Settings Tab

The Settings tab provides system-wide control for various V-Ray features.

UI Path: ||Render Settings|| >V-Ray > Settings tab

Edge Length –  The maximum length of a subtriangle edge after subdivision. This affects the degree of subdivision before displacement, which in turn affects the quality of the displacement itself. Each triangle of the original mesh is subdivided into a number of subtriangles. More subtriangles mean more detail in the displacement, slower rendering times and more memory usage. Less subtriangles mean less detail, faster rendering and less memory used. Units used for this parameter depend on the View Dependent parameter. 

View Dependent – Specifies whether Edge Length is expressed in pixels or world units. When this option is enabled, the Edge Length value determines the maximum length of a subtriangle edge in pixels, and a value of 1.0 means that the longest edge of each subtriangle is about one pixel long when projected on the screen. When this option is disabled, Edge Length is the maximum subtriangle edge length in world units.

Max Subdivs – Controls the maximum number of subtriangles generated from any one triangle of the original mesh. The square of this value is used. For example, a value of 256 means that at most 256 x 256 = 65536 subtriangles are generated for any given original triangle. It is recommended that this value not be increased a great deal over the default value of 256. If you need to use higher values, it is better to first tessellate the original mesh itself into smaller triangles before starting the displacement process.

Tight Bounds – When enabled, V-Ray computes the exact bounding volume of the displaced triangles from the original mesh. This requires presampling of the displacement texture, but the rendering is faster if the texture has large black or white areas. However, if the displacement texture is slow to evaluate and varies a lot between full black and white, it might be faster to disable this option. When it is disabled, V-Ray assumes worst-case bounding volumes and does not presample the texture.

Amount – A scaling parameter for the default displacement. Values larger than 1.0 increase the displacement amount, while values lower than 1.0 reduce it.

The settings in this area of the System rollout control various parameters of the V-Ray raycasting acceleration structure.

One of the basic operations that V-Ray must perform is raycasting – determining if a given ray intersects any geometry in the scene and, if so - identifying that geometry. By default, V-Ray uses Intel Embree raycaster.

Abort Rendering on Missing Asset – When enabled, the scene does not render if an asset fails to load. When Distributed Rendering is used, the DR server(s) that didn't successfully receive an asset are excluded from rendering.

Default Geometry – Internally, V-Ray maintains two raycasting engines: for static and dynamic geometry. This parameter determines the type of geometry for standard Maya mesh objects. Note that some objects (displacement-mapped objects and VRayProxy File Formats, for example) always generate dynamic geometry, regardless of this setting. 

Auto  – Some objects are compiled as static geometry, while others as dynamic. V-Ray makes the decision on which type to use based on the face count for an object and the number of its instances in the scene.
Static  – All geometry is precompiled into an acceleration structure at the beginning of the rendering and remains there until the end of the frame. The static raycasters are not limited in any way and consume as much memory as necessary.
Dynamic  – Geometry is loaded and unloaded on the fly, depending on which part of the scene is being rendered. The total memory taken up by the dynamic raycasters can be controlled by the Dyn. Memory Limit (MBs) parameter.

Dyn. Memory Limit (MBs) – The total RAM limit for the dynamic raycasters, which store dynamic geometry, such as displacement and VRayProxy objects. Set this to 0 to remove any limit (V-Ray takes as much memory as needed). The memory pool is shared between the different rendering threads. Therefore, if geometry needs to be unloaded and loaded too often, the threads must wait for each other, and the rendering performance suffers.

Use Embree for Hair – When enabled, V-Ray uses the Embree library to speed up the rendering of hair. We recommend keeping this option enabled.

Conserve Memory – Embree uses a more compact method for storing triangles, which is slightly slower but reduces memory usage.

Output Enabled –  Enables tracking of how much memory is used by V-Ray for different categories of objects like textures, geometry, GI, image sampling, etc. Enabling this option generates .html reports with detailed information on memory usage.

Output Directory – Specifies the location to save the memory reports. The default location is the user temp directory.