The Preview Swatch resides in the right panel of the Asset Editor, rendering all changes done to the currently selected asset. This is a quick preview of materials, textures, and lights. It has several controls that can be customized for your workflow.
You can enable or disable the live preview of the swatch by pressing the corresponding button (/). As the Preview Swatch is an actual render, it might require some additional computing power. The Stop live preview button comes in handy in such situations. When you stop the live preview, you have the option to Preview the asset once (). The swatch will render the current settings of the asset, but will not take into consideration any changes done to it later.
When using the live preview swatch, there are other ways to reduce resource usage – choose the resolution of the rendered swatch from 100% (1/1) (which is the best quality but is a slower render), 50%(1/2), 25%(1/4) and 12.5% (1/8) (which trades off image quality for refresh speed).
The CPU/GPU () allows you to change the render engine for the live preview.
Selecting the scene used to preview the asset () is available for materials and textures. You can choose from Generic, Fabric, Floor, Ground, Subsurface Scattering, Wall, Wall Closeup and Sphere.
Pulling the bottom line of the Preview Swatch up and down reduces or expands the swatch.
For Material assets, you can also choose among several swatch scenes. Some are more suitable than others at displaying certain material types. For example, a Brick material will be best seen in a wall preview, instead of a shader ball.
The pin () on the top left is used to preview a specific asset regardless of the currently selected one. It will display the pinned asset until unpinned.
The context menu of each Color slot provides options to Copy and Paste, as well as to Reset it back to its default value. Number slots also have a Reset option.
UI Text Box
type
tip
When changing the Units of a given light, its preview will be updated accordingly. Changes of the light intensity value are displayed up to a certain amount in order to guarantee the preview remains illustrative.
UI Text Box
type
note
Using the Stop Preview Swatch option releases the V-Ray Render node License, if there is no other rendering process taking place.
Column
width
5%
Column
width
50%
...
Section
Column
width
45%70%
Asset Tagging
Custom grouping scene assets of any type is now possible in the V-Ray Assets Outliner. Tags help to organize and work more efficiently in complex projects.
Each tag can be assigned to multiple assets all at once via the context menu and one asset can be assigned multiple tags.
Tags can be assigned to assets of all categories - materials, textures, lights, etc. When a tag is assigned to assets of different types, the tag indicator will appear in each category.
Right-clicking on a tag allows its renaming or deletion. Alternatively, double-clicking a tag name allows its renaming directly.
Drag & dropping an asset over a tag assigns the tag to this asset.
Upon creation each tag is assigned a random color.
A new Tag View button, located at the top-right corner of the Asset Outliner, next to the search field, allows toggling tags visibility on or off.
Right-clicking on any asset and hovering over its "Tag" context menu entry displays a list of all available tags in the scene, as well indicators which tags are currently assigned to the asset.
Tags are considered scene-specific, meaning they are serialized in each project file and they cannot be transferred between scenes.
Saving any asset as a .vrmat does not write its tags to the file keeping it clean of any scene-specific data.
Column
width
5%
Column
width
50%25%
Image RemovedImage Added
...
Section
Column
width
45%
Color Picker
Anchor
colorpicker
colorpicker
The V-Ray Color Picker can be accessed by clicking on any color slot in the Asset Editor. It is a color manager that allows numeric color value selection in Screen (sRGB) and Rendering (RGB) Color spaces, options to regulate RGB, HSV and temperature. V-Ray Color Picker automatically converts Kelvin to RGB values, as well as RGB to Kelvin whenever possible.
Left-click on the current color to save it in the palette. Alternatively, right-click on an empty slot in the palette. Right-click on a saved color in the color slot to replace it with a new one.
The V-Ray Color Picker has a Color Assistant that can be opened by clicking on the side bar at the bottom of V-Ray Color Picker window. The Color Assistant provides color palettes to pick a color from.
Left-click on a color from the Color Assistant to pick the current color. Right-click on it to use as a base for a color palette.
Column
width
5%
Column
width
50%
...
Section
Column
width
45%
The Render button allows you to choose how you wish to render, Render with V-Ray, Render with V-Ray Interactive, and Export V-Ray Scene File.
Button
Description
Renders the current view with the V-Ray production renderer.
