This is a cut out view of a ceramic lined rotary valve, modeled in Rhino, rendered in Vray.
And, a detail view:
The texture mapping isn’t perfect, but I hope you all like it!!
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very nice 
Really impressive. Clean, sharp. Especially like the brushed metal on the circular flange at the top.
Great spun metal material. Does Vray have an anisotropic shader for that or did you use a texture map?
Thanks Jeff and arail! Much appreciated.
Brian, I created all the shaders myself from scratch. Vray has some pretty good control over anisotropy, but there aren’t any decent standard shaders ( that I have found) that give that effect out of the box.
I’m not near my workstation right now, and I created that a while ago, but from what I can recall, I made the textures in GIMP. I made a noise map and used a radial blur to get the radial machining marks which I used for both bump and reflection maps. I used a radial gradient map for the anisotropy rotation as well. I think the fresnel settings were bumped higher than is theoretically correct as well, to give the right reflective effect.
If anyone’s interested, I can go into a bit more detail when I’m next on Vray, if I can remember how I did it!
By the way, Brian, the modeling looks pretty straightforward on this, but there were a couple of fillets that had me pulling my hair out. Your videos were really helpful, so many thanks! Typically, once I had settled on an angle for the finished shot, none of the tough ones were visible, but there you go!
Thanks for the extra info and I’m glad I was able to help a bit with fillets. More renderers need anisotropic shaders to make this material type easier to hook up!
Vray is very powerful, and you have a lot of control, but you do need to work pretty hard. Lighting and geometry are crucial too. In this render of a venturi eductor, there’s a more pronounced anisotropic effect on the raised face of the flange because of the more pronounced grooves (still bump mapped) even thought texturing aside it’s the same material as the flat face
With metals, it’s really important to get the lighting and reflections right too, I’ve found. On this eductor, I set the HDRI to make the most of the nozzle shaft and the flange face, but ended up with the cut faces looking a little flat. I experimented with adding in some manual lights, but nothing really added to the result. HDRI Light Studio looks like it might be good for that kind of thing, so I’ll probably give it a try at some stage.
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Will be interested in hearing about your experience with this application. I like that you can ‘paint’ the light on an object - thus reversing the traditional process of positioning a light and aiming it at an object.
A really great book on lighting different materials, including metal, is Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting (that is a link to the 5th edition, which doesn’t yet have many reviews, the 4th can be found here).
I never seem to have enough time to get fantastic renders, but it was a very interesting and I felt applicable read to lighting real and not real world scenes 
James,
Sure glad that Brian set up the gallery, these renderings are are wonderful. Thank you for all the information you have provided, makes me think Vray might be worth checking out.
Thank you again … All my best … Danny
That’s exactly what I’m hoping will be helpful. I don’t know exactly how it works in practice, but it sounds like just what I need. I’ll give it a go on my next model and report back.
Thanks Sam, nice tip!
I’ve been using the physical camera on Vray, it gives better results, I think, but having no background or experience in photography it’s been quite a learning curve. I’ve come to the conclusion already that it’s definitely a good idea to approach lighting as a photographer would, so I can see that that book could be a real help. Cheers!
Thanks for the kind words!
I can’t claim to have great experience with other render engines, but Vray is very powerful, fast, and with the new express tools, easy to get a quick, quality render.
If you really want to dig deep it can get quite complicated, but it kind of all makes sense in the end if you invest a bit of time with it.
Great work.
James G.,
How much time do you have invested in this rendering.
Tom M.
Hi Tom,
Firstly, thanks!
I actually did this a couple of years ago, and it was the first real project I had done with Rhino and Vray. The modelling took a long time, mainly through having a make it up as you go along workflow, and needing to start again pretty much on a few occasions!
As far as the actual rendering, I’d say possibly 120 hours. It might even have been longer. Bear in mind though that there are no preset materials, so I had to do a bit of research, experiment, create some textures, learn about mapping, scratch my head about the mapping, and so on. That’s not including the hours extracting surfaces and so on from the model in order to apply materials though.
At least as much time was spent experimenting with lighting as creating materials. Catching the right light and reflections on the surfaces is every bit as important as a good shader.
Of course, after that work, I now have a decent library of materials, and a couple of versatile HDRIs that I know work in this kind of situation, so a lot of those hours are invested and effectively carry over to other projects.
Now, if I had that finished model, I’d expect to be able to get to a finished render in 10-12 hours, and the majority of those would be fiddling with the lighting and the camera settings in Vray. I can do something 90% of the kind of quality I prefer in a couple of hours though, if I just need to show a customer a decent quality shot.
I did this quickly for a customer in less than 2 hours, modelling included:
Awesome Rhino modeling and rendering!