IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hello! My name is Brian Bradley and welcome
to SketchUp Rendering Using Twilight!
| | 00:09 | We will start things off by running
through an installation of the Twilight
| | 00:13 | plug-in and then just taking a bit
of time to locate Twilight's tools and
| | 00:17 | controls inside of the SketchUp user interface.
| | 00:21 | We will then take a look at using
Twilight's versatile lighting tools to add
| | 00:25 | illumination to our scenes.
| | 00:27 | This will include looking at the
Physical Sun and Sky system, as well as
| | 00:31 | some specific Twilight light types that can
be used to mimic artificial light sources.
| | 00:38 | We will naturally want to work closely
with Twilight's material system, starting
| | 00:41 | with diffuse or color services, before
moving on to the more complex reflective
| | 00:46 | and refractive material types.
| | 00:48 | We will make an examination of
Twilight's photographic camera controls, as well
| | 00:53 | as a consideration of just how we
can use Twilight's render presets in a
| | 00:57 | compositing-oriented render pipeline.
| | 01:00 | If you're ready to build your
SketchUp rendering skills, let's go ahead and
| | 01:04 | jump right in.
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| What you should know| 00:00 | Throughout this course I will do my best
to make you aware of tool locations and
| | 00:05 | keyboard shortcuts as I make use of
them inside the SketchUp publication.
| | 00:09 | However, when it comes to working with
standard SketchUp tools and performing
| | 00:13 | typical viewport navigation operations,
I will, to a certain extent, be assuming
| | 00:18 | that you have at least a reasonable
level of familiarity with the SketchUp
| | 00:22 | application and so will know
how to handle such operations.
| | 00:26 | If you are new to SketchUp and need
to learn how to master these and other
| | 00:30 | SketchUp operations before working
through our Rendering with Twilight course,
| | 00:34 | then I would strongly recommend you
check out some of the great SketchUp titles
| | 00:38 | already found on the lynda.com online
training library, especially focusing on
| | 00:42 | the Essential Training titles.
| | 00:45 | You have probably already noticed that
my SketchUp interface is a little bit
| | 00:48 | different from the one set up by
default inside the application.
| | 00:52 | Really, all I've done is gone into the
View menu, into the Toolbars option, and
| | 00:57 | I have disabled the Getting Started tool
set and enabled the Large ToolSet instead.
| | 01:02 | I have of course also docked the
Twilight toolbar to the top of my
| | 01:06 | SketchUp interface.
| | 01:07 | To be able to easily access the
model and texture files contained in the
| | 01:12 | exercise files download, there is a
little bit of setup you may want to run
| | 01:15 | through inside of the SketchUp application.
| | 01:18 | This simply consists of
coming into the Window menu,
| | 01:21 | coming down to the Preferences option,
| | 01:24 | and then inside the floating dialog
that appears, choose the Files section.
| | 01:28 | All we need to do then is point each of
these options, particularly the Models
| | 01:32 | and Texture images sections,
to our exercise files folder.
| | 01:36 | If you are not certain how to do that,
all you need to do is click on one of
| | 01:38 | the Browse buttons and then navigate to
where you have saved your exercise files folder;
| | 01:45 | in my case this is on the desktop.
| | 01:46 | Other skills that you will probably find
helpful as you work through this course
| | 01:50 | would include photography and its
general principles, but perhaps with a
| | 01:53 | particular focus on photographic
lighting and exposure techniques.
| | 01:57 | Of course, any knowledge we already
have of working with other render engines,
| | 02:01 | whether that's inside SketchUp or
another 3D application, those skills will
| | 02:05 | easily transfer over to using
Twilight in SketchUp as well.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a Premium member of the
lynda.com online training library, you have
| | 00:05 | access to the exercise files used
throughout this SketchUp rendering course.
| | 00:10 | The exercise files are in the Exercise
Files folder, which I've placed on my desktop;
| | 00:15 | you can of course store it wherever you like.
| | 00:17 | There are files for most movies.
| | 00:19 | They reside in subfolders
named according to the chapters.
| | 00:24 | It is not necessary for you to use these files;
| | 00:26 | you can use files of you own
in place of them if you like.
| | 00:30 | If you are a Monthly or Annual
subscriber to lynda.com, you don't have access
| | 00:34 | to the exercise files, but you can follow
along using files containing your own work.
| | 00:40 | Let's press on then and get
started with our SketchUp Rendering Using
| | 00:43 | Twilight course.
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1. Getting Ready to Render with TwilightInstalling the Twilight renderer| 00:00 | As Twilight is a plug-in render engine
for the SketchUp application and not a
| | 00:04 | part of the SketchUp installation
process itself, we thought it would be a
| | 00:08 | good idea to start this course
by quickly walking you through the
| | 00:11 | installation of Twilight.
| | 00:12 | The first thing we need to do of
course is download the Twilight install
| | 00:16 | application from twilightrender.com.
| | 00:19 | Once we are at the website, if we go to
the Downloads menu, you can see there is
| | 00:23 | a The Latest Version option.
| | 00:25 | If we click on this, we get a
link to download the latest install.
| | 00:29 | To save time, I have already downloaded
the Twilight 1.5 for SketchUp installer
| | 00:33 | application to my desktop.
| | 00:35 | In this instance, I will be installing the
PC version of Twilight on a Windows 7 machine.
| | 00:42 | If you were installing to a different
flavor of Windows, or indeed to Mac OS,
| | 00:46 | there will be some slight differences
regarding file paths used and the onscreen
| | 00:51 | dialogs that will appear
during the installation process.
| | 00:54 | In fact, during the course itself,
you may encounter one or two such differences
| | 00:58 | as we work through the exercises.
| | 01:01 | These will not affect the benefit you
can get from the course, and should be
| | 01:05 | easy to work around.
| | 01:07 | To get things rolling, all we need
to do is click or double-click on the
| | 01:10 | executable and the
installation process will begin.
| | 01:13 | Firstly, I need to just confirm that
I want this installer to execute by
| | 01:18 | clicking Run in the pop-up window.
| | 01:20 | We can confirm we want to install this
application by clicking Next in the Setup window.
| | 01:26 | Now of course we need to read and
accept our end user license agreement.
| | 01:30 | We do want to read through this
before a check in the I accept radio button.
| | 01:35 | Once we click Next then, we know
exactly what we have agreed to.
| | 01:39 | Next, we want to locate the root
folder for our SketchUp installation.
| | 01:43 | If it is not the default and we know
the address, we may want to type it in, or
| | 01:47 | we could just use the Browse
button to locate it on our hard drives.
| | 01:51 | Once that is in place,
we can once again click Next.
| | 01:54 | Now we have one last chance to check
that our installation details are correct
| | 01:58 | and that we do want to go ahead.
| | 02:00 | Once we're certain, we can click Install.
| | 02:02 | And then we're off and running
with the installation process.
| | 02:05 | Once it's done, we can click Finish on
the End screen, and that completes our
| | 02:10 | Twilight installation.
| | 02:11 | We're now set up and ready to use
the Twilight demo inside of SketchUp.
| | 02:15 | Of course if we've purchased the full
license of Twilight then we need to make
| | 02:19 | certain that it is fully activated.
| | 02:21 | To do that, we can go into Twilight's
Options dialog and then just click on the
| | 02:25 | Request License button, enter the email
address we used to set up our account on
| | 02:30 | twilightrender.com, save the generated
request file to disk, and then email it
| | 02:35 | to the folks at twilight.com.
| | 02:37 | Once we receive our activation
information back, we can again come into the
| | 02:41 | Options dialog and click on the appropriate button.
| | 02:44 | Here we need to enter our license details,
| | 02:47 | and once we've done that, our Twilight
engine is ready for production work.
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| Locating Twilight tools and features| 00:00 | The first time we start the SketchUp
application after running through the
| | 00:03 | Twilight installation process
| | 00:05 | we don't really have to do too much in
order to find Twilight's main control set.
| | 00:10 | This is because on launch we get this
handy floating toolbar that gives us
| | 00:15 | access to the vast majority of the
controls that we will use when working with
| | 00:19 | the Twilight renderer.
| | 00:20 | If for some reason we close this toolbar
down and need to find it again, just go
| | 00:25 | up to the View menu, come to the
Toolbars option, and from the flyout menu, come
| | 00:30 | down and choose the
Twilight for SketchUp option.
| | 00:32 | What we want to do for the next few
minutes is just look at what the icons found
| | 00:37 | on the Twilight toolbar represent.
| | 00:39 | We can see that our first icon is
in the likeness of a power button.
| | 00:43 | Clicking on this will open up
Twilight's Render dialog for us.
| | 00:48 | This floating window in itself houses a
number of controls and options that are
| | 00:52 | all related to the rendering process.
| | 00:55 | If we just take a look at the icons
across the top of the floating window,
| | 00:58 | you can see that they allow us to start,
stop, pause, and even save a rendered image.
| | 01:04 | The large area in the center of
this dialog is where we can view our
| | 01:09 | current render in progress.
| | 01:11 | Interestingly, our final icon gives
us the ability to export the current
| | 01:15 | SketchUp scene to an XML file that
can be read by the Kerkythea rendering
| | 01:20 | system, from which, incidentally,
the Twilight Render is derived.
| | 01:25 | The menus in this Render dialog
essentially mimic the icon functionality that
| | 01:29 | we have just outlined, but we do get one
or two extra options added in there as well.
| | 01:34 | On the right-hand side of our Render
dialog we have a number of options that
| | 01:38 | are split out into individual tabs.
| | 01:41 | The Render tab is where we essentially
control the output of our rendered images.
| | 01:45 | We work with Resolution and
Quality settings inside of this tab.
| | 01:49 | The Camera tab, naturally enough,
allows us to control aspects of Twilight's
| | 01:53 | virtual camera, including
focal length and exposure settings.
| | 01:58 | The Advanced tab, as its name
suggests, handles a number of advanced
| | 02:02 | Twilight rendering options.
| | 02:04 | Finally, we the Animation tab.
| | 02:06 | In here we're given the ability to
control options regarding Animation
| | 02:10 | rendering with Twilight.
| | 02:12 | And if we just close our Render dialog
and come back to our Twilight toolbar,
| | 02:17 | you can see the next two icons allow us
to create specific Twilight light types.
| | 02:22 | This would be the Point or Omni
light and a Twilight Spot light.
| | 02:26 | Our next icon opens up
Twilight's Light Editor for us.
| | 02:30 | This has a nice compact interface that
gives us access to the parameters for all
| | 02:36 | of Twilight's unique light sources.
| | 02:38 | Each source has its own tab giving
access to the unique features for that
| | 02:43 | particular light type.
| | 02:45 | Next, we have an icon that allows us
to open up Twilight's Material Editor.
| | 02:49 | This, as you can see, is a little
unique when compared to material editors in
| | 02:53 | other render engines.
| | 02:55 | We say unique in the sense that it
doesn't actually house any materials; instead,
| | 03:00 | we use this Material Editor to pick
SketchUp materials from our scene.
| | 03:05 | Then we can apply either a Twilight
material template or a Twilight library material.
| | 03:11 | Now the Twilight renderer doesn't have a
lot of options associated with it, but
| | 03:16 | the ones that we can work with
are accessed through our next icon.
| | 03:20 | You can see that we can even set up Twilight
to work in any one of eight major Languages.
| | 03:26 | And finally, we have a button that
enables Twilight's position scene view tool.
| | 03:31 | Essentially, this is a set of
Twilight viewport navigation controls.
| | 03:36 | These can work independent of
SketchUp's own viewport navigation aides.
| | 03:40 | Well, now that we have had an overview
as to how we access Twilight tools and
| | 03:45 | features inside of the SketchUp
interface, time to move on to working with
| | 03:49 | those tools in earnest.
| | 03:51 | In the next chapter, entitled
Lighting up the Place, we will begin the
| | 03:54 | learning process by examining the
lighting tools that Twilight adds to our
| | 03:59 | SketchUp rendering arsenal.
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2. Lighting the Place UpAdding the Physical Sun and Sky| 00:00 | There are a number of important
Twilight elements that are already set up and
| | 00:05 | ready to work for us each time we start
a new scene in the SketchUp application
| | 00:09 | with the Twilight plug-in installed of course.
| | 00:12 | Three very important ones are
Indirect Illumination provided by Twilight's
| | 00:16 | Light Transport or GI engines,
natural-looking daytime lighting provided by a
| | 00:22 | Physical Sun and Sky environment, and
a photographic camera through which
| | 00:26 | Twilight will render our scenes.
| | 00:28 | With that having been said, however, if
we were to take a render in our Chapter
| | 00:33 | 02_Daylight start scene, we would find
that we actually have a completely dark
| | 00:37 | environment; at this moment in time we
have no lighting in the scene whatsoever.
| | 00:41 | This is because we have deliberately
set this scene file up so that we have to
| | 00:45 | manually build our sun and sky system.
| | 00:48 | Hopefully this will help us familiarize
ourselves with the components that make
| | 00:52 | up this important Twilight lighting system.
| | 00:55 | Do keep in your mind, though, that
the other two elements mentioned, namely
| | 00:59 | global illumination and the Twilight
camera, are both still at work in the test
| | 01:03 | renders that we make.
| | 01:04 | To turn our daylight system back on, as
it were, we first of all need to access
| | 01:09 | or open up the Twilight Light Editor.
| | 01:12 | We can do this by coming up to the
Twilight toolbar and clicking on the Light
| | 01:16 | Editor icon. As you can see, this
opens up the Light Editor dialog and we're
| | 01:20 | taken instantly into the Sun/Sky tab.
| | 01:23 | This happens if we don't have any
other light type selected in the scene.
| | 01:28 | If we do, then we'll be taken to
the tab that is relevant to that
| | 01:31 | particular light type.
| | 01:32 | In the Sun and Sky tab you can see our
controls are separated into two distinct sections.
| | 01:38 | On the right we have our Sunlight
controls and on the left we have the
| | 01:43 | controls that we're going to focus on
initially, which are of course for our Sky settings.
| | 01:47 | If we access the Background and Sky
Type dropdown, you can see we have quite a
| | 01:51 | number of options available to us when
it comes to setting up a sky type when
| | 01:56 | rendering with Twilight.
| | 01:57 | This of course is exactly what we would
expect from any quality render engine.
| | 02:01 | Now the option we have at work in our
scene at this moment in time is this
| | 02:06 | simple Background Color control.
| | 02:08 | As you can see, we have our Background
Color set to black, which is how we've
| | 02:12 | achieved a blacked-out render.
| | 02:14 | We could have of course set any color
in here for our background that we want.
| | 02:18 | Do keep in mind though that we set a
pink sky for our renders, then we will get
| | 02:22 | pink lighting in our scene as well.
| | 02:25 | Really what we want to do is set up a
Physical Sky environment for ourselves, so
| | 02:30 | let's access our dropdown list and
choose the Physical Sky option that can be
| | 02:35 | found down towards the bottom.
| | 02:36 | Once we enable that, we know have a
physical sky in terms of the backdrop and in
| | 02:40 | terms of sky lighting in our scene.
| | 02:43 | So let's come up to the Twilight
toolbar, let's open up the Render dialog, and
| | 02:47 | let's click on the Start
render icon to take a test render.
| | 02:50 | Now as you can see, we have a clear sky
environment. This is present in both the
| | 02:55 | background of our rendered image and
of course the illumination, the lighting
| | 02:59 | that is coming from our sky.
| | 03:01 | If it is that we want to see the
coloration in our procedural sky just a
| | 03:05 | little more clearly, if we come over
to the Camera tab and then if we just
| | 03:09 | drop our Exposure value down to, say, .9,
you can see the coloration that is
| | 03:13 | taking place there.
| | 03:14 | Let's just increase that value back
up to 1.1, just so we get a nice bright
| | 03:20 | daylight look from our sky.
| | 03:21 | Of course, it is readily apparent
in our render that we still have no
| | 03:25 | direct light in our scene.
| | 03:27 | We need to enable our sunlight as it were.
| | 03:29 | To do this we need to go back into our
Light Editor dialog. So even though it is
| | 03:33 | open, let just come up to our Twilight
toolbar and click on the icon once more.
| | 03:37 | This will just give it focus and
bring it in front of our Render dialog.
| | 03:41 | Then, to get our sunlight working, all
we need to do is put a check in this very
| | 03:45 | obvious Sunlight Enable checkbox.
| | 03:48 | Of course, having done that, we will
most likely want to enable our Sunlight
| | 03:52 | Caste Shadow option as well.
| | 03:54 | If we didn't, of course our direct light
would simply pass through the walls of
| | 03:58 | our building. Now whilst in some
situations that may be the desired behavior,
| | 04:03 | typically, when it comes to
architectural rendering, things are going to look
| | 04:07 | much better if the sunlight actually
is blocked by the walls of the building.
| | 04:10 | So, we're going to
enable that particular option.
| | 04:12 | Well then having turned shadows on, if
we want a little bit of extra realism
| | 04:16 | from them, we may also want to enable
the Soft or Blurry Shadows checkbox.
| | 04:21 | This will add a little to our render
times, but when we use SketchUp shadow
| | 04:25 | setting controls to set the time of
day--maybe to something such as early
| | 04:29 | morning--then we would really see the
extra level of realism that comes from
| | 04:34 | having this option enabled.
| | 04:36 | We would now see that our shadow
edges would blur, or soften as they travel
| | 04:40 | away from a shadow-casting object, which of
course is exactly what happens in the real world.
| | 04:46 | The level of softness found on our
shadows is controlled by this Sunlight
| | 04:50 | slider. High values in here will
increase the blurriness, or the soften, of
| | 04:55 | our shadows, so that if we take the
slider to the right, if we go to the
| | 05:00 | left and decrease the values, then we're
going to obviously lessen that particular effect.
| | 05:04 | We're going to get sharper,
crisper shadows from the system.
| | 05:07 | In this instance, as I do want blurry
shadows, but not as blurry as the default,
| | 05:11 | I'm going to set this to a
value of around about 20.
| | 05:14 | You may also want to make a little
tweak to our Maximum Sun Intensity control.
| | 05:19 | This really handles how strong a
sunlight effect we get in the scene. Really, I
| | 05:24 | think of it as how harsh the direct
light will appear on the surfaces.
| | 05:28 | Again, I'm just going to tweak this
down a little from the default, so I'm just
| | 05:30 | going to drop that down to a value of 3.
| | 05:35 | Once again, I can bring our Render
dialog to the fore, and I can use the Start
| | 05:39 | render icon to test how our sunlight is looking.
| | 05:41 | And as you can see, with all of those
options enabled and working together, we
| | 05:47 | know have a complete
natural-looking daylight system.
| | 05:50 | We have our direct sunlight; we have our
soft shadows, our skylight; we have our
| | 05:54 | procedural sky gradient in the background.
| | 05:57 | Of course, do remember that in
Twilight for SketchUp we get all of this by
| | 06:01 | default whenever we start a new scene.
| | 06:02 | All of this is already set up for us.
| | 06:04 | But we hope just having seen how the
system is put together--where the controls
| | 06:09 | are, how they can be accessed--that you
will now be in a position to take full
| | 06:13 | advantage of this very
powerful Twilight lighting feature.
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| Employing the Point light type| 00:00 | When rendering with Twilight in
SketchUp, especially if we are producing
| | 00:04 | architectural visualizations, there is a
very high likelihood that we will need
| | 00:09 | to create or re-create
artificial light sources for our renders.
| | 00:14 | To help with this area, Twilight gives us
two specific light types that can cover
| | 00:18 | many artificial lighting situations.
| | 00:21 | We will in this instance be once again
working with an artificially darkened
| | 00:25 | start scene. This means that we can keep
test renders very straightforward, in
| | 00:30 | that the illumination we see in them
will be coming only from the light type
| | 00:34 | under consideration.
| | 00:35 | So, if we just come up to our Twilight
toolbar, you can see that we have two
| | 00:39 | icons that allow us essentially to
create our two light types in the scene:
| | 00:43 | we have a Point Light
icon and a Spot Light icon.
| | 00:47 | In this video we're going to focus
on using our Point or Omni light type.
| | 00:51 | To make a start, we just want to come
over to our Window menu and then come down
| | 00:56 | and select the Layers option. This of
course will bring up the Layers dialog for us.
| | 01:00 | Down towards the bottom, you can see
we have two light layers already set up.
| | 01:04 | We have a Light_Spot and a Light_Point
layer. As we said, we want to work with a
| | 01:09 | Point light, so let's put a check in the
box, and you can see that brings a point
| | 01:11 | light into the scene for us.
| | 01:15 | To access its control parameters we can
indeed come to the toolbar and click on
| | 01:19 | the Light Editor icon.
| | 01:20 | We would want to have our light
object selected first though, because then
| | 01:23 | when we open up the Light Editor, you can see
we get taken straight into our light controls.
| | 01:28 | Another way to access this Light
Editor would be to simply select and then
| | 01:33 | right-click on our light, come down to
the Twilight entry, and then click on the
| | 01:36 | Edit Light option from the flyout.
| | 01:38 | Generally speaking, whenever we add a
new light object into a scene, we want
| | 01:43 | to take a test render.
| | 01:45 | Really, we want a render
of that light in isolation.
| | 01:48 | We really want to see what kind of
light contribution it is making to the
| | 01:51 | scene, and we want to get an idea of
the kind of emission pattern that is
| | 01:55 | coming from our new light type.
So we're going to do just that.
| | 01:58 | First of all I'll just grab my Light
Editor and just move it off to one side of
| | 02:02 | the SketchUp interface.
| | 02:04 | We'll come up to the Twilight toolbar,
open up our Render dialog, and then click
| | 02:08 | on the Start render icon to take a test render.
| | 02:10 | In this instance because we have an object
selected in the scene, we have a choice to make:
| | 02:15 | Do we want to render only the selected
object or do we want to render the entire scene?
| | 02:20 | As we want to render the entire scene,
I'm just going to select No from this
| | 02:24 | dialog and let our test render run.
| | 02:25 | Straight away, because we are rendering
only this one particular light object in
| | 02:29 | the scene, we get a very good idea of
the light contribution it is making.
| | 02:33 | We can see that it does indeed cast
omnidirectional light into the scene.
| | 02:37 | We can even see the general emission
pattern captured on this 2D surface of our
| | 02:42 | upright shelving unit.
| | 02:43 | Now, at this moment in time we are
probably making it a little harder for
| | 02:47 | ourselves to see the emission than is
necessary, so let's go over to the Camera
| | 02:51 | tab and we'll just drop our Exposure
value down a little bit. Let's set it
| | 02:55 | down to something around about 1.4.
| | 02:57 | That way we just can see the contrast
in the scene a little bit more clearly.
| | 03:00 | And let's set our Gamma
value to its default of 1.
| | 03:03 | Now we can see that we have this very
bright spot where the center of the light
| | 03:08 | object is, and then we see the falloff
of light emission as the light travels
| | 03:12 | away from the emitting object.
| | 03:14 | Very rarely though we are going to
want to accept just the defaults for a new
| | 03:18 | light type that we have placed in the
scene, so again, let's click on our Light
| | 03:21 | Editor icon, just to bring that to
the fore, and have a look at this light
| | 03:25 | type's control parameters,
| | 03:27 | which, as you can see, are very much
self-explanatory. One option we do want to
| | 03:32 | highlight is the fact that
we can name our light types.
| | 03:35 | We really want to do this as we're
adding new lights into the scene. A nice
| | 03:38 | descriptive name can go a long way
towards easing the frustration of working
| | 03:42 | with many light objects in our environments.
| | 03:45 | So we can, as you can see, also
enable and disable our light type.
| | 03:49 | We can set it to cast or not cast
shadows as the need may be, and we can get
| | 03:54 | realistic behavior from those shadows
by checking the Soft (Blurred) Shadows
| | 03:58 | option. And of course we can use the
color swatch to set the color of the
| | 04:02 | light in the scene.
| | 04:03 | One very important set of controls
are these Attenuation options. These
| | 04:07 | essentially control the falloff of our light.
| | 04:10 | By default, we have InverseSquared set,
which give us realistic light behavior.
| | 04:15 | This is how a light will act in the real world.
| | 04:18 | But if we access the dropdown, you can
see we do have a couple of other options
| | 04:22 | available to us, should we
need to use those in our scenes.
| | 04:25 | Light Strength is, as we've said, a
very self-explanatory title for this
| | 04:30 | particular control; it will determine the
intensity of illumination coming from our light.
| | 04:34 | We also have this Light
Bulb Size or Radius option.
| | 04:38 | This controls really the softness of
the shadows that we get from our light
| | 04:42 | type. Higher values will give us softer
blurrier shadows; decreased values will
| | 04:46 | naturally give us sharper,
cleaner or crisper raytrace shadows.
| | 04:50 | We do need to know that this value will
not change the intensity or the strength
| | 04:55 | of light in our scene.
| | 04:56 | That's why we have a separate control for that.
| | 04:58 | All it will do is determine
how the shadows are working.
| | 05:01 | In fact, to demonstrate how this control
works, let's set a value of 20 in here.
| | 05:06 | Now we're going to take a note of the
shadow edges that we have in the scene
| | 05:11 | at this moment, in time particular the
shelving unit and of our test objects.
| | 05:15 | And again, we want to select
No from our selection option.
| | 05:18 | And you can see we do indeed make
quite a difference to the edges of our
| | 05:22 | shadows. Our light intensity of course
remains unchanged, but the blurriness of
| | 05:26 | shadow edges has increased quite
considerably--not just on the large object.
| | 05:31 | You can see our sample spheres here.
Even though they are closer to our light
| | 05:34 | source, they still have a
much softer edge to the shadows.
| | 05:38 | At this moment in time, our Light
Editor controls are of course only affecting
| | 05:43 | the Point light that we have in the scene.
| | 05:45 | These are Point-Light-specific controls.
| | 05:47 | Importantly though, you will see that
these controls are also available on each
| | 05:51 | of our other light types.
| | 05:53 | Becoming very familiar with these
controls then becomes fairly important when it
| | 05:57 | comes to working with artificial
lighting in our Twilight and SketchUp scenes.
| | 06:02 | Now whilst the Point light type can
come in handy in certain lighting
| | 06:05 | situations, the fact that it casts
light in all directions makes it firstly
| | 06:10 | harder to control in terms of adding
light only to specific areas of our
| | 06:15 | scene, and secondly, the extra
lighting calculations it will require will
| | 06:19 | probably add to our render times.
| | 06:21 | For those reasons, in many artificial
lighting situations, a more useful light
| | 06:27 | type would probably be
Twilight's Spot Light option.
| | 06:31 | This is the light object that we
will consider in our next video.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the Spot and Projector light types| 00:00 | As we have already noted, for many
artificial lighting situations a very useful
| | 00:05 | light type to have
available is Twilight's Spot light.
| | 00:08 | As with our Point light, we have a
Spot light layer set up in the scene.
| | 00:12 | So let's come up to our Window menu,
come down to the Layers option, and you can
| | 00:16 | see in our Layers dialog we have
our Spotlight layer (Light_Spot).
| | 00:19 | Before we work with our Spot light,
however, we'd just like to take a moment to
| | 00:23 | explain what this Light_
Placement_Guide layer is all about.
| | 00:26 | In fact, if we put a check in the box,
you can see this reveals a simple line in our scene.
| | 00:31 | This has been placed here
as a Light Placement Guide.
| | 00:35 | To demonstrate how we would use this,
I'm just going to come up to the Twilight
| | 00:38 | toolbar and click on the Add New Spotlight icon.
| | 00:42 | To create a new Spot light in the scene, we
essentially need to use three mouse clicks.
| | 00:46 | If we just demonstrate, the first click will
actually set the creation point in the scene.
| | 00:52 | Now, as we move our mouse around, in
typical SketchUp fashion, you can see we
| | 00:56 | snap to certain pieces of geometry in the scene.
| | 00:59 | As our guide object is set up
exactly where I want my Spot light to be in
| | 01:03 | the scene, I'm just going to snap to the
End point of my line and then left-mouse-click.
| | 01:08 | Now we have set the creation point;
our second click will create the
| | 01:12 | light object itself.
| | 01:14 | Now, if I move the mouse, you
can see we have this rubber band.
| | 01:17 | Essentially this means we can now
orient or point to Spot light in our scene.
| | 01:22 | As I want to point straight down on our
sample spheres, I'm just going to again
| | 01:27 | snap to the End point of our placement
guide and then left-mouse-click once more
| | 01:31 | to create our Spot light for me in the scene.
| | 01:33 | Now, of course we can create a Twilight
Spot light without any placement guide;
| | 01:37 | it is not a requirement. But hopefully
you can see how handy it can be just to
| | 01:42 | have such an object set up in the scene.
| | 01:44 | And of course we already have a
Spot light in the scene, so we don't need
| | 01:47 | our newly created one.
We could just go and delete it.
| | 01:50 | But as you may have noticed in our
Layers dialog, we have a new light layer
| | 01:55 | (TWL_Light_Layer) that is being created.
| | 01:56 | If I just delete the light
object, that will remain behind.
| | 01:57 | So I'm just going to use Alt+Backspace
and that actually gets rid of both of them.
| | 02:02 | Now, of course we can hide our
Placement_Guide layer and unhide our Spotlight layer (Light_Spot).
| | 02:08 | As we have once again added a new
light object into the scene, we're going to
| | 02:12 | want to render it in isolation.
| | 02:13 | We want to see what kind of
illumination it adds to our environment, and of
| | 02:17 | course what kind of
emission pattern we get from it.
| | 02:20 | So let's click on the Open Render dialog
icon, and let's click to start a new test render.
| | 02:25 | We now of course get a completely different
emission pattern as compared to our Point lLight.
| | 02:30 | We don't have
omnidirectional light in the scene.
| | 02:32 | Now we have got a very,
very focused spot of light.
| | 02:35 | Interestingly, as well as the expected
spot shining down on the floor, because
| | 02:40 | we have intersected our light
emission with this upright shelving unit, we
| | 02:44 | actually get a very nice visual
representation of the cone of our light emission also.
| | 02:48 | Now, of course we're going to want
to work with our light object's control
| | 02:52 | parameters, so let's dismiss our dialog,
select our light object in the scene,
| | 02:57 | and in this instance I'm just going to
right-click, come down to the Twilight
| | 03:00 | entry, and click on the Edit Light flyout.
| | 03:03 | As with our Spot light, we're taken straight
into the Standard tab of our Light Editor.
| | 03:07 | This is because these controls are as
relevant for our Spot light as they were
| | 03:11 | with our point light.
| | 03:13 | In fact, as I want soft shadows to come
for my Spot light, let's alter our Light
| | 03:17 | Bulb Size. Let's set a value of 15 in
here, and as you can see, our light object
| | 03:21 | updates in the scene.
| | 03:23 | Because we are working with a Spot light,
we are going to be interested in the
| | 03:27 | Spot-light-specific control, so let's
come to the Spot tab and you can see we
| | 03:30 | have a Falloff and a HotSpot option.
| | 03:33 | These of course are the controlling
parameters for the cone of light that we
| | 03:37 | get from our Spot light.
| | 03:38 | If we just come back into the Render
dialog, you can seem essentially those two
| | 03:42 | controls are creating this
particular effect for us.
| | 03:46 | We can of course change our
light emission a little bit.
| | 03:48 | Let's come back into our Spot controls.
Let's set some values in our Falloff
| | 03:53 | and HotSpot settings.
| | 03:54 | In fact, let's just change our Falloff
to 90, but we will keep the HotSpot at
| | 03:58 | the default 40, as it was
in our existing test render.
| | 04:01 | So let's come and let's take another render.
| | 04:04 | What we get now of course is a very
different termination of light from our cone.
| | 04:08 | Whereas before we had a harsh cu off
at the edge of our Spot light's cone, now
| | 04:13 | we see this gradual falloff into darkness.
| | 04:16 | We do still of course have our
original hotspot, the bright spot at the
| | 04:20 | center of our light cone.
| | 04:22 | We even have soft-edge shadows inside of
that because we increased our light bulb size.
| | 04:26 | Now, you may think that the controls in
our Spot tab and the ones found in our
| | 04:31 | Standard tab really are all we have in
terms of controlling what we get from
| | 04:35 | our Spot light object.
| | 04:37 | But that in fact would not be the case.
| | 04:39 | Twilight has a very cool piece of
functionality whereby it allows us to
| | 04:42 | essentially convert one light
object into another light type.
| | 04:46 | If we just come up to the Convert
option found at the top of our Light
| | 04:50 | Editor, you can see we can actually convert
our Spot light into a Point or Projector light.
| | 04:55 | As we have examined the Point Light
already, let's click on the Projector option.
| | 05:00 | And you can see, that changes the look
of our Spot light object in the scene.
| | 05:03 | Again, the Standard controls are all
relevant when it comes to working with
| | 05:08 | the Projector Light, so we need to
keep in mind that these options are still
| | 05:12 | very much usable, but of course we're
going to be interested in what's found in our Projector tab.
| | 05:16 | So if we just select that, you can
see essentially we have two options:
| | 05:20 | we can control the size of our
Projector Light and we can load a Texture that
| | 05:24 | can be projected into the scene.
| | 05:26 | Now, I'm just going to set my size to
a value of something like 512, which as
| | 05:31 | you can see, because the Width and
Height are locked, updates automatically.
| | 05:34 | Now, we can see that our light object
in the scene has become quite large.
| | 05:39 | That would be absolutely
fine if that is what we wanted.
| | 05:41 | It's not quite how I want to work
things at this moment in time, however.
| | 05:45 | We do need to bear in mind that our
Width and Height options here will work in
| | 05:49 | conjunction with our Light Bulb
Size inside of the Standard controls.
| | 05:53 | So if I set this down to a value of 2,
you can see that completely changes the
| | 05:57 | size of our Projector Light object.
| | 05:59 | We haven't of course loaded a texture
as of yet, so let's come back into that
| | 06:03 | tab and click on the Texture button.
| | 06:05 | Now, if we have set things up
according to our introductory videos inside of
| | 06:09 | SketchUp, we would automatically be
taken into our Exercise_Files folder.
| | 06:14 | We can just navigate then into the
Texture_Files folder. And I'm going to choose
| | 06:17 | this Water_Displacement image.
| | 06:20 | To see how that looks projected into the
scene, we will of course need to take a render.
| | 06:25 | What we get of course is
a very interesting effect.
| | 06:27 | We're only getting grayscale values
from our projected image at this moment in
| | 06:32 | time, because it is a grayscale image.
| | 06:34 | If we had chosen a color image, we would
be projecting the color into the scene also.
| | 06:38 | As I'm sure you can imagine, there are
quite a number of specialized scenarios
| | 06:41 | where this Projector light
could come in very handy.
| | 06:45 | So we have seen that our Twilight
Spot light adds quite a bit of flexibility to
| | 06:49 | our artificial lighting toolset.
| | 06:51 | We can use it as a spotlight.
| | 06:53 | We can use it as a Projector light.
| | 06:55 | But that isn't all that our Spot light can do.
| | 06:58 | In our next video, we will take a
look at how we can add an extra level of
| | 07:02 | realism to our artificial
lighting setups by means of IES profiles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding the IES light type| 00:00 | So far, we've seen that Twilight's Spot
light can be used in a couple of ways,
| | 00:05 | firstly, as a spotlight naturally.
| | 00:07 | But we've scene that it can also be
turned into a very handy projector Light.
| | 00:11 | Of course, we do need to know that
Twilight's Point light can also be turned
| | 00:14 | into a projector light.
| | 00:16 | What we'll do in this video is show
you that there is actually a third option
| | 00:20 | available when making use of the Spot light.
| | 00:23 | Essentially, we can attach real-world lighting
data to it and turn it into an IES light type.
| | 00:29 | So once again, let's bring our
Spot light into our scene, come down to our Layers
| | 00:34 | option, and put a check in the Spot Light Layer.
| | 00:37 | But you of course need to select our
Spot light and then click on the Light
| | 00:41 | Editor icon, because we need
to gain access to the IES tab.
| | 00:45 | If we click on this, you can see we
have one option in here that essentially
| | 00:48 | allows us to load our IES profile
and attach it to our Spot light.
| | 00:53 | There are of course lots of free IES files
| | 00:56 | that can be found on the world wide
web. Many lighting manufacturers, such
| | 01:00 | Erco.com, provide them for free,
| | 01:02 | oftentimes along with 3D models
of the light fixtures they profile.
| | 01:07 | The one that I will be using is from my
personal IES Library collected over a number of years.
| | 01:12 | You will of course need to
add your own IES file in here.
| | 01:16 | Let's click then on the Load button and
navigate to where we have our IES file,
| | 01:20 | select that, and that's it.
| | 01:22 | We've now attached real-world
lighting data to our Spot light object.
| | 01:27 | You may have noticed that in the scene
that object has actually changed shape.
| | 01:32 | This is very typical behavior in many
applications that allow the use of IES profiles.
| | 01:37 | Essentially, the light icon is trying
to shape itself to the emission pattern
| | 01:41 | that it sees in the IES file.
| | 01:44 | This oftentimes can give us a visual
representation of that emission pattern.
| | 01:48 | Now just before we take a test render
to see how our IES file will affect our
| | 01:53 | Spot light, I just want to make one little tweak.
| | 01:56 | I want to come into the Standard tab of
our Light Editor and I want to set this
| | 02:00 | Light Strength to a value of 1.
| | 02:03 | You see, the brilliant thing about IES
files is that they not only contain light
| | 02:07 | distribution data, but also the
intensity data of a given light fixture.
| | 02:12 | This is measured in lumens.
| | 02:14 | Our Light Strength value of 1
essentially tells Twilight to look at the IES
| | 02:19 | file and read the intensity data from there.
| | 02:22 | So let's now go and take a test render and see
what this particular profile will give to us.
| | 02:27 | What you can see is that we get a
very realistic, very complex light
| | 02:31 | emission pattern that we really
couldn't create using any of the other
| | 02:35 | Twilight light types.
| | 02:36 | Of course, we are not limited to using the
intensity data found inside of our IES file.
| | 02:41 | We can increase our Light Strength if
that is something that we want to do.
| | 02:46 | We can also use the rest of the
controls inside the Standard tab.
| | 02:49 | We can increase our Light Bulb Size so
that we get soft shadows from our IES light.
| | 02:54 | We can even set a color for our
light if that is what we want.
| | 02:58 | So again, with those changes
made, let's take another render.
| | 03:00 | What we get now of course is probably a
more artistically pleasing end result,
| | 03:06 | although we do of to keep in mind
that we have actually now broken the
| | 03:09 | physicality of the data that
is contained in our IES file.
| | 03:13 | But oftentimes it is just the emission
pattern that render artist are interested in.
| | 03:17 | They like to add their own intensity to suit
the particular render that they are creating.
| | 03:22 | So we have seen then that when it comes
to mimicking artificial light sources in
| | 03:27 | our rendered images, Twilight's Spot
light offers us a very comprehensive set of
| | 03:31 | tools with which to work.
| | 03:32 | However, our final artificial light
type is possibly the most versatile and
| | 03:38 | useful of them all, as it allows us to
create a light-emitting object from any
| | 03:43 | piece of scene geometry:
| | 03:44 | this is Twilight's emitter material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using light-emitting materials| 00:00 | Although we have already looked at
creating artificial light types in Twilight
| | 00:05 | using the Point and Spot lights, there
is another option available to us that
| | 00:09 | comes with a lot of
flexibility and believability.
| | 00:12 | In this video, we're going to use
Twilight's ability to apply a light-emitting
| | 00:17 | material to any geometry in our
scene, and use it as a light source.
| | 00:21 | In fact, what we are going to do is
instead of lighting our sample spheres
| | 00:25 | with an artificial light type, we're going
to turn two of them into actual light sources.
| | 00:30 | We do need to say though, that this may
not be something you will want to do in
| | 00:34 | every production scene, particularly one that is
already quite heavy in terms of scene geometry.
| | 00:40 | You see, at render time Twilight
converts scene geometry into triangles in
| | 00:44 | order to render them.
| | 00:45 | A simple SketchUp rectangle may
appear to be just a single face,
| | 00:49 | but at render time Twilight
will actually see two triangles.
| | 00:53 | Each triangle that has a light-emitting
material applied to it is counted as a
| | 00:58 | light source in the scene.
| | 01:00 | So, if we have a sphere that appears
to be made up of 40 four-sided faces or
| | 01:04 | quads, it will actually become 80
triangles, and so 80 lights, at render time.
| | 01:11 | On anything other than the progressive
rendering modes, this could be very bad,
| | 01:15 | in terms of memory usage, and may
even cause our scenes not to render.
| | 01:20 | So, be aware, we need to use
light-emitting materials wisely.
| | 01:24 | For the purpose of our task here
though, what we have will work just fine.
| | 01:28 | We will be using a number of pre-
prepared renders just to show you the effect
| | 01:32 | that using the
light-emitting material can produce.
| | 01:35 | Before we examine those renders though,
let's walk you through the steps of
| | 01:38 | turning our spheres into actual light sources.
| | 01:41 | As we will need to apply an Emitter
material template to them, the first thing
| | 01:46 | we need to do is create a
couple of new SketchUp materials.
| | 01:49 | So, let's come up to our paint bucket icon,
open up the SketchUp Materials browser.
| | 01:53 | I want to make certain that I'm
looking at the in Model Materials, and now I
| | 01:57 | will come and create a couple of new ones.
| | 01:59 | We will call our first one White Light,
and we will of course make certain that
| | 02:05 | it is white. And we will create
second one, and we'll call it Orange Light.
| | 02:11 | And of course, we want to make it orange,
so I am just going to punch some very
| | 02:13 | specific RGB values in here;
so 175, 75, and 40. Then we can click OK.
| | 02:21 | Now, at this moment in time our sphere
objects are collected together in a group,
| | 02:25 | so I am just going to use the
spacebar to return to my normal Select tool.
| | 02:29 | I am going to select the group and then
right-click and use the Explode function.
| | 02:33 | Now, I can just select individual face,
or I can indeed just come and select my
| | 02:37 | material and apply it to individual objects.
| | 02:40 | So, let's apply our orange material
to that one, and we'll apply our white
| | 02:44 | material to that one.
| | 02:46 | I do need to do a little bit of scene setup
so that we are in harmony with our test render,
| | 02:50 | so I am just going to
dismiss our Material Browser.
| | 02:53 | I am going to make use of our
secondary scene camera, just to push in on
| | 02:57 | our SketchUp Materials.
| | 02:58 | I am going to come into our Render dialog.
| | 03:00 | I am going to first of all make certain
that we are working with the 09-Render preset.
| | 03:05 | Then I want to come into the Camera Tab,
and I am just going to make a quick
| | 03:09 | tweak to my Exposure and Gamma settings.
| | 03:12 | So, 1.25 for my Exposure level,
and just a straight value of 1 in the
| | 03:16 | Gamma Adjustment option.
| | 03:18 | With that done, I can just
dismiss the Twilight Render dialog.
| | 03:21 | Now, of course we need to
apply our Emitter template,
| | 03:24 | so we are going to need
the Twilight Material Editor.
| | 03:26 | So, let's come up to the toolbar
and click on the icon for that.
| | 03:30 | We can just move this off to one side
because what we are going to want to do
| | 03:33 | is, using the From Scene dropdown, I am going
to first of all select my orange light material.
| | 03:39 | We're going to come to the Templates,
come down to Light Emitter, and we're
| | 03:42 | going to choose the 100 Watt option.
| | 03:44 | And of course, we need to repeat
that for our white light material,
| | 03:48 | so Templates > Light Emitter > 100 Watt.
| | 03:50 | As we have been applying these Emitter
templates, you have probably noticed this
| | 03:55 | set of controls appear.
| | 03:57 | We have an Emitter Behavior dropdown,
and we have Power or Intensity value
| | 04:02 | that we can work with.
| | 04:03 | Again, to bring things in line with the
test renders already taken, I'm going to
| | 04:07 | set my Power Output to 750 watts.
| | 04:10 | The default Emitter behavior of Normal
essentially means that our object will be
| | 04:15 | a visible light source in the scene.
| | 04:17 | It will show up inside of our renders.
| | 04:20 | Let's jump into Adobe Photoshop and
have a look at a render taken using
| | 04:24 | this particular setting.
| | 04:26 | As you can see, our light-emitting
materials are working very nicely indeed.
| | 04:30 | We have a nice level of illumination,
we have some very nice, very realistic
| | 04:35 | soft edge shadows, and we get realistic
light falloff from the material as well.
| | 04:40 | All in all, a very convincing, very
nice-looking artificial light source.
| | 04:45 | The second option in the Emitter
Behavior dropdown is entitled Fake.
| | 04:49 | It is designed to make an object look
lit but won't really increase the render
| | 04:54 | times at all because it doesn't
actually add any light into the scene.
| | 04:57 | That is, if we don't use one of
the progressive rendering methods.
| | 05:01 | If we do use a progressive rendering
method, then our emitter will behave as if
| | 05:05 | we left it set on Normal.
| | 05:07 | For a fake emitter, we need to use
one of the easy 01 to 07 options.
| | 05:12 | If we take a look at the render
using the Easy > 04 preset, you can see,
| | 05:16 | essentially what we get is
just a self-illuminated material.
| | 05:20 | As we say, this really isn't a light
source at all, but it can be very useful
| | 05:24 | in certain situations when we want to
give the appearance of an object being a
| | 05:27 | light source, but we don't really want to
add any extra illumination into the scene.
| | 05:32 | The third emitter option
available is entitled Invisible,
| | 05:35 | and, as its name suggests, it makes our
light source invisible in the render,
| | 05:40 | which will of course get our
illumination and shadows in the scene.
| | 05:44 | And if we just make a quick
comparison between our initial render and the
| | 05:48 | invisible version, you can see
essentially, all that happens is our objects
| | 05:52 | disappear. Maybe a little bit of
the reflectivity in them disappears.
| | 05:55 | You can just see that turn off as
we switch between these two renders.
| | 05:59 | But again, a very nice feature if we
have a need, under specialized circumstances,
| | 06:04 | to actually make our light source invisible.
| | 06:07 | If I just switch back the little black
splotch that you see here, I suspect it has
| | 06:11 | nothing to do with the Light Emitter
Material, but really is just a side effect
| | 06:15 | of interpenetrating geometry.
| | 06:17 | The final Emitter option available, if
we just jump back into SketchUp, gives us
| | 06:23 | the ability to attach an IES
profile to our light-emitting material.
| | 06:27 | We probably would want to be careful here.
| | 06:29 | We need to make certain that the IES
profile we apply is appropriate to the
| | 06:33 | shape of the geometry that we are
applying our light-emitting material to.
| | 06:38 | All in all then, the Light Emitter
material offers an easy-to-use and extremely
| | 06:43 | versatile option for creating
artificial light types in our Twilight renders.
| | 06:48 | Do bear in mind that for anything other
than Fake, which of course is not really
| | 06:52 | a light source at all, we would
probably be best served using one of the
| | 06:56 | progressive rendering modes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating image-based lighting using High Dynamic Range Images (HDRIs)| 00:00 | One of the great things about
lighting with Twilight is the versatility and
| | 00:05 | diversity of the options available.
As well as the Physical Sun and Sky system
| | 00:10 | and the ability to mimic artificial light
sources using some very specific light types,
| | 00:15 | we also have the option to use image-
based, or HDRI, lighting if we want to.
| | 00:20 | The initials HDRI stands
for High Dynamic Range Image.
| | 00:24 | This is a specialized image format
that holds a far higher amount of data,
| | 00:29 | including luminance data, than can be
captured by a typical film or digital
| | 00:33 | camera in a single shot.
| | 00:35 | In this video, we are going to walk
you through the steps required to set up
| | 00:38 | image-based lighting in Twilight.
| | 00:40 | Our start scene is once again in
complete darkness, so we will be building our
| | 00:44 | scene lighting from scratch.
| | 00:46 | To do this, our first port of call needs
to be Twilight's Light Editor, so let's
| | 00:50 | come up to the Twilight toolbar
and click on the icon to open that.
| | 00:54 | Straight away we are taken into our Sun/Sky
tab, which is exactly where we want to be,
| | 00:59 | because we want to access the options
for our Sky type. Which of these we choose
| | 01:04 | to work with will depend very much on
what type of HDRI we have available to us.
| | 01:09 | If we have, as I will be working
with, a full 360-degree map, then the
| | 01:14 | Spherical Sky option is the
one we are going to want to pick.
| | 01:17 | Of course HDRIs do come in
Hemispherical or even Light Probe formats,
| | 01:22 | Light Probe often being
referred to as mirror ball HDRIs.
| | 01:26 | If we have one of those, then we just
need to choose the appropriate option, but
| | 01:30 | as we say, we are going to be
working with Spherical Sky.
| | 01:33 | Once that is set, we of course need to
load our HDRI into our environment, so
| | 01:38 | let's click on the Browse button
for the Background Image option.
| | 01:41 | Now, of course, as with IES files,
there are lots of sites around the Internet
| | 01:45 | that offer free high-quality images that
can even be freely used in commercial work.
| | 01:50 | I am using a renamed image from the
free sIBL set entitled BasketballCourt,
| | 01:56 | downloaded from HDRLabs.com.
| | 01:59 | You of course will need to supply your own HDRI.
| | 02:02 | With the image loaded in, we can
now work with our Sky Rotation Angle.
| | 02:07 | This control allows us to rotate our
HDRI environment around our scene geometry.
| | 02:13 | This means we can set our scene
lighting to suit and then use SketchUp Shadow
| | 02:17 | settings to match the sunlight in our scene.
| | 02:20 | After performing a number of tests with
this image, I know that I want to set my
| | 02:24 | Rotation Angle to
something around about 90 degrees.
| | 02:28 | Of course at this point we could go
and enable our Sunlight options, but
| | 02:32 | typically, when working with an
image-based lighting setup, we will want to take
| | 02:37 | a render with just our HDRI in situ.
| | 02:40 | This means we can try and get a sense
of where any directional light in the
| | 02:44 | image may be coming from and again,
| | 02:46 | we can use SketchUp Shadows
settings to match things up.
| | 02:49 | So let's go and do just that.
| | 02:50 | Let's open up the Render dialog.
| | 02:52 | I want to render in this
instance with the Easy 07 preset.
| | 02:56 | Even though this is a high quality
setting, because of the simplicity of our
| | 03:00 | scene, we should still get fast renders back.
| | 03:03 | With that set then, let's take a test
render. And in just 34 seconds we have a
| | 03:08 | very nice representation of the scene render.
| | 03:11 | You can most certainly see the
coloration that is coming from our High Dynamic
| | 03:15 | Range Image that is being pulled into
our scene lighting, and you can hopefully
| | 03:19 | just make out the directional
shadows that are occurring in the scene.
| | 03:23 | So get a rough idea of how we
want to position our sunlight.
| | 03:27 | We can do that of course
using SketchUp Shadows options.
| | 03:30 | So let's come up to our View menu,
into the Toolbars, and let's turn on
| | 03:34 | the Shadows controls.
| | 03:35 | The first thing you will probably want
to do is enable those in the viewport,
| | 03:39 | just so you can see how things are working.
| | 03:42 | Again, because I have performed a
number of tests, I know exactly what
| | 03:45 | settings I want to use here, so I am
going to set my time of day to around
| | 03:50 | about 16:00 p.m., and we are going to
set our month to September and indeed
| | 03:54 | choose the 1st of September.
| | 03:56 | As you can see in the SketchUp
viewport, this places our shadows pretty
| | 03:59 | much where we want them.
| | 04:01 | Of course we still need to enable the
Sunlight options in our Twilight controls,
| | 04:06 | but before we go and do that, just a
word of caution: make certain that you turn
| | 04:10 | this Sunlight setting off in the
SketchUp viewport; otherwise, you will find your
| | 04:14 | Twilight user interface
becoming very slow to respond.
| | 04:17 | In fact, because we are finished with
these controls, we can just go and turn
| | 04:21 | them off and close down our dialog.
| | 04:23 | Jumping back then into Twilight's
Light Editor, we can go and enable our
| | 04:28 | three Sunlight options.
| | 04:29 | I will want to make a quick change to
the softness of the shadows in the scene.
| | 04:34 | I want to sharpen them up just a little
bit from the default, so I am going to
| | 04:38 | set my slider to a value of 30.
| | 04:40 | As I also want to reduce the harshness
of the sunlight in the scene, I am going
| | 04:43 | to set my Maximum Sun
Intensity to a value of 2.5.
| | 04:47 | And with that done, we can
once again go and take a render.
| | 04:51 | What we see now is a very nice, very
natural-looking daytime lighting setup.
| | 04:56 | Now, you may be thinking that this
looks very similar to our earlier Physical
| | 05:00 | Sun and Sky setup, but if you were to make
a very close examination, you would find
| | 05:05 | that an IBL setup has subtle variations that
don't exist in the Physical Sun and Sky system,
| | 05:11 | subtle variations in color,
particularly in the shadowed areas,
| | 05:14 | even subtle variations in
the illumination levels.
| | 05:18 | You will have noticed of course that at
this moment in time we are rendering our
| | 05:22 | HDRI as the background of our render.
| | 05:24 | If this is how we want things,
then that is absolutely fine.
| | 05:28 | My preferred method would at this
point be to render out an alpha mask of
| | 05:32 | our scene geometry and then add my
back plate in a compositing or image
| | 05:36 | editing application.
| | 05:37 | That just means we have a little more
control over our foreground and background
| | 05:42 | elements, but as I say,
that is just a personal preference.
| | 05:46 | To really finish off our image-based
lighting setup, we would probably at this
| | 05:49 | point want to switch over to one of our
progressive render presets, such as Easy 09.
| | 05:54 | That would really maximize the
subtleties of light and color that are coming
| | 05:59 | from our High Dynamic Range Image.
| | 06:01 | Hopefully though, you would agree, based
on the results that we have so far that
| | 06:05 | image-based lighting is yet another
powerful lighting option that is available
| | 06:09 | to us in the Twilight Render engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using Sky Portals for interior global illumination (GI)| 00:00 | Without a doubt getting a believable
exterior lighting solution in Twilight is a
| | 00:05 | very achievable, dare I say
even easy, task to accomplish,
| | 00:09 | especially if we use the Physical Sun
and Sky for our scene lighting and then
| | 00:13 | just rendering over to one of
Twilight's progressive render presets.
| | 00:17 | The problem with rendering interiors,
however, whether we're using the sun and sky
| | 00:21 | or indeed any exterior light source,
is that we are always going to struggle a
| | 00:26 | little bit to pull enough light
energy into our interior environment.
| | 00:30 | Anything then that we can do to
squeeze a little bit more quality, a bit more
| | 00:34 | light out of our render engine,
| | 00:36 | that's at least going to be worth considering.
| | 00:39 | What we want to do in this video is
just show you how you can turn some simple
| | 00:42 | SketchUp planes into Sky Portal objects.
| | 00:45 | These can help our interior lighting
solutions by really telling the render
| | 00:50 | engine where to focus its
global illumination sampling efforts.
| | 00:54 | The first thing we need to do is take a look
at how our Chapter 02 Portal scene is set up.
| | 00:59 | So I am just going to middle-mouse-
click in the viewport and then orbit around
| | 01:03 | until we can just see the
outside of our building.
| | 01:06 | Here, as you can see, we have two simple
plane objects covering each of our window sets.
| | 01:11 | You may wonder why we don't have a plane
for each of the distinct window openings.
| | 01:16 | Well, in SketchUp, as in all three
applications, a plane is made up of
| | 01:20 | two triangular faces.
| | 01:22 | In Twilight, each triangle will represent
a distinct light source once we add our
| | 01:28 | Sky Portal material to this object.
| | 01:30 | Each light source of course will mean
more calculations; more calculations will
| | 01:35 | naturally translate into slower renders.
| | 01:38 | With our current setup Twilight will read
four extra light sources when it is rendering.
| | 01:43 | If we added a plane at each distinct
window opening, we would actually be adding
| | 01:48 | 14 extra light sources.
| | 01:50 | No prizes for guessing that that
would of course add to our render times.
| | 01:54 | Now again, if we just rotate around a
little bit more in our scene, you can tell
| | 01:58 | that these planes are facing outward.
| | 02:01 | This is denoted by the white color.
| | 02:03 | This geometry would currently fail if
we tried to turn it into a sky portal, and
| | 02:08 | of course as our windows are completely covered,
all light into our interiors is being blocked.
| | 02:14 | This does actually raise a very vital point
when it comes to setting up your Sky Portal planes.
| | 02:18 | They have to be--how should we
say?--watertight as it were.
| | 02:22 | They really need to snap to each of
the vertices around our window openings.
| | 02:27 | We don't want any exterior light
entering into our interior unless it is passed
| | 02:32 | through our Sky Portal geometry.
| | 02:34 | Reversing the phases on these plane
objects is of course a very simple matter,
| | 02:38 | so let's just double-click to make
certain that we select everything in the
| | 02:41 | geometry. Then we can just right-click
and use the Reverse Faces function, and
| | 02:45 | again let's do the same for our second object.
| | 02:48 | Now we can go back to our
camera and our original composition.
| | 02:53 | What we need now is a new SketchUp
material that we can attach Twilight's Sky
| | 02:58 | Portal definition to.
| | 03:00 | So let's click on a paint bucket icon,
make certain that we are looking at our
| | 03:04 | In Model materials, which, as you can see,
is just our default gray material, and I
| | 03:08 | will come and create a new material.
| | 03:10 | This we will just very humbly call Sky Portal. We can,
| | 03:14 | if we want, give it a distinct color,
just so that we can tell where it is in
| | 03:18 | the scene. I am going to click OK.
| | 03:20 | And then finally, I can just dismiss
the Browser dialog and just Ctrl+Click on
| | 03:24 | each of our plane objects to make
certain that I applied that Sky Portal
| | 03:27 | material to all of the geometry.
| | 03:30 | What we need now is the Twilight
Material Editor, so let's come up to the
| | 03:33 | Twilight toolbar, click on the icon; once
that's open, we can just pull it off to one side.
| | 03:39 | Using the From Scene dropdown, I'll just
select our Sky Portal material and now
| | 03:43 | rather than applying a template,
we need to come into our Library tab.
| | 03:47 | So as long as we are in the
Architectural Twilight tab, you'll see the first
| | 03:50 | definition is our Sky Portal or
our Invisible Sky Portal option.
| | 03:55 | To attach these to our SketchUp material, all
we need to do is double-click and that's it.
| | 04:00 | We now have our Sky Portal material applied.
| | 04:03 | Now of course taking a test render at this
moment in time wouldn't really serve any purpose.
| | 04:08 | To understand what is happening with
our Sky Portals in place, we need to see a
| | 04:12 | render of the scene with no Sky Portals.
| | 04:15 | Well, if we jump into Adobe Photoshop, we
can do just that, as we have a number of
| | 04:19 | ready to be compared.
| | 04:21 | What we have first of all, is, as the
image title tell us, a no Sky Portals render.
| | 04:26 | This was taken using the Easy09_
preset and rendered for ten passes.
| | 04:31 | As you can see, this took ten minutes to render.
| | 04:33 | And what we have is a pretty
reasonable lighting solution.
| | 04:37 | It looks a little bit dark from my taste.
| | 04:39 | You can tell that we're not getting
quite as much light bounce or light
| | 04:43 | penetration as we would perhaps like.
| | 04:44 | So, what happens if we add Sky Portal objects?
| | 04:48 | If we click on our next image,
you can see that we do indeed get a
| | 04:51 | considerable brightening.
| | 04:53 | Keep in mind we're not
changing camera exposure.
| | 04:56 | We're not changing light intensity.
| | 04:57 | We are not even changing material
reflectance. All we have done is added Sky
| | 05:02 | Portals into our scene.
| | 05:04 | Now, interestingly, you can see that the
render times are not really that different.
| | 05:08 | We have just added an extra
minute with our Sky Portals added,
| | 05:12 | which is pretty fair, considering the
effect that we're getting so much more
| | 05:15 | light into the environment.
| | 05:17 | Clearly then, when using one of the
progressive render presets, we get a fairly
| | 05:21 | good result from adding
Sky Portals into the mix.
| | 05:24 | However, let's take a look at one of
our photon map and final gather presets.
| | 05:29 | This render, again, no sky portals added.
| | 05:31 | This was taken using the Easy03_renderingpreset.
| | 05:35 | This took just 20 seconds to create.
| | 05:38 | Clearly, our GI solution is looking a
little bit ragged, and the light bounce,
| | 05:42 | particularly at the far end of the
room, doesn't look incredibly natural.
| | 05:45 | So, what happens if we add
Sky Portals into the mix?
| | 05:47 | Well, as you can see, we get quite a
considerable increase again in the level of illumination.
| | 05:53 | We actually get a much cleaner global
illumination solution as well. A lot
| | 05:57 | of the noise smoothes out as we get extra
light bouncing around inside our interior.
| | 06:03 | However, there is quite a shock when we
compare the render times: 21 seconds for
| | 06:07 | our no portals render, 54 minutes for
our Sky Portals version, which is quite a
| | 06:13 | considerable increase.
| | 06:15 | Now, obviously Sky Portals can make
quite a difference when it comes to pulling
| | 06:19 | light into an interior space. We can
see that with both of these sets of
| | 06:23 | renders. We have seen that they are
very easy to create, as really all we
| | 06:27 | essential need to do is create a plane
or two, add a Sky Portal library material,
| | 06:31 | and we are good to go.
| | 06:33 | We do have to keep you in mind, however,
that if we are rendering with the photon
| | 06:37 | and final gather presets, we
probably will want to take that significant
| | 06:40 | increase in render times into account.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the importance of reflectance in materials| 00:00 | One of the things that newer render
artists could fail to grasp regarding their
| | 00:04 | scene lighting is the role that
materials often play in the actual bouncing of
| | 00:08 | light around an environment.
| | 00:10 | In this video, we just want to
give you a quick demonstration of the
| | 00:13 | important role that material reflectance
plays in the global illumination lighting process.
| | 00:19 | Reflectance, or diffuse reflection,
should not be confused with reflectivity.
| | 00:24 | Reflectance is the reflection of
light from a surface, but instead of the
| | 00:28 | incident ray being reflected at
just one angle, as in the case of
| | 00:32 | specular reflection--
| | 00:33 | that is, property that we call Reflectivity--
| | 00:36 | reflectance sees the ray bounce at
many angles, hence the production of colored
| | 00:40 | and matte-looking surface.
| | 00:43 | In this demo, we're just going to use
different grayscale values in our default
| | 00:47 | material to demonstrate the difference
this can make regarding light's ability
| | 00:51 | to bounce around an environment.
| | 00:54 | Remember, as we perform our test
renders, we are not going to be changing the
| | 00:58 | amount of light in the scene, nor will
we be adjusting our camera's exposure;
| | 01:02 | that will be fixed at a value of 1.7.
| | 01:04 | This gives us a nice interior exposure.
| | 01:07 | The only thing we will work with in
order to affect our scene lighting is the
| | 01:11 | Reflectance value of our default gray material.
| | 01:14 | So let's make a start by first of all
opening up SketchUp's Material Browser.
| | 01:18 | Now I want to come to our In Model materials,
which as you can see, consists of just
| | 01:23 | one default gray material.
| | 01:24 | Then if I come into the Edit tab,
you can see we're going to make use of
| | 01:28 | SketchUp's HSL Color mode, even
though this is wrongly spelled inside of the
| | 01:33 | Color Picker dropdown.
| | 01:34 | Of course, we could make use of the
Twilight Material Editor, if I just pull
| | 01:39 | that off to one side of our interface.
| | 01:41 | But if I just select our default
material and then come into the color swatch,
| | 01:46 | you can see, Twilight makes use
of a typical 0 to 255 color range,
| | 01:51 | whereas SketchUp's values run from 0 to
100. This just makes it a little easier
| | 01:56 | to picture where on a sliding
scale the color values we will use sit.
| | 02:01 | So let's set an initial
Luminance value in our material of 20.
| | 02:05 | This, as you can see, gives us
quite a dark-gray material.
| | 02:09 | To see how this affects our scene
lighting, let's us open our Twilight Render
| | 02:13 | dialog and take a test render.
| | 02:15 | What we see of course, perhaps not
unsurprisingly, is an extremely dark interior.
| | 02:20 | You can see our ceiling is receiving
very little light. The far end of the room
| | 02:25 | is pretty much in blackness.
| | 02:26 | We can just make a little bit of light
bounce out, but we can't really see any
| | 02:30 | light penetrating into that far space at all.
| | 02:33 | Clearly, for a natural-looking
environment, we need more illumination in the
| | 02:38 | scene. And as we've mentioned,
possibly the first port of call would be to
| | 02:42 | increase the intensity of lighting in
the scene, to bring more light into our
| | 02:46 | interior or indeed to work with the
Camera Exposure control and try and lift the
| | 02:50 | illumination levels in that way.
| | 02:52 | But we can demonstrate now that
oftentimes those steps are unnecessary when it
| | 02:57 | comes to raising
illumination levels in an environment.
| | 03:00 | So let's come to our material and
raise the Luminance value to 50.
| | 03:05 | Once again of course, we need to
take a render. Now, as you can see,
| | 03:08 | we have significantly
increased our illumination levels.
| | 03:11 | We're getting quite a bit of light
coming up onto to our ceiling now.
| | 03:15 | We are even starting to make out our far wall.
| | 03:17 | We are seeing the light bouncing
around that far end of the room.
| | 03:21 | And we need to stress, all of this has
been achieved without touching any of the
| | 03:25 | typical lighting controls.
| | 03:27 | We have just simply raised the
Reflectance value of our material.
| | 03:31 | Also interesting is the fact that we have only
increased our render times by a single second.
| | 03:36 | As I would still like to get a little
more illumination bouncing around this
| | 03:40 | interior, I am just going to go and
raise my Luminance value one final time.
| | 03:44 | This time we will use a setting of
75, and again, we'll take a render.
| | 03:48 | What we see now of course is an extreme
improvement, in terms of the illumination
| | 03:53 | levels found in our environment.
| | 03:55 | If we take a look down to the far end
of the room, you can see, we can clearly
| | 03:59 | make out the wall at the far end there.
| | 04:00 | We're getting what looks like
natural light bounce occurring.
| | 04:03 | And as you can see in this instance,
we've not increased our render times at all.
| | 04:08 | This in fact is a behavior that you
would see with any of the Easy_01 to 07
| | 04:12 | presets, as they use Photon Mapping
and Final Gather as their GI system.
| | 04:17 | Because photons are so good at moving
light around an interior space, even the
| | 04:21 | increased Reflectance values don't really
add anything significant to the render times.
| | 04:27 | Things would actually be
considerably different if we use any of the
| | 04:30 | progressive, unbiased
Rendering Options available to us.
| | 04:34 | In fact, if we just jump into Adobe Photoshop,
| | 04:37 | here you can see we have two
progressive renders taken using the Easy09 preset
| | 04:42 | and rendered for 10 passes each.
| | 04:44 | Our first image is taken using our
initial Luminance value of 20, and as you
| | 04:49 | would perhaps expect from that setting,
we have a very dark interior indeed,
| | 04:54 | although we do get a little more
natural light behavior. You can see the
| | 04:58 | brightening of this right-hand side
wall, where light is bouncing, but still,
| | 05:02 | down on the far end of the room, we really
can't see any light penetrating down there at all.
| | 05:07 | Now this particular render, if we
look at the image title, took 6.1
| | 05:11 | minutes to complete.
| | 05:13 | Now if we switch over to our second
image, which was taken using our final
| | 05:17 | Luminance value of 75, you can see,
well, we have much more natural, much more
| | 05:22 | realistic-looking lighting in our environment.
| | 05:24 | As with our Photon and Final Gather option,
we can see all the way down to our far wall.
| | 05:30 | And again, even though we have a little
bit of noise in there, we're getting what
| | 05:33 | looks like natural light bounce.
| | 05:35 | However, the render times for this
particular image were considerably different.
| | 05:40 | You can see here, 11.5 minutes
to complete the same 10 passes.
| | 05:45 | The difference in render time is
occurring because light rays in our progressive
| | 05:49 | render are continually being calculated.
| | 05:52 | As the reflectance of the material
rises, the light rays will bounce more and
| | 05:56 | more often, and of course, as they
bounce more, they require more computation.
| | 06:00 | This leads to increased render times.
| | 06:03 | Clearly then, although seemingly
separate disciplines, materials and
| | 06:07 | lighting cannot be thought about,
they cannot be dealt with, in a mutually
| | 06:11 | exclusive environment.
| | 06:12 | What settings we apply to one
will affect the other, especially, as
| | 06:16 | we've demonstrated, when it comes
to getting light to bounce around an
| | 06:19 | interior environment.
| | 06:21 | So if we want to maximize our light
transport or our light bounce, we need to
| | 06:26 | make certain that we've given
attention to our material's Reflectance values.
| | 06:30 | Just be aware though that as we
increase reflectance, we generally have to
| | 06:34 | decrease saturation in a material;
otherwise, color bleed can become extremely
| | 06:38 | strong, even overpowering.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Understanding Rendering Presets in TwilightExploring Light Transport options in Twilight| 00:00 | When it comes to producing
high-quality global illumination renders, render
| | 00:04 | artists love to have options
available to them in terms of the types of
| | 00:09 | algorithms used to compute
bounce lighting in the scene.
| | 00:12 | The choice of course means that we can
pick a GI method that suits the needs of
| | 00:16 | the current project or the current
phase of the project that we are working on.
| | 00:20 | For instance, in the early stages of a
project, we may be asked to produce some
| | 00:24 | proof-of-concept renders.
| | 00:26 | These don't need to be particularly
polished, but they do need to convey the
| | 00:31 | mood and feel of lighting, and possibly
materials, in the scene reasonably well,
| | 00:36 | and of course they must be
quick and easy to produce.
| | 00:38 | On the other hand, when it comes to
final renders, quality, not time, is
| | 00:43 | generally the more important consideration.
| | 00:45 | For each of these situations,
many render engines require that we have a fairly
| | 00:51 | extensive understanding of the GI
algorithms at work and the myriad of settings
| | 00:56 | controlling them, so that we can push
our render settings either towards speed or
| | 01:00 | towards high quality.
| | 01:01 | Well, Twilight relieves us of the pain
of such tweaking, while still offering
| | 01:07 | plenty of choice regarding the GI
algorithms used to compute our scene
| | 01:11 | lighting and materials.
| | 01:13 | Simply put, we have three basic
choices that can actually split into
| | 01:16 | six separate options.
| | 01:19 | These are accessed by coming
into Twilight's Render dialog.
| | 01:22 | Inside of the Render tab,
we have our Preset options.
| | 01:27 | We make our choice of GI engine or GI
algorithm when we choose the Twilight
| | 01:31 | Render preset that we're going to work with.
| | 01:34 | The first of the GI options available
that we will focus on is the combination
| | 01:38 | of photon mapping and final gather, or
irradiance mapping, to give it its official title.
| | 01:44 | Twilight uses this combination in all
of the first seven of the easy presets.
| | 01:48 | These are biased rendering options,
| | 01:52 | meaning that the algorithms use some
nonphysical cheats to get good GI in the
| | 01:57 | scene as quickly as possible.
| | 01:59 | These very different global illumination
technologies are combined because when
| | 02:03 | used separately, you never really get a
complete GI solution from them, as each
| | 02:09 | system has its own limitations.
| | 02:12 | Photons, for instance, are
really good at bouncing light around.
| | 02:15 | That makes them very useful on
interiors, and they're pretty fast to calculate.
| | 02:19 | The problem is that getting a smooth
photon solution is not an easy thing to do.
| | 02:25 | The number of photons required would
usually be exceptionally high, and as these
| | 02:30 | are stored in a 3D data map, we can
eat up our RAM pretty quickly indeed.
| | 02:34 | Irradiance mapping, on the other hand, is
very good at creating a smooth or evenly
| | 02:38 | spread GI solution,
especially so on an interior scene.
| | 02:42 | But it doesn't bounce light around
anywhere near as well as photons do.
| | 02:46 | So whilst these two technologies do have
their limitations when working on their
| | 02:50 | own, they complement each other very nicely.
| | 02:53 | They work exceptionally well
and pretty speedily together.
| | 02:56 | In fact, let's just demonstrate how
speedily by coming to our Easy > 02.Low
| | 03:00 | Preset and then taking a test render.
| | 03:02 | As you can see, in no time at all--just
13 seconds--we get a very useable global
| | 03:08 | illumination solution.
| | 03:09 | Of course we don't mean useable in the
sense of final render quality, but in the
| | 03:13 | context of a quick test render, we can
easily evaluate the direct lighting, the
| | 03:18 | global illumination, and the
materials that are set up in the scene,
| | 03:22 | although of course we only have our default
gray material applied at this moment in time.
| | 03:26 | Of course we don't want to give you the
impression that Photon Mapping and Final
| | 03:30 | Gather are for low-quality renders only.
| | 03:32 | Certainly, as we start to work with the
Easy > 04 and upwards preset, we can get
| | 03:37 | some very high-quality
renders out of this combination.
| | 03:40 | In fact, if we just jump into Adobe
Photoshop, we'll show you a render of our
| | 03:44 | scene in its current state,
taken using the Easy > 07 Preset.
| | 03:48 | As you can see from our render,
Photon Mapping and Final Gather are both
| | 03:52 | perfectly capable of producing
a very nice, very clean global
| | 03:55 | illumination solution for us.
| | 03:57 | Any bits of noise, any blotchiness
that is still present in the system would
| | 04:01 | very easily be hidden once we
apply materials to our scene.
| | 04:05 | The brilliant thing about this
particular render, if we just come up and
| | 04:08 | examine its title, is that it only took one
minute to complete, which is very, very fast.
| | 04:13 | Now, of course things will slow
down considerably once we add complex
| | 04:17 | materials into the scene, but still,
you can see that Photon Mapping and Final
| | 04:21 | Gather are capable of producing a high-quality
GI solution in very respectable render times.
| | 04:27 | Let's jump back into SketchUp and have a
look at the next GI option available to us.
| | 04:33 | This is Path Tracing.
| | 04:35 | Well, actually, we get
Path Tracing in two forms.
| | 04:38 | To work with progressive Path Tracing,
we will choose the easy 08 Preset.
| | 04:43 | But if we just scroll down in our list
to the Tech options and into this Path
| | 04:48 | Tracing set, you can see we have a
number of fixed Path Tracing options
| | 04:52 | available to us also.
| | 04:54 | The term Progressive, as used in the
easy 08 Preset, refers to the fact that
| | 04:59 | once we set a render going using this
particular option, it will progressively
| | 05:04 | continue to refine the rendered
solution until we tell it to stop.
| | 05:08 | The Path Tracing part of the
description, if we were to just simplify things
| | 05:12 | down quite a bit, refers to the fact
that light paths, or rays, are continuously
| | 05:17 | being traced throughout the
environment using this rendering option.
| | 05:21 | So long as a ray has enough energy
and continues to encounter surfaces that
| | 05:25 | will bounce it--be they Diffuse or Specular--
the ray will just keep on being calculated.
| | 05:31 | This is a physically accurate
approach to image calculation, because no
| | 05:35 | shortcuts are taken in the algorithms.
| | 05:38 | Path tracing is an unbiased rendering solution.
| | 05:41 | Once again, if we jump into
Photoshop, we have a render prepared using
| | 05:46 | this particular preset.
| | 05:47 | So let's just swap our image
over to that particular render.
| | 05:51 | You can see an example of
progressive path tracing.
| | 05:54 | This particular render
was sampled over 15 passes.
| | 05:57 | Now again, if you take a look at the
title of the image, you can see that this
| | 06:02 | took just five minutes to complete,
which for a progressive unbiased rendering
| | 06:05 | option, is pretty good.
| | 06:06 | Of course, what we have here is
not a final rendered solution;
| | 06:10 | we have quite a bit of noise in our render
that would need quite a bit more time to clean up.
| | 06:15 | But again, we can make a very good
evaluation of the scene--its lighting, its
| | 06:20 | light bounce, its
materials--based on what we have.
| | 06:23 | And if we just compare this to our
Photon Map and Final Gather render, you can
| | 06:27 | see that the light bounce has
a much more natural feel to it.
| | 06:31 | The easy 08 Preset that was used to
render this particular image uses what I
| | 06:35 | will refer to as standard path tracing.
| | 06:38 | This means that rays are shot from
the rendering camera's point of view and
| | 06:42 | traced through our 3D environment.
| | 06:45 | But if we come back into SketchUp and
again, accessing our presets, if we just
| | 06:50 | come down to the Tech option, you can
see that we have, in our Progressive set,
| | 06:54 | the Bidirectional Path
Tracing option available to us also.
| | 06:58 | This is pretty much the same as path
tracing in every respect, except that the
| | 07:02 | rays are traced not just from the
camera's point of view; they are also traced
| | 07:06 | from light sources found in the scene,
hence the Bidirectional label given to
| | 07:11 | this particular algorithm.
| | 07:13 | This too is a progressive
unbiased rendering method.
| | 07:17 | The final distinct option we have for
light calculation in Twilight is the
| | 07:22 | Metropolis Light
Transport engine, or MLT for short.
| | 07:25 | This is used in the easy 09 Preset.
| | 07:29 | It is basically a variation of
progressive path tracing that uses some
| | 07:33 | specialized algorithm changes that
allow it to make path modifications
| | 07:38 | during its calculation.
| | 07:39 | It can even create new optional
paths in the scene if they're required.
| | 07:44 | Generally speaking, it is regarded, on
paper, as the fastest of the unbiased
| | 07:48 | rendering algorithms available,
although mileage definitely does vary
| | 07:52 | between implementations.
| | 07:54 | Again, if we jump into Photoshop, we can show
you a render taken using the easy 09 Preset.
| | 08:00 | Now, as you can see, it is
considerably cleaner than the progressive
| | 08:04 | path tracing version.
There is a lot less noise present in the image.
| | 08:08 | As with the progressive path tracing
version, this particular render was given
| | 08:12 | 15 passes in which to
complete its rendering calculations.
| | 08:16 | Besides the difference in quality,
you will notice--if again we look at the
| | 08:19 | titles--that there is a
considerable difference in the render times:
| | 08:22 | 16 minutes for the Metropolis Light
Transport version, whereas our Progressive
| | 08:26 | Path Tracing option took just five
minutes. So, quite a jump in render times, but
| | 08:31 | of course as we've seen, quite
a jump in render quality also.
| | 08:34 | As with Progressive Path Tracing,
Metropolis Light Transport shoots its rays
| | 08:39 | from the rendering camera and then
traces them throughout the scene.
| | 08:42 | We can, if we want add,
bidirectionality into the mix. We would do that by
| | 08:47 | choosing the easy 10 Preset.
| | 08:49 | Again, here we would find that our rays
are calculated both from the rendering
| | 08:53 | camera's point of view and from
any light sources in the scene.
| | 08:56 | So if we are a render artist who likes
to have choice but perhaps doesn't have
| | 09:01 | the time, or maybe even the desire, to
become an expert parameter tweaker, well,
| | 09:06 | Twilight has a GI option for every occasion.
| | 09:09 | Familiarity with the presets
available of course will go a long way towards
| | 09:12 | making the choice of which one to use
in any given rendering scenario that
| | 09:16 | much easier.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Managing the Quality presets| 00:00 | As we've already seen, rather than
giving us a bewildering array of
| | 00:04 | parameters and controls that need to be
tweaked and then re-tweaked in order to
| | 00:08 | achieve a desired quality level in our
renders, Twilight simply gives us a wide
| | 00:12 | range of rendering presets
designed to fit most rendering situations.
| | 00:17 | This means setting a desired quality level
for our renders is as easy as a mouse click.
| | 00:22 | Now of course we have already looked
at our presets with regard to the global
| | 00:26 | illumination methods used in them,
| | 00:28 | but we do have to keep in mind that
these presets control every aspect of
| | 00:34 | the rendering process.
| | 00:36 | When it comes to setting up the final
quality for our rendered images, these
| | 00:40 | presets really are it.
| | 00:42 | So let's revisit them, but this time
with a view to how they work in terms of
| | 00:47 | controlling not just GI quality, but
the overall quality of our final renders,
| | 00:53 | including the all-important
anti-aliasing phase of that process.
| | 00:58 | To examine our presets, we do of course
need to be inside Twilight's Render dialog.
| | 01:02 | Now many of these preset sets, or
groups if we want to call them, are
| | 01:06 | arranged in a very easy and very easy-to-
understand manner, when it comes to the
| | 01:11 | quality settings involved.
| | 01:13 | If we just open up the Easy,
Animation, Photon Map, Path Tracing sections,
| | 01:21 | you can see that they all progress
from lowest to highest quality as we
| | 01:26 | travel down the list.
| | 01:27 | Now, do also keep in mind that this
generally means that the list runs from
| | 01:31 | fastest to slowest renders also.
| | 01:34 | The naming conventions used in these sets,
as you can see, make it very, very easy
| | 01:38 | to understand what is going on.
| | 01:40 | Quick, Low, Medium, Medium+, High, they
all really are nice and descriptive to
| | 01:44 | show what we are going to get from that
particular preset, or what we can expect
| | 01:49 | from that particular preset.
| | 01:50 | You will have noticed that may of
our preset options have a Plus next to
| | 01:54 | the descriptive name.
| | 01:56 | This really designates an intermediate step.
| | 01:59 | So Easy 03 Low+ is an intermediate
quality step between 0 to Low and 0 for Medium.
| | 02:06 | The Plus symbol really servers as a nice
little suffix. That just means we don't
| | 02:11 | have to have another descriptive
name in between Low and Medium.
| | 02:15 | Let's just, for a minute or two,
focus on the Animation group of presets.
| | 02:19 | There is a little bit of information that
you need regarding this particular list.
| | 02:23 | In here you can see our first four
options range from Preview to High.
| | 02:28 | Now these options used Photon
Mapping and Final Gather for their global
| | 02:33 | illumination engine.
| | 02:34 | This means we have the ability to
render our animations using Photo Mapping and
| | 02:39 | Final Gather in a number of quality steps,
ranging, as we say, from Preview up to High.
| | 02:43 | The next four options, however, I
will use unbiased rendering methods.
| | 02:48 | Now again, they range in terms of
quality, so 04 and 05 are designed for, first
| | 02:53 | of all, interior animation and will
give you 100 passes per frame. And 05 is
| | 03:00 | designed for Exterior Daytime Animation,
and again, will give us 100 passes per
| | 03:05 | frame before that frame is counted as
finished and the next frame will begin to render.
| | 03:09 | Then we jump up in terms of Quality.
Again we have Exterior Daytime and
| | 03:14 | Interior Animation settings,
| | 03:15 | this time giving those 500 passes
each. And of course this means that our
| | 03:20 | final two options will take quite a
long while to render per frame, but the end
| | 03:24 | result we get should be very, very nice.
| | 03:27 | Now, if it is that you want to have a
large number of quality steps available to
| | 03:31 | you, then you could do no better than to
go to the Advanced > Alternative_AA, or
| | 03:35 | anti-aliasing section.
| | 03:38 | Now, if we have a look in here,
you can see that we have a number of grouped
| | 03:40 | options available to us. We have a Low group, a
Medium group, and a High group.
| | 03:46 | Now this description is referring to
the global illumination quality inside
| | 03:50 | of this preset, and all of these presets use
Photons and Final Gather for their GI system.
| | 03:55 | As you can see, at the top end of the
scale in this group of presets, we have
| | 04:00 | Ultra High quality settings, and we
can come all the way down to essentially
| | 04:02 | what is just a
Preliminary or test render option.
| | 04:06 | Now of course, we can work with any of
the Twilight Preset groups that we want to.
| | 04:11 | They are all perfectly admissible for
using in our day-to-day rendering operations.
| | 04:14 | But for ease of use, and just to
make things simple on ourselves, for most
| | 04:19 | general rendering situations, we can
stick inside of the Easy Preset group.
| | 04:24 | As we have again already mentioned,
01 to 07 all use Photon Mapping and Final
| | 04:30 | Gather, and again range from a
preliminary setting all the way up the High+, in
| | 04:34 | terms of final image quality that we
will get. And we also have 08 to 11 all
| | 04:40 | using progressive unbiased rendering methods.
| | 04:43 | Now, of course whenever we are
rendering with any of the progressive options in
| | 04:47 | Twilight, quality simply becomes a
function of the amount of time that we allow
| | 04:51 | our image to render for.
| | 04:53 | The longer we leave it rendering,
the more rays will be used to compute our
| | 04:57 | pixel color values, and more rays will
naturally equate to a higher-quality end result.
| | 05:02 | And of course we can stop our
progressive renders at any time, save them out,
| | 05:07 | and use them as they are.
| | 05:08 | It definitely has to be said that when it
comes to setting up the quality for our
| | 05:13 | final render output in Twilight,
things just couldn't be simpler.
| | 05:16 | All we do is pick a preset that will
give us the desired or required quality
| | 05:20 | level, hit Render, and away Twilight will go.
| | 05:23 | Of course, the problem with many render
artists, if indeed you would count it a
| | 05:28 | problem, is that they really do
like to have control of their render.
| | 05:32 | The ability to fine-tune the render
engine so that it gives them just what
| | 05:36 | they need oftentimes is viewed as an
art form in and of itself, and is something
| | 05:41 | that they take pride in.
| | 05:42 | Now, whilst Twilight is not
specifically designed around such a tweakable
| | 05:46 | workflow, there is still a way to
access the engine's core options and tweak
| | 05:50 | things up as much as we like.
| | 05:53 | This in fact is just what
we will do in our next video.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Editing and saving presets| 00:00 | Quite clearly, the Twilight render
engine has been built around the premise of
| | 00:05 | making realistic rendering as easy
and painless as possible for artists who,
| | 00:09 | for one reason or another, have no
need to learn the intricacies of balancing
| | 00:14 | the myriad parameters that may need
to be tweaked in order to fine-tune a
| | 00:18 | raytrace render engine.
| | 00:19 | That though doesn't mean that such
parameters cannot be accessed by artists
| | 00:24 | using the Twilight renderer.
| | 00:25 | It is just that the user interface doesn't
expose them to us at this moment in time.
| | 00:31 | In this video we're going to walk you
through the basic process of creating our
| | 00:34 | own custom render preset.
| | 00:37 | To do this, the first thing we will need to
know is where our render preset files reside.
| | 00:42 | This will mean we need to, first of all,
locate our SketchUp installation folder.
| | 00:47 | You can see we are inside
our Google SketchUp install.
| | 00:49 | To locate our render preset files we
need to come into the Plugins folder and
| | 00:55 | then of course locate and enter the
Twilight folder, and in here you can see we
| | 00:59 | have a RenderSettings folder.
| | 01:01 | It is in here that our Render Presets reside.
| | 01:04 | Once in here, you will see options that
we will be very familiar as they mimic
| | 01:08 | the layout that is found inside
of the Twilight user interface.
| | 01:12 | So we have our Express and our Tech
folders with the various subcategories of
| | 01:17 | render presets held within them.
| | 01:19 | Now, before we make any changes in here,
I just want to jump back into SketchUp
| | 01:23 | because I just want to highlight something
inside of Twilight's Render dialog for you.
| | 01:28 | If we just come into our Preset
options here, you can see that inside of our
| | 01:32 | custom set we have, well, no render presets.
| | 01:35 | We have no custom options set up at
this moment in time, which of course is
| | 01:39 | something that we will change right now.
| | 01:41 | So let's jump back into
our Render Settings folder.
| | 01:44 | In this instance, I want to come into
our Easy folder and I'm going to make a
| | 01:49 | change to our 04_Medium render preset.
| | 01:52 | Well, we're not going to make a change
to this one, because obviously we don't
| | 01:54 | want to break anything
inside of Twilight itself.
| | 01:58 | What we are going to do is first of all,
make a copy of this particular file, so
| | 02:02 | let's just right-click, go to Copy,
then we want to come back up into our
| | 02:06 | Express folder, and indeed come into the
Custom option and then just right-click
| | 02:10 | and paste our file in there.
| | 02:14 | Straight away, to avoid confusion, I'm
going to rename this new Render Preset.
| | 02:18 | I'm going to leave the 04.
| | 02:20 | Medium tag on there, just so I know
from which render preset I have taken
| | 02:24 | this custom option.
| | 02:25 | But I'm going to append the
NoReverseGamma label. That describes exactly the
| | 02:32 | change that I'm going to make inside
of this particular render preset, and of
| | 02:35 | course then we can accept those changes.
| | 02:38 | Now, if we jump back into Twilight and
if we close our Render dialog and then
| | 02:43 | reopen it, you'll see that we do
indeed have our new render preset showing up
| | 02:47 | inside the Custom options.
| | 02:49 | Of course we haven't actually
customized anything at this moment in time, so
| | 02:53 | let's jump back into our
folder and do just that.
| | 02:56 | Now as we're working with XML files here,
we can generally open, edit, and save
| | 03:01 | them in a simple text editor application.
| | 03:04 | Now in my case working on Windows 7, as I am,
| | 03:07 | I can just right-click my file, choose
the Edit option, and you see it will be opened
| | 03:11 | up inside of Windows Notepad.
| | 03:13 | You can of course use any
text editor that you'd like.
| | 03:16 | Obviously, we can now make changes to
any of the parameters inside of this file
| | 03:21 | without doing any damage to our
existing Twilight render presets.
| | 03:25 | Do be careful though:
| | 03:26 | if we make changes to options inside
of these files without having any real
| | 03:30 | idea of the expected end result, we could run
ourselves into any number of render problems,
| | 03:36 | not least of which would be
greatly inflated render times.
| | 03:40 | These files do contain controls
handling every aspect of the rendering process.
| | 03:45 | This of course includes controls
handling the quality of our global illumination
| | 03:50 | as well as our anti-aliasing options.
| | 03:53 | In this instance, to keep our changes
nice and simple and trackable, we're just
| | 03:57 | going to change one option inside of this file.
| | 04:00 | So, if we scroll all the way down to the
bottom, you can see we have this Reverse
| | 04:05 | Correction and Reverse Gamma options.
| | 04:07 | Now we could make a change to the
Reverse Gamma value if we just wanted to
| | 04:11 | tweak how much reverse gamma
correction is applied to our bitmaps and our
| | 04:15 | material color swatches.
| | 04:16 | In this instance though I'm going to
make things a little more obvious, a little
| | 04:20 | more dramatic, and actually turn off
our inverse or reverse gamma correction.
| | 04:25 | As this is just a simple Boolean value,
that means that 0 is off and 1 is on.
| | 04:30 | I can just go, select that,
set a value of 0, and we're done.
| | 04:34 | Now what I want to do is come up and
just choose the File > Save option.
| | 04:38 | Again, we do want to be
careful when saving our files out.
| | 04:42 | We don't want to inadvertently
write out a simple text file.
| | 04:45 | If we do that, Twilight
will not recognize the preset.
| | 04:48 | It won't in fact show up inside
of the Twilight user interface.
| | 04:52 | This has to remain an XML
file for it to be usable.
| | 04:55 | Now what we can do is just dismiss
our floating dialogs, because I just need
| | 04:59 | to make a couple of tweaks inside of
SketchUp and Twilight before we can take
| | 05:03 | our comparison render.
| | 05:05 | So let's just close our Render dialog,
and I first of all want to come into my
| | 05:09 | Layers dialog and just turn
off our Sky Portals layer.
| | 05:12 | Of course, first of all, I need to make
certain that it isn't the default layer
| | 05:16 | and then I can go and turn that off.
| | 05:17 | We don't want to increased render times that
that would give us using the Easy 04 preset.
| | 05:22 | Now I can go back into my Twilight
Render dialog, and I just want to go into the
| | 05:27 | Camera tab and make certain that my
Gamma Adjustment value is set to 1.0.
| | 05:31 | That means we're just inline with the test
renders that we're going to show you in
| | 05:35 | Photoshop in just a moment.
| | 05:37 | Now we can come and take two renders
using our Easy 04 and our Custom 04
| | 05:41 | NoReverseGamma presets.
| | 05:44 | As we've already done that, we can of
course just jump into Adobe Photoshop.
| | 05:48 | Here, first of all then, is our Easy 04 preset.
| | 05:51 | This is using the settings that we've
just created inside of our SketchUp scene
| | 05:55 | file. And if we just come up to our tab
and switch to our Custom Preset, you can
| | 06:00 | see that there is quite a
considerable difference.
| | 06:02 | Now, because there is no inverse or
reverse gamma correction taking place on our
| | 06:07 | bitmaps or our material color
swatches, you can see we definitely get a very
| | 06:11 | different end result.
| | 06:13 | Clearly then, parameter tweaking is
available to us when we render in SketchUp
| | 06:17 | using the Twilight engine.
| | 06:19 | We just have to be prepared to dig a
little into the render preset files, the
| | 06:23 | XML files, to be able to do this.
| | 06:25 | Again, just to reiterate our warning:
do be sure that you have at least some
| | 06:30 | idea of what effect a particular
parameter change is going to have on your
| | 06:34 | render before you make it.
| | 06:35 | That way you'll just avoid
running into any nasty surprises.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Working with the Twilight CameraPositioning your scene view| 00:00 | When using any render engine, cameras
and the positioning they are given in a
| | 00:05 | scene will play a huge role in the
quality of our final output. Because of this,
| | 00:11 | we will more certainly want to make
good use of any tools available that can
| | 00:14 | help us position and control our
camera's point of view, thus producing a more
| | 00:19 | pleasing composition in our shots.
| | 00:20 | In our start scene you can see that we
have a poorly positioned camera view.
| | 00:25 | Poor composition such as this will
detract massively from our final render, even
| | 00:30 | if the lighting and material work in
our scene is the best we've ever produced.
| | 00:35 | Fortunately, Twilight has a tool that
can help even the most novice of camera
| | 00:39 | users create a pleasing
shot very quickly indeed.
| | 00:42 | This is the Position Scene View tool
and if we come up to our Twilight toolbar,
| | 00:47 | you can see we have an icon
that allows us to enable this tool.
| | 00:50 | Its purpose is to provide us with an
overlay grid that can make using certain
| | 00:54 | compositional rules, such as the rule
of thirds, very easy, as well as providing
| | 00:59 | us with a set of controls that can
allow us to make use of that grid.
| | 01:03 | To get our grid to show up once we
have initialized our tool by clicking the
| | 01:06 | icon, we just need to bring our
mouse into the SketchUp viewport.
| | 01:09 | Well, the shape and size of the grid
we get will be determined by the render
| | 01:14 | output settings that we have
already specified in Twilight.
| | 01:17 | Once this tool is engaged, we can now
simply left-click in our scene, or we can
| | 01:22 | even pick an object in the view if we
want to, and then drag our mouse to orbit
| | 01:26 | the view around that chosen point.
| | 01:28 | This of course means we now have
the ability to search for a pleasing
| | 01:32 | composition in our shot in a very easy manner.
| | 01:35 | Experimentation can be both
fast and easy at this point.
| | 01:38 | To produce a different set of
behaviors from our camera controls, we can also
| | 01:43 | hold down the Shift key.
| | 01:44 | If we do this and then left-mouse-click
and drag, we see that we're now panning
| | 01:48 | around our viewport.
| | 01:50 | A third behavior can be
produced by holding down the Alt key.
| | 01:53 | Now if we left-mouse-click and drag,
we see that we swivel our camera as if
| | 01:57 | it were on a tripod.
| | 01:59 | This of course is different
from our initial orbiting behavior.
| | 02:03 | All of these behaviors of course are
critical when it comes to setting up a
| | 02:06 | pleasing composition for our final render.
| | 02:09 | The Scene View tool also allows us to
set our camera focal point in the scene.
| | 02:14 | We do this by holding down the Ctrl key.
| | 02:16 | Now as we move our mouse, you can see
that our cursor has changed to a target icon.
| | 02:21 | All we need to do now is simply
left-mouse-click on any object or point in
| | 02:25 | the scene and that will be set as the point
of view, or the focal point for our camera.
| | 02:30 | A nice thing about this
functionality is that it doesn't change the
| | 02:33 | composition of our scene view;
| | 02:36 | all that happens is the focal plane
for the camera is realigned in the scene.
| | 02:40 | Although we can indeed augment this
behavior by holding down both the Alt and
| | 02:44 | Ctrl keys while clicking
on a point in the scene.
| | 02:47 | This will actually swivel the camera
to focus on a point we've selected,
| | 02:52 | setting it at the center of our
camera view, whilst also at the same time
| | 02:56 | setting it as the new
focal point for the camera.
| | 02:59 | Which of these options we choose to
use of course will depend upon the needs
| | 03:03 | of our final render.
| | 03:05 | There is no doubt, when setting up a
scene for rendering, good composition is
| | 03:10 | a critical element.
| | 03:11 | The ability to easily manipulate the
camera through well-thought-out tools can
| | 03:15 | also be considered a critical element.
| | 03:18 | With Twilight's Position Scene View
tool this job is made very easy for
| | 03:21 | us indeed.
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| Altering projection types| 00:00 | On occasion, render artists can be called
upon to produce any one of a number of
| | 00:05 | special render types that mimic
photographic effects or options that are
| | 00:09 | available by means of specialized camera lenses.
| | 00:12 | Sometimes we may just want to produce such
a render for use in one of our own projects.
| | 00:17 | Of course, in Twilight, we don't have
the ability to actually swap out lenses
| | 00:21 | for our rendering camera, but we do
have the ability to change its behavior.
| | 00:26 | To see what options are available
to us, we need to come and open up
| | 00:30 | Twilight's Render dialog.
| | 00:31 | Once that is opened, we need to come
across to the Camera tab, and you can see
| | 00:35 | the first option is this Type of
Projection control, and in the dropdown we have
| | 00:40 | four options available.
| | 00:41 | The first option, Planar, is the default
in Twilight, and if we come and take a
| | 00:46 | test render, you'll see why that is the case.
| | 00:48 | As you can see, the render we get
gives those expected camera behavior.
| | 00:53 | This is because the Planar option
renders our image as if it is projected onto
| | 00:57 | a flat plane, and this is the default
camera behavior that you'll find in most
| | 01:01 | any 3D application.
| | 01:03 | The brilliant thing for us of course is
that Twilight doesn't limit us to this
| | 01:07 | particular behavior.
| | 01:08 | If we come back to our Projection dropdown,
you can see our next option is Cylindrical.
| | 01:13 | With that set, let's again take a render.
| | 01:15 | And of course, the render we get
doesn't look particularly impressive
| | 01:19 | inside of Twilight's Render dialog.
But what we've just created is a
| | 01:23 | cylindrical panorama.
| | 01:25 | This particular render could be taken
into a virtual panoramic program, such as
| | 01:29 | Easypano, and used to create, well,
a cylindrical virtual panorama.
| | 01:32 | In fact, our next projection type
can be used in a very similar way.
| | 01:37 | This is the Spherical option, and again,
with it chosen, let's take a render.
| | 01:42 | The Spherical Projection type renders a
complete 360-degree view of everything
| | 01:47 | in our scene, from of course,
the camera's point of view.
| | 01:50 | With this Projection mode operational,
our rendering camera is set essentially
| | 01:53 | at the center of a virtual sphere.
| | 01:56 | Then camera rays are sent out,
| | 01:58 | bent around the environment, and so we get,
as we can see, a complete 360-degree view.
| | 02:04 | This option again, can be
used to create virtual panoramas,
| | 02:07 | this time of course, spherical
panoramas. Or we could indeed save out our images
| | 02:12 | as floating-point files, such as OpenEXR
or HDR, and then they can be brought back
| | 02:17 | into Twilight for use as both
backgrounds or indeed lighting images, using the
| | 02:21 | sky options that we have already examined.
| | 02:24 | Now up to this point, the Projection
options that we have chosen have not
| | 02:28 | made any difference to our SketchUp
viewport; in fact with Spherical still
| | 02:32 | chosen, let's dismiss the Render dialog, and
you can see our camera is just as we left it.
| | 02:37 | But if we come back and have a look at
the very last of our Projection options,
| | 02:41 | Parallel, and then again, if we close
the Render dialog, you can see that
| | 02:46 | things are now very different.
| | 02:47 | This particular Projection type is
designed to give us a render that will not
| | 02:51 | take any perspective or
vanishing point convergence into account;
| | 02:55 | essentially, we get an
isomorphic render of the scene.
| | 02:58 | Now there is a little bit of a gotcha
with this particular projection type that
| | 03:02 | we need to be aware of.
| | 03:03 | At this moment in time, if we take a
render, we will get exactly what we see in the
| | 03:07 | SketchUp viewport, and as you can see,
our building is occupying a very small
| | 03:11 | percentage of our screen area.
| | 03:13 | So the temptation will be to just center
things up, zoom in to frame things, and
| | 03:20 | then maybe pan a little more, and then
say that that is very nice. And we can
| | 03:24 | indeed go and take a render.
| | 03:26 | As promised, what we see in the
SketchUp viewport is exactly what we get in
| | 03:30 | our Twilight render.
| | 03:31 | However, time to point out
the potential danger to us.
| | 03:34 | If we just come back into our Projection
type dropdown and if we just switch back
| | 03:40 | to Planar, and then again, dismiss the
Render dialog, you can see that we've
| | 03:44 | completely changed our initial camera framing.
| | 03:47 | Now at this moment in time, this is
not such a big deal for us because we
| | 03:50 | have a saved scene view, but if we
didn't have these camera scene saved and we
| | 03:55 | made alterations while we were in the
Parallel Projection mode, then we need
| | 03:59 | to be aware that that will completely change
the framing once we switch back to Planar.
| | 04:03 | If we just go and take a look at our
Render once again, you may be wondering why
| | 04:07 | we get this view of our interior
scene here. Why do we have this cutaway?
| | 04:11 | Well, remember, our rendering
camera is down in this area here.
| | 04:15 | This means these walls are behind our
camera's point of view, hence the cutaway.
| | 04:20 | This is why this particular rendering mode is
perfect for rendering section, or cutaway, views.
| | 04:25 | If we want to increase the amount of
cutaway, all we need to do is move the
| | 04:29 | camera forward in the scene.
| | 04:31 | We do of course need to be careful
with our camera's orientation in the
| | 04:34 | scene. As you can tell,
| | 04:36 | this particular cutaway is not
particularly straight, so we're not getting what
| | 04:39 | we would think of as a very clean section view.
| | 04:42 | We do of course also need to note
that we don't have any perspective or
| | 04:46 | convergence in our render.
| | 04:48 | This means that this particular
Projection mode is extremely good for
| | 04:51 | creating elevation views.
| | 04:52 | Now of course, the options we've
examined in our Projection dropdown are not
| | 04:57 | ones that most rendering artists will
need to use on a daily basis, but having
| | 05:01 | the ability to change the behavior of
our rendering camera can indeed open
| | 05:05 | up lots of artistic and functional
options when it comes to outputting our
| | 05:09 | final rendered images.
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| Working with depth of field| 00:00 | Oftentimes, when rendering shots
out of Twilight we will want to add a
| | 00:04 | photographic effect that can enhance both the
artistic and realistic aspects of our image.
| | 00:10 | One way to do this would be by adding
a photographic depth-of-field effect.
| | 00:14 | We can accomplish this in a very
straightforward manner using Twilight's tools.
| | 00:18 | As Twilight's controls conform to
general photographic principles, some
| | 00:23 | experience working with cameras can go
a long way when it comes to setting up a
| | 00:27 | depth-of-field effect, but of course
it isn't essential for us to work with
| | 00:30 | the Twilight controls.
| | 00:32 | To work with those, we need to of
course come up to the Twilight toolbar, click
| | 00:35 | on the Open Twilight Render icon.
| | 00:37 | That will bring the Render dialog up for us.
| | 00:39 | Once in here, we need to come into the
Camera Tab, because the primary tool we
| | 00:43 | are interested in is
this Camera F-Number option.
| | 00:47 | This F-Number, or F-Stop, control, just
as with a real camera, will control the
| | 00:52 | depth-of-field effect in our scene.
| | 00:54 | Just as with a real camera, higher
F-Number values will give us a less
| | 00:59 | pronounced depth-of-field effect in the scene.
| | 01:01 | This is often known as a deeper depth of field.
| | 01:03 | Of course, lower F-number values will
increase the blurriness of our depth-of-field effect.
| | 01:09 | This is again known as a
shallower depth of field.
| | 01:12 | The default setting of Pinhole of
course gives us infinite focus in the scene.
| | 01:16 | Now, to correctly set up a
depth-to-field effect, we do need to use this
| | 01:20 | F-number value in conjunction
with Twilight's Scene View tool.
| | 01:24 | This will allow us to specify
a point of focus in the scene.
| | 01:27 | Otherwise, we could find our depth of
field effect working in the wrong place.
| | 01:31 | So, let's dismiss our Render dialog and
go and set the point of focus in the scene.
| | 01:37 | We need to select our Scene View tool.
| | 01:39 | As soon as we roll into our viewport,
of course we will get our 3 x 3 grid.
| | 01:43 | And now, if we hold down the Ctrl key,
you can see we get this target icon that
| | 01:47 | allows us to use a simple
left-mouse-click to set the focal point of the scene.
| | 01:52 | I'm going to choose this sphere in the
middle of our outdoor pool here and just
| | 01:56 | left-mouse-click, and now we have set
that as the point of focus in the scene.
| | 02:01 | Once that's done, I can just use
spacebar to return to my normal Select tool,
| | 02:05 | and I can again go and access the Render dialog.
| | 02:07 | What I need to do now is
set up my F-Number value.
| | 02:10 | Now, to get a fairly strong or
pronounced depth-of-field effect in this
| | 02:14 | particular scene, I'm going to
use an F-Number value of 2.8.
| | 02:18 | Do remember that this will work in
conjunction also with the focal length of your lens.
| | 02:23 | You get different depth-of-field
effects from different focal lengths.
| | 02:27 | So, with that set, let's go
and take a test render.
| | 02:30 | And as you can see, with just a few
simple steps, we have a very nice depth-of-
| | 02:34 | field effect taking place.
| | 02:36 | And as you have seen, we can very easily
change the point of focus in our scene
| | 02:40 | and so produce a completely
different depth-of-field effect.
| | 02:44 | One thing we do need to point out
here is that the F-Number value on our
| | 02:47 | Twilight camera, unlike a real-
world camera, doesn't affect exposure.
| | 02:52 | So we can set this value to anything we like;
it will not change the exposure of our scene.
| | 02:57 | Don't forget of course that we could
very easily change our depth-of-field
| | 03:01 | effect at this point in time.
| | 03:02 | If we came and raised our F-Number value,
we would get a subtler blurring in our render.
| | 03:07 | And of course, the opposite would
happen if we drop this value down;
| | 03:10 | we would get a much
stronger depth-of-field effect.
| | 03:13 | We could also alter the depth-of-field
effect by working with our focal lengths.
| | 03:17 | But do remember, if we work with the
focal lengths in our scene, then we're
| | 03:21 | going to change our
camera setup and composition.
| | 03:23 | So, oftentimes it's easier to just
work with the F-Number value to create a
| | 03:27 | different depth-of-field render for ourselves.
| | 03:30 | One quick workflow tip that we can give
after setting up our F-Number value, if
| | 03:34 | we want to make certain that our camera
focal point is stored with our scene, we
| | 03:38 | just need to come right-click on our
Scene Tab and use the Update option to
| | 03:42 | make certain that all of
that is fixed for ourselves.
| | 03:44 | So, there is no doubt that creating
effects such as depth of field in our
| | 03:49 | renders really is a great way to add both an
artistic and realistic touch to our final output.
| | 03:54 | And of course using Twilight tools,
it really couldn't be any simpler.
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| Working with focal length| 00:00 | One aspect of the Twilight camera that
we do need to give a little bit of an
| | 00:04 | explanation for is its use
of this Focal Length value.
| | 00:08 | Now, in photographic terms, the focal
length of a lens is defined as the distance
| | 00:13 | in millimeters from the optical center
of the lens to the focal point, located
| | 00:17 | on the sensor or film, if the
subject at infinity is in focus.
| | 00:22 | The values associated with focal length
are based on the 35 millimeter film format.
| | 00:26 | Now this means that choosing the
appropriate focal length can get a little
| | 00:31 | tricky in the digital arena, as many
of today's cameras, even many SLR models,
| | 00:37 | do not use what are called full-frame sensors--
that is sensors that are equivalent to 35 mm film.
| | 00:43 | In such cameras the cropped, or reduced,
size of the sensor means that the given
| | 00:48 | size of a lens--for example, a 60
millimeter lens--does not produce the same
| | 00:52 | result as a 60 millimeter lens when
mounted on either 35 millimeter film camera
| | 00:57 | or a camera that has a full-frame sensor.
| | 01:00 | In the words, composition, framing,
even depth of field will not look the same
| | 01:05 | on two cameras using different sensor
sizes, even though we may use the same
| | 01:10 | lens on each of them.
| | 01:11 | Now, of course you're probably
wondering why we're throwing all of this
| | 01:14 | information your way.
| | 01:15 | Well, simply put, Twilight is essentially
working as a cropped-sensor render engine.
| | 01:21 | You may already have noticed that the
reported focal length of your SketchUp
| | 01:24 | viewport does not match the reported
focal length inside the Twilight Render dialog.
| | 01:30 | If we just make certain that we have
our Zoom tool selected and then come down
| | 01:34 | to the bottom-right of our SketchUp
interface, you can see we have our reported
| | 01:38 | focal length, which is 35 millimeters.
This is the setting that was used to
| | 01:41 | render this particular image, but
you'll notice that Twilight is reporting a
| | 01:45 | completely different focal length value.
| | 01:48 | Here, we're getting 24.306.
| | 01:51 | This is happening because Twilight is
basing its values on an expected film size
| | 01:56 | of 25, not 35 millimeters.
| | 02:00 | Now again, you may wonder why this is the case.
| | 02:02 | Well, the Twilight engine is built on
the Kerkythea Echo 2008 Render Engine.
| | 02:08 | Kerkythea was built on the premise of
a 25 millimeter film size, hence the
| | 02:12 | reason that Twilight uses the same camera model.
| | 02:15 | Now, the good news is that all of this
doesn't really alter what we will get
| | 02:18 | in our final render.
| | 02:20 | If we have used Twilight's Scene View
tool to setup our SketchUp viewport,
| | 02:24 | then our composition, our framing, will all
be preserved in our final Twilight render.
| | 02:30 | We do, however, need to keep in mind that
when we are choosing focal lens for our
| | 02:34 | shots, SketchUp will be using
established photographic conventions, whereas
| | 02:38 | Twilight will be reporting its focal
lengths based on a 25 millimeter film format.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Harnessing tone mapping, exposure, and gamma| 00:00 | Tone mapping is simply the
modification of an image to control the
| | 00:04 | representation of the brightest and
darkest values found in the pixels.
| | 00:09 | Oftentimes, tone mapping is used to achieve
a particular look or style for a final image.
| | 00:15 | To access Twilight's tone mapping controls,
we need to open up the Render dialog.
| | 00:19 | So, let's come up to the Twilight toolbar
and click on the Open Twilight Render icon.
| | 00:23 | Here, as you can see, we
have a render of our scene.
| | 00:26 | This was taken using the easy
10 preset, which of course is a
| | 00:30 | progressive unbiased method.
| | 00:32 | If we select the Camera tab, you can
see at the end of the bottom we have our
| | 00:37 | Tone Mapping controls.
| | 00:38 | If we take a look at the options in
the dropdown, you can see we have three
| | 00:42 | choices available to us.
| | 00:44 | At this moment in time, the render
you're looking at is making use of this first
| | 00:48 | option, which is None.
| | 00:49 | As the name suggested,
this mode produces an as-is image.
| | 00:53 | No alteration of pixel values is taking place.
| | 00:57 | And of course, as you can see, we have no
controls with which to effect any changes.
| | 01:01 | What we see is what we get.
| | 01:03 | However, just so that we are clear on
the importance of tone mapping, it has to
| | 01:07 | be noted that a form of tone mapping
has already taken place inside of the
| | 01:12 | Twilight render engine,
| | 01:13 | so as to produce the pixel
values that we are seeing.
| | 01:16 | We just don't have access to any extra controls.
| | 01:19 | We can't make any
alterations using this particular mode.
| | 01:22 | The second choice available in our
dropdown list, and the default in Twilight,
| | 01:26 | is the Simple option.
| | 01:28 | Now of course tone mapping or the
filtering of our tone mapping inside of
| | 01:32 | Twilight is a post render process.
| | 01:35 | This means that in order to use the
different tone mapping filter types,
| | 01:38 | we have no need to rerender our image.
| | 01:41 | We can just simply switch to
another tone mapping filter.
| | 01:44 | So, when we switch to simple, you can
see we do indeed make a big difference to
| | 01:48 | the look of our pixel values.
| | 01:50 | At this moment in time of course our
Exposure level is blowing out our render,
| | 01:54 | so let's drop this down to a value of 1,
which will essentially return us to the
| | 01:57 | same end result as our None option.
| | 02:00 | From this point of course we can
tweak our Exposure levels up or down,
| | 02:04 | although we do need to be careful
because it is very easy to ruin the look of
| | 02:08 | our image by overdoing or
underdoing our exposure levels.
| | 02:11 | So, as you can see, we can increase the
brightness of our overall image, or indeed,
| | 02:16 | we can drop our exposure
level down and darken the image.
| | 02:19 | We also, as you can see, have a Gamma
Adjustment option available to us.
| | 02:24 | This essentially allows us to change the
contrast ratio in our image on the fly.
| | 02:28 | It allows us to remap the midtones.
| | 02:31 | So, let's just set this to a value
of 2, and you can see we lose a lot of
| | 02:35 | contrast in the image.
We flattened midtones out quite a lot.
| | 02:38 | And if we drop this down, you
can see we do exactly the opposite.
| | 02:42 | We produce a much contrastier-looking image.
| | 02:45 | The final of our tone
mapping filter types is Linear.
| | 02:48 | With this option we only have control
over the brightest and darkest pixel
| | 02:53 | values in the image.
| | 02:54 | We don't have any ability to affect
the midtones in a separate manner.
| | 02:58 | Essentially, now the application will decide
what is a bright pixel, what is a dark pixel,
| | 03:03 | and as we make alterations to our
values, it will be remap them accordingly.
| | 03:07 | So, if we take our Brightness level
and increase it, you can see, Twilight
| | 03:11 | decides what a bright
pixel is and will add to that.
| | 03:14 | If we take our Darkness level and
decrease, you see Twilight will decide what
| | 03:18 | constitutes a dark pixel and darken that down.
| | 03:22 | Without tone mapping in some form, we
wouldn't get any kind of usable images
| | 03:26 | out of render engines.
| | 03:28 | But with Twilight's simple and
straightforward controls we do get a nice simple
| | 03:32 | way to apply some measure of
tone mapping to our images.
| | 03:35 | However, if we want greater control
over the mapping of pixel values in our
| | 03:40 | renders, then perhaps our best option
would be to render out of Twilight using
| | 03:44 | the None Tone Mapping Filter type
and then saving our renders out as
| | 03:48 | floating-point images.
| | 03:49 | That way we can use the extensive
tools available to us in postproduction
| | 03:53 | applications such as Photoshop to
really fine-tune and tweak our pixel values.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using two-point perspective correction| 00:00 | Oftentimes when producing visualization
renders, a SketchUp artist will be asked
| | 00:04 | to mimic the use of a perspective
control or shift lens as employed by many
| | 00:09 | visualization photographers.
| | 00:12 | The basic idea of such lenses is that
they give photographers the ability to
| | 00:16 | control the appearance of
perspective in an image.
| | 00:19 | The lens can actually be moved
parallel to the camera's sensor.
| | 00:23 | Architectural photographers often
make use of this functionality to avoid
| | 00:27 | convergence of vertical lines in tall
buildings, but of course it can be used
| | 00:32 | to straighten the verticals
in any perspective photograph.
| | 00:35 | Indeed, if we take a render of our
start scene, you'll see why this kind of
| | 00:39 | functionality--the ability to correct
perspective--may also be something that we
| | 00:43 | need to do inside of our visualization renders.
| | 00:46 | Clearly, we have a number of vertical
lines that are, well, not really vertical.
| | 00:52 | They're leaning quite badly in fact.
| | 00:54 | Now if you're a regular SketchUp user,
then you're probably thinking, well,
| | 00:58 | this is not a problem;
| | 00:59 | SketchUp has perspective
correction tools built in.
| | 01:02 | One thing we do need to keep in mind is
that those tools don't always work with
| | 01:06 | third-party render engines; happily
| | 01:09 | this isn't the case with Twilight.
| | 01:11 | To demonstrate how these tools work,
I'm just going to dismiss our Twilight
| | 01:15 | Render dialog and come up to the
Camera menu, and we're going to come down
| | 01:20 | and all we need to do is enable these Two-
Point Perspective option. And as you can
| | 01:24 | see in the SketchUp viewport, our leaning
verticals are now standing nice and upright.
| | 01:29 | Of course, our composition is a little
bit off now, so let's just frame things
| | 01:33 | up a little more nicely.
| | 01:34 | Now of course, we want to
go and take a test render.
| | 01:36 | We want to be certain that Twilight has
captured that perspective correction for
| | 01:40 | us, which, as you can see,
it most definitely has,
| | 01:43 | although there does appear to be a
little bit of a problem. We don't have
| | 01:47 | the composition in our Twilight Render that
we're seeing inside of our SketchUp viewport.
| | 01:52 | This really is a limitation of
SketchUp's Two-Point Perspective tool.
| | 01:56 | Once we have enabled it, we cannot
perform any further viewport operations. Well,
| | 02:01 | we can perform the viewport operations,
as you saw us demonstrate, but our
| | 02:05 | render engine will not capture them.
| | 02:07 | The render we get will essentially be
from the point at which our perspective
| | 02:12 | correction was applied.
| | 02:13 | If we do need to improve our
composition a little bit, then we have to
| | 02:17 | make certain that any
alterations are applied before we use our
| | 02:20 | perspective correction.
| | 02:22 | Of course, this means a little bit of
trial and error when it comes to setting
| | 02:25 | up our cameras, but with a bit of
work we can get both our upright vertical
| | 02:29 | lines and our pleasing
composition in the final render.
| | 02:33 | Of course, we could perform these
perspective corrections in an image editing
| | 02:37 | application such as Photoshop, but
seeing as we have such an easy-to-use and
| | 02:42 | readily accessible control in SketchUp,
one that Twilight can render, it seems
| | 02:46 | to make sense to apply this kind of
perspective correction at render time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. It's a Material WorldIntroduction to Twilight materials| 00:00 | When it comes to outputting high-
quality renders, one of the things we have to
| | 00:05 | recognize is that a lot of the
finished quality, a lot of the power and
| | 00:08 | functionality housed in our rendering engine
of choice, comes from the materials it uses.
| | 00:14 | Our final renders would be nowhere near as
appealing, nor convincing, if not farther.
| | 00:19 | Twilight is of course no
exception in this regard.
| | 00:22 | This is why it installs with a number of
its own material presets and templates,
| | 00:27 | all designed to help us quickly and
easily re-create both simple and complex
| | 00:32 | materials as we have the need.
| | 00:34 | Naturally, familiarity with the tools
available will open up options for us.
| | 00:39 | So in this video we just want to
familiarize ourselves with Twilight's basic
| | 00:44 | material functionality, which is a little
different from all the SketchUp render plug-ins.
| | 00:49 | Twilight's materials work by
initially linking to a SketchUp material and
| | 00:55 | using it as a base.
| | 00:57 | So to create a new material in Twilight we
must first create a new SketchUp material.
| | 01:03 | Then we can use the Twilight Material
Editor to work with presets, templates, and
| | 01:07 | general material parameters.
| | 01:09 | In fact, let's just show you how that is done.
| | 01:12 | So the first thing we'll do is come
and open our SketchUp Material browser.
| | 01:15 | Now we could of course work with one
of the SketchUp's preset materials.
| | 01:20 | We could apply that to scene geometry
and then work with the Twilight Material
| | 01:23 | Editor to add properties
such as reflectivity to it.
| | 01:26 | But we're actually going to
work from the ground up here,
| | 01:29 | so we just want to examine our In Model
materials, which as you can see, consists
| | 01:33 | of just our default gray material.
| | 01:36 | Now we can create a brand-
new material from scratch.
| | 01:39 | So let's come to Create Material icon,
click on that, and now we can set up our basic
| | 01:44 | SketchUp material properties.
| | 01:45 | The first thing we should do of course
is give our material a descriptive name.
| | 01:49 | As I'm going to apply it to our walls,
| | 01:51 | that is exactly what I will call it.
| | 01:53 | We can set a custom color if
that is what we want to do.
| | 01:55 | So if we want to play around with our
color settings a little bit, we can apply
| | 02:00 | that to our material.
| | 02:01 | We could use a texture image if that is
what we wanted, but we're just working
| | 02:04 | with the basics at this
moment in time. So let's click OK.
| | 02:08 | Now we can use the Paint Bucket tool
to just simply left-mouse-click on the
| | 02:12 | walls to apply our material to them.
| | 02:14 | Now, even though we haven't applied any
Twilight-specific material properties
| | 02:18 | at this moment in time, what we have here
will still render with the Twilight engine.
| | 02:23 | In fact, just to demonstrate that, let's
close our SketchUp Material browser and
| | 02:26 | come and take a test render.
| | 02:30 | Clearly, Twilight is quite happy to
render our SketchUp material, as you can see
| | 02:34 | the diffuse color applied to our walls.
| | 02:36 | Of course, the scene does look a little
rough, but that's because we're using the 02.Low preset.
| | 02:41 | In fact, let's switch for 04 for our
next test render, because we do of course
| | 02:45 | still need to apply some Twilight
material properties to our SketchUp material.
| | 02:50 | To do that, we need to open up
the Twilight Material Editor.
| | 02:53 | So let's come up to the Twilight
toolbar and click on the Material Editor icon.
| | 02:57 | Once we have our Material Editor open,
there are essentially two methods for
| | 03:01 | loading our SketchUp material in here.
| | 03:03 | Firstly, we could come
and use the Eyedropper tool.
| | 03:06 | We just come into the scene and
left-mouse-click on one of our materials.
| | 03:10 | We can see that basic definition is
loaded into the Twilight Editor--and we can
| | 03:14 | do this for any of our scene materials.
| | 03:16 | We could also use the From Scene dropdown.
| | 03:20 | If we left-click on this, you can see all of
our available scene materials are listed here.
| | 03:24 | If we had more in the scene,
they would also be in this list.
| | 03:28 | So again, let's select our Walls material.
| | 03:30 | Now we can work with any all the
controls available to us to change the
| | 03:34 | appearance of our basic
SketchUp material definition.
| | 03:38 | We can change the coloration, add reflection;
| | 03:40 | we can add a bump map; all of
the options in here can be used.
| | 03:44 | To create a more complex set of
material definitions, however, we will need to
| | 03:48 | come to our Templates menu.
| | 03:50 | If we just left-click on this, you
can see we have quite a number of material
| | 03:54 | types listed in here.
| | 03:55 | Now although there is quite a variety
listed here, it is oftentimes the case
| | 04:00 | that you'll not find an exact match for
the material type that you're working on.
| | 04:05 | The idea is to find something that
shares similar characteristics to your
| | 04:09 | material and then choose that
to give you a basic head start.
| | 04:13 | So let's, for instance,
apply some paint to our walls.
| | 04:16 | Let's take our Gloss option and apply that.
| | 04:19 | You can see that a number of
parameters inside of the Twilight Material
| | 04:23 | Editor do update now.
| | 04:24 | Our Index of Refraction has changed, as
has our Shininess value. To check that
| | 04:29 | that has been applied to our Twilight
material, let's once again go and take a render.
| | 04:33 | Now initially, not much may seem to
have changed, but if you look closely at
| | 04:36 | the material you will see that it does have
quite a measure of reflectivity applied to it.
| | 04:42 | We can just make out reflections in them.
| | 04:44 | So the material template has done its job.
| | 04:46 | It got us going in a particular direction.
| | 04:49 | We now have reflections
applied to our wall paint.
| | 04:52 | There is, however, another option inside
of the Twilight Material Editor when it
| | 04:56 | comes to applying material properties.
| | 04:58 | Rather than use templates, we could come
into our Library tab and make use of the
| | 05:03 | options found in here.
| | 05:05 | If I just access our dropdown list,
you can see that there are a number of
| | 05:09 | library options available.
| | 05:11 | And as we pick a particular option,
you can see we switched to the tab that
| | 05:14 | houses those material types.
| | 05:17 | If we take a look down at the bottom of
the Material Editor, you see you have a
| | 05:21 | Type description, and as we double-
click on each of these options, this will
| | 05:25 | update and tell you now that you're
using a Library material and not a template.
| | 05:30 | If it is that we want a basic
description of what the material type is meant
| | 05:33 | to be, we need to come up to the top
of our Material Editor, and as we switch
| | 05:37 | through the different materials, you'll see
that they update to give you information.
| | 05:42 | You will also notice, again, down at the
bottom of the Material Editor, that as we
| | 05:46 | roll over our different material types,
| | 05:48 | we do get a basic description of
what that material is meant to be.
| | 05:52 | To apply a Library definition to our
SketchUp material, all we need to do is
| | 05:56 | double-click and that is now attached.
| | 05:59 | There is, however, a very important
distinction that we need to make here between
| | 06:03 | Twilight's templates and its Library materials.
| | 06:07 | Once we apply a template, we can
continue to edit the basic parameters of that
| | 06:11 | material type inside the
Twilight Material Editor.
| | 06:13 | However, once we've applied a Library
material, if we come back to the Edit tab,
| | 06:19 | you can see that all of our
properties are grayed out.
| | 06:22 | As you can see, properties such as Index of
Refraction and Shininess are no longer accessible.
| | 06:27 | What we have is what we get in
terms off a Library material.
| | 06:31 | Now of course, sometimes this could be
a considerable frustration for render
| | 06:35 | artists, not being able to make any
alterations whatsoever to the material.
| | 06:40 | However, the good news is that if we
are a licensed user of the Twilight render
| | 06:43 | engine then there are tons of quality
material libraries available for download
| | 06:48 | at the twilightrender.com site.
| | 06:50 | So having applied our library
definition then, I suppose it would make sense if
| | 06:54 | we took a render and just
have a look at what it had done.
| | 06:57 | What we get of course is very different
as compared to our previous material type.
| | 07:02 | Now there is one final aspect of
Twilight's Material Editor functionality that I
| | 07:06 | would like to highlight to you before
we end this quick overview of how the
| | 07:10 | material system works with Twilight,
| | 07:12 | and that is this render preview that we
get down at the bottom of the Material Editor.
| | 07:16 | A very handy feature is the ability
to actually change the studio setup of
| | 07:21 | our render preview.
| | 07:22 | If we just access this dropdown,
you can see that we have quite a number of
| | 07:26 | options available to us.
| | 07:27 | A lot of them refer to scale, so at
this moment in time we are using the 30 cm
| | 07:31 | cube, but we could work with
a 240 cm cube, a 1 ft cube.
| | 07:35 | The choice we would make of course
would depend upon the scale of our scene and
| | 07:39 | the materials that we were trying to create.
| | 07:41 | We do, of course, have a number of
specialized options. Down towards the bottom,
| | 07:44 | we have, for instance, our checkered
studio setup, which gives us not a cube,
| | 07:48 | but a sphere, and a checkered backdrop against
which we can check reflections and refractions.
| | 07:52 | So just be aware that that is there.
| | 07:54 | Oftentimes that can help us get a
better estimation of the type of material
| | 07:58 | surface that we're creating.
| | 07:59 | So although a little different in
behavior from other render engines, in that
| | 08:03 | they typically have their own specific
material types with which we work, still
| | 08:08 | Twilight's Material Editor gives us
fast, easy options that really can help us
| | 08:12 | create pretty much any type of
realistic and even nonrealistic material that we
| | 08:16 | may have a need to, and all of this is
done with as little force, with as little
| | 08:20 | parameter tweaking, as possible.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating diffuse surfaces| 00:00 | Up to this point in our course,
all the geometry we have in model has had a
| | 00:05 | default gray material applied.
| | 00:07 | In this video we're going to work at
creating some diffuse properties in our scene.
| | 00:11 | In fact, we will focus on just the diffuse, or
color, properties for the floor of our interior.
| | 00:17 | The steps of course we use for this one
material can be applied to creating the
| | 00:21 | diffuse properties for all
of the geometry in our scene.
| | 00:24 | To start with of course, we need a new
SketchUp material, so let's click on our
| | 00:29 | paint bucket icon and open up
SketchUp's Material Browser.
| | 00:32 | I just want to make certain that I am
looking at the In Model materials, so
| | 00:36 | let's click the In Model button, and as you
can see, we just have our default gray material.
| | 00:40 | It's time now of course to create a new
material in the scene, so let's click on the
| | 00:44 | Create Material icon.
| | 00:45 | I am just going to give
this a nice descriptive name.
| | 00:48 | We'll call this Wood Floor.
| | 00:49 | And as we want to add a little bit of
extra realism to our final render in this
| | 00:55 | case, we're going to work not with a
solid color, but with a bitmap image.
| | 00:58 | So I am going to put a check
in the Use texture image box.
| | 01:02 | This of course will open
up a Choose Image dialog.
| | 01:05 | We need to navigate to our
Exercise_Files folder and come into the
| | 01:09 | Texture_Files folder as well.
| | 01:10 | Down towards the bottom of the
files in there, we should find these
| | 01:14 | WoodFloor_Diffuse map.
| | 01:16 | I am just going to left-click to select that.
| | 01:18 | With everything set up nicely, I can
just click OK and then with our paint
| | 01:22 | bucket tool still active, I am just
going to left-mouse-click on our floor.
| | 01:26 | Now, you can see the material has been
applied, but our scale is a little bit
| | 01:30 | off here, which is not surprising
because we didn't really set the UV Scale up
| | 01:34 | in our new material.
| | 01:36 | So let's come into the Edit tab, and down
here in our UV Scale options, I need to
| | 01:41 | set a value of 7 foot in here. So I
could type that in, or I can give SketchUp
| | 01:46 | the value in inches, which it
will convert to feet for me.
| | 01:49 | Now as you can see, our scale looks much better.
| | 01:53 | Now, to be honest, without ever
touching our Twilight Material Editor, we
| | 01:57 | have done everything we need to do to set up
the diffuse properties for our floor material.
| | 02:02 | In fact, if we just come up to our Open
Twilight Render icon, click on that to
| | 02:07 | open the Render dialog, and then
take a test render, you will see that
| | 02:09 | everything is working just as we would want it.
| | 02:12 | As you can see, our floor material, or
the diffuse properties for our floor
| | 02:16 | material, are showing up just fine in the render.
| | 02:19 | We are even getting some nice color
bounce or color bleed in our environment
| | 02:22 | because of the coloration in our bitmap image.
| | 02:26 | We are, however, going to do a little bit more
with our material before we leave it behind.
| | 02:31 | Oftentimes texture artists, when setting
up the diffuse properties for a material,
| | 02:35 | will also add any bump
properties that are required.
| | 02:39 | This is because oftentimes the bump and
diffuse properties of a material share
| | 02:44 | the same source files.
| | 02:45 | So that's what we'll do.
| | 02:47 | We'll add a little bit of bump
to our material before we move on.
| | 02:50 | Now, for this of course we do need
Twilight's Material Editor, so let's come up
| | 02:54 | to the toolbar and click
the Material Editor icon.
| | 02:57 | Once that loads in, we'll just
move it into view a little bit.
| | 03:00 | And of course using the From Scene dropdown,
we will choose our Wood Floor Material.
| | 03:05 | Once the material definition is loaded,
you can see we have this Bump Map option.
| | 03:09 | to load it up as our bump map.
| | 03:10 | If I just access the dropdown, you can
see we have a No Texture and Texture option.
| | 03:15 | As we want to apply yet again another
bitmap image here, I am just going to
| | 03:19 | click on the Texture option and
this again will take us into our
| | 03:22 | Texture_Files folder.
| | 03:23 | In here we do have a WoodFloor_Bump image.
| | 03:27 | This, however, is a little bit
on the noisy side for my tastes.
| | 03:30 | I prefer to work with this WoodFloor_
Disp map, which was originally created as a
| | 03:35 | displacement map for another render
engine, so I am just going to click on this
| | 03:41 | Now, a problem we can oftentimes run
into when we want to set up bump mapping
| | 03:46 | inside our renders is the fact that
our diffuse properties can tend to get in
| | 03:50 | the way a little bit.
| | 03:51 | In other words, the details in our
diffuse bitmap make it hard to see whether
| | 03:55 | the bump map is actually
working correctly or not.
| | 03:58 | There is actually a piece of Twilight
Material Editor functionality that can
| | 04:01 | help us get around that.
| | 04:03 | If we come up to our Color slot,
you can see, at this moment in time we have
| | 04:08 | this chain-link icon.
| | 04:09 | This is telling us that the diffuse, or
color, properties for our material are
| | 04:14 | linked to our original SketchUp material.
| | 04:16 | In fact, if we were to come and
uncheck our Use texture image inside of the
| | 04:21 | SketchUp material, it would not only
disappear in the viewport, it would also
| | 04:25 | disappear from our Twilight Render,
and you would see that this section would
| | 04:28 | just update to once again read a solid color.
| | 04:32 | Well, we can use this
functionality to give ourselves a kind of
| | 04:35 | override material.
| | 04:36 | So if I just uncheck this icon, you can
see I get a Select image texture dialog.
| | 04:42 | This is because Twilight is
assuming that I want to apply a different
| | 04:46 | bitmap inside the slot.
| | 04:47 | Now, whilst this technically isn't the
case, just to make certain that Twilight
| | 04:51 | is happy that I have made changes,
I am just going to choose any of the files
| | 04:55 | that are found in this dialog.
| | 04:57 | Really what I want to do is access this
dropdown and set it to be a solid color.
| | 05:02 | Now when I take a render, I'll be able
to clearly see whether or not my bump map
| | 05:06 | is working in the scene.
| | 05:07 | In fact, just to make certain that it
is showing up, I am going to set a value
| | 05:11 | of something like 5 in here, which is
quite high for a bump map, and we will
| | 05:15 | come and we will take another render.
| | 05:17 | As you can see, our bump map is
working just fine, if somewhat overdone.
| | 05:21 | The scale of our bump map is of course
still correct, because if we take a look
| | 05:25 | at our SketchUp material, we are
still essentially making use off the UV
| | 05:29 | Mapping, the UV Scale
that we have already set up.
| | 05:32 | So long as we keep our Use texture
image option checked, our UV Mapping Scale
| | 05:37 | will continue to be applied to this material.
| | 05:40 | So, most definitely a handy little
piece of functionality in the Twilight
| | 05:44 | Material Editor, the ability
to unlink our color channels.
| | 05:47 | Now, of course things can get a
little confusing, because the SketchUp
| | 05:51 | material still says that it is using
our Wood Floor bitmap and the viewport is
| | 05:55 | still showing that, but of course our Twilight
renders are just using this solid gray color.
| | 05:59 | As of course we do want to use our bitmap image,
| | 06:02 | we can either relink our Twilight
material or we can just set this to Texture
| | 06:07 | and then browse for the appropriate image file.
| | 06:09 | And again, so long as we keep our
Use texture image option checked in our
| | 06:13 | SketchUp Material, our UV
Scaling will remain completely useable.
| | 06:18 | With our diffuse color properties taken
care of then, we really do want to move
| | 06:22 | on to adding a little bit
more realism to our renders now.
| | 06:25 | We just have a flat color render with
a little bit of bump mapping applied,
| | 06:28 | which reminds me, we do want to just go
and make a change to our bump mapping.
| | 06:32 | We can set this to a value of something
around about .4 should give us some nice
| | 06:36 | subtle bump mapping in our future renders.
| | 06:38 | So with our diffuse color properties
taken care of, we probably want to move on
| | 06:43 | now to adding a little bit
more realism to our materials.
| | 06:46 | We can do this in the next video by
showing you how we can add reflective
| | 06:50 | properties to our Wood Floor material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating reflective surfaces| 00:00 | As most objects in the world around us
have at least a measure of reflectivity
| | 00:05 | in their surface properties, there is
a high probability that when we want to
| | 00:09 | create realistic-looking materials in Twilight
| | 00:12 | we will need to spend at least some
time each project working with the
| | 00:16 | reflection controls of our materials.
| | 00:19 | In this video we're going to continue
working with our floor material and show
| | 00:22 | you how to add nice blurry reflections to it.
| | 00:26 | As you can see, our start scene has been
upgraded a little, in that we have taken
| | 00:31 | what we learned in our diffuse video
and applied all of the maps and relevant
| | 00:35 | colors to the geometry in our scene.
| | 00:38 | In fact, the current state of
our scene does help prove a point
| | 00:41 | regarding reflectivity.
| | 00:42 | If we were to take a render at this
moment in time, we would see that whilst
| | 00:46 | our diffuse maps and colors do help us see what
type of surfaces we are meant to be looking at--
| | 00:52 | they do give us an overall color scheme
for our render--our eye would pick out
| | 00:56 | that something is not quite right;
something is missing, and that something
| | 01:00 | would of course be reflectivity.
| | 01:02 | So let's start to fix this problem.
| | 01:04 | First of all, we need to come up to
the Twilight toolbar and open up the
| | 01:08 | Twilight Material Editor.
| | 01:09 | Of course we can use the From Scene
dropdown or the Material Selection tool to
| | 01:13 | come and pull our material
definition into the editor.
| | 01:17 | Straight away we are going to want to
apply templates, so let's come up to the
| | 01:20 | Templates dropdown, and I'm just going
to, in this instance, come to the Paint
| | 01:23 | section and apply the Gloss Paint option.
| | 01:26 | Now, whenever we make changes to a
material, it is good practice to instantly go
| | 01:31 | and take a test render.
| | 01:32 | If we make too many changes, come to the
render, and things and not looking quite
| | 01:36 | right for us, we may find it hard to
figure out which of the steps we have taken
| | 01:40 | is actually causing us the problem.
| | 01:42 | So let's come and open up the
Render dialog and take a render.
| | 01:46 | Now, instantly there are a few things
that we can discern from our render.
| | 01:50 | Firstly, you will have noticed that our
render times have increased dramatically.
| | 01:55 | This is because of the blurriness
or diffusion of our reflections.
| | 01:59 | You can see there is a lot of noise,
a lot of breakup in these reflections.
| | 02:03 | This of course means that our engine
has to work much harder to try and smooth
| | 02:07 | things out and clean them up.
| | 02:09 | We can also see that we have nice breakup
in our reflections coming from our bump map.
| | 02:14 | We may want to increase or decrease the
strength of this a little later on, as we
| | 02:18 | come to completion of our materials.
| | 02:20 | We can also of course tell that we
do have reflectivity, which is most
| | 02:24 | definitely a good thing.
| | 02:25 | We can also see that our
reflections are incredibly bright;
| | 02:29 | in fact, for me, they are just
too bright at this moment in time.
| | 02:32 | So there really are two
problems that I would like to fix:
| | 02:35 | one is the intensity or
brightness of our reflections,
| | 02:37 | and the other is the breakup or the blurriness.
| | 02:40 | I want them to be a little bit
sharper, a little more defined.
| | 02:43 | Well, we can do this using the
controls found in our Material Editor.
| | 02:47 | The first problem we will tackle
is the intensity of our reflections.
| | 02:51 | Now, in the Reflection section,
there are a couple of ways that we can actually
| | 02:56 | control both reflection
intensity and breakup in the scene.
| | 02:59 | We can either work with a solid color
or we can indeed use a texture map to
| | 03:03 | do that job for us.
| | 03:04 | To keep things simple, I am just going
to continue working with a solid color.
| | 03:08 | At this moment in time if we come
across to our color swatch, you can see our
| | 03:12 | reflectivity color is set to full white.
| | 03:14 | This means we are getting
full-intensity reflections.
| | 03:17 | I want to use the grayscale slider to
just drop down that intensity by quite a bit.
| | 03:22 | So I am going to set a very specific value
of 70 in each of my R, G, and B Channels.
| | 03:28 | With that done, I can click OK and
again we're going to want to take a render
| | 03:33 | to see how that affects our reflections.
| | 03:35 | Straight away you will notice that our
render time has come way, way down, which
| | 03:39 | of course is generally
speaking, a very good thing.
| | 03:41 | But you may be saying that that is
because we have completely killed
| | 03:44 | reflectivity in our material.
| | 03:46 | Well, in actuality, that is not the case.
| | 03:49 | You see, we still have to remember
that we have our very blurred or diffuse
| | 03:53 | reflections occurring in the scene.
| | 03:55 | All that's happened now is that by
dialing down the intensity of our
| | 03:59 | reflections, we've made it so that they
are blending into our diffuse material,
| | 04:03 | perhaps much more than we would want them to.
| | 04:05 | We can of course easily fix this
problem by just coming back into our
| | 04:09 | Twilight Material Editor. In fact,
we can solve two problems with a single parameter.
| | 04:14 | This is our Shininess option.
| | 04:17 | This is the control that will
determine how sharp or indeed how blurry, how
| | 04:21 | diffuse our reflections are.
| | 04:23 | At this moment in time a
Shininess value of 80.000 is quite low;
| | 04:27 | in fact, you can see that if we look
at our Material Preview; you can see we
| | 04:31 | have got very diffuse
and spread-out reflections.
| | 04:33 | I am going to increase
this value by quite an amount.
| | 04:36 | I am going to set these to 2500,
which may seem quite high, but when you
| | 04:41 | consider that to get mirror-like
reflections we can actually increase our
| | 04:44 | Shininess value to 50,000 and higher,
you will realize that this isn't
| | 04:48 | actually that high at all.
| | 04:50 | Again, we want to test the effects of
our parameter change by taking a render.
| | 04:54 | Our parameter change, as you can
see, has clearly had a couple of
| | 04:58 | advantageous side effects.
| | 05:00 | First of course is the fact that we
have reflections back in the scene.
| | 05:03 | We can now see them clearly again.
| | 05:05 | The second, and very much linked to that,
is the fact that we have sharpened our
| | 05:09 | reflections up by quite a bit;
they are no longer as spread out or as
| | 05:13 | diffused, so we're able to make out what we
are actually reflecting quite a bit more clearly.
| | 05:17 | And of course our render times
have not increased that much at all.
| | 05:21 | So all in all, we're actually making
very nice progress with our reflections.
| | 05:25 | However, we do have a little bit of a problem,
in that our reflections seem to be truncated.
| | 05:29 | We're getting this cutoff point that
isn't looking as natural as I would like.
| | 05:33 | This again can be easily solved by
coming into our Material Editor and working
| | 05:37 | with our Index of Refraction value.
| | 05:40 | One thing that artists newer to
material work often fail to realize is that the
| | 05:45 | Index of Refraction value also
significantly affects how our reflections behave.
| | 05:50 | This is because it controls how
light will interact with a surface.
| | 05:54 | So what we're going to do is we
are going to increase our Index of
| | 05:58 | Refraction value to 4.
| | 05:59 | This is a typical
hard-surface reflections setting.
| | 06:02 | And again, with that change
made, let's take a render.
| | 06:05 | What we get now is looking much nicer.
| | 06:08 | I am quite happy with the direction
that our reflections are going in.
| | 06:12 | And again, we're keeping
our render times fairly low.
| | 06:15 | Of course, feel free to experiment with
the look of the reflections in your scene.
| | 06:19 | You can work with the reflectivity
color, the Index of Refraction, and the
| | 06:23 | Shininess value to get things
looking just how you like them.
| | 06:26 | What we hopefully have demonstrated in
the scene though is that having materials
| | 06:30 | that reflect the world around them
really is one of the keys to making more
| | 06:33 | believable materials and so of
course more believable renders.
| | 06:37 | We have the ability to use image
maps or solid-color grayscale values.
| | 06:41 | We can work with our Index of
Refraction and Shininess parameters.
| | 06:44 | When we combine all of these options
together, we have a great deal of control
| | 06:49 | over just how our reflections will be working.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating glassy refractive surfaces| 00:00 | As glass is one of a handful material
types that we come into contact with
| | 00:04 | pretty much every day, the chances that
we will want or need to re-create it in
| | 00:09 | our scenes really are quite high.
| | 00:11 | In this video, we're going to work at
creating a couple of slightly different
| | 00:15 | glass types, really as a way of
demonstrating how we create refractive materials
| | 00:20 | using the Twilight renderer.
| | 00:21 | The first material we will
create is a glazing material.
| | 00:25 | Now, we need of course glazing
geometry to apply that material to,
| | 00:29 | so I just want to come up to my
Window menu, down to the Layers option, and
| | 00:33 | in the Layers dialog, I need to unhide the
Patio Glass and the Skylight Glass layers.
| | 00:39 | With those pieces of geometry in the
scene, I do want to go and select them.
| | 00:43 | So I am just going to
middle-mouse-click and orbit a little bit around our
| | 00:47 | view. Then I am just going to
middle-mouse-scroll out, just until we can see all
| | 00:51 | of our glazing geometry.
| | 00:52 | Then I am just going to left-click to
select one and then hold Ctrl and then
| | 00:56 | just left-click to select
all of the other pieces.
| | 00:59 | Once that's selected, I can
just go back to my glazing camera.
| | 01:03 | Really, we've just selected those so that
we can easily apply our new material to
| | 01:07 | them once we've created it.
| | 01:09 | To do that, we're again going to
need our SketchUp Material browser, so
| | 01:12 | let's come into that.
| | 01:14 | I am just going to go and check our In
Model options, and I just want to select
| | 01:18 | our default gray material.
| | 01:19 | This really is because when we create
a new material in SketchUp it takes
| | 01:23 | the definition of the already selected
material and applies that to our new material.
| | 01:28 | If we have our default gray material
selected, then we have no bitmaps that
| | 01:32 | need the clearing out.
| | 01:33 | So with that material selected,
I am just going to go and click on the
| | 01:36 | Create Material icon.
| | 01:37 | Again, we're going to give our
material a name, and we're going to call this
| | 01:42 | Glazing, and then we can just click OK.
| | 01:44 | Now, we can just simply
left-mouse-click and apply that material to all of
| | 01:48 | our selected geometry.
| | 01:50 | Now, what we need to do of course is apply
a template to our newly created material.
| | 01:54 | So let's close the SketchUp browser.
| | 01:56 | I am just going to use spacebar to
return to my normal Select tool, and I am
| | 02:00 | going to come up to the Twilight
toolbar and click on the Material Editor icon.
| | 02:03 | Once that opens, we do of course need to
go and select our material in the scene.
| | 02:06 | I am just going to use the Material
Select tool in this instance. I just
| | 02:09 | left-click our Glazing geometry.
| | 02:12 | With the default gray material loaded
in, we of course need to go and apply a material template.
| | 02:17 | If we just come up to the Templates
menu and come down, you can see we
| | 02:20 | essentially have two options
available to us, so far as glass is concerned.
| | 02:24 | We have Realistic Glass, which gives
us reflections and refractions from the
| | 02:28 | material, and we have our Architectural Glass,
which gives us reflections but not refractions.
| | 02:34 | The reason this Architectural Glass set exists
is just to save us a little bit on render time.
| | 02:39 | With glazing, the refraction is so
imperceptible, more often than not, that it
| | 02:44 | makes sense to cut that path
off the material calculation out.
| | 02:48 | So, we're going to use the
Architectural Glass set in this case.
| | 02:52 | So if I just left-click on that, and
we're going to come in. And we're going to
| | 02:55 | use this Common option.
| | 02:57 | As you can see, our material preview
updates and shows us that we do have a
| | 03:01 | transparent or see-through material.
| | 03:02 | Of course while the material preview
can be useful, it is no substitute for a
| | 03:07 | test render, so that's what we'll go and take.
| | 03:09 | Again, because we have geometry
selected in the scene, we're being asked if we
| | 03:13 | want to render only that geometry.
| | 03:15 | Of course, with glass we want to
make certain that it is reflecting the
| | 03:17 | environment around it,
so we are going to say no.
| | 03:21 | As easily as that, we get a
very nice glazing material.
| | 03:24 | You can even see the physical
accuracy of this material at work in the
| | 03:29 | reflections as the viewing angle
gets steeper. Looking at these pieces of
| | 03:32 | geometry down at the far end, you
can see that the reflectivity increases
| | 03:36 | just that little bit.
| | 03:37 | So as we see, very nice, very
easy to create this glazing material.
| | 03:41 | Now, if we just come back into our
Material Editor, you will see that there
| | 03:44 | really are three parameters that
are creating this material for us.
| | 03:48 | We have our diffuse color that is
contributing somewhat to the overall finish.
| | 03:52 | We have our Alpha option, which is
essentially controlling the transparency of
| | 03:57 | our material. With the Alpha set at 100,
| | 03:59 | we have a completely opaque or solid-
looking surface; if we set our alpha at 0,
| | 04:04 | we have a completely transparent material.
| | 04:07 | We also have this extremely
important Index of Refraction option.
| | 04:11 | Now, as we've mentioned that the
Architectural Glass templates don't actually
| | 04:15 | give us any refraction, that part of
the material definition has been removed,
| | 04:19 | you may wonder whether this
value actually has any relevance.
| | 04:23 | Well, if we just set our IOR value to 1,
we can show you the relevance that it
| | 04:27 | has, by taking another render.
| | 04:29 | The result we get is an almost
completely transparent material, so transparent
| | 04:34 | that it really doesn't look as if we
have any window geometry in the scene.
| | 04:39 | We get this result because Twilight
materials have physically correct Fresnel
| | 04:43 | equations built into them.
| | 04:45 | These equations govern the look of both
reflections and refractions in a material.
| | 04:51 | In a see-through material, such as glass
or water, the Index of Refraction value
| | 04:56 | will determine the amount of
reflection versus the amount of refraction, or in
| | 05:00 | this case the amount of
transparency, seen in the material.
| | 05:04 | Seeing then as the reflective aspect
of these equations is still very much at
| | 05:08 | work in these Architectural Glass templates,
| | 05:10 | that's why the Index of Refraction
value is still extremely important.
| | 05:15 | Before we move on of course, we do want to
go and reset our Index of Refraction value.
| | 05:19 | If you are not certain what the
physically accurate value was that was set, then
| | 05:24 | we just need to come back up to our
templates, come back to Architectural Glass,
| | 05:28 | and reapply the Common option.
| | 05:29 | So creating a clear glass
material is pretty easy to do using
| | 05:33 | Twilight's Material templates.
| | 05:35 | How though would we go about
adding some color to our glass?
| | 05:38 | Well, although with the default
materials and libraries that install with
| | 05:42 | Twilight we have no way to create
a physically accurate colored glass--
| | 05:46 | that is, one whose color will to some
extent be determined by the volume of the
| | 05:50 | geometry it is applied to--
| | 05:52 | we can still go and
create a quick pseudo version.
| | 05:55 | To do that, we will of course need an
object to apply our material to, so I am
| | 06:00 | just going to close my dialogs and then
come and switch my scene camera over to
| | 06:04 | our butterfly garden ornament.
| | 06:06 | This piece of geometry makes the perfect
candidate for applying a colored glass effect too.
| | 06:11 | Again of course we need to walk through the
process of creating a new SketchUp material.
| | 06:15 | In this instance, I will make certain
that our glazing material is selected
| | 06:18 | before I go and use the Create Material button.
| | 06:21 | In the Create Material dialog,
I will go and instantly name our material.
| | 06:25 | So we will call this
Colored Glass and then click OK.
| | 06:29 | And with the Paint Bucket tool still
active, we can just click to apply that to
| | 06:33 | our butterfly geometry.
| | 06:35 | We do of course need to apply our
material template, so let's close SketchUp
| | 06:39 | Material Browser and open up
our Twilight Material Editor.
| | 06:42 | And again, I will just use the
Material Selection tool to pull my material
| | 06:46 | definition into the Material Editor--
| | 06:48 | although in this instance I don't want
to make use of the Architectural Glass
| | 06:52 | option. With a piece of geometry that
has so much volume and thickness to it, we
| | 06:57 | really would expect to see some
refraction occurring inside this piece of glass.
| | 07:02 | Because of this, when we come to our
template options, we really want to work
| | 07:06 | with the Realistic Glass set in this instance.
| | 07:08 | So let's just click on that.
| | 07:10 | And I think we will choose something a
little bit different; we will work with
| | 07:13 | the Light Frosted option.
| | 07:15 | Straight away we can check our material
preview, just to see what kind of effect
| | 07:19 | this particular option will give us.
| | 07:21 | We do still need to add our coloration,
so we need to come up to our Diffuse
| | 07:25 | Color controls, click on the Material
swatch, and I think in this instance,
| | 07:29 | we'll choose something in the orange spectrum.
| | 07:31 | And we can just make that a little bit darker.
| | 07:33 | Now because this is a fake, meaning
that the coloration does not grow stronger
| | 07:38 | in thicker parts of the geometry,
| | 07:40 | I would suggest keeping our
saturation values fairly low and our luminance
| | 07:44 | values reasonably high.
| | 07:46 | If we have too much coloration,
too much saturation in our color choice, we can
| | 07:50 | tend to get some very, very strong
color effects in our glass of course.
| | 07:54 | If that is what you want,
then that is absolutely fine.
| | 07:57 | In this instance, I am going to set my
saturation all the way down to a value of
| | 08:01 | 75, and I will keep my
Luminance at a value of 125.
| | 08:06 | Now, if this is not the color you want,
don't be overly concerned because as
| | 08:09 | soon as we click OK,
| | 08:11 | you will see that this really isn't the
color that we end up with in our glass material.
| | 08:15 | And as soon as our material preview
updates you can see the coloration is looking
| | 08:19 | quite a bit different.
| | 08:20 | Still, if you want to make some changes,
feel free; you can really set whatever
| | 08:23 | color you like at this point.
| | 08:25 | Again, to see what kind of effect, what
kind of material this will give us, we
| | 08:29 | do need a test render.
| | 08:30 | As you can see, we get a fairly nice
colored glass effect from our material.
| | 08:35 | Clearly, we can see that it lacks
physical accuracy; where we have these thicker
| | 08:39 | parts of our butterfly's body,
| | 08:41 | they should really be deep and vibrant
in color, and of course these thin areas
| | 08:45 | should be almost colorless in terms of
how we would expect real glass to look.
| | 08:49 | But still, nevertheless, a
fairly nice effect in the end.
| | 08:52 | If you're wondering about the extremely
increased render times, this essentially
| | 08:56 | is because of our Frosted Glass effect.
| | 08:59 | Really, Twilight is having to perform
blurred refraction calculations inside of
| | 09:04 | the geometry volume,
| | 09:05 | so it's not surprising that it will take a
little bit of time to produce that effect.
| | 09:09 | Ultimately though, the good news for
us is that Twilight's Material templates
| | 09:13 | have made the creation of our very different
glass materials very simple, very easy indeed.
| | 09:18 | Not that we're finished with
our refractive materials mind you!
| | 09:23 | In our next video, we're going to
look at how we can go about creating our pool water.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating watery refractive surfaces| 00:00 | Another refractive material that most
of us will come into contact with on a
| | 00:05 | daily basis is water.
| | 00:06 | Of course, this generally
comes in many different forms:
| | 00:09 | rainwater, seawater, river water.
In this particular video though, we're going to
| | 00:14 | walk you through the creation
of our ornamental poolwater.
| | 00:17 | Although this is somewhat similar to
our glass material in terms of the steps
| | 00:22 | taken to reproduce it, and of course the
final composition of the material, there
| | 00:26 | is just a little bit of extra
functionality, a little bit of extra material
| | 00:30 | quality that we're going to
add to our water material.
| | 00:33 | Our first step naturally will be to
create a new SketchUp material, so let's
| | 00:37 | click on paint bucket icon, come into
our SketchUp Material's Browser and come
| | 00:42 | into the In Model materials.
| | 00:43 | Again, I'm just going to start
with our default gray material.
| | 00:46 | With that chosen, let's click on the
Create Material button and come and give
| | 00:50 | our new material a nice descriptive name;
| | 00:53 | in this instance, Pool Water
should suffice very nicely.
| | 00:57 | Now, we can if we want, add a little
bit of coloration here, just so that we
| | 01:01 | can tell the difference when we apply
our new material to our water geometry.
| | 01:04 | That just tells us whether
it has been applied or not.
| | 01:07 | Do keep in mind though that any
coloration we add here will be added into our
| | 01:12 | Twilight Material definition, so we
may have to tweak it once we get into the
| | 01:16 | Twilight Material Editor.
| | 01:17 | With that done, let's click OK and left-click
to apply that material to our pool geometry.
| | 01:22 | As with the creation of our glass
materials, we do need to go and apply a
| | 01:27 | Twilight Material template now.
| | 01:28 | So let's come and open the Twilight
Material Editor. And this time using the
| | 01:32 | From Scene dropdown, I'm just going to
go and choose my Pool Water material.
| | 01:37 | Once that is loaded in, we need to
apply a Twilight template of course, so
| | 01:41 | let's come up to the Templates menu
and come down, in this instance, to our
| | 01:45 | Realistic Glass Set.
| | 01:46 | Because water is a refractive
material and because we are looking directly
| | 01:50 | into the body of water, we are really going
to want to see our refraction process at work.
| | 01:55 | It will add to the
believability of our material.
| | 01:58 | So we of course need to work
with the Realistic Glass options.
| | 02:01 | And if I just left-click, you can see
there is actually a water preset in here, so
| | 02:06 | let's just click to apply that.
| | 02:07 | Straight away of course we can see
that a number of material properties are
| | 02:11 | applied, including the all-
important Index of Refraction value.
| | 02:15 | The setting of 1.33 is physically
accurate for water and is extremely important
| | 02:20 | if our water material is to be believable.
| | 02:24 | Just looking down at our preview,
it's looking a little bit too saturated in
| | 02:28 | terms of the color for my taste,
so I'm just going to come up to our material
| | 02:32 | swatch and I'm just going to drop
the Saturation value down to something
| | 02:35 | around about 15-20.
| | 02:36 | I think I'll go for 15 in this instance.
| | 02:40 | Of course you can set the
colors up here however you like.
| | 02:42 | And I'm just going to move this a
little bit more into the bluish region of our
| | 02:47 | color picker, and again I'll just
reset our Saturation value there.
| | 02:51 | That looks okay for now, so let's click
OK, and you can see we essentially get a
| | 02:55 | clear water look to our material now.
| | 02:57 | With that little tweak and of course
the template applied, it's time to go and
| | 03:02 | take a test render for ourselves.
| | 03:04 | As you can see, everything
appears to be working just fine.
| | 03:07 | Of course just coming back into the
Material Editor, we can work with any of the
| | 03:11 | available parameters to
change the look of our water.
| | 03:14 | If we want, we can change the
diffuse color a little bit.
| | 03:17 | We could tweak our alpha;
| | 03:18 | we could drop this down a little bit to
make it more transparent, rely less on
| | 03:22 | the diffuse properties.
| | 03:23 | I really wouldn't recommend tweaking the
Index of Refraction unless you have a
| | 03:26 | very specific reason to do so, because
as we said, that value of 1.3 recurring
| | 03:31 | is the physically accurate option there.
| | 03:34 | We do, however, want to add a
little bit more to our Pool Material.
| | 03:37 | At this moment in time things are
looking a little bit too flat, a little bit
| | 03:42 | too static for my taste.
| | 03:43 | And of course we do sometimes see water
in this perfectly mirror-like state, but
| | 03:47 | more often than not, we're used to seeing
water with some kind of breakup on its
| | 03:51 | surface, usually due to some kind of
wind or breeze that is in the environment
| | 03:55 | just causing ripples or
movement on the surface of the water.
| | 03:58 | So that's what we'll do.
| | 04:00 | We're going to use a bump map to
apply just a little bit of life to the
| | 04:04 | surface of our material.
| | 04:05 | Of course the problem we have at this
moment in time--if we just come back
| | 04:09 | into our SketchUp Material Browser,
and make certain that our Pool Water is
| | 04:12 | chosen--if we just come to the Edit tab, you
can see we actually don't have a UV Scale set up.
| | 04:18 | This of course is because we're not
using a texture image, which of course we
| | 04:22 | are going to have to do if
we want to apply a UV Scale.
| | 04:26 | So let's just put a check in the
box and from our Exercise_Files >
| | 04:29 | Texture_Files folder,
| | 04:30 | we're just going to apply
this Water_Displacement map.
| | 04:34 | This of course means we now get
access to our U and V Scale parameters.
| | 04:39 | If you need to set this up interactively--
| | 04:41 | in other words, if you need to do a
little bit of experimentation with the scale
| | 04:44 | you want to apply--then I would suggest
that you come back to your Alpha option
| | 04:49 | and set a value of 100 in there, and
you get now a completely opaque material.
| | 04:53 | This means as you update the scale
values, you'll be able to see exactly what
| | 04:57 | that is doing to your applied map.
| | 04:59 | In this case, I don't really need to experiment;
| | 05:01 | I know the value I want to add in here,
which is a value of 25 feet in both
| | 05:06 | the U and V options.
| | 05:08 | Now, of course at this moment in
time I have completely killed our water
| | 05:12 | material by applying this
black-and-white map in the diffuse color slot.
| | 05:16 | But of course we can break that
behavior inside the Twilight Material Editor.
| | 05:20 | So let's come to the Color options
and let's just unlock or unlink this
| | 05:24 | particular option from our SketchUp material.
| | 05:27 | Of course Twilight thinks we want to add a
different texture map inside of the color slot.
| | 05:31 | That's why we get this Select image
texture dialog, but in this instance we
| | 05:35 | can just click Cancel.
| | 05:36 | This means that Twilight will now
return our Color option to the Solid Color
| | 05:40 | setting, which is exactly what we want,
| | 05:42 | although we will have to make
certain that our Alpha value is reset.
| | 05:47 | In this instance, I think I'll set a
value of 15 and just rely a little less
| | 05:50 | on our diffuse color.
| | 05:51 | As you can see, this returns us
to a nice clear water material.
| | 05:55 | Of course, we still need to apply our bump map.
| | 05:58 | We have our Scale set up;
| | 06:00 | we have our Color Channel set up, but
we do need to apply our bump texture.
| | 06:04 | So we need to come to the Bump controls
and set this to use the Texture option,
| | 06:07 | and we're just going to use
that same Water_Displacement map.
| | 06:11 | I know the Size value is a little
strong in here, so I'm just going to drop
| | 06:13 | this down to something around about
.45, and we should be set now to take
| | 06:19 | another test render.
| | 06:21 | As you can see, we now get some very
nice breakup on the surface of our water.
| | 06:27 | We have a little bit more life in
our material, and of course now we can
| | 06:29 | really see the benefit of having
physically accurate refractions taking place
| | 06:34 | in our water material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. Rendering for Compositing and AnimationRendering for animation| 00:00 | Although not designed as general
animation tools, SketchUp and Twilight are
| | 00:05 | perfectly capable of
producing animated sequences for us.
| | 00:09 | Indeed, if we are using SketchUp Pro,
then quite a myriad of animation
| | 00:13 | options open up to us.
| | 00:15 | As we are working with the free
version of SketchUp, however, we will work in
| | 00:18 | this video with a simple animated
camera sequence that has already been set up
| | 00:22 | in our start scene.
| | 00:24 | To render out an animation sequence in
Twilight, we really need to work with
| | 00:28 | two sets of options.
| | 00:30 | The first thing we need to do is
set Twilight up to use one of its
| | 00:33 | animation render presets.
| | 00:34 | This means we will get flicker-free
global illumination in our final renders.
| | 00:40 | If we open up our Twilight Render,
dialog by coming up to the toolbox and
| | 00:43 | clicking on the Open Twilight icon, and
if we just close up our Easy presets, you
| | 00:48 | can see that we actually have an
entire Animation section available to us.
| | 00:53 | The list is actually split into two halves.
| | 00:56 | The first four options use Photons and
Final Gather for global illumination;
| | 01:01 | the next four are all
Unbiased rendering methods.
| | 01:05 | Now we do need to note that these
are not progressive rendering options.
| | 01:08 | Each frame will only be rendered for a
fixed number of passes, is what we get.
| | 01:13 | So you can see we have options for 100
passes per frame and then options for
| | 01:18 | 500 passes per frame.
| | 01:20 | Do bear in mind, these options will take quite
a bit of time to render on a per-frame basis.
| | 01:26 | We also need to be aware that our
Photon and Final Gather options are really
| | 01:31 | designed to account for
object animation in a scene.
| | 01:34 | They're not really
designed for interior camera work.
| | 01:37 | As we are rendering only an animated
camera in this instance, we may want to
| | 01:42 | focus on using any of the
Unbiased options available.
| | 01:45 | If however we're not looking to produce
a high-quality final animated sequence,
| | 01:50 | but really just want to render out
something that gives us a good idea of how
| | 01:54 | the animated sequence will work and
basically what our scene is looking like,
| | 01:58 | there is another option available to us.
| | 02:01 | If we just scroll up, close up our
Animation section, and come into the Advanced
| | 02:05 | group, you can see we have
an Animation Interior option.
| | 02:09 | This preset will give us a reasonable
amount of quality in our final renders
| | 02:12 | but will still produce our
animated sequences pretty speedily.
| | 02:16 | Now, as to which one of these
animation presets we should use for our own
| | 02:21 | projects, well, I can only suggest that
you may want to perform some quick test
| | 02:24 | renders to determine which
one will suit your needs.
| | 02:28 | In the case of these animation presets,
the old adage "one man's meat is another
| | 02:32 | man's poison" can be very true.
| | 02:34 | Indeed, we have to determine which suits
the needs of our project in its current phase.
| | 02:39 | For the purpose of cause of our quick
demonstration here, we are going to use
| | 02:43 | this Animation Interior option.
| | 02:45 | So with our render preset selected,
we now need to work with yet another set
| | 02:50 | of Twilight controls.
| | 02:51 | These are found in the
Animation tab of our Render dialog.
| | 02:55 | As you can see, by default
Twilight is set to render no animation.
| | 02:59 | But if we just access our dropdown
list, you can see there are a number of
| | 03:02 | rendering modes available to us.
| | 03:05 | We can render a sequence that
has animated lighting in the scene.
| | 03:08 | We can render a sequence that has
animated objects, or we can choose this Only
| | 03:12 | View option, which essentially is
designed for camera or scene view animation.
| | 03:17 | As this is what we want,
this is the option that we will choose.
| | 03:20 | Now you can note here that Twilight is
reporting that we have a 0 to 5 second
| | 03:25 | animation available to render.
| | 03:27 | If you're wondering where it is
getting these values from, we need to go and
| | 03:31 | look at SketchUp's animation settings.
| | 03:33 | So let's come into the View menu, come
down to the Animation set, and then come
| | 03:38 | down to the Settings option.
| | 03:39 | Now you can see in here we have a
3-second animation set up, and we have a delay
| | 03:45 | of 1 second between each camera move.
As we have two cameras in the scene, this
| | 03:49 | of course adds up to a total all 5 seconds.
| | 03:52 | Now generally speaking, we are always
going to want to set our Scene Delay to 0
| | 03:57 | before rendering out our animation.
| | 03:59 | If we don't, then SketchUp will tell
Twilight to render the same frame over and
| | 04:04 | over again for the duration of our Scene Delay.
| | 04:07 | If then it is that we have our frame
rate set to 30 frames per second--that is,
| | 04:13 | 30 images being rendered for every
second of animation--then we will essentially
| | 04:16 | render 30 identical frames.
| | 04:19 | This of course would be a
waste of our rendering resources.
| | 04:22 | It would be much better to build that
delay in later on as we put our animated
| | 04:27 | sequence together in some
video production software.
| | 04:30 | So with our Scene Delay set to 0,
there is another piece of SketchUp
| | 04:34 | functionality that we
may just need to check out.
| | 04:36 | If I come to the Window menu, come down
to the Scenes option, you can see, each
| | 04:40 | camera has this Include in animation checkbox.
| | 04:43 | If we don't make certain that each of
the scene views has this option enabled,
| | 04:47 | it will be completely
disregarded for the purposes of animation.
| | 04:51 | So in our case, with only two scene views in the
scene, we wouldn't actually get any animation.
| | 04:57 | So we have our SketchUp
options set up as we want them.
| | 05:00 | All we need to do now is work with the
rest of our Twilight animation controls.
| | 05:04 | Before we set those up though, there are
just a couple of things that we need to
| | 05:07 | be aware of with regard to
rendering animation in Twilight.
| | 05:12 | Firstly, since all lighting in the
scene is taken into account by Twilight,
| | 05:16 | whether it is contributing light to
the currently rendered frame or not, it
| | 05:20 | really would be a good idea to turn off
any lights that are not contributing in
| | 05:24 | a significant way to our
particular animated sequence.
| | 05:28 | This could potentially reduce our
render times by quite a significant amount.
| | 05:33 | We also need to be aware that
Twilight will calculate direct and indirect
| | 05:37 | lighting for all lights on all
geometry processed in the scene, whether we
| | 05:42 | actually see it in the
final rendered frame or not.
| | 05:45 | We may then want to hide any geometry
in the scene that is not going to appear
| | 05:49 | in our final rendered frame.
| | 05:51 | Of course, if a piece of geometry is
contributing significantly to the light
| | 05:55 | bounce in our environment, then we
would really want to keep that in the scene.
| | 06:00 | So keeping those pieces of information
in mind, we can now set up the rest of our
| | 06:05 | Twilight animation options.
| | 06:07 | As you can see, we now have a 3-second
animation available to render if we want to.
| | 06:12 | If that is the case, then our End of
Animation value, which of course is set in
| | 06:16 | seconds, needs to be set to 3.
| | 06:18 | Now, as you can see, we are
rendering 3 seconds of an available 3-second
| | 06:22 | animation, totaling 91 frames.
| | 06:25 | Now this frame value is set
according to the Frame Rate set in this
| | 06:30 | particular parameter.
| | 06:31 | If the default frame rate of 30 frames
per second is just what we need, then we
| | 06:35 | can leave this value alone. But we do
need to keep in mind that certain delivery
| | 06:39 | mediums may require some
very specific frame rates.
| | 06:42 | As what we're doing here is
really just a proof-of-concept render,
| | 06:46 | I'm going to use a web-based frame
rate of around about 15 frames per second.
| | 06:51 | This just means we've got less frames
to render. As you can see, we are now
| | 06:54 | going to render a total of 46.
| | 06:56 | We do have the ability, using this
Starting Frame option, to offset the start of
| | 07:01 | our rendered sequence.
| | 07:03 | So if we wanted, for instance, our first
rendered frame to be in actuality frame
| | 07:08 | 15 of our animated sequence, we could
just set our Start Frame to be 15 and that
| | 07:13 | is the point from which
our render will commence.
| | 07:15 | Our final and extremely important step
is to set a Render Location and of course
| | 07:21 | a Base Image Name for our animated sequence.
| | 07:24 | So if I just click on the Browse
button, you can see we are in our
| | 07:28 | Exercise_Files folders structure.
I am just going to come into Ch06 and into my
| | 07:32 | Renders > Animation folder, just so
that I can contain all of my animated
| | 07:37 | sequence in one place.
| | 07:38 | This just means I know where everything
is once I come to compile the sequence
| | 07:42 | in some video production software.
| | 07:44 | So we do need to give our renders a name,
so I am just going to call this Anim_.
| | 07:50 | Underscore means that my numerical
sequence can be appended after the base
| | 07:54 | file name that I've set.
| | 07:55 | Once I have done that, I can click
Save, and we are now ready to render out
| | 08:00 | our animated sequence.
| | 08:01 | As soon as we start the render,
Twilight will simply run through each of the
| | 08:04 | frames, rendering them in sequence.
| | 08:07 | As we've already run through this
process, we can of course just show you
| | 08:10 | the final animation.
| | 08:11 | So if I just go and pull up QuickTime
player, we can just play you the final
| | 08:15 | animated sequence, which as you
can see, turns out quite nicely.
| | 08:21 | It certainly isn't a high-quality vendor,
but it is more than enough to get an
| | 08:24 | idea of how the animation is working,
and indeed how the scene lighting and the
| | 08:28 | materials are working.
| | 08:30 | Of course, we do need to keep in mind
that Twilight only renders out still images,
| | 08:34 | so we have to compile our image
sequence in a piece of video editing software,
| | 08:39 | something such as Adobe Premiere or Sony Vegas.
| | 08:42 | So even though, as we mentioned in our
introduction, SketchUp and Twilight are
| | 08:46 | not designed as general animation tools,
| | 08:48 | if we just follow the simple steps
outlined in this video, we can still get some
| | 08:52 | very nice results from them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rendering out an alpha mask| 00:00 | Oftentimes a render artist may be
called upon to provide specific rendered
| | 00:04 | elements that may be needed by
compositing artists further down a production
| | 00:09 | pipeline, or indeed it may well be that
we need these elements to perform our
| | 00:13 | own compositing operations.
| | 00:15 | In this video, we will walk you through
the steps required to create an alpha
| | 00:18 | mask render that we can use a little
later in this chapter to perform some basic
| | 00:23 | color correction operations
on our final rendered image.
| | 00:26 | Before we create our alpha mask, there
is a little bit of scene setup that we
| | 00:31 | need to run through, so let's just come up to
our Window menu and come down to the Layers option.
| | 00:36 | The first thing I want to do in here
is just Layer0 as the Default layer.
| | 00:40 | This is so that we can go and turn
off our Sky Portals, Patio Glass, and
| | 00:46 | Skylight Glass layers.
| | 00:47 | We've hidden these objects because we don't
want to them included in our alpha mask render.
| | 00:52 | Now of course, we could just
perform a number of selection operations,
| | 00:55 | but if we know we have objects that we
definitely don't want included in our
| | 01:00 | alpha mask, it's a very simple method
to just go and turn off their layers.
| | 01:04 | In fact, what we can do now is to just
go up to the Edit menu and just use
| | 01:09 | the Select All command.
| | 01:10 | We could of course use the
keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+A as well.
| | 01:14 | By selecting our geometry, what we are
essentially doing now is telling Twilight
| | 01:19 | which objects had to be
included in our alpha mask render,
| | 01:23 | in other words which objects are
to be assigned a pure white color.
| | 01:26 | As you will see in just a moment or
two, any objects not included in this
| | 01:31 | selection will ultimately have a pure black
color assigned to them in the final render.
| | 01:36 | Another little tweak we may want to
perform is to come into our Twilight Render
| | 01:40 | dialog, come to the Camera tab, and
just set our Tone Mapping Filter to None.
| | 01:45 | This just ensures that no tone mapping
will interfere with the creation of our mask.
| | 01:49 | We'll of course, need to come to the
Render tab, come into the Advance Settings,
| | 01:54 | and choose our Alpha Mask Render preset.
| | 01:57 | And now we ready to start over render,
so let's go and click on the Start Render icon.
| | 02:02 | In this instance when we get our
Selection dialog, we actually want to say Yes.
| | 02:07 | This means that only the selected
geometry will be rendered and anything not
| | 02:11 | included in the selection will again
just be a simply assigned a pure black
| | 02:14 | value which worked
perfectly for our alpha mask render.
| | 02:18 | So let's click Yes and let our render start.
| | 02:22 | And as you can see, we get a black-and-
white image with all of our geometry
| | 02:26 | assigned to pure white value and our
background, or our environment, assigned
| | 02:29 | a pure black color.
| | 02:30 | This of course makes it a perfect
mask for over sky and as we say, we will
| | 02:34 | use this a little later on in
Photoshop to perform some basic color
| | 02:37 | corrections on the sky.
| | 02:39 | Naturally, we do need to save our image to disk,
| | 02:41 | so I'll click on the Save option, and
I'm just going to give these a nice
| | 02:45 | descriptive name. I'll call this Alpha.
In this instance we can just Save As a PNG
| | 02:49 | file, click Save, and now we are done.
| | 02:52 | We have of course only created a single
mask image in this instance, but we can
| | 02:57 | create as many images, as many
configurations of mask renders as we feel our
| | 03:02 | compositing operations will require.
| | 03:04 | We could even create an alpha mask
render for every single object in our scene.
| | 03:09 | That means we could isolate every
single object inside of Photoshop and then
| | 03:13 | perform image editing operations own them.
| | 03:16 | Certainly there is no doubt that
compositing has increasingly become an
| | 03:20 | essential part of the modern rendering pipeline.
| | 03:23 | It brings a lot of flexibility to the
creative process, as well as potentially
| | 03:27 | saving us having to perform costly
rerenders for entire scenes, maybe even
| | 03:31 | entire sequences when we render with Twilight.
| | 03:34 | With that in mind then,
it certainly can be said that when we rendering
| | 03:37 | for compositing, the Alpha Mask
preset is an essential piece of Twilight
| | 03:42 | functionality.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up a depth render| 00:00 | Along with alpha masks, another
commonly required compositing element is the
| | 00:05 | depth or Z-Depth pass.
| | 00:07 | This element can be utilized to create
a number of depth-based effects inside a
| | 00:12 | compositing application.
| | 00:14 | A very common one is to add a fake
depth-of-field or lens effect to our final shot.
| | 00:19 | We're actually going to be adding a little bit of
haze to our scene interior by of course
| | 00:25 | creating a depth pass render for it.
| | 00:27 | Now once again we may need to perform a
little bit of scene setup if we want
| | 00:31 | our depth pass render to work in a
specific way--that is, if we want it to take
| | 00:37 | into account our exterior environment.
| | 00:40 | This will mean we need to once again
hide our sky portal and glass layers.
| | 00:43 | Now you may wonder, with the glass
objects having transparent material applied to
| | 00:49 | them, why is this so?
| | 00:50 | Because in our Beauty render we can
clearly see through to the outside
| | 00:53 | environment. But when creating a
depth render, Twilight doesn't look at the
| | 00:58 | material definitions
assigned to a piece of geometry;
| | 01:01 | it will just see the geometry in the scene
and so terminate the depth render at that point.
| | 01:06 | So let's do that. Let's open up our
Layers dialog. Again we just need to make
| | 01:11 | Layer0 the default so that we can
turn off our Sky Portals layer, our Patio
| | 01:15 | Glass layer, and of course
our Skylight Glass layer.
| | 01:18 | Now we can actually go and set
up Twilight for a depth render.
| | 01:22 | So let's open up the Render dialog, and
again in the Presets we're going to skip
| | 01:26 | past the Easy options and work
instead inside the Advanced group.
| | 01:29 | Here, as you can see, we
have a Depth Render option.
| | 01:33 | Using this preset, Twilight can now output a
render that really measures depth in the scene.
| | 01:39 | So points closes to our camera will
be represented by a black color; points
| | 01:43 | farthest away from the camera in the
environment will be represented by a pure
| | 01:47 | white color; and anything in between
will receive a grayscale gradient that
| | 01:52 | essentially represents the changing distance.
| | 01:55 | To see this in action, let's go
and take a render for ourselves.
| | 01:58 | If we just come into our Render
window and right-click and fit the image to
| | 02:03 | screen, you can see what we have
actually doesn't look every interesting.
| | 02:06 | In fact, we don't appear to have much
variation in terms of depth in our scene.
| | 02:11 | This is because, if we just come over
to our Camera tab, we will see that the
| | 02:15 | Twilight's Tone Mapping filters do
affect how our depth pass render works.
| | 02:20 | So if we just switch over from Simple
to None, you can see we get a much better
| | 02:25 | representation of depth in our scene.
| | 02:28 | In fact, if we want to control how
our depth render is working inside of
| | 02:33 | Twilight, we can use the Tone
Mapping filters to do just that.
| | 02:36 | Now generally speaking, the None
filter type would be my preferred option.
| | 02:40 | From here I would save out to a
floating-point image, so that would be a HDR or
| | 02:44 | EXR file from Twilight.
| | 02:46 | And then I could use tools in my image
editing application to affect how the
| | 02:51 | depth render is working.
| | 02:52 | In this instance though, just to
demonstrate how it does work, we're going to
| | 02:56 | switch over to the Simple option and
we're going to make some changes in here.
| | 02:59 | We're going to set our Exposure Level
to a value of 1, and we're going to set
| | 03:02 | our Gamma Adjustment level all the way
down to .1. This will really crunch the
| | 03:07 | grayscale gradient of our depth render
and mean that really, we're just pushing
| | 03:11 | all of our depth information
down to the far end of our room.
| | 03:14 | This means that when we add our Haze
effect inside of Photoshop, everything close
| | 03:18 | up to the camera will appear a bit
clear, but everything further away will
| | 03:21 | receive our Haze effect.
| | 03:23 | Now of course I do need to save this
out, so I'm going to click on the Save
| | 03:27 | current render icon, and I'm just
going to overwrite our existing HDR file.
| | 03:31 | Using a floating-point file format
means that I will still have lots of
| | 03:35 | control over my depth render once I
start to work with it inside of my image
| | 03:39 | editing application.
| | 03:41 | So in a very short space of time,
we have created a very useful depth pass
| | 03:46 | compositing element.
| | 03:47 | Not that we finished just yet
with Twilight's compositing presets.
| | 03:51 | In the next video, we'll show you how
we can use the Diffuse Texture Pass
| | 03:55 | preset in Twilight's Tech options to
essentially create a three-in-one mask
| | 04:01 | render for ourselves.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating an RGB mask using the Diffuse Texture Pass preset| 00:00 | In this video we are going to take
a quick look at a potentially very
| | 00:04 | useful compositing preset.
| | 00:06 | To examine it, we need to come into
our Twilight Render dialog of course, and
| | 00:10 | I will just close up my Easy and
Express options and just open up the Tech
| | 00:15 | and Specialized groups.
| | 00:16 | Of course, in here we have quite a
number of presets available, most of them
| | 00:20 | only giving us functionality that can be
found in other Twilight render presets.
| | 00:24 | Remember, the Tech section is
really designed for Kerkythea use.
| | 00:27 | There is, however, one option in here
that does give us something different,
| | 00:31 | something that we can't
find in other Twilight presets.
| | 00:35 | This is the Diffuse Texture Pass.
| | 00:38 | This preset will give us a render
containing only diffuse, or color,
| | 00:42 | texture information.
| | 00:44 | Before we take a render, we do need to once
again perform a little bit of scene setup.
| | 00:48 | So let's come to our Layers dialog,
let's switch over our default layer, and hide
| | 00:53 | our Portals, Patio Glass, and
Skylight Glass layers once again.
| | 00:57 | Now if we open up the Render dialog,
we can take a render to show you how our
| | 01:01 | Diffuse Texture Pass ought to look.
| | 01:03 | To see our image in its entirety,
we just need to right-click and use the Fit
| | 01:08 | Image to Screen option.
| | 01:09 | Although what we get here is still
not a proper representation of our
| | 01:13 | Diffuse Texture Pass.
| | 01:14 | We do need to come across to our
Camera tab and reset our Exposure controls.
| | 01:19 | And even now, we still don't have a correct
representation of our Diffuse Texture Pass.
| | 01:24 | This is a little glich you can
sometimes run into when using Twilight's Tone
| | 01:28 | Mapping Filter controls.
| | 01:30 | Rather than interpreting the colors
correctly, we now have this gray cast to our
| | 01:35 | render that clearly is not correct.
| | 01:37 | There is, however, a very quick fix for
this: if we just come into our Render tab
| | 01:41 | and just select one of the other
Render presets and if we just quickly take a
| | 01:45 | render with this, once we switch back
to our Diffuse Texture Pass we should get
| | 01:48 | a correct representation.
| | 01:50 | Of course I haven't chosen
the Light Pass preset by chance.
| | 01:54 | If we have no other light sources in
the scene, rendering with the Light Pass
| | 01:58 | really gives us a render of our sky, as
this is interpreted as the light-casting
| | 02:03 | element that can be found in the environment.
| | 02:05 | A way to keep in mind what we get from
this render as we switch back now to our
| | 02:10 | Diffuse Texture Pass and take a render,
| | 02:12 | what we now get is a correct
representation of our Diffuse Texture Pass.
| | 02:17 | Now interestingly, the Diffuse Texture
Pass could be used as a kind of non-photo-
| | 02:22 | realistic render pass in its on right.
| | 02:25 | Now of course we don't get anything
from our sky in the Diffuse Texture Pass,
| | 02:28 | but as we've just demonstrated, in our
Light Pass we only get our sky rendered
| | 02:33 | providing there are no other
light sources in the scene.
| | 02:36 | This means we can use an alpha
mask to simply composite these two
| | 02:39 | renders together, and as we say,
we would have a very pseudo NPR render for ourselves.
| | 02:45 | This so isn't what we are going to
use our Diffuse Texture Pass for.
| | 02:50 | As you can see in the render,
no lighting, no reflections, no refractions are
| | 02:53 | taken into account with this
particular rendering preset.
| | 02:56 | As we say, all we get are diffuse colors.
| | 02:59 | This means it can be very useful for
use as a compositing preset, because we can
| | 03:04 | now set colors in our scene.
| | 03:06 | We can assign solid colors to our
geometry and not have them change, not have
| | 03:11 | them be affected by our scene lighting.
| | 03:13 | To demonstrate how useful this can be,
we first of all need to set up three
| | 03:17 | SketchUp materials for ourselves.
| | 03:18 | So let's go and click on our Paint Bucket tool.
| | 03:21 | Let's to come to our In Model materials,
and again I am just going to start with
| | 03:25 | a base of our default gray material.
| | 03:28 | With this selected, I am going to click
on the Create Material button, and we're
| | 03:32 | is going to name our new material very
descriptively red, and we are of course
| | 03:37 | going to set it to be a
completely pure red color.
| | 03:41 | We can click OK and
create a new material of that.
| | 03:44 | This time we will call it Green, and
we will set it to be pure green color.
| | 03:49 | And then finally we can create a Blue
material, and of course give it a pure blue color.
| | 03:56 | Now what we need to do is apply our
compositing colors to particular elements in our scene.
| | 04:03 | So for instance, we can take our red
color and assign it to the beam work.
| | 04:07 | We can take our Green color and assign
it to the skylights surrounds, and we can
| | 04:12 | take our Blue color and just
assign this to our roof section.
| | 04:15 | To make things nice and easy for
ourselves once we initiate a render, I am just
| | 04:20 | going to first of all close my
Materials dialog, hit Spacebar to just return to
| | 04:23 | my normal Select tool, and then I am
just going to select our ceiling, hold down
| | 04:27 | Ctrl key, and select our beams and then
still holding the Ctrl key, I am going to
| | 04:32 | add our skylights surrounds.
| | 04:33 | Now when we come to the Twilight Render
dialog, make certain the Diffuse Texture
| | 04:37 | Pass is chosen and hit Render,
| | 04:40 | we can once again say that yes, we only
want to render the selected geometry.
| | 04:45 | By doing this, we will ensure that
everything else in the scene is assigned a
| | 04:48 | pure black value, thereby meaning that
it can be completely ignored once we are
| | 04:52 | compositing with this particular image.
And very quickly, you can see that we
| | 04:56 | have our pure color mask render completed.
| | 05:00 | The fact that we have no scene lighting
affecting these colors means that they
| | 05:03 | remain pure, and of course we haven't
had to play around and turn off all of
| | 05:08 | our scene lighting just to get this mask rendered.
| | 05:10 | We have done this very quickly
without really too much force at all.
| | 05:13 | Finally, we do need to go and save our
render, so in this instance we will call
| | 05:17 | this RGBMask. And once again we
can just save this as a PNG file.
| | 05:23 | So there we have one very quick method
of using Twilight's Diffuse Texture Pass.
| | 05:29 | Of course this is not a preset that we
are most likely going to want to use on a
| | 05:33 | daily basis, but if we are working in
a compositing pipeline--again, either for
| | 05:37 | ourselves or with a team of dedicated
compositing artists--then this can prove to
| | 05:42 | be a very handy little trick to have available.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with a composite| 00:00 | Compositing is very much a part
of the modern rendering pipeline.
| | 00:05 | Oftentimes, it maybe impossible to
bring a project to completion, or at least
| | 00:09 | completion on time, without the
compositing process playing a hand.
| | 00:13 | In this video, we are going to take
the passes we have rendered out of the
| | 00:16 | Twilight render engine and make
use of them inside of Photoshop.
| | 00:19 | You can of course make use of any
compositing application you like.
| | 00:23 | So let's bring our four images into Photoshop.
| | 00:26 | Let's come to the File menu > Open, and
we just need to make our way into our
| | 00:31 | Exercise_Files folder.
| | 00:32 | Once there, we can come into
Model_Files/Ch06/Renders, and here you can see the
| | 00:38 | four images that we need to work with.
| | 00:39 | So I am just going Ctrl+Select our Alpha,
Beauty, Depth, and RGBMask options and
| | 00:46 | then click Open to bring them into Photoshop.
| | 00:48 | The first thing I want to do is consolidate
all of my separate images into a single document,
| | 00:53 | so I am just going to hold down the
Alt key and double-click the Lock icon
| | 00:57 | for our RGBMask layer.
| | 00:58 | Then I am going to come up and select
the Move tool, left mouse-click in the
| | 01:02 | document window, and drag
this up to my Beauty tab.
| | 01:05 | Once here, I can just come back into
the document window, hold down the Shift
| | 01:09 | key to register or center my image, and
then just release my left mouse button.
| | 01:14 | We will get a warning dialog telling us that
the bit depth of our two images is different.
| | 01:18 | This is absolutely fine.
| | 01:19 | We can just click Yes to proceed and then OK.
| | 01:22 | Of course, we want to do this for our
depth render, so let's Alt+Double-click,
| | 01:26 | left-mouse-click, drag up to the tab,
back into the window, hold Shift, and then release.
| | 01:31 | And finally, our alpha mask layer,
Alt, double-click, drag it in, hold down the
| | 01:36 | Shift key to register, and again
just Yes and OK to our warning dialogs.
| | 01:40 | Now, the first thing I just want to
give attention to is my Beauty render,
| | 01:44 | so let's turn those layers off and
just focus on this for a moment or two.
| | 01:48 | At this moment in time, the render I am
seeing inside of Photoshop here is not
| | 01:52 | the one I saved out of the
Twilight Render dialog window.
| | 01:56 | In there I had a nice exposure setting,
a nice gamma adjustment, and everything
| | 02:00 | in this interior looked bright and airy.
| | 02:02 | Here we have a very dark, very saturated image.
| | 02:05 | This is just simply a matter of how
Photoshop reads floating-point image files.
| | 02:10 | You see, once it recognizes that an
incoming image is in a floating-point file
| | 02:15 | format, it will assign an RGB
linear color profile to it.
| | 02:19 | This means we get the look that
we're seeing at this moment in time.
| | 02:24 | Not to worry though, fixing
things in Photoshop very simple indeed.
| | 02:27 | All we need to do is come up to our
Image menu, into the Adjustment options, and
| | 02:32 | we can apply an Exposure command.
| | 02:34 | Now of course we could apply this as
an adjustment layer if we wanted to.
| | 02:37 | In here we just need to use the values
that we had set up inside of Twilight's
| | 02:42 | tone mapping controls.
| | 02:43 | So 1.7 was our Exposure in this particular
case, and we had a Gamma adjustment of 1.25.
| | 02:50 | Once we click OK, you can see that
everything once again looks nice and bright and airy.
| | 02:55 | Now we are ready to apply our fake
haze effect using our depth render.
| | 03:00 | First though, I just want to
rearrange my layers stack a little bit,
| | 03:03 | so I am just going to drag my RGBMask
up to the top and now we have everything
| | 03:07 | where we really need it.
| | 03:09 | So let's come and turn on our depth
render layer and just select it, because we
| | 03:13 | are going to be applying some operations to it.
| | 03:16 | To start the ball rolling as it were,
we first of all need to change this
| | 03:19 | particular layer's blending mode,
| | 03:20 | so I will come up to the Blending
Mode dropdown and select the Linear Dodge
| | 03:24 | (Additive) option from there.
| | 03:26 | Now of course, not a lot
appears to have happened.
| | 03:29 | In fact, you probably will have
noticed that this particular depth
| | 03:31 | render doesn't look like the
same image that we saved out of our
| | 03:35 | Twilight Render dialog.
| | 03:36 | Well, again this is because we
did save this particular image in a
| | 03:40 | floating-point file format.
| | 03:42 | This means that Photoshop has once
again linearized all of the colors.
| | 03:46 | But we can fix this just as
easily as we fixed our beauty pass.
| | 03:50 | So let's come back up to our Image
menu, into the Adjustment options.
| | 03:54 | This time we want to apply a Levels command.
| | 03:56 | As we want to push this Depth Render
effect away from our camera, let's just
| | 04:00 | take our Gamma, or midtones, slider and
just drag that to the right to crunch
| | 04:05 | things down a little bit. And you can
see that we can very nicely push this
| | 04:09 | away from the camera.
| | 04:10 | We don't want to go too far, because we
are going to work with our layer's opacity.
| | 04:14 | So let's just drag that to around
about there and then just accept that.
| | 04:18 | Now, we just want to drop the Opacity of
our layer down, actually by quite a bit.
| | 04:22 | So let's take this down to something
around about 2%, and if I just go and
| | 04:25 | disable the layer, you can see that
we've just added a little bit of a subtle
| | 04:29 | atmospheric effect inside of our interior space.
| | 04:33 | The next pass or element we
will use is our alpha mask.
| | 04:37 | We are going to use this
to color correct our sky.
| | 04:40 | So let's enable the layer
and then just select it.
| | 04:43 | I do want to say at this point that
there are probably a half dozen different
| | 04:47 | ways that we could use this alpha mask
render to mask out our sky and then apply
| | 04:52 | a color correction to it.
| | 04:53 | The steps that we will take here are
just one of the options available to us.
| | 04:58 | So, with my alpha mask showing in the
window, I'm going to use the Ctrl+A keyboard
| | 05:02 | shortcut to select everything that is visible.
| | 05:05 | I am going to use Ctrl+C to
copy this particular layer.
| | 05:09 | Then I am going to come
into the Channels palette.
| | 05:11 | I am going to come all the way down to
the bottom and click on the Create New
| | 05:15 | Channel icon, and then I'm going to
use Ctrl+V to paste my alpha Mask render
| | 05:20 | into that alpha Channel.
| | 05:22 | Now I can use Ctrl+D to deselect, enable
all of my channels once again, and then
| | 05:27 | when I come back into my Layers palette
and just click on my Background layer,
| | 05:32 | you can see that that strange
coloration inside of our own mask disappears.
| | 05:35 | Now of course to see the color
correction taking effect on our sky, we are going
| | 05:39 | to have to disable our alpha mask
layer, and then we want to come up to the
| | 05:44 | Select menu and come down and
use the Load Selection command.
| | 05:47 | You can see that the channel is
already selected as Alpha 1, which is the new
| | 05:52 | channel that we created.
| | 05:53 | So we can click OK, and you can see
that that mask is loaded as a selection.
| | 05:57 | We are currently selecting the wrong
aspects of our image though, so let's go
| | 06:01 | back up to the Select menu and
just choose the Inverse command.
| | 06:05 | Now, if I come down and just apply the
Levels Adjustment layer, and then if I
| | 06:10 | just take my Midtone slider and slide
it to the right, you can see that we do
| | 06:14 | indeed darken our sky quite nicely.
| | 06:17 | You can also see that these reflections
in our window geometry start to become
| | 06:21 | a little more apparent as we just take
that coloration or deepen the coloration
| | 06:25 | in our sky as well.
| | 06:26 | And just to test how much of an effect
we've made, we can just go and disable
| | 06:31 | our Levels Adjustment layer.
| | 06:32 | You can see we've made quite a
difference to how our sky is looking there.
| | 06:36 | So time to move on to our final
rendered element, and that is our RGBMask.
| | 06:41 | So let's just go and again select that
layer and enable it, just to see what we
| | 06:46 | created inside of Twilight.
| | 06:48 | Here you can see we have our three
pure RGB--or red, green, and blue--colors.
| | 06:53 | Now of course, we could use the
magic wand to select these colors.
| | 06:56 | It would be very simple, very easy,
because of the purity of the coloration in the
| | 07:00 | rendered image, but I am just going to
show you another way that we can go about
| | 07:04 | selecting things here.
| | 07:04 | If we just come into Channels palette,
you can see we have our Red, Green, and
| | 07:09 | Blue channels, and because the colors
we used were pure, they are the only thing
| | 07:13 | showing up inside each of these channels.
| | 07:15 | What we can do then is holding down the
Ctrl key, we can for instance Ctrl+Click
| | 07:20 | on the thumbnail for our Red channel.
| | 07:23 | What will happen now is if we just
come back into our Layers palette and just
| | 07:27 | turn off our mask layer, you can see
we have indeed selected only that single
| | 07:31 | element inside of our Beauty image.
| | 07:33 | Of course, what we've forgotten to do
here is to turn on our R, G, and B channels,
| | 07:38 | so let's do that and then come back
into the Layers palette, because I want to
| | 07:42 | select my Beauty pass on my Background
layer and just apply again another Levels
| | 07:47 | command or Levels Adjustment layer to it.
| | 07:48 | What we can do now is brighten or
darken the selected elements in the scene, and
| | 07:53 | I am just going to artificially
darken them, just so you can clearly see the
| | 07:57 | effect that this particular mask and
adjustment layer combination is having.
| | 08:01 | And again, to just see how the effect
is working, we can go and disable and
| | 08:05 | enable that layer as we like.
| | 08:07 | Of course, we can use the other colors
inside of this mask in just the same way.
| | 08:11 | We just Ctrl+Click on the
particular channel that we want to load as a
| | 08:14 | selection, come back into our Layers
palette, and then we can just apply color
| | 08:18 | correction operations to that
selected portion of our image.
| | 08:23 | Now of course just because we are
making use of these compositing elements that
| | 08:27 | we've rendered from Twilight, we don't
want to make it seem as though we are
| | 08:30 | suggesting that Twilight isn't
capable of producing a final high-quality
| | 08:34 | rendered image on its own, or
straight out of the box as it were.
| | 08:38 | It most certainly is.
| | 08:40 | Oftentimes though, the time and the
energy that it would take to really force
| | 08:44 | that to happen means that we are
being neither as productive as we probably
| | 08:49 | could be, nor are we necessarily
getting the best end result from our scene.
| | 08:53 | Sometimes it just makes sense to make
use of the specialized compositing passes
| | 08:57 | that the Twilight render
engine makes available to us.
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ConclusionWhat's next?| 00:00 | Well, here we are at the end of
SketchUp Rendering Using Twilight.
| | 00:04 | Of course there's still plenty that
you can do to continue building your
| | 00:09 | Twilight rendering skills.
| | 00:10 | One excellent option is to simply
practice the things you have learned
| | 00:14 | throughout the duration of this course.
| | 00:16 | If you have access to the exercise files,
the scene files provided, so much the better.
| | 00:21 | Do be sure also to give attention to the many
photography courses available here on lynda.com.
| | 00:27 | Be especially sure to check out the
Foundations of Photography series by Ben Long.
| | 00:32 | Of course you will then need to apply
the principles of photography from those
| | 00:35 | courses to working with
the Twilight render engine.
| | 00:38 | You can even check out any of the 3D
titles here on lynda.com that feature
| | 00:43 | render engine training, such as our
SketchUp rendering with V-Ray course.
| | 00:47 | Many of the principles, the ideas used
in other render engines can fairly easily
| | 00:52 | be transferred over to use in Twilight.
| | 00:55 | Finally, you will also want to
check out the resources available on the
| | 00:59 | twilightrender.com website.
| | 01:01 | I certainly hope that you've found this
course helpful and informative in your
| | 01:05 | endeavors to learn the Twilight render engine.
| | 01:08 | My name is Brian Bradley, and I
will say take care and bye for now.
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