what does what you can get some amazing results. Heck, with some of those shots you could make some pretty amazing artwork!

Comment from Wayne Parker
Time: September 23, 2009, 2:50 pm

fantastic renderings and an insight into this great vray setting which opens up all sort of possibilites.

I love the fine noise in the renderings. i assume that you used brute force as, at least, you primary gi engine. Would you mind posting your rendering setting? thanks in advance,
Wayne

Comment from admin
Time: September 23, 2009, 3:13 pm

Thanks again !

@Peaky, of course you can use this for your demo.

@Wayne, settings are pretty straightforward, that’s the beauty of it, jsut use the universal method. I just lower the AA Max. subdivs 100 to 16 or 20 to avoid stucked buckets on high dynamic parts (since I don’t need free float)

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/tutorials_unisettings.htm

Comment from Wayne Parker
Time: September 23, 2009, 4:02 pm

are these the universal settings. thats great news. never tried using them before! do they work well for external archviz scenes? thanks for the help. keep up the good work.

Comment from nq26
Time: October 12, 2009, 8:41 am

I’m not sure but for my eyes and my time playing vray in rendering. That multiplier can’t go over 0.01 to smaller number anyway, you can put 0.001 but no matter what you put, Vray still render image with mimimum value 0.01 for final result. Use scroller beside that value field, whenever you go down 0.01 next step it go to pure zero ~0 in number value. Some input fields in Vray don’t allow extreme input value (different from each other, they’re not same about input range).

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