This page provides information about the Generic material in V-Ray for SketchUp.
Overview
Generic is a special V-Ray material, that allows for better physically correct illumination (energy distribution) in the scene, faster rendering, more convenient reflection and refraction parameters. Within this material you can apply different texture maps, control the reflections and refractions, add bump and displacement maps, force direct GI calculations, and choose the BRDF for the material.
UI Paths
||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Materials (right-click) > Generic
||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Create Asset (left-click) > Materials > Generic
UI Options
The Generic material settings are organized in Basic and Advanced modes. You can switch the mode from the toggle button under the Preview Swatch or globally from the Configuration rollout of the Settings tab.
The Add Layer and Add Attribute buttons are provided for some V-Ray materials, including Generic. For more information, see the Layers and the Attributes sections of the Materials page.
The context menu of the Color slot provides options to Copy and Paste, as well as to Reset the color.
A Reset option is provided in the context menu of each Number Slider. You can reset the slider value to the default one.
The blue indicator next to a rollout (
) indicates that the lead parameter of this rollout, which affects the final appearance of the material, is changed.
Attributes
The attributes available for the Generic material are as follows.
Translucency
Back Material– Defines the material V-Ray uses for back side faces as defined by their normals.
Translucency – Determines if the front or the back side of the material is more visible in the rendering process. By default this value is 0.5, which means that both sides are equally visible. When this parameter is closer to zero, the material facing the camera is more visible, when it is closer to one, the back material is more visible. A texture can be used to control the variation of the effect.
Mult. by Front Diffuse – When enabled, the translucency is multiplied by the diffuse of the front material.
Bump
Mode/Map6 – Specifies the bump map type.
Bump Map – A height map should be used.
Normal Map5 – RGB map should be used with this option. Note that in most cases the normal map bitmap color space should be set to Linear to ensure correct results.
Local Space Bump – A height map should be used. Unlike the standard Bump mode, in this case the height is not measured in scene units. It is only determined by the raw texture values. Scaling objects will not affect the local space effect. This option has to be selected for the round edges effect (Edges texture used as bump).
Amount6 – Multiplier for the bump/normal map.
Outline
The Outline attribute is available only when the engine is set to CPU. It is currently not supported for GPU.
Line Color – Specifies the color of the outlines.
Opacity6 – Specifies the opacity of the outlines.
Normal Threshold – Determines when lines are created for parts of the same object with varying surface normals (e.g. at the inside edges of a box). A value of 0.0 means that only 90 degrees or larger angles generate internal lines. Higher values mean that smoother transitions between face normals can also generate a line. Setting this value to 1.0 fills curved objects completely.
Overlap Threshold – Determines when outlines are be created for overlapping parts of the one and the same object . Lower values reduce the internal overlapping lines, while higher values produce more overlap lines. Setting this value to 1.0 fills curved objects completely.
Width – Specifies the width of the outlines.
Inner Line Control – Enables a separate control for the inner edges.
Inner Line Color – Specifies the color of the inner lines
Inner Width – Specifies the width of the inner lines.
Some of the global parameters have an effect on all materials with Outline attribute. These parameters are Width Type, Trace Bias, No Inner Edges, Visible in Secondary, and Compensate EV.
Displacement
This is a legacy attribute that is about to be removed in the future. Consider using the geometry displacement modifier instead. It can be created as a geometry asset in the Outliner and can be applied to objects in the scene. Note that the displacement effect is no longer going to appear in the Preview Swatch.
Displacement1 – Enables or disables the displacement effect.
Mode/ Map2 – Specifies the mode in which the displacement is rendered.
2D Displacement – Bases the displacement on a texture map that is known in advanced. The displaced surface is rendered as a warped height-field based on that texture map. The actual raytracing of the displaced surface is done in texture space and the result is mapped back into 3D space. The advantage of this method is that it preserves all details in the displacement map. However, it requires the object to have valid texture coordinates. You cannot use this method for 3d procedural textures or other textures that use object or world coordinates. The parameter can take any values.
Normal Displacement – Takes the original surface geometry and subdivides its triangles into smaller sub-triangles, which then are displaced.
Amount – The amount of displacement. A value of 0.0 means the object appears unchanged. Higher values produce a greater displacement effect. This parameter can also take a negative value, in which case the displacement pushes geometry inside the object.
Shift – Specifies a constant, which is added to the displacement map values, effectively shifting the displaced surface up and down along the normals. This can be either positive or negative.
Keep Continuity – When enabled, tries to produce a connected surface, without splits, when there are faces from different smoothing groups and/or material IDs. Note that using material IDs is not a very good way to combine displacement maps since V-Ray cannot always guarantee the surface continuity. Use other methods (vertex colors, masks etc.) to blend different displacement maps.
Resolution – This option is available when the Mode/Map is 2D Displacement. It determines the resolution of the displacement texture used by V-Ray. If the texture is a bitmap, it is recommended to match this resolution to the size of the bitmap. For procedural 2D maps, the resolution is determined by the desired quality and detail in the displacement. Note that V-Ray also automatically generates a normal map based on the displacement map in order to compensate for details not captured by the actual displaced surface.
View Dependent – When enabled, Edge length determines the maximum length of a subtriangle edge in pixels. A value of 1.0 means that the longest edge of each subtriangle is about one pixel long when projected on the screen. When disabled, Edge length is the maximum sub-triangle edge length in world units.
Edge Length – Determines the quality of the displacement. 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 RAM usage. Less subtriangles mean less detail, faster rendering and less RAM. The meaning of Edge length depends on the View dependent parameter. The slider's minimum range is set to 0.4. Using lower values is still possible by manually typing them in the input box but it may cause significant render delay.
Max Subdivs – Controls the maximum sub-triangles generated from any triangle of the original mesh when the displacement type is Subdivision. The value is in fact the square root of the maximum number of subtriangles. For example, a value of 256 means that at most 256 x 256 = 65536 subtriangles are generated for any given original triangle. It is not a good idea to keep this value very high. If you need to use higher values, it is better to tessellate the original mesh itself into smaller triangles instead. The actual subdivisions for a triangle are rounded up to the nearest power of two (this makes it easier to avoid gaps because of different tessellation on neighboring triangles).
Water Level
Clips the surface geometry in places where the displacement map value is below the specified threshold. This can be used for clip mapping a displacement map value below which geometry is clipped.
Level Height – Value below which the geometry is clipped.
Materials need to be applied to objects (groups/components) to have working displacement. If various materials are applied to different faces of an object, the displacement from the top-level (group/component) material is used on all of them. Normal Displacement takes into account the texture size of each different face material, while 2D Displacement ignores them.
Raytrace Properties
Visible to Camera – When enabled, makes objects using this material visible to the camera.
Visible to Reflections – When enabled, this option makes objects using this material visible for to Reflection rays.
Visible to Refractions – When enabled, this option makes objects using this material visible for the Refraction rays.
Cast Shadows – When disabled, all objects with this material applied do not cast shadows.
Override
Shadows – The material that is used when a shadow ray hits the surface.
Reflection – The material that is used when a reflection ray hits the surface.
Refraction– The material that is used when a refraction ray hits the surface.
GI – The material that is used when a GI ray hits the surface.
Environment – The texture that is used instead of the scene environment maps.
Material ID
ID Number – Isolates objects as an R/G/B mask in the MultiMatte render elements.
ID Color – Allows you to specify a color to represent this material in the Material ID VFB render element.
Each material is assigned with an automatically generated ID Color.
Notes
Materials with Normal opacity mode are now migrated to Stochastic opacity mode.
The Highlight Glossiness parameter is a legacy plugin. It is migrated from previous versions; however, if it is disabled, the row is hidden and its value is set to 1.
Use the Generic material whenever possible in your scenes. This material is specifically optimized for V-Ray and often GI and lighting is computed much faster for V-Ray materials than for standard materials. Many V-Ray features (e.g. light cache, render elements ) are guaranteed to work properly only with Generic and other V-Ray compliant materials.
The Generic material can produce reflections/refractions for matte objects - see Wrapper Material.
The 2D mapping method ignores the Tiling parameters specified in the textures themselves.
The 2D mapping (landscape) method only supports one UV mapping channel.
Having a very large number of scene objects using materials with 2D Displacement may substantially prolong the geometry compilation phase of the rendering process.
Calculated in the default SketchUp unit - inches.
Prior to V-Ray Next, Update 1 the Fog Scattering section was known as Translucency.
With V-Ray 5, PBR layers are converted to regular material layers.
With V-Ray 5, update 2, all Normal maps of newly-created materials are calculated in Tangent space. The options for Object/World/Screen space normal maps are now considered legacy options. They remain unchanged in materials from older scenes unless the materials are updated to a non-legacy bump mode. In this case, the legacy options cannot be restored back.
- When a Bitmap texture is mapped in this slot, its color space is automatically adjusted. Copy-pasting, replacing or wrapping a texture does not trigger this automatic adjustment. It is reserved solely when creating a Bitmap in the specified material slot.