6. VRay Materials

Workflow

The option to import the vrscene assets as Materials will automatically create a material asset for each Vray material at the top of a hierarchy inside vrscene added. You may have multiple material nodes feed into other material nodes, such as Vray Materials being fed into a Vray Blend material. The top material will be the one that will get extracted as an asset on the platform, and in this case it would be the Blend Material.

Here is an example of a Vray material in ThreeKit:

Here we can see the use of the TK_ prefix in the node names, to denote the fact that these nodes will be exposed for configuration on ThreeKit.

This is how this material will import on ThreeKit:

First of all, the name of this material asset is extracted from the name of the material inside the vrscene file. This means that the name of your vrscene file does not actually matter at all when importing the materials.

The Viewport Color and Viewport Map properties will be present on all imported Vray materials, and their effect only applies to the Webgl preview of this material. When rendering this material with Vray, these two properties will have no effect. When configuring some of the custom TK_ properties on the material, it may be helpful sometimes to also set the Viewport Map and Color of the material in order to confirm that the configuration works correctly, prior to doing render tests.

In the example above we are showcasing three different types of nodes that can be exposed for configuration:

TK_Multiplier is a VrayUserScalar/Integer node TK_BaseMap is a texture/bitmap node TK_Tint is a VrayUserColor node

Only these types of nodes are supported for configuration when named with the TK_ prefix inside the 3D application. Naming other types of nodes this way will not expose them on ThreeKit.

Parameters

While the VrayUserScalar and the VrayUserColor are pretty self explanatory, in terms of how they can be used on ThreeKit, the texture nodes come with some additional settings.

Map Asset	This slot allows the user to assign a texture asset from the ThreeKit Asset Library. All texture assets are allowed here, and Vray will render this texture as it was uploaded. The platform does not currently apply any of the modifications applied to that texture asset, such as brightness and gain adjustments. When no Map Asset is specified for a texture node, ThreeKit will automatically use the texture files included in the vrscenezip (if any files were included for that node). If no file was included in the uploaded vrscene for this material, then it will render with the equivalent of a null texture for that slot.
UV Settings	This setting allows the user to specify which UV tiling settings should be applied to the texture asset. Map Asset - This option will use the tiling settings specified on ThreeKit inside the texture asset. Source Material - This option will use the tiling settings specified on this texture node inside the vrscene file.
UV Channel	This allows the user to choose which UV channel this texture node will apply to. When the user first imports this material to the platform, the UV channel will be automatically populated with the UV channel detected inside the vrscene file for this particular node.

Logic

All of the custom properties named with TK_ can be set through configuration logic using the Set Property action in the rules.

This is necessary for building Template Materials, and will be the typical use of logic inside Vray Materials, or any materials for that matter.