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For advanced camera effects, such as DoF, exposure etc. you will need to enable the physical camera. See the Physical camera subsection in the settings section below for details.

3. Creating lights

Good lighting is the most important thing for getting good photorealistic renders. It also affects image noise and performance. Some lights (generally the simpler ones, especially the first four in the list) render faster and with less noise than others. Listed below are V-Ray's light plugins, ordered roughly by increasing photorealism. Common parameters are at the end and some specific parameters are described in the Reference at the end of this document. There are even more parameters that we will not mention here.

• LightAmbient - Do not use this one. Ambient lighting is a fake effect.
• LightOmni - A point light source. Has parameters for the rate of decay and casting soft shadows (shadowRadius below).
• LightDirect - Infinite parallel light. Does not originate from its position, so only the rotation matrix matters.
• LightSpot - Conical spot light, such as the light coming from a flashlight.
• LightRectangle - Rectangular area light. Option for rounding to a disc shape. Can be textured.
• LightSphere - Spherical area light. The geometric detail is parametrized by number of segments.
• LightMesh - Turn a geometry plugin into a light source. Can be textured.
• LightDome - A light emitting dome encompassing the scene at infinity. Usually used for HDR image based lighting (IBL) with a spherical texture file.
• LightIES - Measured real world lights defined through an .IES file. Shape can be overriden.
• SunLight - Mathematically approximated model of our Sun. The light varies according to its elevation. Usually coupled with a TexSky environment texture. See the Environment settings section below for details.

Some of these plugins have versions from 3dsMax with additional parameters, such as LightOmniMax, LightSpotMax etc.

Common light parameters:

• enabled - Enabled by default. Use to turn lights on/off without having to recreate and reset parameters.
• transform - Position and orientation. See notes on camera position above. Some lights can also be scaled.
• color - The color of emitted light. Default is white (1.0, 1.0, 1.0). The value can be above 1 for larger intensity, but most lights have a separate intensity parameter for this. Some lights such as rectangular and mesh lights can have textured color through additional parameters. For example you can make a stained glass window this way. The Sun light doesn't have this parameter, but it has others for color control.
• shadows - Enabled by default. Set to false to cast no shadows. Not recommended.

Other parameters common to many, but not all of the lights (check respective parameter lists):

• shadowRadius - Can be used to make simple light sources like omni, spot, direct behave as area lights, casting soft shadows.
• intensity (intensity_tex) - Multiplier for the intensity of the light.
• invisible - False by default. Enable to make the area light invisible to the camera. This includes the back side of rectangle lights for example.
• units - Physical units for the intensity of photometric lights. Possible values are: 0 - default, 1 - lumens, 2 - lm/m/m/sr, 3 - Watts, 4 - W/m/m/sr

4. Creating geometry

5. Creating materials

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