© Bertrand Benoit

Table of Contents

This page provides an overview of the V-Ray Material Instance Asset and its use.



Overview


The V-Ray Material Instance Asset is a material asset that enables you to easily create V-Ray materials in Unreal.

Material Instances  are used in favor of Materials because they provide less compilation times, immediate interaction and are more optimized. Some features (e.g. using a texture) are implemented using static switches check boxes and will require additional compilation. However these are small and usually quick to compile.

For your materials to work properly at render time make sure your textures have a valid file path (Source File in the texture Details panel). V-Ray loads the textures from that directory during rendering. If the texture is not found at the specified location, V-Ray will automatically export the texture. You can then find it in your project folder > Content > Texture Cache.



VRay Material Instance Setup

The V-Ray Material Instance Asset can be created from two different places:



  • In the Content Browser > Add New > V-Ray > VRay Material Instance
  • In the Content Browser > Right Mouse Button click > V-Ray > VRay Material Instance








After a VRay Material Instance Asset is created in the Content Browser you can choose which V-Ray material will be its parent. Double click the newly created material and at the bottom of the asset editor, in the General section, click the Parent slot and set one of three V-Ray materials:


  • VRayMtl - a very versatile material that can easily be set up to simulate a huge variety of surfaces from plastics to metals to glass and more by adjusting a handful of parameters. For more details see theVRayMtl documentation.
  • VRayCarpaintUberMtl - a material that simulates metallic car paint. For more details see the VRayCarpaintMtl documentation.
  • VRayPBRMtl - The VRayPBRMtl enables you to use the PBR workflow with V-Ray, similar to the one in Unreal. For more details see the VRayPBRMtl documentation.



In order to select any of the VRay Materials you have to first make the plugin folder VRayForUnreal visible. Enable Show Engine Content and Show Plugin Content in the View Options of the Content Browser. Then the VRay Materials will be listed in the Parent dropdown menu.