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Generic • Attributes
• Translucency
• Bump
This page provides information about the Generic material in V-Ray for SketchUp. • Outline
  • Displacement
• Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
Overview • Override
• Material ID
• Notes
Generic is a special V-Ray material, that allows for better physically correct illumination (energy distribution) in the scene, faster rendering, more convenient reflection and
refraction parameters. Within this material you can apply different texture maps, control the reflections and refractions, add bump and displacement maps, force direct GI
calculations, and choose the BRDF for the material.

       

Generic Diffuse Generic Reflection Generic Refraction

       

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• Overview
Generic Coat Generic Sheen Generic Thin Film
• UI Paths
• UI Options
• Attributes
• Translucency
• Bump
• Outline
• Displacement
• Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
• Override
• Material ID
• Notes
Generic Self- Generic Opacity Generic Bump And
Illumination Normal Mapping

         

Generic Multipliers Generic Binding And

Override Control
 

UI Paths
||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Materials (right-click) > Generic Page Contents ×
||V-Ray Asset Editor|| > Create Asset (left-click) > Materials > Generic
• Overview
• UI Paths
• UI Options
• Attributes
• Translucency
UI Options • Bump
• Outline
• Displacement
The Generic material settings are organized in Basic and Advanced modes. You can switch the mode from the  
• Water Level 
toggle button under the Preview Swatch or globally from the Configuration rollout of the Settings tab.
• Raytrace Properties
An Add Layer button is provided for some V-Ray materials, including Generic. You can select an additional layer • Override
that can add up to the appearance of the material. For more information, see the Layers section on the • Material ID
Materials page. • Notes
From the Add Attribute button, you can select additional attributes that can add up to the appearance of the
material. For more information, see the Attributes section.

 Holding down Ctrl (or Cmd on macOS) while having the Add Attribute or Add Layer menu open,
allows selecting multiple entries without closing the dropdown.

The context menu of the Color slot provides options to Copy and Paste, as well as to Reset the color.

A Reset option is provided in the context menu of each Number Slider. You can reset the slider value to the
default one.

 The blue indicator next to a rollout ( ) indicates that the lead parameter of this rollout, which
affects the final appearance of the material, is changed.

Attributes
The attributes available for the Generic material are as follows.
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• Overview
Translucency • UI Paths
• UI Options
• Attributes
Back Material– Defines the material V-Ray uses for back side faces as defined by their normals.  
• Translucency
Translucency – Determines if the front or the back side of the material is more visible in the rendering process. • Bump
By default this value is 0.5, which means that both sides are equally visible. When this parameter is closer to • Outline
zero, the material facing the camera is more visible, when it is closer to one, the back material is more visible. A • Displacement
texture can be used to control the variation of the effect. • Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
Mult. by Front Diffuse – When enabled, the translucency is multiplied by the diffuse of the front material.
• Override
  • Material ID
• Notes
 

Bump

Mode/Map6 – Specifies the bump map type.

Bump Map – A height map should be used.

Normal Map5 – RGB map should be used with this option. Note that in most cases the normal map bitmap
color space should be set to Linear to ensure correct results.
Local Space Bump – A height map should be used. Unlike the standard Bump mode, in this case the height
is not measured in scene units. It is only determined by the raw texture values. Scaling objects will not affect
the local space effect. This option has to be selected for the round edges effect (Edges texture used as
bump).

Amount6 – Multiplier for the bump/normal map.

 
 

Outline

The Outline attribute is available only when the engine is set to CPU. It is currently not supported for GPU.

Line Color – Specifies the color of the outlines.

Opacity6 – Specifies the opacity of the outlines. Page Contents ×

Normal Threshold – Determines when lines are created for parts of the same object with varying surface • Overview
normals (e.g. at the inside edges of a box). A value of 0.0 means that only 90 degrees or larger angles generate • UI Paths
internal lines. Higher values mean that smoother transitions between face normals can also generate a line. • UI Options
Setting this value to 1.0 fills curved objects completely. • Attributes
Overlap Threshold – Determines when outlines are be created for overlapping parts of the one and the same
• Translucency
object . Lower values reduce the internal overlapping lines, while higher values produce more overlap lines.   • Bump
Setting this value to 1.0 fills curved objects completely. • Outline
• Displacement
Width – Specifies the width of the outlines. • Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
Inner Line Control – Enables a separate control for the inner edges.
• Override
Inner Line Color – Specifies the color of the inner lines • Material ID
• Notes
Inner Width – Specifies the width of the inner lines.

 Some of the global parameters have an effect on all materials with Outline attribute. These
parameters are Width Type, Trace Bias, No Inner Edges, Visible in Secondary, and Compensate EV.

Displacement

 This is a legacy attribute that is about to be removed in the future. Consider using the geometry
displacement modifier instead. It can be created as a geometry asset in the Outliner and can be
applied to objects in the scene. Note that the displacement effect is no longer going to appear in the

Preview Swatch.

Displacement1 – Enables or disables the displacement effect.

Mode/ Map2 – Specifies the mode in which the displacement is rendered.

2D Displacement – Bases the displacement on a texture map that is known in advanced. The displaced
surface is rendered as a warped height-field based on that texture map. The actual raytracing of the
displaced surface is done in texture space and the result is mapped back into 3D space. The advantage of
this method is that it preserves all details in the displacement map. However, it requires the object to have
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valid texture coordinates. You cannot use this method for 3d procedural textures or other textures that use • Overview
object or world coordinates. The parameter can take any values.  • UI Paths
Normal Displacement – Takes the original surface geometry and subdivides its triangles into smaller sub- • UI Options
triangles, which then are displaced.  • Attributes
• Translucency
Amount – The amount of displacement. A value of 0.0 means the object appears unchanged. Higher values
• Bump
produce a greater displacement effect. This parameter can also take a negative value, in which case the
• Outline
displacement pushes geometry inside the object. 
• Displacement
Shift – Specifies a constant, which is added to the displacement map values, effectively shifting the displaced • Water Level 
surface up and down along the normals. This can be either positive or negative. • Raytrace Properties
• Override
Keep Continuity – When enabled, tries to produce a connected surface, without splits, when there are faces
from different smoothing groups and/or material IDs. Note that using material IDs is not a very good way to
• Material ID
combine displacement maps since V-Ray cannot always guarantee the surface continuity. Use other methods • Notes
(vertex colors, masks etc.) to blend different displacement maps.

Resolution – This option is available when the Mode/Map is 2D Displacement. It determines the resolution of the
displacement texture used by V-Ray. If the texture is a bitmap, it is recommended to match this resolution to the
size of the bitmap. For procedural 2D maps, the resolution is determined by the desired quality and detail in the
displacement. Note that V-Ray also automatically generates a normal map based on the displacement map in
order to compensate for details not captured by the actual displaced surface.

View Dependent – When enabled, Edge length determines the maximum length of a subtriangle edge in pixels.
A value of 1.0 means that the longest edge of each subtriangle is about one pixel long when projected on the
screen. When disabled, Edge length is the maximum sub-triangle edge length in world units.

Edge Length – Determines the quality of the displacement. Each triangle of the original mesh is subdivided into
a number of subtriangles. More subtriangles mean more detail in the displacement, slower rendering times and
more RAM usage. Less subtriangles mean less detail, faster rendering and less RAM. The meaning of Edge
length depends on the View dependent parameter. The slider's minimum range is set to 0.4. Using lower values
is still possible by manually typing them in the input box but it may cause significant render delay.

Max Subdivs – Controls the maximum sub-triangles generated from any triangle of the original mesh when the
displacement type is Subdivision. The value is in fact the square root of the maximum number of subtriangles.
For example, a value of 256 means that at most 256 x 256 = 65536 subtriangles are generated for any given
original triangle. It is not a good idea to keep this value very high. If you need to use higher values, it is better to
tessellate the original mesh itself into smaller triangles instead. The actual subdivisions for a triangle are
rounded up to the nearest power of two (this makes it easier to avoid gaps because of different tessellation on
neighboring triangles). 
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• Overview
Water Level  • UI Paths
• UI Options
Clips the surface geometry in places where the displacement map value is below the specified threshold. This
can be used for clip mapping a displacement map value below which geometry is clipped. 
• Attributes
• Translucency
Level Height – Value below which the geometry is clipped.  • Bump
• Outline
 Materials need to be applied to objects (groups/components) to have working displacement. If • Displacement
various materials are applied to different faces of an object, the displacement from the top-level • Water Level 
(group/component) material is used on all of them. Normal Displacement takes into account the • Raytrace Properties
texture size of each different face material, while 2D Displacement ignores them. • Override
• Material ID
• Notes

Raytrace Properties

Visible to Camera – When enabled, makes objects using this material visible to the camera.  

Visible to Reflections – When enabled, this option makes objects using this material visible for to Reflection rays.

Visible to Refractions – When enabled, this option makes objects using this material visible for the Refraction
rays.

Cast Shadows – When disabled, all objects with this material applied do not cast shadows.

Override

Shadows – The material that is used when a shadow ray hits the surface.  

Reflection – The material that is used when a reflection ray hits the surface.

Refraction– The material that is used when a refraction ray hits the surface.

GI – The material that is used when a GI ray hits the surface.

Environment – The texture that is used instead of the scene environment maps.
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  • Overview
• UI Paths
  • UI Options
• Attributes
Material ID • Translucency
• Bump
• Outline
ID Number – Isolates objects as an R/G/B mask in the MultiMatte render elements.  
• Displacement
ID Color – Allows you to specify a color to represent this material in the Material ID VFB render element. • Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
• Override
 Each material is assigned with an automatically generated ID Color.
• Material ID
• Notes
 

Notes
◦ Materials with Normal opacity mode are now migrated to Stochastic opacity mode.
◦ The Highlight Glossiness parameter is a legacy plugin. It is migrated from previous versions; however, if it is disabled, the row is hidden and its value is set to 1.
◦ Use the Generic material whenever possible in your scenes. This material is specifically optimized for V-Ray and often GI and lighting is computed much faster for
V-Ray materials than for standard materials. Many V-Ray features (e.g. light cache, render elements ) are guaranteed to work properly only with Generic and other
V-Ray compliant materials.
◦ The Generic material can produce reflections/refractions for matte objects - see Wrapper Material.
◦ The 2D mapping method ignores the Tiling parameters specified in the textures themselves.
◦ The 2D mapping (landscape)  method only supports one UV mapping channel.

1. Having a very large number of scene objects using materials with 2D Displacement may substantially prolong the geometry compilation phase of the rendering
process.
2. Calculated in the default SketchUp unit - inches.
3. Prior to V-Ray Next, Update 1 the Fog Scattering section was known as Translucency.
4. With V-Ray 5, PBR layers are converted to regular material layers.
5. With V-Ray 5, update 2, all Normal maps of newly-created materials are calculated in Tangent space. The options for Object/World/Screen space normal maps are
now considered legacy options. They remain unchanged in materials from older scenes unless the materials are updated to a non-legacy bump mode. In this case,
the legacy options cannot be restored back.
6. When a Bitmap texture is mapped in this slot, its color space is automatically adjusted. Copy-pasting, replacing or wrapping a texture does not trigger this automatic
adjustment. It is reserved solely when creating a Bitmap in the specified material slot.
Page Contents ×
• Overview
• UI Paths
• UI Options
• Attributes
• Translucency
• Bump
• Outline
• Displacement
• Water Level 
• Raytrace Properties
• Override
• Material ID
• Notes