--- title: "Universal V-Ray Settings" canonical: "https://documentation.chaos.com/space/VMAX/113587869/Universal%20V-Ray%20Settings" format: markdown --- This page provides a tutorial on universal settings for V-Ray that work for most still images. ## **Overview** --- The "universal" settings comprise a set of settings that work very well for still images in many situations and are the default for V-Ray. Please note that these settings are not optimal, in the sense that with enough tweaking, you can probably get similar quality with faster render times. The beauty of these settings, though, is that they require almost no tweaking, and you are guaranteed to get a good result in the end. The advantages of these settings are: - very little parameters for controlling render quality vs. speed - work for a very large number of scenes - produce high-quality results With the Progressive Image Sampler, the default **Max render time (min)** is set to 0.0 min. This means that rendering continues until the **Noise threshold** is reached. Want to follow along but don’t have a license? > Macro (ui-button) ## **Setting the V-Ray Renderer** --- 1. Set V-Ray as the current rendering engine (with the default V-Ray settings). 2. The default settings are optimized to work universally, so it is recommended to keep them: **Progressive** image sampler with **100** Max. subdivs and **1** Min. subdivs; **GI** enabled, using **Brute Force** as Primary GI engine and **Light Cache** as Secondary GI engine. 3. You can further refine the noise levels from the Progressive Image sampler rollout by adjusting the **Noise Threshold**. 4. You can control the amount of **AA** vs **shading samples** (for materials/lights/GI) using the **Min shading rate **parameter in the [Image Sampler rollout](https://docs-chaos.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/VMAX/pages/113587190) but the default value is optimized to work well for the majority of scenes. ## **Notes** --- - Avoid using sharpening AA filters. They can make the noise more apparent.