Look-up-tables (LUTs) define the look and feel of a movie or a particular sequence of a movie. They record color and contrast corrections as presets, they can be troublesome to use as they are usually created for a specific situation in a specific in-house pipeline. We will see how to upload in ...

Linear workflow is an approach to shading, lighting, and rendering that offers many advantages over naïve methods. Color management enables a linear workflow by properly converting colors for input, rendering, display, and output. To summarize, softwares display values and contrast differently fr...

The OCIO config has been developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks, the studio behind Beowulf and Hotel Transylvania to standardize their color workflow across the production pipeline. The main idea is that the same color workflow (notably LUTs and color spaces) are needed from shoot to texturing wit...

Having a controllable color space workflow from shooting, through post and to delivery is mandatory in film production. The ACES (Academy Color Encoding System) support whatever possible color despite being able to reproduce it or not. It has the largest gamut of all color spaces and uses OpenEXR...

Tone mapping addresses the problem of strong contrast reduction from the scene radiance to the displayable range while preserving the image details and color appearance important to appreciate the original scene content. To summarize, we often get very bright and concentrated lit areas near area...

Global illumination methods are quite intimidating because they must be blended in order to simulate indirect illumination created with photons in the physical world. We will study in depth brute force, irradiance and light cache methods and see how they can be used in case of animation, not only...

It is often useful to blend two or more materials together for such effects like shellacs, varnishes and more.
We ll see how to use the V-Ray_Carpaint_mtl and go beyond its limitations with complex shading networks.

This is a live session recorded on the fly, unfortunately without sound. How to blend two shader in order to create a layered type of material: Shiny paint on top, rust or bare metal revealed with chipped paint or scratches. Rust progression over time method demonstrated at the end of the tutorial.

We can divide materials into two categories: reflective light materials versus emissive light materials, the moon belong to the first one and the sun to the second. This tutorial explore how to create self-illuminated or emissive materials, basically materials that behave like light sources. Two ...

Light rays can penetrates and scatter under the surface of many materials. We must distinguish between thin materials like paper, leaf versus thick materials like wax, jade or marble for example. We’ll see in depth the V-Ray_sss2_mtl and the V-Ray_2side_mtl.
Tutorial to watch next: “vr_sub-surfac...

Creating a believable skin material and light it realistically is a daunting task, this is certainly the “Graal” for most CG artists !
V-Ray has two specialized materials that simulate the triple layered nature of the skin translucence: epidermal, subnormal and hypodermis.
Tutorial to watch next:...

Simulating glass and transparent materials cam be intimidating, particularly when it comes to create the envelope of light rays called caustics. The major bullet points are: glass versus plexiglass, neutral versus tinted glass, thick versus thin glass, glass with gold inserts and more !
Tutorial ...