How to Create Realistic Road Puddles or Wet Paving in V-RAY For SketchUp

In this tutorial, you will learn how to render wet paving or road puddles road  in V-Ray 3.4 for SketchUp. This particular render technique is applicable for rainy scenes, sunset view scenes or night scenes, with strong vibrancy of colored street lights or car lights reflected on the wet surfaces. For this tutorial, I would like to render a roof parking area with wet paving for demonstration purposes.

SETTING UP YOUR BACKGROUND

STEP 1

Set-up your background scene by adding a HDRI. Here, I used the HDRI Rooftop Night from Poly Haven. Follow the setting for adding HDRI in the scene. Go to V-Ray Asset Editor> Settings> Environment> Background, change the value of background to 20 and expand the option selection > select Bitmap then load your HDRI. Under UW change the setting from UVWGenChannel to UVWGenEnvironment. Under the Mapping Spherical type, change the value of horizontal rotation based on your preferred angle view.

Step 1

The HDRI ‘Rooftop Night’ preview from Poly Haven.

HDRI

STEP 2

Still in the HDRI settings, change the value of GI (Skylight) to 20. Then expand the Environment Overrides  > enable the GI (Skylight) > click the loading option > select the Bitmap then choose your preferred HDRI. 

Step 2

STEP 3

Go to Lights and disable the Sunlight. We don’t want our HDRI to be overpowered by the V-Ray Skylight when we proceed to rendering.

Step 3

SETTING UP YOUR MODEL

 STEP 1

Set-up your SketchUp scene by adding a plane surface. Under Shapes > Rectangle, draw a surface plane.  Later, during the render process, this will serves as a base for the wet paving texture, rendered using V-Ray 3.4.

Step 1

STEP 2

Select the surface plane model, using the SketchUp Material tool box select and apply concrete material to the model.

Step 2

STEP 3

Go to V-Ray Asset Editor > Materials and select the material you applied to your  model plane which is the polished concrete old. Under VRayBRDF, go to Diffuse and click the load image. Under Bitmap > File click the Open file icon then select a more realistic concrete texture. If necessary, go to SketchUp Material Dialogue box > Edit > change dimension value.

Step 3

Concrete texture from istockphoto.

Texture image

STEP 4

Under VRayBRDF, go to Reflection and change to color surface from black to white by extending the level. 

Step 4

STEP 5

For entourage, add 3D cars to the scene. The 3D cars are available from 3D Warehouse.

Step 5

A Test Render

Find an appropriate view and save the scene. Run a test render. As you can see the reflection of the concrete paving is very strong. Hence, we are going to add reflection glossiness with appropriate texture.

Test Render

METHOD 1 (adding puddle road map using BITMAP)

STEP 1

Under VRayBRDF, go to Reflection Glossiness then click the load image icon. Expand the loading selection and select Bitmap.

Step 1

STEP 2

Select the appropriate map texture available in the folder. Here, we will be using the puddle road map. During the rendering process, in order to visibly notice the puddle road map, you have to change the size of the diffuse texture in SketchUp. Here, go to SketchUp Material Dialogue box and change the dimension size of the concrete texture by increasing the value. Here, the size of the puddle road map from the Reflection Glossiness is relative to the diffuse texture (concrete paving texture) from the SketchUp model. When done, click the render button for test render.

Step 2

Sample map texture, Puddles Road Map.

Sample Texture

Result so far using BITMAP.

BITMAP Render

METHOD 2 (adding puddle road map using FALLOFF)

STEP 1

Under VRayBRDF, go to Reflection Glossiness then click the load image icon. Expand the loading selection and select Falloff.

Step 1

STEP 2

Under Falloff > General > Color 2, click load image. Click the Bitmap and select the appropriate map texture available in the folder. Here, we will be using the puddle road map.

Step 2

 Sample map texture ‘Puddles road map’. 

Texture Map

STEP 3

Still on the Bitmap, under Manipulation, check Invert Texture. When done, click Back.

Step 3

Result so far using FALLOFF

Result so Far

RENDER SETTINGS

Under V-Ray Settings > Camera, change the parameters for Standard Camera with the following values (1) Film Sensitivity (ISO) from 100 to 120, Aperture (F number from 8 to 7, Shutter speed (1/s) from 300 to 260. To enhance your render image during post-production, add appropriate render elements for the scene such as denoiser, raw reflection, raw total light, Material ID, and Object ID. When done, click the render button.

Final Renders With Elements

My other works with wet paving or puddle road.

Other Works

Thank you for reading!

Benedict Caliwara

See more of Benedict’s work here.