- [Instructor] To help us become familiar
with the V-Ray tools that can now be found in Unreal,
before we actually try working with them,
let's use this particular exercise
to very quickly run through just where in the UI
those V-Ray tools can be found.
With perhaps the first and most obvious examples
being seen in the V-Ray and V-Ray Bake buttons
that now sit right in front of us on the main toolbar.
The buttons themselves are pretty straightforward,
in that what is called the V-Ray button here
would typically be called the render button
in many other applications.
Whilst the V-Ray Bake option does exactly what it says
and runs through the light map baking process
using V-Ray as the lighting and rendering engine.
This, of course, taking the place
of Unreal's own light mass engine,
which would normally be used for light map baking
whenever we hit the build
or build lighting only buttons in the UI.
Now, an interesting difference found in the Unreal version
of the V-Ray render button is that it actually has a number
of states associated with it.
So, what we see now is it's default or idle state,
meaning it isn't currently doing any processing
or rendering in the scene.
If I go ahead and click the button, though,
we instantly see it shift into its preparing state,
which shows that in the background V-Ray is now caching
the meshes, textures, materials, and light
that make up the scene and is processing them
ready for rendering.
This state having a turning hourglass animation.
Once that phase is complete,
the button then moves on to the rendering state,
which tells us that the scene is now being rendered,
as denoted by the render bucket animation that it runs.
Once the render is completed, if the scene is heavy enough,
the button will then switch to its busy state,
which is a stationary hourglass,
whilst unloading same resources from memory.
After which, it will settle into its finished state,
which has a green check or tick,
denoting that the current render job has been completed.
To stop a render at this point, all we need to do is click
on the V-Ray button a second time.
And besides being able to click on the buttons themselves
in order to initiate functionality,
each of them also has a dropdown that can open up
a number of other UI elements.
So, from the V-Ray toolbar dropdown,
we can open up the V-Ray frame before window,
which, in essence, is an external application
that runs outside of Unreal.
And we can open up the V-Ray settings window,
which we can dock to any part of the Unreal UI that we like.
From the bake dropdown, we gain access to the small number
of light bake options that V-Ray also makes available to us.
Leaving the main toolbar behind,
we can come over to the modes tab
where we have a V-Ray assets category
that lets us very quickly create V-Ray-related actors.
So the dome light, the rectangle light,
the V-Ray physical camera, a V-Ray environment,
and the V-Ray sun and sky system.
Each of which will, of course, have its own UI elements
that can be used to edit functionality,
as is true of all V-Ray tools
that can be selected in a scene.
If we come to the world outliner and select our V-Ray sun,
for instance, we immediately see a number of controls
appear in the details tab.
And if we want deeper access
to the root sun and sky system,
we can also click on the edit option in the outliner
and open up its construction script,
which, unless we're pretty well versed
in the use of blueprints is probably going to be
a little on the scary side.
Now, do be warned, that if we alter this script,
we will affect how every instance
of the V-Ray sun and sky tool works,
if we should go ahead and compile it, that is.
And so it is probably best left alone.
The final UI element that we will take a look at
in this exercise can be seen if we make sure
that we are in the V-Ray scene folder
in the content browser.
And then from the filter's popup,
filter for just V-Ray material instances.
If we then double click on one of the material entries
that we have, we can open up the asset editor
to gain access to the material's parameters,
that we can then alter according to our project's needs.
Note also that if we have bitmaps assigned to the material,
we can double click on those, as well,
in order to open up the texture asset editor,
which is where we can control things
like automatic SIGB color correction
for imported maps as needed.
With a good idea of where V-Ray elements can be found
in the Unreal UI then and of how those tools
can then be edited, let's move on to our next exercise
and take a look at some basic workflow options
that we have available when using V-Ray in Unreal.