---
title: "Globals Rollout"
canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VBLD/117639033/Globals%20Rollout"
format: markdown
---
This page provides information on the  Globals  rollout under the  Globals tab  in V-Ray's  Render Settings.   Overview  The Globals rollout allows you to control some of V-Ray's features globally so as to quickly debug your scene. Camera Auto White Balance  –  Automatically determines a suitable white balance value for the image. This option requires Light Cache in  Single Frame  mode. Note that the Auto White Balance does not take into account pixels with zero Alpha value. Auto Exposure  –  Automatically determines an appropriate exposure value for the render. This option requires  Light Cache  in  Single Frame  mode. Note that the Auto Exposure does not take into account pixels with zero Alpha value. Disabled  – Auto Exposure is not applied. Center-weighted   average  – Calculates the exposure by evaluating the light in the center of the frame and its surroundings, ignoring the corners. Histogram  – Calculates a histogram of the image, which allows very bright or very dark areas of the scene to be excluded from the exposure calculations, creating a more balanced result. Auto Corrections Mode  – Specifies which camera and/or views to use the automatic exposure and white balance setting. This option is available only if  Auto Exposure  or  Auto White Balance  are enabled. Cameras without exposure only  – Applies Auto Exposure and Auto White Balance only to cameras with no local exposure settings. All cameras  – Applies Auto Exposure and Auto White Balance to all cameras, regardless of their local exposure settings. Motion Blur Enable Motion Blur  – Enables motion blur only for non-physical cameras in the scene. Camera Motion Blur  – Enables the calculation of motion blur caused by the movement of the camera for physical and non-physical cameras. Duration (frames)  – Specifies the duration, in frames, during which the camera shutter is open. Interval Center  – Specifies the middle of the motion blur interval with respect to the Cinema 4D frame. A value of 0.5 means that the middle of the motion blur interval is halfway between the frames. A value of 0.0 means that the middle of the interval is at the exact frame position. Bias  – Controls the bias of light for the motion blur effect. A value of 0.0 means that the light passes uniformly during the whole motion blur interval. Positive values mean that light is concentrated towards the end of the interval, while negative values concentrate light towards the beginning. Shutter Efficiency  –  In real world cameras, the shutter requires some time to open and close which in turn affects the way motion blur looks. This is especially true for lenses with large apertures. To simulate this effect, this parameter controls how the motion blur samples are distributed in the time interval of the shot. A value of 1.000 means that the samples are evenly distributed as if the shutter opens and closes instantly. Lower values produce more realistic results by placing more samples toward the middle of the time interval. Geometry Samples  – Determines the number of geometry segments used to approximate motion blur. Objects are assumed to move linearly between geometry samples. For objects rotating at high speed, increase this parameter to get correct motion blur. Note that higher values increase memory consumption since more geometry copies are kept in memory.  Depth of Field These parameters are activated once  Depth of Field  is enabled. Aperture  – The size of the virtual camera aperture, in millimeters. Small aperture sizes reduce the DOF effect. Center Bias  – Determines the uniformity of the DOF effect. A value of 0.0 means that light passes uniformly through the aperture. Positive values mean that light is concentrated towards the rim of the aperture, while negative values concentrate light at the center. Use Camera Focus Distance  – When enabled, the focal distance is determined from the camera target. Focus Distance  – Determines the distance from the camera at which objects are in perfect focus. Objects closer or farther than this distance are blurred. Aperture Shape  - Enables simulation of the polygonal shape of the aperture of real-world cameras. When disabled, the shape used in calculations is perfectly circular. Number of Blades  – Sets the number of blades for the polygonal shape of the aperture. Rotation  – Specifies the orientation of the aperture shape. Anisotropy  – Stretches the bokeh effect horizontally or vertically. If you want the ratio of height to width of the bokeh to be k:1,  then the value for anisotropy should be sqrt(1/k)-1. For example, for anamorphic bokeh, which is 2.39:1, the anisotropy value should be -0.353.  Geometry Edge Length  –  Determines the quality of the displacement or subdivision. Each triangle of the original mesh is subdivided into a number of sub-triangles. More sub-triangles means more detail in the displacement, slower rendering times and more RAM usage. Fewer sub-triangles mean less detail, faster rendering and less RAM. The meaning of Edge length depends on the View-dependent parameter below. Max Subdivs  –  Controls the maximum sub-triangles generated from any triangle of the original mesh. The value is in fact the square root of the maximum number of sub-triangles. For example, a value of 256 means that at most 256 x 256 = 65536 sub-triangles 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. View Dependent  –  When on,  Edge Length  determines the maximum length of a sub-triangle edge, in pixels. A value of 1.0 means that the longest edge of each sub-triangle is about one pixel long when projected on the screen. When View-dependent is off,  Edge Length  is the maximum sub-triangle edge length in world units. Tight Bounds  –  When on, V-Ray computes the exact bounding volume of the displaced triangles from the original mesh. This requires pre-sampling of the displacement texture, but the rendering is faster, if the texture has large black or white areas. However, if the displacement texture is slow to evaluate and varies a lot between full black and white, it may be faster to turn this option off. When off, V-Ray assumes worst-case bounding volumes, and does not pre-sample the texture. Displacement Multiplier  – Determines a global multiplier for the displacement effect on all meshes in the scene. Min Hair Width  – Controls the minimum hair width globally. Works for all hair geometry within the scene. The value is in screen units and defines the number of pixels from the final rendered image. A value of 0 means that the global override is disabled. Values above 0 help reduce flickering in animation, as well as transparency issues when multiple hairs are in front of each other, but this may add to the render time. Values above 2 are not recommended. Lighting Lights  – Enables lights globally. Note: Disabling this will cause V-Ray to use the default lights. Shadows  – Enables shadows globally.  When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Disable Self-Illumination  – Disables the rendering of self-illuminated objects (objects assigned a V-Ray Light Mtl). When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Light Evaluation  – Determines how lights are sampled in scenes with many lights.  For more information, see the  Adaptive Lights example . Full Evaluation  – V-Ray goes through each scene light and evaluates it at each shading point. In scenes with many lights and lots of GI bounces, this leads to a lot of shadow rays being traced, and rendering can become extremely slow.    Light Tree  – V-Ray selects a variable number of suitable finite light sources based on proximity and evaluates only those. This mode may speed up the Light Cache and Brute Force calculations for scenes with lots of lights. It can also reduce flickering due to missed light sources. Adaptive Lights  – Uses information from the Light cache to determine which lights to sample. If a Light cache is not used, light tree sampling is used. Depending on the scene, it can be faster than the  Full lights evaluation  mode Number Of Lights   – Number of lights from the scene that are evaluated by V-Ray when the  Light Evaluation  parameter is set to  Adaptive . Lower values make the rendering go faster, but the result is noisier. Higher values cause more lights to be computed at each hit point, thus producing less noise but increasing render times.   Example: Adaptive Lights Below is an example rendering of a scene with the default  Progressive  Image Sampler settings, using  Brute Force/Light Cache  GI engines. Only the  Noise Limit  parameter was set to 0.002. Notice how the render time is reduced significantly in favor of the Adaptive Lights in comparison to Full Evaluation. Adaptive Lights ; render time 39 mins Light Tree ; render time 48 mins Full Lights Evaluation ; render time 1h 9 mins Materials Reflection / Refraction  – Enables (default) or disables the calculation of reflections and refractions in V-Ray maps and materials. Glossy Effects  – Enables (default) or disables the rendering of glossy effects. SSS  – Enables (default) or disables the rendering of sub-surface scattering effects. Use Global Max Depth  – Enables global limiting of the reflection/refraction depth of a material. When this is disabled, the depth is controlled locally by the materials' Reflection Max depth parameter. When this option is enabled, all materials use the  Global Max Depth  specified in this rollout.  For more details,  see the Global Max Depth example . Global Max Depth  – Specifies the maximum depth when  Global Max Depth  is checked. To disable all reflections/refractions in the scene, set this value to 0. Max. Transparency Levels  – The depth to which transparent objects will be traced.  For more details, see  the Max Transparency Levels and Reflection/Refraction example . Transparency Cutoff  – Determines when tracing of transparent objects are stopped. If the accumulated transparency of a ray is below this threshold, no further tracing will be performed.  Example: Global Max Depth   The images below show the original beauty render along with  Use  Global Max Depth  enabled and a  Global   Max Depth  of   1.  When  Max depth  has been set to a value of   1 , all reflections and refraction will only have a single bounce and therefore we can see that the windshield's refractions are incorrect.   Original Beauty render with local Reflection Max Depth  5  and a Refraction Max depth of  5   Beauty render with  Global Max Depth  set to a value of  1,  overriding local Reflection Max Depth  5  and Refraction Max depth of  5 Example: Max Transparency Levels and Reflection /Refraction   When all refractions and reflections are disabled, the car retains only its black diffuse color because refractions and reflections are no longer present on any of the materials in the scene, and when  Max Transparency Levels  is reduced to a value of  1  nothing is visible through the windshield.   Beauty render with  Reflection / Refraction  disabled   Beauty render with  Max. Transparency Levels  set to a value of  1 , overriding local Reflection Max Depth  5  and Refraction Max depth of  5.   As a result, we can't see through the windshield. Textures Maps  – Enables (default) or disables texture maps. This option is useful for troubleshooting renderings, for example, for determining the extent to which texture maps contribute to noise or other rendering artifacts.  When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Filter Maps  – Enables (default) or disables texture map filtering. When enabled, the depth is controlled locally by the settings of the texture maps. When disabled, no filtering is performed.  When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Uninverted Normal Bump  – A global option to prevent inversion of a normal bump in tangent space on flipped UVs. When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Max Mipmap Resolution  - Sets the maximum resolution for mipmaped files. All planes with higher resolution from the file won't be used. If set to zero, the original file resolution is used.  When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available. Rendering Secondary rays bias  – A small positive offset applied to all secondary rays. This setting is useful when the scene contains overlapping faces, which can cause black splotches to appear in the rendering.  For more information,  see the Secondary Rays Bias example .  When overlapping faces are present in a scene, in order for GI to calculate correctly, it is often necessary to assign a 2-sided material to the overlapping objects in addition to enabling the Secondary rays bias option. Clamp Max Ray Intensity  – Uses the Max ray intensity value to suppress the contribution of very bright rays, which can typically cause excessive noise (fireflies) in the rendered image. The  Max Ray Intensity  value is applied to all secondary (GI/reflection/refraction) rays as opposed to the final image samples, allowing fireflies to be effectively suppressed without losing too much HDR information in the final image. Max Ray Intensity  – The maximum ray intensity when  Clamp Max Ray Intensity  is enabled.  Example: Secondary Rays Bias   This example shows the effect of the  Secondary rays bias  parameter. The scene has a box object with a height of 0.0, which makes the two sides of the box to occupy exactly the same region in space. Due to the overlapping faces, V-Ray cannot resolve intersections of rays with these surfaces. The first image shows what happens when the scene is rendered with the default settings. Splotches appear in the GI solution, caused by the fact that rays randomly intersect one or the other surface: In the second image, the  Secondary rays bias  is set to 0.001, which offsets the start of each ray a little bit along its direction. In effect, this makes V-Ray skip the problematic surface overlaps and render the scene correctly: Note that the  Secondary rays bias  setting  affects light ray calculations in the rendering (such as GI and reflections), but it alone cannot correct for materials on overlapping faces. In order to correctly render the overlapping faces, the material assigned to the box has its 2-sided option checked. This is so that the object looks the same way regardless of whether the camera rays hit the top or the bottom of the box. If the material did not have this option checked, it would appear "noisy" even though the  Secondary rays bias  is greater than 0.0: Volumetrics Enable Probabilistic Volumetrics  – When Probabilistic volumetrics is enabled, the volumetrics will select a only few samples (based on the smoke density) along each camera ray, and evaluate the volume lighting at those points. When disabled, the volumetrics will evaluate the lighting at regular intervals using many steps along each camera ray, and thus each pixel will take longer to render, but when it's finished, it will have no noise at all. Enabling Probabilistic volumetrics is particularly useful when using the Progressive Image Sampler in V-Ray, as well as when using complex lighting on the volume. The Probabilistic volumetrics option makes the shading much faster, but also it can result in noisier renders with low sample counts. This mode applies to the Volumetric Grid (VRayVolumeGrid) and the Environment Fog. When using V-Ray GPU renderer, this option is not available in the UI, but is turned on and the Number of Direct Samples are set to 1. Number of Direct Samples  – Specifies the number of probabilistic samples to use when  Probabilistic volumetrics  is enabled. For the best rendering performance, use a higher number of samples for transparent smoke, and lower number for dense smoke. A very high number of samples will converge to standard ray-marching.