Ahhh… all those painfully slow minutes and seconds that we all spent in front of the screen, waiting for the next pixel to appear, so many memories. But, wait, we do have relatively cheap and quite fast processors now-days, so why not set up your own render farm in that case?

As technology advances, we have much more processor speed available, but it is important to have really fast processors when it comes to rendering nice scenes with VRay. In this article we are going to explore some possibilities and solutions that VRay offers us to render faster. Namely: we shall set up our own render farm!

I’m sure that any serious studio or individual needs to cut down production time. In case of studios, I’m also pretty sure that there are quite a few computers around, and they should be more-less newer vintage. In case of individuals in the rendering market, if you do not have, go buy another (or a couple) of computers plus – you are going to need them to be over the competition.

VRay and Network Rendering

VRay is a pretty awesome piece of software when it comes to using it with render farms. It has a built in option for network rendering, and is very simple to set up. There are a couple of rules that needs to be followed, but those are quite simple, and should be pointed out to the artists when working on a project.

For starters, you will need:

1. VRay installed on all computers – as there is no stand-alone version of VRay has to be installed with Max, Maya, etc.

2. A local network where computers can access each other – take care that firewalls are not blocking, that all computers are in the same network group.

Your system administrator can set that up, if not already, and it is also quite simple to create a local network, so I won’t go into detail there. One thing I need to warn you here is that you need a fast network, so low quality (slow) wireless connections are out of the question – if you are connected over WiFi @ 54MBPS – it will not be enough. A good old hard-wired 1GBPS is what you need. If you are asking if you could somehow do this over the Internet – forget it – it will be way too slow – just too many data exchanged in your future render farm.

Your First Render Farm

Once you have all that, you need to start the VRay render server on the slave machines by launching the “Launch V-Ray DR spawner”, which is located in the folder where you installed VRay: Start/Programs/Chaos Group/V-Ray Adv for 3dsmax 20xx x86/Distributed rendering. Note that the path may differ in regard to what software you installed VRay to, but take care that the 4Th section of the path starts with “V-Ray Adv for” and then Max, Maya or whatever. If you are running in Vista or Win7, make sure these have administrator privileges by either going into properties and assigning them the privilege, or by running them as administrator. If you do not do this it simply wont start.

When it starts, you should have a small VRay icon in the right of the task-bar, and your render farm should be ready to go!

Setting Up VRay

Now that we have the render farm running, you need to set up the parameters on the master machine. Bring up the Render Setup, assuming that you already set VRay to be the Production renderer, and switch to the “Settings” tab. There is a “Distributed Rendering” check-box there which you need to check. Once that is done, click on the “Settings” just right to it (all underlined with a fancy red color).

Ok, now, you need to tell VRay on what IP addresses are the render farm slave servers located by checking out the local IP addresses of the slave computers. There are plenty tutorials on the net how to find that out, so I’m not going into detail regarding that (type “how to find local ip address windows” in Google and there you go).

Once you have obtained the IP addresses of the slave machines, you need to enter them by clicking on the “Add Server” button and typing in the IP adress. Once you added all your servers, you can also check the “Save hosts in the scene” check-box, so the IPs get into the Max/Maya file that you are saving, and might need to work on it some other day too. If you take that file to another render farm, you will need to repeat the process of finding the IP addresses.

The check boxes left to the IP numbers should be self-explanatory – determines if we should use the server or not.

So, basically, if you made it thus far, you can hit the render to test your render farm and see how much faster your scene is generated!

Additional Considerations and Rules

There are a few rules that need to be followed not to confuse VRay and get a bad rendering using your freshly set up render farm.

First, all files should be on an absolute path – this means that the textures, accompanying files are on the server X, and all machines “see” the same path to the resources. Failing to respect this rule will result with e.g. a rendering without textures on machines that haven’t got the resource available.

Slave machines should be left alone – you will anyway not be able to work on them, as the VRay render server program shall take all the CPU power away.

It is recommended to make low-res tests before you start your 4 day rendering project, just to be sure that everything is OK.

Got a question about creating a VRay render farm? Comments section is below, so knock yourself out!

In the previous article I did some talk about setting up materials, some things that we should avoid, and gave a couple of examples. Now, as I said there that I need a full post for glass, diamonds and related materials, I took the effort to go through different material setups with VRay and give tips and tricks for rendering refractive materials. So, let’s see how to render photorealistic glass and diamonds with VRay Materials!

I have been checking out some forums previously to see what people are using for glass rendering, and I was astonished that folks out there suggest, for example, turning off the Fresnel reflections for glass – which is not good. Glass type materials all have Fresnel reflections. Diamonds, water and basically all the liquids have it.

Testing Glass VRay Materials

So, I made 3 different materials and applied them to the same glass object. The first one has IOR of 1.5 and the second has IOR or 1.7. They both have Fresnel reflections turned on. Now, the third material has no Fresnel reflections, but I lowered the reflectiveness to 50% (gray color, RGB: 128/128/128). Let’s see how that looks like.

VRay Materials - glass material tests

VRay materials - settings for glass

Glass materials have IOR values around 1.5-1.7. Let’s say that’s a fair estimate. The first two glasses look OK, but the third one can’t really pass as a glass material. Good, it’s refracting and reflecting and all that, but it’s just not a glass (rather plastics). It looks interesting though.

It’s best to observe thing in nature (real world, that is). I was sitting in a cafe some days ago with my friend and she was talking about something (as usual). I was checking out how the glass that I had on the table reflects objects on steeper angles (Fresnel) and I was actually moving my finger around the glass to see how visible it became. Other than being accused that I’m not listening I found out that the glass really had nice Fresnel reflections. Luckily, I can multitask so I repeated what she said, so it was all good. OK, back to our VRay Materials.

Note that I also added a Fog color to the material, a light turquoise color with a certain multiplier. Regarding the fog multiplier, my value is set to 5. It greatly depends of the unit system you are using how this value effects the scene, and it’s also dependent of the object sizes, so I’m going to leave you experiment with it. If you are not getting the light turquoise colors on some parts of the glass, well, crank up the multiplier!

I’ll also add that the Max Depth parameter is important. If you want to speed up rendering lower those values to 10. I however like to keep those pretty high, so the light bounces around and produces a nice glassy effect.

For the sake of simplifying your life, I included a screenshot of the material settings of the middle glass object, so you can use those values to make your own VRay glass materials. Note that the top color pop-up is the color I used for the Fog Color. Click on the image for a bigger preview, and watch for the scroller when you do so on the right side – some pretty important settings are there in the lower part of the screenshot. Namely, the reflect on back side option, which needs to be turned on.

Advanced Glass Materials for VRay

Now that we are relatively happy with the VRay material we created, let’s kick up a notch.

All the refractive materials have dispersion effects. The dispersion of light is the effect when the light passes through a material and decomposes it’s spectrum by refracting different wave lengths with a slightly different IOR. This effect also produces rainbows, the zillion colors in a diamond and so on.

VRay 1.5 or older, does not have a dispersion effect incorporated within the material itself, so here, we are going to do a little trick. BTW, I hear the the new VRay 2.0 already has a built in dispersion control, and it works really good as I can see from the official demonstrations.

Dispersion trick material

Open a new material and choose it’s type to Vray Blend Material. Now, take your favorite glass material and copy it to the first 3 slots. Be careful not to make instances of the material, but copies, because we are going to modify those 3 separately. Note that the Base material is to be left empty.

Once you got that one, choose the fist color field right to the materials to red, green and blue. Use fully clear values as shown on the right screenshot. By this we are separating the red, green and blue photons and composing a material that will act differently for different wave lengths of light.

Once that is set up, go to each and every of the three materials and add a slightly higher IOR. The first (red) is 1.7, the second (green) is 1.75 and the third (green) is 1.8. Be careful to choose custom Fresnel reflections and set that value to 1.7, because reflection of light does not cause dispersion and rainbow effects.

Let’s see how that looks like!

Glass VRay material with light dispersion

Note that I turned on the caustics for this example, so it’s even more interesting to see how this trick works on dispersed refracted light. I also removed the chequer texture, so you can see the refraction and the “minimal rainbows” that it’s producing. The effect is much more profound in the next example I’m going to present you. The glass object walls are quite thin, so basically the dispersion is smaller than those in a diamond, for instance.

Rendering Diamonds With VRay

Another nice case when you need refractive materials setups is rendering of diamonds. Nice, shiny all the colors are present in them (for a white diamond, that is), no wonder that everyone likes them.

Diamonds have a very high index of refraction (2.417), which makes them break and bounce light internally much more than any glass or liquid type material. Basically that is what is making them so shiny and also adds “fire” to it, as the diamonds experts would say.

Diamonds rendered in VRay

The material I used here is basically same as the “rainbow glass” material, I just used IOR values for diamonds and turned off the fog color (set it’s color to full white). The IOR values for the refraction were gradually increased from (red) 2.417 to (green) 2.437 and (blue) 2.457.

This basically conludes the crash-course about rendering refractive VRay. Try to enjoy the experimentation with new materials, I know I did!

Fine tuning VRay materials can be somewhat time consuming, but if you really want to be step ahead more close to photorealism, it’s a bet that you should take – the benefits are far better than the time consumed to research the issue. So let’s dig in VRay materials!

If you checked the previous article that is actually similarly related to basics of VRay materials as this one, or, if you already know some things about VRay materials  (I’m talking about really knowing, not “I heard about it stuff” thing), here are explanations are rendering examples of some advanced material setups so you can take the next step to mastering your VRay materials knowledge.

In the previous article I started with displaying a simple scene with some objects (the coffee scene) and I promised to explain how I did set up those materials. Here, we are going to do a step by step tutorial about that, and touch some more possible scenarios that you might need when defining materials for your render projects.

Before we continue, let’s take a flashback and check out the coffee scene rendering once more!

Coffee scene rendered using VRay

Fine Tuning VRay Materials

As we previously learned the basic VRay material settings, we shall learn now how to properly combine and use all of it’s properties. We shall now go over each material, except the materials from the background (the sofa and the floor).

Ceramic

Let us start easy by analyzing what settings we need for ceramic. I presume that you are more-less familiar with the VRay materials subject, so you basically know these at least in theory. So, the best would be if you have an object that is made of ceramic (coffee cup maybe?). OK, I’m sure you do have some objects that are made from that material, so do yourself a favor: grab it and start the visual analysis.

A regular (non-trained) person would say it’s only a coffee cup or a ceramic figurine or whatever the object is, but you, as someone who is in the rendering business should be able to tell much more. Namely the main characteristics of that material. So, fire up 3D Studio Max (or Maya, or whatever you use with VRay) make a new VRay material and let us start filling in the data.

The first one is the diffuse color or texture. As in this case we can use only a color estimate, we shall do so. Ceramic usually has a bright, clear white diffuse color. Set it so, but beware that perfectly white objects in real world are very, very rare. So instead of taking the color value scroller and cranking it all the way up set it to a bright gray (RGB: 200/200/200).

Intermezzo: Color values in the real world

Here, we shall take a small detour from the main subject which is actually still connected to the VRay materials setup. Let me share a tip with you – and you can test it for yourself too.

Make a very simple scene, a room without windows (draw a box, convert it to a poly, invert normals) place a cube and a sphere in there, and a light. Now, create a new VRay material and set it’s diffuse color to full white. Set up the renderer to do indirect illumination and render the scene. You will probably play a bit with the light intensity to get the illumination right. One important thing: set the color mapping type to exponential as it is the way that things work in nature. Once you get a decent rendering (light amount), it should look something like this:

Full white diffuse color - problem with rendering

Nope, there is nothing wrong with VRay, it’s the settings you use. As it’s painfully obvious, this scene has no contrast. Yes, the full white color of the objects is creating this effect. So, when you are defining your VRay materials, you need to keep in mind that even such a trivial setting as the diffuse color can and will have a big effect on your rendering. Even if you use the linear color mapping model, the contrast will still low or mediocre.

Let me explain what is going on here with this example. As you set the color in the VRay materials for the object to full white, the photons are bounced off the surfaces all over the place and practically nothing is “eating up” the light. There are similar effects that can happen on other material properties, so I advise you to instead of downloading the first VRay materials database you find (and using it without ever testing them out), please, I do urge you to experiment and use your brain. That’s what will make you different and better as an artist or a professional (or both) from others. Not that all those share-ready materials are bad, I’m just trying to explain that it’s better to know how things work so once you got a real job on your hands or some project that is important for you, or already there and holding your head without knowing what the problem is – so instead, you are “in the zone” and a pro. I revoke the said about downloading of VRay materials libraries if you are planning to back-engineer those – that is a good idea if they are giving good results.

Ok, now lower the diffuse color to RGB: 200/200/200, crank up the light source power to 500% of the previous value and hit render again. The result should be close to this:

Light gray diffuse color - a much better solution

Much more contrast now. Good. I could have increased the light amount a bit more than 500% though.

OK, back to our VRay materials now.

Porcelain/Ceramic

Porcelain/Ceramic VRay material

Once you set the diffuse color to a proper value (can be set a bit higher than the recommended 200/200/200 value), let’s move on to the next part of setting up ceramic VRay materials.

Porcelain is a reflective material, and is usually slightly blurring the reflections. It also can be pretty much characterized as a material that has Fresnel reflections. The strength of the reflections (Reflect color value) can differ because it can be set pretty low if you are not using Fresnel reflections, or close to full white if you do so. You won’t make a big mistake in either cases.

We shall set the Reflection color to RGB: 200/200/200, same as diffuse color. The Reflection glossiness is at 0.85, Subdivs to 16. Now, regarding this parameter (reflection glossiness), you can play with it a bit. You will start to get hang of how much you need to put this value to to get the glossiness value you need not only for this material, but only from looking at something what you see in the physical world. Experience will give you that you “see” VRay materials characteristics in the real world.

Next, turn on the Fresnel reflections and click on the “L” letter beside the option. This VRay materials option is a lock that locks the value to the Refractive IOR. Once you unlock it set to 1.8. The higher the value to more reflections from surfaces that are towards the camera. Appropriate values for porcelain IOR are from 1.2-2, depending on the effect you wish to achieve.

Wood

Wood VRay material

For creating VRay materials for wood, the first thing you need is a good wood texture, preferably tileable. Load it to the appropriate material slot once you got it. There are number of ways to get your hands on good textures. Either take a camera and do photos of materials/textures you have at hand, or just type “free textures” in Google and there you have it.

Once you have that, set the Reflect color value RGB: 170/170/170, and fire up the Fresnel reflections too. Unlock the IOR and set it to 2.4. If you use lower values the table (I’m talking about the example render, the first image on this web-page) might not do reflections where you want it, so specially on the scene setup I used, I needed a table that would reflect a bit more, so I put in a bit stronger value. This is an appropriate value for surfaces that are “quite” polished.

The Reflection glossiness needs to be set to 0.9, and the Subdivisions value to 32. The lower the Reflection glossiness is the higher the Subdivision value is to be set – if not you will get noise on the surface because there are not enough samples collected to calculate a valid light solution for the pixel/object in question.

Note that this value seems to be a sample grid definition, so a value of e.g. 8 VRay makes 8×8 ray samples from the point in question – beware, the higher the value it needs exponentially more time to render. So, be careful not to put in values that are too high but produce no visible enhancement to the rendering. I personally never used values higher than 48, and I figure that values higher than 64 have no sense except in really, really rare situations of creating some really not standard VRay materials.

(There is no) Metal Spoon

Metal VRay material

Just kidding, here it is! So, rendering metals are a bit tricky thing regardless if you are using VRay materials or default Max’s materials. It took some time before I figured out what the diffuse color of metals are. It’s close to black, at least in our spoon case.

No, I’m not kidding. Try it. If you set the Reflection color of the material to full white (full reflection) it will become a mirror. If you lower that value (to RGB: 190/190/190, however metals can have much lower values than that and still reflect a sufficient amount of ligth to look metalish), as metals do not have such a profound reflection value, the reflections will be less prominent, and the diffuse color will kick in. Try setting the diffuse color to white – you will get a very smooth plastic material, or something similar. Lower the diffuse value to gray – it’s much closer. Set is to nearly black (RGB: 4/4/4) and you are getting something that looks like a highly reflective metal.

See that I set the value close to black? As previously stated, the extreme values kills reality in the rendering. So, there is NO clear black in nature. Except if it’s a brand new secret military aircraft painted with some special “really and totally black” color which is usually not the case, and they generally never occur in nature (don’t grow on trees) so forget full black. Always go with non-extreme values when defining VRay materials.

Note that different metals have different color values, but for the situation here, the diffuse value is good to be set to very low.

Now, to get rid of the mirror feel of our metal VRay materials, set the reflection glossiness to 0.98 (or a bit lower, e.g. 0.9 ).  Metals that are brushed to be highly reflective have basically no Fresnel reflections, so leave this one off. However, you might use Fresnel for rendering metals that are not so polished, for instance metal parts of a tool. For these material types the Reflection glossiness is lower.

More VRay Materials

Basically that is all I wanted to introduce to you in this article about VRay materials. The only significant property that I did not elaborate about are refractive materials (glass, water, diamonds…) because it deserves a separate post/web page – the subject matter is a bit more complex, so I’ll need more space to wave around. However, the material is under preparation and will be available soon. Correction, I added the post! Click the link to check out the Glass and Refractive VRay Materials!

Other than that, the main point of this article is to teach you about setting up your custom VRay materials, and that there are rarely absolutely clean colors/values of materials in nature. Failure to respect that will result in a rendering that will look like rendered, and not our goal – rendering photorealistic scenes using Vray materials settings that are precisely set to do the job.

If you checked out some renderings with VRay on various site and forums, you probably wonder how the hell did they do it? Well, there are a couple tricks I’m going to share with you about photorealistic rendering using Vray materials and rendering setups so you can too have photorealistic renderings using VRay materials!

Materials in the Real World

Vray has a very interactive and handy material setup interface, which you will surely love once you familiarize with it. The usual settings that are basically in the default material editor if you are using Max or Maya are more close to the model that is used in computer games. It is also quite old, and is only an approximation of the real light behavior model.

Photorealistic rendering using VRay - a simple cup of coffe

To get you more interested in the subject, here’s an image (on the right) I rendered using VRay as a demo of using some advanced VRay materials and render setups. You like it? Good! Let’s party then!

VRay materials lets us define actual physical properties of materials that are based on light physics, so once you understand this model you will be able to create any custom material for any purpose.

For a brief moment, let’s stop and take a look around out rooms. Everything we see has 5 major characteristics:

1. Diffuse texture
2. Specular texture
3. Reflection factor
4. Refraction factor
5. Bump texture
6. Displacement texture

And a couple minor characteristics which we are not going to get into this tutorial, except for bump mapping which is quite basic, and the displacement feature of VRay materials that is actually a “sin” not to mention.

Note that the term “texture” can also be referred to as “color” of the surface, but I used the “texture” term deliberately because no object in the world has the absolutely same color all over it’s surface – so we are actually talking about textures all the time.

Unless, it’s something we can approximate with a constant color. A glass window, for instance. Still, even in that case, it’s advisable to add some very light texture on the glass surface adding realism. If you do not do that you will end up with a perfect rendering and that’s not photorealistic.

Next, let us go over all these Vray materials characteristics with rendering examples how they actually work. Later I will do a combination of VRay materials properties to simulate real world situations, and at the end we shall do a simple rendering of a coffee cup. I’ll also explain how to set up the materials for that one.

Defining VRay Materials

Diffuse Properties

Diffuse property

The diffuse texture has been used around for quite a long time. Back in time, when the CPU/GPU power was pretty low, we were all happy that we had at least have that one. Basically, it describes colors that are present on the surface. So I applied a simple stone texture to the sphere over at the right image using VRay materials. This is as simple as it gets regardless of what model of light or renderer you use.

Note that you can click on any image to see it larger.

Specular property

Specular Properties

In this simple example of specularity, I’ll only add a 100% specular property to the surface – which means it’s fully reflecting the environment. Let’s check out the image on the right. Not that I also added (my favorite) checkered marble as a floor so we see how the sphere is reflecting it.

Vray materials here are doing a pretty good job here specially if you take into account the next feature.

Let’s take a look at the Reflection Glossiness (Refl. Glossiness) parameter. It basically defines how uneven the surface is on a molecular level. Think of it as really, really small bumps that you need to zoom in pretty much to be visible. What it does is that it adds a bluriness factor to the reflection, so we can simulate surfaces that are not mirror flat. Adding a subtle bump map and tiling if a lot of times over the surface would produce a similar effect – and that is actually what happens in nature. But, to speed up things the Reflection Glossiness is added so we can take advantage of it.

Specularity with a blurry reflection

Let’s check out the results at the right image. The additional VRay materials parameters applied here are:

Refl. Glossiness: 0.9
Subdivs: 32
Interpolation: No
Max depth: 5
Exit color: Black (RGB: 0,0,0)

There are some additional parameters that are associated with the Reflection Glossiness – namely the Subdivision (Subdivs.) that is defining how many test rays are to be shot out to sample the surroundings. Basically, the lower the Reflection Glossiness the higher the Subdivisions settings need to be. If the Reflection Glossiness is set to 1 this parameter is ignored, and only one ray is shot out to sample the reflection of the VRay materials.

The Max. Depth parameter defines how many times the ray shot out to determine the reflection can be bounced from other reflective or refractive materials. The Exit Color defines if the number of maximum trace depth has been reached what color to apply at the end of the trace point. Note that this does not mean what color will be applied as a final color to the pixel in question.

I basically never use the Interpolation parameter, as it actually blurs the result. It is to be used when the Subdivs value is low, and you still want to have a render that is relatively decent, not blotchy. It is also recommended to use this VRay materials feature if you are creating an animation because it causes severe flickering of the rendered solution.

Fresnel Reflections

Fresnel reflections

Next, you can use Fresnel reflections with your VRay materials. A Fresnel reflection is a physical characteristics of the material that is getting more reflective the steeper the angle between the viewer and the surface itself. A perfect real life example is when you are driving on a highway and you see that the road close to the horizon is actually reflecting like a miror – you are actually looking at a Fresnel reflection. Other materials also have this property, for instance porcelain. Here is a material rendered with Fresnel reflections.

Note that you can also tweak the IOR (Index of Reflection) with the Fresnel model – the bigger the value, the sooner it reflects objects around on less steep angles.

Refraction Property

Simple refraction example using VRay

Usually refraction comes with reflection in nature, but bare in mind that these are two different things. Reflection is when a photon makes “ricochet” from the surface, and refraction means that the surface is transparent and the photons are going through the material, breaking the trajectory of light by some angle (IOR, Index of Refraction/Reflection). For this VRay material rendering example I turned on additional render settings so the light that is refracted is properly simulated. I should also have done that for the reflection, but I shall provide a glass example later that will contain both reflect and refract with additional render settings to simulate photons focused from the glass acting as lens.

The refraction has no Fresnel property, but still has an IOR factor which we can play with once we understand the basics how this works.

For rendering refraction and reflection properly using VRay materials you must check out the Caustics section of render settings, which will be further discussed in an article related to glass, refractive and reflective rendering tricks. Note the light refracted to the lower part of the sphere and to the floor.

Bump texture applied

Bump Property

The bump texture is used, as you already may know, to simulate uneven surfaces without geometry, so we get faster rendering times for details that are anyway too small to be presented with geometry. I used a simple bump texture accompanying the stone texture we used for the diffuse texture test. There is a factor associated with the bump and it defines in some relative terms how “deep” the bump should be simulated. Setting this property might differ very much depending on the texture you use.

VRay materials using bump has also a nice feature that it will do some displacement depending on the angle of view without making the surface actually come out. This feature is called parallax mapping. The feature that can actually make the bump come out from the surface is discussed in the next secion.

The bump map/texture settings are available a bit lower in the “Textures” section of the VRay material.

Displacement Property

Displacement Texture rendered with Vray

There is a very handy thing you can use with VRay materials – using the previous bump texture we shall apply it as a displacement texture. No you may ask, what’s the difference? Well, VRay calculates the amount of displacement and creates an actual geometry of the surface, so the texture is displacing the surface as it would be a high polygon model. This is really helpful if you want to render a stone wall (for instance) and you are really not in the mood to create actual geometry. Even if you successfully create that geometry it will cost you a LOT of time. So, let’s check you how this looks like in an actual VRay rendering (image on the right).

Beware that the slight changes in the high map can produce a lot of extra geometry and is also quite visible. So, if you are using textures such as the example it is recommended blurring it a bit. It is also recommended to keep an eye on the rendering setup displacement Max. Subdivisions parameter which is controlling how many subdivisions are to be made to the geometry. It’s also a good idea to combine the displacement texture with the bump texture, so you get both geometry plus the small details from the bump.

Using Photorealistic VRay Materials

Now that we learned all these VRay Material properties, let’s take a step further and combine some of the material setups we used thus far. We shall render a stone material that has a displacement, and is wet. This should be the next step taken towards creating your photorealistic VRay Materials setups in the future.

Let’s digress for a moment from VRay and it’s material settings. Let’s try to think in real world parameters. The diffuse texture is simple, just apply it. The displacement is also a piece of cake (except for the renderer, it slows it down quite a bit). Now for the specularity. Wet surfaces tend to have strong specularity, so we shall put that parameter close to 1. As for the others, just leave it as default, except you need to turn on Fresnel refractions.

Combining the material properties - a wet stone

If you want to be a professional using VRay to render jaw-dropping scenes, you must understand that the material settings are very subtle, and it’s basically best to observe those in real life situations. With time you will develop an ability to basically “see” parameters you need to set up in VRay to have the same result – or close to it. You will always need to do test renders to see if every material is just as it should be.

OK, let’s check out our stone ball now!

Next, let us explore some more advanced and real life examples of VRay Materials, and as promised, I’ll give you examples of materials used in the first image in this post (the photorealistic rendering of a coffee cup).

Continue to: Photorealistic Rendering With VRay – Material Examples

Have fun exploring VRay materials for your ultimate photorealistic renderings!

It’s nice to have Google Maps on your web-page for various reasons, so if you are using WordPress, here’s a handy tutorial how to add a WordPress Google Map in 5 minutes!

Preparations for Inserting a Google Map in WordPress

Google Maps is a flexible API for getting Google Maps to your website, WordPress included. The simplest way to do that is using an IFrame, and Static Google Maps. So, let’s go over what you need to get a WordPress Google Map!

First, you need a WordPress plugin called InsereFrame. It lets you insert IFrames using short-codes. Once you install it, activate it, and we are finished adding new plugins for our needs.

Google Map Settings for the embedded window

Now, go to Google Maps, and navigate around, find the spot you need to display in your WordPress page or post. Once you found the location, you need to click on the “Link” tab in the upper right corner. A small frame will pop up offering you embed links from email or website. You need the second option, but even better,  click on the “Customize and preview embedded map“. A new window will pop up (if your browser lets new windows to be popped up, check browser settings if this window does not come up).

What is really lovable in the pop up window is that you can choose number of parameters for your Google Maps window that you are going to embed to WordPress. First, you can set the size (resolution) of the window, next the map type, and all that with preview! As far as the Map types go, I recommend using any except the “Earth” type. This is because if one wants to preview in Google Earth style, needs to download a plugin for that. Ok, it’s not such a big problem, as your embedded window will display a nice link to download the plugin, and once it’s installed the user is ready to view the maps in Google Earth style (3D) too.

You can also scroll, position, rotate (if in “Earth” mode), and once you are happy with it, copy the lower code from the window (“Copy and paste this HTML to embed in your website”).

WordPress Google Map Embedding

Once you have the code copied, you need to add it to your post or page like this:

[ iframe:  width="425" height="350" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" src="http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=36.102376,-112.060547&spn=24.76128,37.353516&z=4&output=embed" ]

It’s enough to copy the parts that are limited with the <iframe> code, like shown on the right image. You can drop the last <iframe> and convert the start and end <,>’s to [ and ]. Add a “:” after iframe and you are ready to go.

Important: you need to add the iframe and google maps code you copied from our pop-up window IN HTML EDIT MODE! If you are in visual mode the code will get messed up and your WordPress Google Map will show the whole Google Maps window, like you would see it while visiting the actual site. So, if you are having that, delete the code and re-add it in HTML edit mode. Afterward it’s safe to switch back and forth between Visual and HTML edit mode.

I added spaces after and before the ]’s so the IFrame plugin does not convert that to an actual IFrame. I did a small modification in the positioning and zooming of the previous code (which was showing the US west coast), and now it’s showing the general San Fransisco Bay area:

Other than that, you are ready to go! Enjoy your new Wordress Google Maps!

The WordPress permalinks structure of your website or blog is one of the most important things you need to know about. The URL that is generated via the permalink settings crucially effects how search engines rank your pages and/or posts. It takes minutes to set it up properly and the benefit far bigger than the time “wasted” on it.

Here’s an article for you to teach you how to set up the WordPress permalinks properly in and some examples how to make the most effective URLs for your pages!

Before I start telling you how and why is this all very important, first, let’s go to the WordPress Settings and check out what are our options there.

WordPress Permalink Settings

Wordpress Permalink Settings (click to enlarge)

Let’s head to the page where you need to set up your WordPress permalinks structure. Open up your site’s administration and go to Settings/Permalinks (right image). As you see, you have a couple of options there. You can leave the WordPress permalinks to default and have /p=1575 in the URL, change to date or day related permalinks or put up a numeric one.

What we need here is the last one: the Custom Structure. Let me explain why.

Google and all the major search engines keep the URL as a part of the ranking algorithm, checking keywords and density there. So, if you leave the WordPress permalinks type to any of the suggested ones (except the last one) you are actually more-less making a mistake. If your URL for the post is “http://mycoolblog.com/2010/4/4/p=4353/” what did you tell to the search engines? You told them that your site is “my”, “cool” (BTW, search engines do not actually think your site is cool if you write that in the URL, it only tells them it is related to the “cool” word) and “post” plus a bunch of numbers that noone cares about. So, this is bad. Let’s check out now how to properly set up the WordPress permalinks settings!

One Permalink Customization to Rule Them All!

At this point we shall look what WordPress offers us to set up a permalink structure that is custom and fits our needs from the aspect of human readability and Search Engine Optimization.

If you enlarged the previous image you probably noticed that the WordPress permalinks is set to custom, and has the “/%category%/%postname%/” in the field that is otherwise empty by default. What this actually means is this. You wrote a post about “growing chilly in your garden”, and that went to the “food” category. Good, so the post URL will be:

Home URL + / + categorie + / + growing chilly in your garden

what comes out as:

http://www.mycoolblog.com/food/growing-chilly-in-your-garden/

First, this is far more descriptive for human readers then having a bunch of numbers and p=68724. You actually TOLD the search engines what this post is about! It’s about food, growing, chilly, in, your and garden. As simple as that. WordPress will automatically add the categories and post titles to the URL, you only need to take care to give descriptive titles to your posts or pages.

Some people recommend the /%year%/%month%/%day%/%postname%/ WordPress permalinks structure, or the same with %categorie% added before the post-name. I agree that this structure is important for news type sites or if you want to apply for Google news – I think they will ask for a similar URL setup.

Here is the complete list of codes that WordPress supports for creating custom WordPress permalinks:

Some of the suggested %code-for-the-permalink-structure%s are not recommended by the good people over at WordPress.

So you can combine all sorts of styles with these codes. Once you set it up properly you will only need to choose the post categorie, tag, and give the article/post/page a proper slug:

Editing the slug post or page title in WordPress

Like shown on the image, and you are good to go!

Just set up the WordPress permalinks structure and the search engines will love you and then you can also start loving them back!

WordPress is great for creating web pages! HTML is cool, but, from time to time, or on a more regular basis, you need to add some PHP code to your page. Let’s take a crash course on the subject of inserting custom PHP code directly in your posts and/or pages!

If you need a custom php code executed in your post or page, you probably tried doing something similar as I did – copy pasted it directly into the editor. Next, you wondered why isn’t it working. Well, the content you put in the editor is either:

1. Text, image, video, audio or any feature supported by the Visual editor.
2. HTML code in the HTML editor mode

And that’s why it won’t work. By default WordPress excepts HTML code, not PHP.

Adding PHP Code to Your Post Using a Plug-in

WordPress is built in PHP, so it’s logical that it can use it, but for our purpose we will need to add a plugin that actually tells WordPress that it needs to execute PHP code. Type “Inline PHP” in the plugins search field (Plugins/Add New) and install and activate the “Inline PHP” plugin. You can also use the “PHP Shortcode” plugin that is based on the previously mentioned one.

Once you install one of these plugins adding PHP code is very simple. You simply use a shortcode to tell WordPress that there is a php block there!

Using the Inline PHP plugin:

[ exec]
echo 'This is a test';
[ /exec]

Using the PHP Shortcode Plugin

[ php]
  $a = 1;
  $b = 2;

  echo $a + $b;
[ /php]

Note: I added a space after the “[" so the plugin does not kick in. If I would not, you would not see the actual code. So, when you use the shotcodes, remove the space before the exec and /exec (or php /php if you installed the PHP Shortcode plugin).

WordPress Coding Usage Scenarios

And now you can go code-happy and add all kinds of PHP codes to your pages!

For example, you can write a page (not a post) about one of the subjects on your blog or website and list all the articles in that category using a simple php call.

You can also use php in widgets to add some custom gizmos you created on your own.

If your PHP code is quite extensive, you can create your own function that can be called with a single PHP line so your post does not get "overloaded with code". To do this you need to do the following:

1. Create the actual PHP function and add it to a folder somewhere on your site
2. Include the function in the theme's functions.php by adding this in the file:
   include_once (/my_custom_php_code/my_custom_function.php');
   With this you made your function(s) recognizable to WordPress. Note that the path is relative from the root folder of your website.
3. Execute the PHP function using the shortcodes in your posts, pages or sidebar widgets. For instance if you have a function in the included .php that is called DisplayDate() you would call it using:
   [ exec]DisplayDate();[ /exec]
   Again, I added spaces so the code does not get actually executed.

And that’s it! Happy PHP WordPress coding!

One of the best things with WordPress is that you can customize as you like. Using plugins, you can do almost (or totally?) everything. In this post, I’m going to give you the top 35 WordPress comments plugins making your site better than the competitor’s and make your visitors love you even more!

WordPress has a built-in commenting feature. You write in what you want, leave an email address, name, the comment, and hit the “Submit comment”. That’s it.

But, how many times did you post a comment and saw that you made a typo, without the possibility to edit? How many times, you wanted to add some custom smiley? How many times you wanted to see if there are new comments and reply, but not having to return every day to check out if anyone has disagreed with you (or if everyone agrees, so you can take credit)?

Customizing WordPress Commenting With Plugins

First, if you think that adding some funky WordPress comment plugin will jazz up you site’s ranking, well, it won’t. Not directly, that is.

Here, we are talking about visitors satisfaction. If your visitor is satisfied, will come back, bookmark you, or even put a nice link to your site (now that DOES improve ranking). Adding a plugin that allows one to subscribe to comments will also attract visitors back to you.

By adding comment enhancements with WordPress plugins, you are actually helping to build a community on your website. You can also encourage commenting by adding a beneficial “do-follow” link for your commenter, CommentLuv so others can see the person’s latest blog entry.

In the last section, we shall also talk about detecting and getting rid of spam comments.

Enhancing WordPress Comments With Plugins

As the title says, it makes the commenter’s life easier by adding some things that are handy, useful – and everyone loves those! Let’s enhance your website/blog with these cool WordPress comment plugins!

Facebook Comments for WordPress

Facebook Comments for WordPress plugin let’s the user make a comment while logged in to Facebook, thus having posted a comment in your blog and in Facebook too. Features number of comments, customizable styles, manual or automatic insertion to pages or posts. Definitely a social media plugin for comments that you must have.

CommentLUV

CommentLuv is one of the most popular plugins for comments right now. It adds a link right below the comment about the latest post from the commenter’s site. Nice way to inspire to write a nice coment! You get a link back to you(to the commenter) !

Do Follow

Do Follow is removing the “evil” no-follow from the links to the commenter’s site. This way, your commenters get a genuine link to their site with PR actually flowing towards them. This and the previous WordPress comment plugin makes a potent combination for attracting visitors to your site. There are also “do-follow” directories that you can submit your site to in case you have this plugin installed and activated.

Recent Comments with Gravatar

Recent Comments with Gravatar is not exactly a WordPress comments enhancer – it is a sidebar widget. But I find it important mentioning it here, because it inspires the commenters by displaying the most recent comments on every page of your site in the sidebar. And, it’s visually appealing to have such gizmos on your WordPress website.

Top Contributors

Top Contributors WordPress plugin is a widget that lets you display the top contributors (commentators) either in a form of a list with Gravatar images, or as a Gravatar list only.

Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering

Greg’s Threaded Comment Numbering is a WordPress comment plugin that adds numbers to the comments. You can use custom style numbers too. Easier for referencing.

Greg’s Comment Length Limiter

Greg’s Comment Length Limiter for WordPress is another great plugin from Greg. It is simply adding a configurable limit to the number of characters in the comment, so your visitor does not get “keyword happy”. Displays the “characters left” below the comment dialog box.

Custom Smilies

If you feel that the WordPress provided smileys are boring you can use the Custom Smilies plugin to jazz it up!

Tango Smileys Extended

If the previous WordPress plugin did not satisfy your lust for smileys, here’s one that will blow your socks off. Tango Smileys Extended delivers 202 smileys in the plugin that replaces the original WordPress defaults. Click to insert into comments!

Editable Comments

Editable Comments WordPress comment plugin allows the commenter to edit it for the during of time window you set. Good if one makes a typo and want to edit that, before someone sees that and he/she is all embarrassed.

OpenID

OpenID lets the commenter use the OpenID authentication in order to leave name, email and site info when writing a wordpress comment.

Disqus

Disqus (pronounced “discuss”) is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. It has a great future, flexible, powerful, and provides leaving comments with OpenID, Twiter and Disqus logins.

GD Star Rating

GD Star Rating plugin lets you to set up rating and review system for pages, posts and comments in your WordPress website. There is a very nice amount of options you can set, has a template editor, you can even build short-codes for customizing this rating plugin!

Comment Rating

Comment Rating WordPress comment plugin is a great way of knowing your audience and about comments you have about your post. If you have a negative comment, it does not mean that your post is bad, others will comment negative to a that, so you know that the guy only had a bad day when he posted “that” comment.

Subscribe to comments

As the name says, Subscribe to Comments does exactly that. Someone adds a comment to the post – the subscriber gets a mail informing about the occasion, with optional un-subscription.

Most Popular Posts

Most Popular Posts is sidebar widget that displays the WordPress posts with the most comments by creating links to those. You can also choose what categories you like to be considered for the selection.

TinyMCEComments

TinyMCEComments WordPress comment plugin lets your making of comments (and previewing) a piece of cake using a WYSIWYG editor. Nice!

WP-Paginate

WP-Paginate WordPress plugin, amongst other things, can do pagination of comments, so it’s easier to navigate if you got tons of comments. It is also good using this plugin for limiting the number of comments per page. Too much comments can mess up your keyword density, thus effecting the SEO of a given page.

Gravatar Signup

Gravatar Signup WordPress comment plugin inserts a check-box for users who don’t have a Gravatar (based on the e-mail they typed in). It will initiate the first step of signing up for Gravatar, on the commenters behalf by getting an e-mail directly from Gravatar and instructions how to complete the process. Gravatar is the short for Globally Recognized Avatar. People like to see faces, logos, nice pictures. Also, it is highly probable that spam comments will not have Gravatars, so do go get one! And the WordPress plugin too.

Quote Comments

Quote Comments WordPress comment plugin adds an option to quote a comment by copying the quoted comment content to your comment field by simply clicking on the Quote link.

SEO Super Comments

SEO Super Comments WordPress plugin will create comment-dedicated pages on your site. It is known that comments can mess up the SEO of a page, drain PR, etc., so instead of allowing that to happen, this plugin prevents that.

You can also setup tracking for comments in Google Analytics, so you can keep track of visitors that left a comment.

Live Comment Preview

Live Comment Preview is a very nice WordPress comment plugin for previewing your comments, specially if you would like to use HTML in the text, and just not sure how it will all come out. This solves the problem!

Riffly Webcam Video Comments

Riffly Webcam Video Comments for WordPress allows you to post audio or video comments on your blog. Which is cool, because it’s another gem that allows your WordPress powered website to be more than you imagined!

Ozh’ Absolute Comments

Ozh’ Absolute Comments is a WordPress comment manager plugin that let’s you edit, post, reply comments from your admin page. Translated to nearly 20 languages.

Ozh' absolute comments logo

@ Reply

@ Reply copies the commenter’s name and adds an @ sign with a reference to the quoted person.

Moderation Notify Author

Someone dropped a comment that needs moderation? Moderation Notify Author WordPress plugin will informs you about that, so your commenter is not kept waiting!

WP Comment Remix

WP Comment Remix is a great WordPress plugin for extending the comments scope of functionality by adding a bunch of cool options: you can customize comment ordering, separate or remove trackbacks, adds admin functions, and 4 new sidebar widgets for your website!

Easy Comment Uploads

With Easy Comment Uploads you can easily upload images (or other files) to your WordPress comments. In case of images, Lightbox code is added too.

Thank Me Later

Thank Me Later WordPress plugin is something I do not seem often. I commented on some site, and I got a “thank you mail”. I knew that this is an automated message, but I anyway responded to it thanking back for the mail! Heh.

Anyway, Thank Me Later comes with a configurable and very flexible setup. You can even define different messages and assign probabilities of sending!

Anti-Spam Plugins

The reasons for leaving comments are not in the scope of this post, but we can divide visitors in 3 groups:

1. Persons visiting your site wants to leave a creative comment thus enhancing it further
2. Persons would like to say thanks for the great info
3. Persons leaving a spam comments with exclusively selfish interests, leaving a keyword rich name and links back to his/her site, with lousy comments.

The fist is OK, second is cool, the third comment should be deleted. Still, it might happen that the third group is acceptable if the comment is creative.

Let’s check out the most prominent and useful WordPress anti-spam plugins!

Akismet

Akismet has a private database of sites, e-mails, and commenting history. When you install the WordPress Akismet filter, your WordPress site will actually be connecting to Akismet’s database and check out if the data in the comment triggers any spam filter and return a spam/valid response. You will need a WordPress API key for this to work, plugin comes with the default WordPress installation. Instructions are available in your WordPress control panel.

Akismet is great, but I hear that a lot of site owners complain about having someone spammed their comments so they can’t comment on Akismet protected sites any more. There is a false-positive possibility, I also hear that a lot of webmasters are regularly checking out the spam folder for useful comments.

Bad Behavior

Bad Behavior is WordPress plugin that is actually analyzing the HTTP requests, and software that is making the request to make the comment. Even spam that is not yet anywhere detected (or present in some database as known spammer site or email) get’s stopped this way.

Cookies for Comments

Cookies for comments is very smartly designed WordPress plugin. It drops a cookie to your browser, and when one wants to comment, this plugin checks if the cookies are present in your browser. If not, it’s obvious that it’s some kind of spamming software in question, and not a valid commenter.

Si Captcha Anti-Spam

Si Captcha Anti-Spam WordPress plugin displays an image with letters and numbers the user needs to enter in the provided field to prove that he/she is not a spam-bot.

Math Comment Spam Protection

Math Comment Spam Protection adds a simple math equation in the comment form. 2+4= ? Simple – bots and automatic spam software do not solve this properly.

iQ Block Country

With iQ Block Country WordPress plugin you can block out a specific country area from visiting your website, based on IP database of countries. The visitor will be greeted with a nice 403 message.

How many times did it happen to you that you get “finished” designs from the designer, next, open the files and see that it’s all (or at least a bit) messed up? If you did not have experience with this, I presume that you never worked in the industry.

Let’s take a look at some advices and a simple example to make our designs pixel perfect!

You got a mail from your designer!

So, everything is cool, you have the deal, the designer finished the look and feel of the website or a catalog… and then, as you are checking out the files, you see that there is something wrong:

Designs at hand

So, if you see no errors here, look again. The two upper images are for different pages of the same website, with the same positioning. And, it should be completely the same. Same text, position, same bottle shape with a different paper for each product. It must be pixel perfect.

Closer look to the differences

The shape of the bottles is different, the paper on the left image is slanted, and if you look a bit closer, the 2008 is also a bit different too. So, besides the differences generally perceivable with an untrained eye, once you navigate to the next page (next product in the line) the letters will perform a pixel jump to the right. Let’s simulate this with a small gif animation I created for the occasion (image on the right).

And that’s what actually will happen if you navigate to the next page of the products. Unprofessional, right?

So, the designer says it is OK, the customer will see that it’s not. What to do other than fix the problem? In this tutorial we shall explain some precautions, give advices, and fix this example as we go.

Also, make sure to present this somehow to your customer so it’s clear on what did you spend more work hours, if it’s a hourly job. If not, always calculate such issues into the price – remember Murphy – if can go wrong, it will. After all, pixel perfect design should cost more.

Preparation for the designs

The best thing we can do is to have previous working experience in the area, so we know what to do. For the ones already caught in the cross fire, here is how to prevent it next time, and for the future website creators, designers and enthusiasts, here’s what we should have done:

1. Drink a whole bottle of the wine in order to understand it’s essence, thus creating better designs. Or, simply, if it’s not weekend, ask for a filled bottle and take a photo of it. Later, use the bottle photo and montage the wine etiquette(s) onto it.
2. Or, WITHOUT moving the camera (I guess the photographer has a camera stand?) replace the bottle with the next one, targeting the same location, so you have the same light conditions, position, and do a nice cut-out for both bottles in the same time, same position. If you need, use some reference markers, draw some lines on the table (or wherever the bottles are going to be put for the photo-session). Be creative.
3. The third, most prestigious option would be to render the papers on the bottle using 3d Studio Max, but that would cost a bit more, so options 1. and 2. are usually OK.

Remember, that you always need to have a good plan. Predict what you will need. Different projects might need different tools, images, setups, but you can see all that coming, so do something about it.

And, if things already look messed up, you can’t escape it. Fire up Photoshop and let’s do it!

Unification in Design

With most of the design types we have today, steadiness, clearness, and unification should be part of it. Unless, you are Picasso, but that’s a whole new set of rules we won’t discuss here. If there are different articles that you are presenting, they should look very much the same(layout) – it’s not the flee market, we are trying to do some professional work here!

In this case we shall make the positioning, the text, and the bottle to be the same.

Fixing the layers - step 1

We shall start by selecting the most appropriate layer group, the source, so we can make the other image from it. It looks like the “Merlot” text layer is moved 1 pixel to the left. Choose the Move Tool (default keyboard letter V) and move the text layer where it should be (you can also use the arrow keys to move the layer, and holding the shift key while pushing the arrows will multiply the movement by x10). But, after positioning the text layer I got this (image on the right). So, this will not be done with a simple positioning. What needs to be done is next:

1. Duplicate the reference layer group – the Cabernet Sauvignon in this case.
2. In this duplicated group, erase the “Cabernet Sauvignon” and “2008″ letters with the eraser tool (default keyboard shortcut “E”) – we have a graphics layer in this case, no actual fonts here
3. In the “Merlot” group, find the text layer behind the bottle and erase everything but the “Merlot” and the “2008″ text
4. In the bottle layer, erase the actual bottle, but not the “Merlot” text, and position it over the “Cabernet Sauvignon” letters. Be careful not to erase too much, so there is not enough material to cover the old bottle’s text.
5. Copy the “2008″ layer from the “Merlot” group as it looks sharper there.

Let’s get a bit more visual on these steps.

Fixing the layer differeces in Photoshop - Left: leaving only what is ok in the Merlot group, Middle: erasing the bottle leaving the "Merlot" text, Right: composing the layers into a new "cloned" pixel perfect look

Generally, you should always choose the best source and unify that. Or, of everything is blurry, messed up, bad, take time to draw everything from scratch in Photoshop, or whatever software you are using – quality is the thing that can lift you above others.

So, if you already have to fix someone’s work, better take an effort to make it right. And, if you are the designer, always keep track of the work done, test and check out designs before handing them out to the technical person setting up the final layout, may it be web or prepress.

Let’s check out how the designs should actually look!

Final designs

The actual point I’m trying to stress here is that with some fixing of the content you can do better than others. And customers do notice that.

Some pointers for web-design and prepress projects

The best thing you can have is experience. If not, use your brain. You can predict majority of things, what you need, setup, etc. But, using these 9 simple pointers you can evade a lot of problems:

1. Before even starting to work on the job, keep a clear list of expectations of work at hand
2. Present your solutions to the customer in a flexible manner – give advices but do not be too hard to except that a customer wants something that you might not like or approve.
3. LISTEN to what your customer has to say!
4. Always check the unified sections of your designs that they match perfectly
5. While designing, there is a lot of transformation done to the images, so they get blurry during the design phase – keep original source files high resolution, in vector format, as fonts, or once you have the customer accept the solution you can do the final graphics once more by inserting the images once more and transforming them only ONCE so they do not get messed up
6. If working in prepress, always get a signed approval, so if something is missing, you do not get blamed. Also, you need to take special care no to accidentally move some layer or object. This becomes more prominent if you are using a graphics tablet – it’s easy to accidentally move something while dragging the pen.
7. In web design, things look better – you can upload the new content in no time – prepress if a bit tricky. No editing after printing 10,000 flyers (and you messed up the phone number), so keep your eyes open!
8. And, keep a good communication channel open!
9. And if you have mediocre or bad material at hand, make an effort to produce quality by enhancing it – that’s the difference between “so called” and real experts.

In years of experience, I learned (and just can’t stress this enough) that good communication with your designer and customer is essential. It’s basically easy to fix problems discussed in this article, but if there are too many of these details, you might spend quite some time working on it, and that usually costs. Don’t be disappointed if you get such designs. Instead, sit down with your designer and discuss it.

Keep expectations at all sides clear, and you will do just fine.

Yeah, and do not forget to keep your work Pixel Perfect! It makes everyone happy.

In this article we shall explore one of the possibilities of popularizing your content – via pinging popular sites that will index your posts and pages in some way or inform other sites that you exist. Behold! Here is the extended WordPress Ping List!

So, you created your site, articles, posts, pages. Now, someone should come and visit your site and admire the work done. But, who knows that your site exists? No one – that’s who. You need to tell the world about your creation – WordPress ping list to the rescue!

The Ping List

For the ones who are new to website engineering and blogging, let me explain what a WordPress ping list is. For the ones that already know, the list you are looking for is in the next section, below.

In WordPress, under Settings/Writing, you will find the “Update Services” section (bottom of page). By default it is populated with “http://rpc.pingomatic.com/” (this could change in future versions, so if it did, it’s not my fault). The content of this field is actually the WordPress ping list.

What is this ping-o-mat-ic thing? It is a free service that your WordPress powered site pings (plain english: “talks to”) every time you post something new or change an existing content. The Pingomatic service contacts relevant sites further to let those know that you have something new you would like to share with others.

Pingomatic is not the only one that you can use (there is FeedShark, for example). These two site ping other sites further.

But, as I like to customize and tweak stuff myself  (and optimize to my own needs) I created this custom WordPress ping list, so I send a note to as many relevant sites as possible.

A Regularly Updated Extended WordPress Ping List

So, the more sites you ping, more popular you can get, Google indexes your pages faster, and you are letting others to know about your posts and pages. The following is a list of free ping services I use personally with WordPress. The list is a bit longer, and some people might criticize it, but this list has shown very nice results thus far:

http://ping.superfeedr.com/rpc

http://api.postrank.com/v2/ping

http://rpc.spinn3r.com/open/RPC2

http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping

http://ping.kutsulog.net/

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.readablog.com/

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://ping.myblog.jp/

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx

http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2

http://audiorpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.in/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.tw/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2

http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2

http://ping.fc2.com/

Feel free to copy-paste it as your new WordPress ping list for your website or blog, and you are ready to go!

Note: if you are targeting a specific area of the world, feel free to delete Google.”country code you do not need” so you do not ping those about your changes.

Additional Information

Some people are concerned that pinging too much can trigger some kind of a spam filter and hurt your site rank, indexing or whatever. I did not have problems with that.

For security and testing reasons I installed a WordPress plug-in (cbnet Ping Optimizer) that limits the ping services not to be too “trigger happy” every time you update or change you posts. It has controls such as limiting how much times per a period of time your site pings (e.g. Ping at most X time(s) within Y minute(s)). So I set it to ping only once every 15 minutes.

This WordPress ping list is highly effective for letting search engines that you have new content. Yesterday I wrote a post, and it appeared in search in 5 minutes after hitting the “Publish/Update” button. Coincidence? I dunno. You tell me.

Have fun using the Extended WordPress Ping List!