This video gets you up-and-running with some production-proven render settings originally outlined by Robert Nederhorst. Thanks to him, and the Chaos Group team, we have some really useful and simple ways to render complex scenes. It may look a bit tricky at first to set it up, but by all means, save it a preset. I use a preset and apply it at the start of my scene, then set the vray common attribs afterward. You can also text edit the preset, and comment out all the bits that modify the common tab.
