Primary GI Engine: Brute Force
Secondary GI Engine: Light Cache
Relying purely on subdivs to kill noise is inefficient. V-Ray has a powerful Denoiser. vray render settings for sketchup full
Workflow: Render with Noise Threshold 0.01 (moderately noisy) + Denoiser = 50% faster than rendering at 0.005 with no denoiser. Primary GI Engine : Brute Force Secondary GI
| Symptom | Likely Cause | Full Solution | |---------|--------------|----------------| | Grainy shadows | Low Light Cache subdivs | Increase to 1200–1500 | | Splotchy GI | Brute Force subdivs too low | Raise to 24; or switch to Irradiance Map (high preset) | | Long render time | Noise threshold too low (0.001) | Use 0.005; enable denoiser | | Fireflies | High ray intensity | Set Max ray intensity to 20 | | Blurry textures | Compression enabled | Turn off texture compression in Switches | Workflow: Render with Noise Threshold 0
Before touching a slider, one must choose the render engine. V-Ray for SketchUp offers three primary engines: V-Ray GPU, CPU, and Bucket. For a full, production-ready render, V-Ray CPU with Bucket rendering remains the gold standard for stability and memory management. GPU rendering is exceptionally fast but can struggle with extremely complex scenes or specific geometry types. The "Bucket" mode renders the image in squares, allowing for better progress tracking and automatic optimization of complex areas. Set the Bucket size to 48 or 64 for a balance between overhead and speed.
Color mapping controls how colors are translated into final pixels. The most critical choice here is the Type.
This is the most critical section for quality. You have two major types: Progressive and Bucket (or Progressive vs. Classic depending on V-Ray version).