IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hello and welcome to
SketchUp Rendering Using V-Ray.
| | 00:07 | My name is Brian Bradley, and I'm
really excited to be able to introduce you to this
| | 00:12 | powerful lighting and rendering
solution for the SketchUp application.
| | 00:16 | As this course is designed to help
us get to up and running with V-Ray in
| | 00:22 | SketchUp, we will, first of all,
install and then set up to the V-Ray plug-in
| | 00:26 | the SketchUp application.
| | 00:27 | We will take a look at using V-Ray's
extremely powerful and versatile lighting
| | 00:31 | tools to add some illumination to our scene.
| | 00:34 | This will include examining the V-Ray
Sun and Sky systems, which can be used
| | 00:38 | to add natural-looking daylight to our
renders, as well as looking at some of
| | 00:42 | the V-Ray-specific light types
available that can be used to mimic artificial light sources.
| | 00:49 | We will naturally take a close look at
the V-Ray standard material, as it will help us
| | 00:54 | re-create some useful real-world material types.
| | 00:58 | As V-Ray can easily be used as a
virtual photography studio, we will want to
| | 01:03 | put some of its effects tools to work
and add an extra level of believability to our renders.
| | 01:09 | As we have all of this and more,
let's go ahead and dive right in.
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| What you should know before watching this course| 00:00 | Throughout this course I will do my best to
make you aware of tool locations and keyboard
| | 00:06 | shortcuts as I make use of them
inside the SketchUp application.
| | 00:09 | However, when it comes to working with standard SketchUp
tools and performing typical navigation operations,
| | 00:16 | I will, to a certain extent, be assuming that you
have at least a reasonable level of familiarity
| | 00:22 | with the SketchUp application and so
will know how to handle such operations.
| | 00:27 | If you are new to SketchUp and need to learn
how to master these and all those SketchUp
| | 00:32 | operations before working through our V-Ray
rendering Course, then I would surely recommend
| | 00:37 | you check out some of the great SketchUp titles
already found on the lynda.com online training
| | 00:42 | library, especially focusing
on the Essential Training titles.
| | 00:47 | You've probably noticed that my SketchUp
interface is a little bit different from the one set
| | 00:52 | up by default inside of the application.
| | 00:54 | Really, all I've done is come up to the View
menu, into the Toolbox flyout, and I've disabled
| | 01:00 | the Getting Started option and
instead enabled our Large toolset.
| | 01:04 | I have also of course docked the usually floating V-
Ray toolbar to the top of my SketchUp Interface.
| | 01:11 | If we want to easily access the model and
texture files contained in our exercise files
| | 01:16 | download, there is a little bit of setup we may want
to run through inside of the SketchUp application.
| | 01:23 | This consists of coming to our Window menu,
dropping down and selecting the Preferences
| | 01:28 | option, and then in the System Preferences
dialog, just selecting the Files option.
| | 01:34 | As you can see, we've pointed each of our
file types to the Exercise Files Folder that
| | 01:39 | we've saved it on our Desktop.
| | 01:41 | We do this by clicking on one of the navigation
buttons and then just navigating to wherever
| | 01:46 | our Exercise Files folder maybe saved.
| | 01:49 | Once we've done this, we can easily access
the model files using the File > Open command.
| | 01:54 | You can see we go straight to the exercise
files folder. Then we can go into the model
| | 01:58 | Files folder and to the relevant chapter.
And of course, if we are inside of a material
| | 02:03 | and navigating for a bitmap texture then we
can go straight into our Texture Files folder.
| | 02:08 | Well, the skills that we may well find helpful
as we work through this course would include
| | 02:13 | photography and its general principles, both with
the particular focus on photographic lighting
| | 02:19 | and exposure. And of course any knowledge
we have working with other render engines,
| | 02:24 | whether that's inside SketchUp or indeed in
another 3D application, well, those skills
| | 02:28 | will easily transfer over to
using V-Ray inside of SketchUp.
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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 access to
| | 00:05 | the exercise files used throughout
this V-Ray for SketchUp course.
| | 00:10 | The exercise files are in the Exercise Files
folder, which I have placed on my Desktop.
| | 00:16 | You can of course store it wherever you like.
| | 00:19 | There are files for most movies. They reside
in subfolders named for each of the chapters.
| | 00:26 | It is not necessary for
you to use these files.
| | 00:28 | You can use files of your own
in place of them if you like.
| | 00:32 | If you are a Monthly or Annual subscriber to
lynda.com, you don't have access to the exercise
| | 00:38 | files, but you can follow along using
files containing your own work.
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1. Getting Ready to Render with V-RayInstalling V-Ray| 00:00 | As V-Ray is a plug-in render engine for
SketchUp and not a part of the SketchUp installation
| | 00:05 | process itself, we thought it would be a good
idea to start this course by quickly walking
| | 00:10 | you through the
installation of the V-Ray plug-in.
| | 00:14 | Of course, the first thing we need to do is
download the appropriate version of the V-Ray
| | 00:18 | plug-in from the Chaos Group website.
| | 00:20 | This can be found www.chaosgroup.com.
| | 00:24 | To save time, I've already downloaded the
V-Ray for SketchUp plug-in to my desktop.
| | 00:30 | So let's click or double-click to
begin the installation process.
| | 00:34 | The first thing we need to do is confirm that
we want to Install the application by clicking
| | 00:40 | Next in the initial Setup window.
| | 00:43 | Then of course we need to read the end user
license agreement and check the appropriate
| | 00:48 | box to say that we have accepted those terms.
| | 00:51 | Next we see a list of
components that will be installed.
| | 00:54 | Chance are if this is the first time we've
installed V-Ray, we will want all of these
| | 00:59 | checked, which they general add up by default.
| | 01:02 | Now we need to locate the root
folder of our SketchUp installation.
| | 01:06 | If, however, we are installing to the MacIntosh
operating system, we will need to locate our
| | 01:12 | Google SketchUp application support folder.
| | 01:15 | If we know the address for this by heart,
we can simply type it in, or if we need to
| | 01:19 | browse for it, we can use to Browse button,
locate the appropriate drive, and then th
| | 01:24 | appropriate folder.
| | 01:26 | Once that is done and and everything has been
confirmed, we can click Next and we're off
| | 01:30 | and running with the installation process.
| | 01:33 | Now, depending upon your computer speed and operating
system, this may take a while, so do be patient.
| | 01:43 | The final part of the installation process
walks us through setting up our licensing
| | 01:48 | of the V-Ray for SketchUp plug-in.
| | 01:50 | Which of the four options available we
choose will depend upon a number of factors, but
| | 01:55 | essentially, if we are licensing a purchased
version of the V-Ray plug-in, we have three
| | 01:59 | options opened to us.
| | 02:01 | Or it may just be that we want to demo the application,
and so that is the option that we would choose.
| | 02:07 | The final step is to run through
the activation process itself.
| | 02:11 | V-Ray for SketchUp uses a software licensing
approach that is completely flexible and can
| | 02:16 | be handled both on or
offline. And that is it.
| | 02:21 | We've installed the V-Ray SketchUp plug-in,
and it is now ready to be used inside the SketchUp application.
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| Locating V-Ray tools and features| 00:00 | The first time we start the SketchUp
application after running the V-Ray installer process,
| | 00:05 | we don't really have to do to much in
order to find V-Ray's main set of controls.
| | 00:11 | This is because on launch, we get this handy
floating toolbar that gives us access to the
| | 00:16 | vast majority of the controls that
we will use when working with V-Ray.
| | 00:21 | Now if for some reason we close this toolbar
down and need to find it again, we can just
| | 00:25 | come up to the View menu, come to the toolbars
and from the flyout menu, come down and choose
| | 00:30 | the V-Ray for SketchUp option.
| | 00:32 | What we are going to do over the next few
minutes in this video is just examine the
| | 00:36 | options that we get access to
by means of the V-Ray toolbar.
| | 00:40 | As you can see, the first icon we get on
the toolbox is in the form of a letter M.
| | 00:46 | If we hover over this icon, the tooltip tells us that
it'll bring up the V-Ray for SketchUp Material Editor.
| | 00:54 | Now in chapter 5 we will be coming back to
the Material Editor and spending quite a bit
| | 00:58 | of time in here, but for now, we just need to know that
this is where we edit V-Ray materials in our scenes.
| | 01:05 | Coming back to the toolbar, we can see that
the next icon is in the form of a letter O.
| | 01:10 | This stands for Options Editor.
| | 01:12 | Now this dialog houses the vast majority of
the tools and controls that we'll work with
| | 01:17 | when rendering with V-Ray in SketchUp.
| | 01:20 | One very cool feature worth mentioning here
is the fact that we can load, save, and reset
| | 01:26 | to default all of the options in this editor.
| | 01:29 | So we can for instance, set up a number of the
controls in here for a particular rendering scenario.
| | 01:35 | Let's say we want fast preview renders.
| | 01:38 | We can set that up and then save the option set
to disk and have access to it anytime we need.
| | 01:45 | This means of course we don't have to go
through and manually set up the options all
| | 01:48 | over again each time we want to
work with fast preview renders.
| | 01:53 | And of course, we can set up as many
unique rendering option sets as we need.
| | 01:58 | We can keep them all to hand,
ready to load at a moment's notice.
| | 02:03 | Now admittedly, on first inspection, the huge
amount of options available inside of this
| | 02:08 | dialog can seem quite overwhelming,
especially if we're new to lighting and rendering in
| | 02:13 | a 3D application.
| | 02:15 | The simple truth is that whilst V-Ray does
offer a huge amount of control over the rendering
| | 02:20 | process and can be fine-
tuned to the nth degree
| | 02:23 | if we want or need to, still, we can get
extremely good results from V-Ray by just working with
| | 02:29 | a handful of the options available in this
dialog. Hopefully, this will be demonstrated
| | 02:34 | to you throughout this training course.
| | 02:37 | The next option on our V-Ray toolbar is the R
for Render icon, or Start Render icon. Clicking
| | 02:44 | on this will initiate a render
of our current SketchUp scene.
| | 02:49 | Once initialized, our render will appear
inside the V-Ray Frame Buffer for window.
| | 02:54 | Now the frame before itself houses a number
of features and a number of tools that can come
| | 02:58 | in very handy when working with our V-Ray
renders. We have tools along both the top
| | 03:03 | and the bottom of the window.
| | 03:06 | The bottom set being particularly interesting,
as many of them allow us to perform instant
| | 03:11 | exposure and/or color corrections to the
data stored in the V-Ray frame buffer itself.
| | 03:17 | Next, in our toolbar comes the ubiquitous
Help icon in the form of a question mark.
| | 03:23 | Now this option used to take
us to the ASGVIS website.
| | 03:27 | They were the original developers of
V-Ray's implementation into SketchUp.
| | 03:32 | Now, however, it simply takes us to a general
information page on the Chaos Group website,
| | 03:37 | Chaos Group of course being the
creators of the V-Ray render engine.
| | 03:41 | If we do need to access the latest help files,
the place to go is www.spot3d.com. This website
| | 03:50 | houses the help files for all
versions of the V-Ray plug-in.
| | 03:54 | Next on the toolbar we come to the FrameBuffer icon,
which naturally comes in the form of the letter F.
| | 04:01 | If in our current SketchUp session, we have
already performed a render using V-Ray, then
| | 04:05 | clicking on this icon will bring the Frame Buffer
window up for us, with the last render showing in it.
| | 04:11 | If we haven't performed a render in our
current session, then we get a Warning dialog that
| | 04:15 | says: no Frame Buffer to show; the VFB is
not created until a render is started.
| | 04:22 | The next four icons on the toolbar all allow
us to create specific V-Ray light types with
| | 04:27 | just a few clicks of the mouse.
| | 04:30 | Now as each of these will be examined in
chapter 2 of our course, we're just going to skip
| | 04:34 | over them for now.
| | 04:36 | Finally, we have icons that allow us to
create a couple of unique V-Ray geometry types.
| | 04:42 | These are the V-Ray Sphere, which give us a
perfect geometric sphere in the scene, and
| | 04:47 | the V-Ray Plane, which gives as
an infinite plane in SketchUp.
| | 04:52 | Now if we prefer to work with menu items as
opposed to having toolbars and icons floating
| | 04:57 | around, all of the same functionality can
be accessed through the Plugins menu.
| | 05:02 | All we have to do is come to the V-Ray option,
and then using the flyout menu, we can access
| | 05:07 | all of the same tools and features.
| | 05:09 | So, now that we are up to speed regarding
how to access the V-Ray feature set inside
| | 05:14 | of SketchUp, it's time to move on to
working with those tools in earnest.
| | 05:19 | In the next chapter, entitled Lighting Up the
Place, we'll start to look at V-Ray's lighting tools.
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2. Lighting the Place UpCreating natural daylight with the V-Ray Sun and Sky| 00:00 | There are three critical V-Ray lighting
elements that are already set up and working for us
| | 00:06 | each and every time we start a new scene in
SketchUp with the V-Ray plug-in installed.
| | 00:11 | These are indirect illumination, provided by
the V-Ray's Global Illumination engines; natural-
| | 00:17 | looking daytime lighting, provided by the VRay
Sun and Sky environment; and the V-Ray Physical
| | 00:22 | Camera through which we render our scene
in a photographic manner, including the use
| | 00:27 | of exposure controls.
| | 00:29 | However, if at this moment in time we were to
take a render in our chapter 02 Daylight_start
| | 00:34 | scene, we would actually see that we have a
completely dark environment. This is because
| | 00:39 | we have deliberately set this scene file up so that we
have to manually build our day lighting system.
| | 00:45 | Hopefully, this will help us familiarize
ourselves with the components making up these important
| | 00:50 | set of V-Ray lighting controls.
| | 00:53 | Do keep in mind though that the other two
elements mentioned, namely, Global Illumination
| | 00:59 | and the V-Ray Physical Camera, are both still enabled,
and will be at work in the test renders we make.
| | 01:05 | So to build our daylight environment, we
need to first of all open up the V-Ray options
| | 01:10 | dialog for ourselves, so if we come up to the V-Ray
toolbar, we can click on the Options dialog icon.
| | 01:16 | Once that is opened up, we need to find the
environment rollout and then we simply open
| | 01:20 | it up by left-mouse-clicking.
| | 01:22 | Here, as you can see, we have four options
that really control how V-Ray will render
| | 01:27 | the general environment in our scene.
| | 01:30 | The two options that we're interest in are
the GI, or Global Illumination color, which
| | 01:34 | will ultimately control the lighting in our
scene; and the BG, or Background Color, controls.
| | 01:40 | As these are the ones that we want to look
at first of all, let's put a check in the
| | 01:44 | BG Color box to enable
those options for ourselves.
| | 01:48 | Now, as you may expect, we can set a Background
color by means of our color swatch, or we can
| | 01:53 | indeed use a map or an image file that will render
in the background by means of our Map button.
| | 01:59 | Now, anywhere that we see past geometry in our
scene to the virtual environment or background--
| | 02:06 | so in visual terms, anywhere that we see the
sky gradient in our SketchUp viewport--well,
| | 02:12 | this is where our background
color or our map will show up.
| | 02:16 | The VRaySky is a procedural high-dynamic-range
image that has really been designed to mimic
| | 02:22 | the real-world behavior of
a clear sky environment.
| | 02:26 | This makes it an excellent backdrop for any
kind of visualization render. To use that,
| | 02:31 | we simply left mouse-click on the Map button.
| | 02:34 | In the Texture editor that pops up, we can
use the dropdown, and if we just scroll down,
| | 02:39 | you'll find our TexSky entered.
| | 02:41 | With that chosen, you can see we get access
to a number of controls that really allow
| | 02:46 | us to change the appearance of our sky.
| | 02:50 | We can use options such as Turbidity, Ozone,
Water Vapor, et cetera, all of which will
| | 02:55 | slightly change the look and
coloration of our procedural sky.
| | 03:00 | We can even have SketchUp's Shadow Setting
controls--that is, the month of the year, the time of
| | 03:05 | the day--automatically update the appearance of
our sky as we make changes to those controls.
| | 03:11 | For that to happen, we would need to make
certain that this SunLight option is enabled,
| | 03:15 | so let's click on the button, and in the Select
Plugin dialog, let's chose the dropdown, chose
| | 03:20 | SunLight, and click OK. Now you can
see our general sky controls become
| | 03:25 | grayed out and if we just scroll down a little
bit, you see that we now have access to all
| | 03:30 | of these SunLight controls.
| | 03:32 | Well of course we're not controlling the
SunLight as such in terms of lighting, but
| | 03:37 | we are controlling how the SunLight will
affect the look of our procedural sky.
| | 03:41 | So all of the options for changing the sky
such as Turbidity and Ozone and Water Vapor
| | 03:45 | are still in here, but we have extra parameters
that will update the look of our sky as well.
| | 03:51 | One thing we do need to be aware of is that
any changes we make to these controls will
| | 03:56 | eventually be carried over into our scene
lighting once we apply the VRaySky map into
| | 04:02 | our GI color slot.
| | 04:03 | The system has to share a single instance of
the TexSky map for both the GI and Background
| | 04:10 | Color options, even though we do actually
add the map to each slot independently.
| | 04:15 | We won't see what a difference that has made
in terms of what we get in our render, so
| | 04:19 | let's dismiss our dialog, and let's go up to
the Start Render icon on the V-Ray toolbar
| | 04:23 | and take a render for ourselves.
| | 04:27 | Now, as you can see, we get a very nice
procedural sky gradient as the backdrop for our render.
| | 04:33 | Of course, at this moment in time we
still have no lighting in our scene.
| | 04:38 | To enable that, let's go back into our
Options dialog, and this time we want to work with
| | 04:43 | our GI Color control, so again, let's put a
check in the box to enable those for ourselves.
| | 04:49 | With that checkbox enabled, V-Ray will now
give to us 360 degrees of indirect skylight
| | 04:55 | illumination. Now because this is not a
direct light source, we do need to have V-Ray's GI
| | 05:01 | systems turned on in order for this set of
controls to give us any lighting in the scene.
| | 05:06 | Notice they are on by default, and as they're
enabled in these particular scenes, we don't
| | 05:10 | have any problem there.
| | 05:12 | Now with no map in the map slot, V-Ray will
use this color swatch and the value set in
| | 05:17 | this multiply spinner to really control the
coloration and the brightness of the light
| | 05:22 | that comes from our sky.
| | 05:25 | As we want a natural-looking daylight render,
we're going to want to add the VRaySky map
| | 05:30 | into our map slot, so let's
left-mouse-click on the map button.
| | 05:33 | In the Texture Editor, again, we want to go
and find our TexSky map, so let's just scroll
| | 05:39 | down, select that option, and again, we get
our controls. And let's just click OK, dismiss
| | 05:44 | those dialogs, and let's see what we have
in terms of scene lighting for ourselves.
| | 05:51 | Because the VRaySky map is, as we mentioned, a
high-dynamic-range image and has been designed
| | 05:57 | to add real-world levels of light energy into
our environments, what we get is a very nice
| | 06:03 | bright skylight render, helped a little bit of
course by our current camera exposure settings.
| | 06:09 | We still don't have any direct light from
our sun in the scene though, so let's go back
| | 06:14 | into the Options dialog and
add that in for ourselves.
| | 06:17 | So again, click on the Map button and we need
to enable our SunLight plug-in. So let's click
| | 06:22 | on the button, use the drop down to
select SunLight, and click OK.
| | 06:27 | Now as well as controlling our sky, we can
actually control the appearance of our sun
| | 06:31 | by means of these parameters.
| | 06:33 | Of course, we do need to make
certain that our SunLight is enabled.
| | 06:37 | Now we can set the size of the sun as
it'll appear in our procedural sky.
| | 06:42 | If we want to, we can make our sun invisible,
in terms of scene reflections, and of course,
| | 06:47 | we have a lot of control over
how the shadows are looking.
| | 06:51 | So again, let's click OK, dismiss the dialogs,
and let's see how that has changed the look
| | 06:56 | or the feel of the
lighting in our environment.
| | 07:01 | And what we see is that with all of those
options enabled and working together, that
| | 07:06 | we really get a complete
natural-looking daylight look to the scene.
| | 07:11 | Of course, we can change the coloration, the
look of our lighting, the look of our procedural
| | 07:15 | sky, simply by updating
SketchUp's shadow controls.
| | 07:20 | So we do get all of this by default in V-Ray
for SketchUp whenever we start a new scene.
| | 07:25 | Just keep that in mind. All this has only
been constructed simply as a means of really
| | 07:30 | helping us become familiar with how the system
is working, and hopefully will help us take
| | 07:34 | full control and full advantage of
this very powerful V-Ray Lighting feature.
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| Using the Omni Light| 00:00 | When rendering with V-Ray in SketchUp,
especially if we are producing visualization pieces,
| | 00:05 | there is a very high likelihood that we will
need to create, or maybe recreate, artificial
| | 00:10 | light sources for our scenes.
| | 00:12 | V-Ray gives those four light types that can be used to
cover up pretty much any such situation that may arise.
| | 00:19 | If we come up to our V-Ray toolbar, we can
by means of the tooltips actually examine
| | 00:24 | the light types available tools.
| | 00:26 | So you can see we have an Omni Light, a
Rectangle Light, a Spot Light, and an IES Light.
| | 00:34 | Over the next four videos in this chapter,
we're going to briefly look at each of these
| | 00:38 | light types and of course examine
the parameters that control them.
| | 00:42 | Creating our light objects is
a very simple matter indeed.
| | 00:46 | All we need to do is left-mouse-click on the
desired icon, find a spot in the scene that
| | 00:51 | we want to place our light object, and then again
simply left-mouse-click to put it into our scene.
| | 00:57 | Now that process holds for each of the
light types except for our Rectangle Light.
| | 01:02 | If we just come and select that, you can see
here what we need to do is place an initial
| | 01:06 | click, which will allow us to draw out the
shape of our rectangle, and then a second
| | 01:11 | click will create the light
object in the scene for us.
| | 01:15 | To help us keep things focused in our start scene,
we're once again working with an artificially
| | 01:20 | darkened environment.
| | 01:22 | In this instance though, we have also
disabled the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 01:27 | This means that our light intensity will be
derived only from the settings found on our
| | 01:33 | light objects themselves.
| | 01:34 | We don't have to take any exposure settings
into account as we look at the illumination
| | 01:39 | in our test renders.
| | 01:41 | To take a look at the lights we have already
got set up in our scene, we need to come up
| | 01:45 | to our Window menu.
| | 01:47 | We just left mouse-click and
then come down to Layers option.
| | 01:50 | Again, select that, which will
bring up the Layers dialog for us.
| | 01:54 | If we just take a look down at the bottom of
this dialog, you can see we have four light
| | 01:59 | layers, each with a
different light type placed on it.
| | 02:02 | As in this particular video, we want to focus
on the Omni Light, we can put a check in that
| | 02:07 | box, which of course makes our
Omni Light appear in the scene.
| | 02:10 | And then we can just go and
dismiss our Layers dialog.
| | 02:14 | Something worth noting about SketchUp layers
is that whenever they have a light object
| | 02:18 | placed on them and then that layer is disabled or
hidden, we will no longer get any illumination
| | 02:24 | contribution from the light object in the scene;
we have effectively turned that light off.
| | 02:30 | Of course, as we've just added a new light
into our scene, this would be a good time
| | 02:35 | to take a test render for ourselves.
| | 02:38 | Each and every time we add new lights into
the scene, it really is a good practice just
| | 02:41 | to take a render of that light in isolation,
and then we can see what kind of a contribution
| | 02:47 | it is making in terms of
illumination to our environment.
| | 02:50 | So let's go across to the V-Ray toolbar and use
the Start Render icon to take a test render.
| | 02:58 | Straight away we can see--perhaps not
surprisingly giving the name of the light type that we
| | 03:03 | are working with--we can tell that we have
omni directional light being cast in the scene;
| | 03:09 | light is traveling in every direction.
| | 03:11 | In fact, if we examine this upright shelving
unit, we can see that we have very nicely
| | 03:16 | captured the emission of
light from our Omni Light.
| | 03:20 | You can see we have this very bright spot in
the center and as we travel away from the
| | 03:24 | light-emitting object, we have
this nice falloff, or decay.
| | 03:28 | Of course, as well as adding lights into the
scene, we need to know how to control them,
| | 03:33 | so let's just move our V-Ray Frame Buffer
to one side while we just select our light
| | 03:37 | object in the scene, and then we can right-
click and in our pop-up list, we can come down to
| | 03:42 | the V-Ray for SketchUp entry and then
just click on the Edit Light flyout.
| | 03:47 | This brings up the Light Editor for us that
houses all of the control parameters for this
| | 03:51 | particular light object.
| | 03:54 | We do of course want to be able to see our
test render, so let's just move the Light
| | 03:58 | Editor off to the side also.
| | 04:01 | Now we can start to take a look at
some of the control parameters.
| | 04:05 | Of course we have the ability to
enable or disable our light in the scene.
| | 04:10 | We can set its color by
means of this color swatch.
| | 04:15 | We can control the Intensity
or the output of our light.
| | 04:19 | We have the option to set the
Unit type that we work with.
| | 04:22 | You can see, at this moment in time we're
working with the Luminous Power option.
| | 04:26 | This means that our
intensity value is set in lumens.
| | 04:30 | We can of course work with any of the other real-
world light units that can be found in this list.
| | 04:35 | If we just come across to the Option section,
you can see that we can also control the Decay,
| | 04:39 | or the falloff, of light in our scene.
| | 04:42 | By default, the Inverse
Square setting is used.
| | 04:45 | This means we get realistic
behavior from our lights.
| | 04:49 | The decay will act as per
light in the real world.
| | 04:52 | This then is, perhaps more often than not.
| | 04:54 | going to be the option that we want to use.
| | 04:57 | But if our scene has special requirements,
if we just drop down the list, you can see
| | 05:00 | we do have other options available to us.
| | 05:04 | Just below, we have the Affect
Diffuse and Affect Specular options.
| | 05:09 | These allow us to control how our light
object will interact with scene materials.
| | 05:14 | We can disable a light's contribution to
diffuse components of materials or disable the way
| | 05:19 | it interacts with specular components.
| | 05:23 | We do get, as you can see, considerable
control over shadows from our light also.
| | 05:28 | We can enable or disable.
| | 05:30 | We can set shadow colors.
| | 05:32 | Perhaps one of the more important options
in here is this Shadow Radius setting.
| | 05:37 | You may have noticed over in our test render
that the shadow terminator is extremely sharp;
| | 05:42 | this is because by default
our Shadow Radius is set at 0.
| | 05:47 | If we want realistic soft edges to our
shadows, we need to increase this value.
| | 05:52 | We're going to jump it up to something
perhaps a little above, realistically.
| | 05:56 | But we really want to just demonstrate this
effect to you, so we're going to increase
| | 06:00 | it a little higher than
perhaps we normally would.
| | 06:03 | So let's set a value of 20 and let's click OK.
| | 06:06 | Now before we take a render, I just want to
use our secondary scene camera to just push
| | 06:11 | in a little bit on our test objects, and
then again, we can use the Start Render icon.
| | 06:17 | Now, as you can see, we do get a very nice soft
edge to our shadows, albeit quite a bit noisy.
| | 06:25 | You may be a little bit concerned about the level of
grain that we can see in these soft or area shadows.
| | 06:31 | Well, we can easily fix that
using our lights controls.
| | 06:35 | Let's just close out our V-Ray Frame Buffer.
| | 06:37 | Let's come back to our wide camera.
| | 06:40 | And again, we just want to
go into our Light Editor.
| | 06:44 | In here the setting that handles the quality in our
soft or area shadows would be the Shadow Subdivs value.
| | 06:51 | If we increase this, we will definitely
smooth things out in those shadows very nicely.
| | 06:56 | So that's an examination of the
controls for our Omni Directional light.
| | 07:01 | We do of course still have three
light types that we want to look at.
| | 07:04 | So in our next video we're going to make
an examination of the Rectangle Light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring the Rectangle Light| 00:00 | The second of our artificial light types to come
under examination is the V-Ray rectangle light.
| | 00:07 | Now, this particular light type is
extremely versatile and extremely powerful.
| | 00:12 | It really has been designed to
mimic real-world light emitters.
| | 00:17 | For this reason, it is probably the light
type that we'll want to work with most often.
| | 00:23 | Of course, to make an examination of the
light, we need to add it into the scene, so let's
| | 00:27 | come up to our Window menu, down to Layers
and in the Layers dialog, let's come and put
| | 00:33 | a check in the Light_Rectangle layer, and that
will add our rectangle light into the scene.
| | 00:39 | Now again, as with our omni-directional light,
the first thing we want to do once we have
| | 00:44 | added a new light object into a
scene is to take a test render.
| | 00:48 | This will allow us to evaluate both the
illumination that we getting in our environment from our
| | 00:54 | new light object and it will also allow us to see
what kind of a light-emission pattern we're getting.
| | 01:00 | So let's go across to the V-Ray toolbar and
use the Start Render icon to take that test
| | 01:04 | render for ourselves.
| | 01:07 | Of course, straight away we can see that we
get a very different light-emission pattern
| | 01:11 | as compared to our omni-directional light,
which really is not surprising, as all of the
| | 01:17 | light in the scene is now being emitted from
this one side of our rectangular light object.
| | 01:24 | Now, by its very nature, the rectangle light
is a genuine area light and as such, there
| | 01:30 | are just one or two things that we need to
keep in mind when we're making use of it.
| | 01:35 | The first is the fact that by default we get
natural area, or soft-edge, shadows from this
| | 01:41 | particular light type.
| | 01:42 | If we take a look at the shadows coming from
our sample objects here, you can see we don't
| | 01:47 | have that sharp termination anymore;
we actually have a nice soft falloff to them.
| | 01:53 | Something else that we need to keep in mind is
the fact that when it come the V-Ray rectangle
| | 01:57 | light the size really does matter.
| | 02:00 | What we mean is that as we increase the size
of our Rectangle Light object, we will increase
| | 02:06 | the level of illumination; we'll increase
the intensity of light coming from it.
| | 02:11 | This of course is quite natural because as
we increase the size of the light object, we
| | 02:15 | are increasing the
light-emitting surface that it has.
| | 02:19 | A consequence of the fact that our light is
enlarging is also the fact that our shadows
| | 02:24 | will become softer; they will
become more diffused in the scene.
| | 02:29 | Of course, the inverse is also true.
| | 02:31 | As we decrease the size of our light,
we'll decrease the level of illumination coming
| | 02:35 | from it, and we will get
sharper and sharper shadows.
| | 02:39 | If we make our light very small, we'll get
very sharp edge shadows from it indeed.
| | 02:44 | Now of course we're going to want to take a
look at the control parameters for our rectangle
| | 02:49 | light, so let's just move our V-Ray Frame
Buffer so we can select our light object
| | 02:53 | and then right-click, come down to V-Ray for
SketchUp, and click on that Edit Light flyout.
| | 02:58 | Again, this brings up our Light Editor, housing all of the
control parameters for this particular light object.
| | 03:06 | Now, as we want to keep an eye on our test
render, I'm just going to move this off to
| | 03:10 | the side once more.
| | 03:11 | Now you'll notice that some of the
controls in here are very familiar indeed.
| | 03:15 | In fact, our Intensity controls and our Sampling section are
identical to those found on our omni-directional light.
| | 03:24 | Our Shadow setting, if we just scroll up, are
very, very similar, except you will notice
| | 03:28 | that our Shadow Radius setting is missing.
| | 03:31 | This is because, as we said, our rectangle
light is by default an area light. We always get
| | 03:37 | soft edge shadows from it.
| | 03:39 | The real difference of course in terms of control
parameters is found in this Options section.
| | 03:44 | This set of controls is found on no other
light type; only the rectangle light has these
| | 03:50 | options available to it.
| | 03:52 | And as I'm sure you can see, they afford an
awful lot of control over how this particular
| | 03:56 | light object will
interact with our environment.
| | 04:00 | We can, for instance, make our
light object double-sided.
| | 04:04 | This means that instead of emitting light
from a single side of our rectangular surface,
| | 04:08 | we'll actually get light emitted
from both sides of our light object.
| | 04:13 | We can also make our light invisible.
| | 04:16 | This means that we can actually disable the
ability of V-Ray to render this light inside
| | 04:21 | of the rendered frame window.
| | 04:23 | At this moment in time, we have the rectangular
representation of our light in the scene burned into the render.
| | 04:29 | If we check this Invisible option, we will
still get all of the illumination from our
| | 04:33 | rectangle light; we just will not see
show up as a square or a rectangle inside
| | 04:38 | of the final rendered image.
| | 04:40 | We don't have, you'll
notice, any fall off controls.
| | 04:43 | We have no decay options that we can set.
Because this is designed to mimic a real-world
| | 04:49 | light emitter, we get natural
light falloff from it by default.
| | 04:53 | The only thing we can do is
actually set this No Decay option.
| | 04:57 | This essentially means that light will
just continue to travel in our environment.
| | 05:02 | There will be no falloff to it whatsoever.
| | 05:04 | Now down at the bottom, we have some familiar
and very important controls in the Affect
| | 05:09 | Diffuse and Affect Specular options.
| | 05:12 | We also have this new one: Affect Reflections.
This can be very useful indeed, particularly
| | 05:17 | when used in conjunction
with the Invisible option.
| | 05:20 | By default, if we set our light object to
be invisible in our final renders, it would
| | 05:26 | still show up inside of any reflective
materials inside of the environment,
| | 05:30 | unless, that is, we uncheck our Affect Reflections
box. This means now that essentially our light
| | 05:36 | will be completely invisible in the scene
apart from the illumination that it gives off.
| | 05:41 | So, as you can see, a comprehensive set of
controls that really allow us to fine-tune
| | 05:46 | how this very powerful light object
will work inside of our environment.
| | 05:51 | So, now that we have an overview of the
workings of the V-Ray Rectangle Light, let's move on
| | 05:56 | in our next video to examine another V-Ray's
artificial light types, and that is the V-Ray spotlight.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring the Spotlight| 00:00 | Having looked at using both the Omni and
Rectangle Lights in V-Ray SketchUp, it's time now to
| | 00:05 | continue our exploration of our artificial light
types and have a look at the V-Ray Spotlight.
| | 00:12 | Of course, the first thing we need to do is
add our light object into the scene, so again,
| | 00:16 | let's come to the Window menu, open up our
Layers dialog, and this time we want to come
| | 00:21 | to the Light_Spot layer, put a check in that
to bring our Spotlight into the scene, and
| | 00:26 | then of course we can
dismiss our Layers dialog.
| | 00:29 | The spotlight is a slightly newer light type,
added I think in V-Ray SketchUp version 1.48.
| | 00:36 | It is, again, an extremely powerful and
versatile lighting tool that can be configured to work
| | 00:41 | for us in a number of ways.
| | 00:44 | As I have just added this new light object
into the scene, of course I do want to come
| | 00:48 | and take a test render, just to see what kind of
emission pattern we get from this light type.
| | 00:55 | What we get of course is a very
unique look from our Spotlight.
| | 00:58 | We have the expected circle, or spot of
light, as it is shining down onto the floor.
| | 01:03 | We have also interestingly been able
to capture the cone of light emission.
| | 01:07 | You can see the shape of that in our render.
| | 01:10 | We can also see, because our spotlight is a
very focused light type, that we're getting
| | 01:15 | a much smaller amount of
light balance in the scene.
| | 01:18 | You can see we have lots of
dark areas in our test render.
| | 01:22 | Well, let's again have a look at our control
parameters for the Spotlight object, so let's
| | 01:27 | just move our Frame Buffer to one side.
| | 01:29 | Let's select our light object and again
open up the Light Editor for ourselves.
| | 01:34 | We do of course want to keep focused on our
test render, so let's just move the control
| | 01:39 | parameters for this light object off to the
side, and then we can just make a comparison
| | 01:43 | of what we see in the scene
with our actual controls.
| | 01:47 | Many of which will by now
be very familiar tools.
| | 01:50 | You can see that our intensity controls are
as per our previous light types, as are the
| | 01:56 | sampling controls available tools.
| | 01:58 | We do also see that our shadow settings are
identical to those found on our Omni Light,
| | 02:03 | including the return of
our Shadow Radius setting.
| | 02:06 | This means we can set soft edge shadows inside
the Spotlight effect, if that is what we want.
| | 02:12 | Of course, we do get a number of controls that are
new tools, for instance, these Barn Door controls.
| | 02:18 | These are really designed to help us mimic a
real-world spotlight that oftentimes will
| | 02:22 | have four flaps attached to it.
| | 02:25 | These allow the user to focus or
defocus light in a scene as is needed.
| | 02:31 | Another familiar control is found
at the top of our Options section.
| | 02:34 | Once again, we have control over the Decay,
or falloff, of light from our spotlight.
| | 02:39 | By default, the realistic Inverse Square
value is set, but as with our Omni light, we do
| | 02:44 | have all the options
available should we need them.
| | 02:48 | We do have a new Falloff value in
this Penumbra Falloff control.
| | 02:52 | This is designed to work in conjunction with
our penumbra angle to give us a nice soft
| | 02:57 | edge to our Spotlight effect.
| | 02:59 | In fact, if we just enter a value in here of,
say, .25, we'll be able to take a look
| | 03:05 | at how that effect is working.
| | 03:07 | So let's just click OK and
again take another render.
| | 03:12 | What we get now is instead of that harsh
termination to the edge of our illumination, we get this
| | 03:17 | nice soft gradation, controlled of
course by those two penumbra angle settings.
| | 03:23 | We can even see this Falloff captured in our cone
shape, so a very nice change to the Spotlight effect.
| | 03:30 | If we just go back into our Light Editor,
there's one more control that we just want
| | 03:35 | to make mention of.
| | 03:36 | We've already seen the Affect Diffuse and
Affect Specular settings on all the light
| | 03:40 | types, but here we have a
new one: Area Specular.
| | 03:44 | This allows us to make a change to really how the
specular reflections from our spotlight behave.
| | 03:49 | By default, with this setting disabled, we
will get specular reflections that are identical
| | 03:55 | to our Omni Light, that is, they are specular
reflections emanating from a single point in space.
| | 04:01 | But if we need a more accurate realistic
representation of the specular reflections from our spotlight,
| | 04:08 | we can put a check in this box and
that is exactly what we will get.
| | 04:13 | As we see then, the spotlight affords lots of
control over how it will interact with our environment.
| | 04:19 | It is maybe a tool that we will use in more
specialized situations, but definitely a welcome
| | 04:24 | addition to our lighting arsenal.
| | 04:27 | We do of course have one more artificial light
type that we want to make an examination of,
| | 04:32 | so in our next video we're going to
take a look at the V-Ray IES Light.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring the IES light type| 00:00 | The last of our artificial light types to come under
examination in this chapter is the V-Ray IES Light.
| | 00:08 | For architectural visualization work,
particularly interiors, the V-Ray IES Light type offers
| | 00:13 | an extremely powerful and easy-to-use method for
adding real-world lighting data into our scenes.
| | 00:20 | Of course, the first thing we need to do is
to add our IES Light into the scene, so come
| | 00:25 | to the Window menu, open up the Layers
dialog, and put a check in the IES Light layer.
| | 00:31 | By now you'll be familiar with the first step
that we're going to take, which is to start
| | 00:34 | a test render, just so we can
evaluate our light's emission pattern.
| | 00:40 | Well, fortunately, what we get is not very
inspiring indeed, which is really not surprising,
| | 00:47 | as the IES Light type has not been designed
to function as a standalone light object.
| | 00:53 | It really has been designed to have
an IES Light profile attached to it.
| | 00:58 | To do that we will of course need to access
the control parameters for our IES Light,
| | 01:02 | so let's again move our V-Ray Frame Buffer
just so we can select our light in the scene,
| | 01:07 | then a right-click, down to our V-Ray SketchUp
option, and click on the Edit Light flyout,
| | 01:13 | just to open up the Light Editor.
| | 01:15 | Straight away we will notice that we have a
number of familiar control options once again.
| | 01:21 | For instance, our Sampling options are per
our previous light objects. Our Shadow settings
| | 01:28 | are pretty much the same as our Omni Directional
Light, although you will notice that our Shadow
| | 01:32 | Radius control is missing.
| | 01:34 | Instead, if we want the soft shadows, we
have to enable the Soft Shadows checkbox.
| | 01:40 | As with our Spotlight we have our Area Specular,
Affect Specular, and the Affect Diffuse options,
| | 01:46 | but if we just jump across to our Intensity settings,
you'll notice that things are quite a bit different.
| | 01:51 | Perhaps one of the first things you'll notice
is that we no longer have our Units control.
| | 01:56 | This is because the IES Light
type always works in lumens.
| | 02:01 | The Power setting of 0 tells V-Ray to use
the Intensity data that is found inside of
| | 02:07 | the IES file itself, although we can
override that behavior if we want to.
| | 02:12 | Obviously, one important difference inside
of these controls is the fact that we can
| | 02:16 | now add a file or attach a
file to our light type.
| | 02:20 | Now there are lots of free IES files to be
found on the world wide web, many lighting
| | 02:25 | manufactures, such as erco.com, provide them
for free, oftentimes along with the 3D model
| | 02:30 | of the light fixture they profile.
| | 02:32 | The one that I'm going to be using
is for my personal IES library.
| | 02:36 | You will of course need to add
an IES file of your own here.
| | 02:40 | To do that we simply click on the swatch,
find our IES file, select it, and we've now
| | 02:46 | attached that light profile
to our IES Light object.
| | 02:51 | Straightaway of course, we're going to want
to see what a difference that has made to
| | 02:55 | the emission from our light, which as you
can see, is now considerably different.
| | 03:01 | We're now getting some very
interesting emission patterns indeed.
| | 03:05 | In fact, what we see here would be impossible, really, to
recreate with any of the other V-Ray light objects.
| | 03:12 | You will notice also that we have realistic
light falloff in the scene, as with the Rectangle
| | 03:18 | Light that is built into
the IES Light object itself.
| | 03:23 | What we have now then in our render is a
realistic profile of a real-world light fixture.
| | 03:29 | We have the emission pattern; we have the
exact amount of Illumination or the light
| | 03:34 | intensity that would come from that fixture.
| | 03:36 | Of course that isn't
always the desired end result.
| | 03:40 | Sometimes we're more interested in the aesthetics of our
light, as opposed to the physical correctness of them.
| | 03:47 | For that reason we may want to just brighten
up our IES Light profile so that it's just
| | 03:51 | a little bit more prominent in our renders.
| | 03:54 | As we mentioned, we can indeed do that, so
we'll just open up the Light Editor for ourselves.
| | 04:00 | And really, all we need to do is set
an override in the Power option.
| | 04:04 | Remember, this is working in lumens, so I'm
going to set a value of 20,000 in there.
| | 04:09 | We can select OK, and we can just take another
render to see what a change that has made.
| | 04:16 | The end result is of course much more
pleasing from an aesthetic point of view, although
| | 04:21 | as we need to keep in mind, we're no longer
being physically correct in terms of the amount
| | 04:25 | of illumination in our environment.
| | 04:28 | As you can see then, the IES Light type, a
very powerful, albeit specialized lighting
| | 04:32 | tool that V-Ray gives to us.
| | 04:35 | So having looked briefly at our four V-Ray
light objects in this chapter, we hope it's
| | 04:41 | become clear that if we have a need to mimic
artificial light sources, then V-Ray gives
| | 04:46 | to us a comprehensive set of tools with which
we can work. Which like type we actually use
| | 04:51 | will of course depend entirely on the effect
we are trying to recreate and to some extent,
| | 04:56 | the level of realism that we
require from our final renders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up image-based lighting| 00:00 | One of the great things about lighting with
V-Ray is the versatility and diversity of
| | 00:06 | the tools available to us.
| | 00:08 | As well as the natural daylighting system
and the ability to mimic artificial light
| | 00:13 | sources, we also have the option to use
image-based, or HDRI, lighting if we want to.
| | 00:19 | The initials HDRI stand for
High Dynamic Range Image.
| | 00:23 | This is a specialized image format that holds
far higher amount of data, including luminance
| | 00:29 | data, that can't be captured by typical
film or digital cameras in a single shot.
| | 00:34 | In this video we are not only going to walk you
through the steps required to set up image-based
| | 00:38 | lighting, but we will also demonstrate to you
a little trick that can add some directional
| | 00:43 | light back into our renders.
| | 00:45 | This will allow us to compensate for the lack
of strong directional light that we typically
| | 00:50 | see in image-based lighting.
| | 00:52 | Our start scene is pretty much the
same as our earlier sun and sky setup.
| | 00:57 | We are starting with an
artificially darkened environment.
| | 01:00 | We also have Global Illumination and the V-
Ray Physical Camera at work, including use
| | 01:05 | of Exposure control.
| | 01:07 | It is true that many V-Ray for SketchUp artists
like to work with Exposure disabled when producing
| | 01:12 | IBL renders, but as working with the V-Ray
Physical Cameras Exposure controls can be
| | 01:18 | an art in and of itself, I typically prefer
to work with Exposure on as much as possible.
| | 01:24 | Practice, as they say, makes perfect.
| | 01:27 | To create our image-based lighting setup,
the first thing we need to do is open up the
| | 01:31 | V-Ray Options dialog for ourselves.
| | 01:33 | So if we come up to the toolbar, we can click
on the Options dialog icon and open it up.
| | 01:39 | Next we need to access the Environment rollout, so
let's left mouse-click just to open those controls up.
| | 01:45 | And we are going to be working with the Global
Illumination (GI) Color option, so let's put
| | 01:49 | a check in the box just to turn those on.
| | 01:52 | To add the image for our lighting, we of
course need to come into our map slot and in the
| | 01:57 | Texture Editor, use the
dropdown to access the TexBitmap.
| | 02:01 | This means we can now attach a
bitmap file to be used by V-Ray.
| | 02:06 | We can do this by using this File slot.
| | 02:10 | As with IES files, there are lots of sites
around the Internet that offer free high quality
| | 02:16 | high dynamic range images, ones that can
even be freely used in commercial work.
| | 02:21 | The two that I will be using are from the free
sIBL set entitled BasketballCourt, downloaded
| | 02:27 | from hdrlabs.com; you can of course
use any HDRI file of your choice.
| | 02:34 | The image that we will be adding into this
lighting slot is actually a much smaller in
| | 02:39 | terms of resolution and blurred
version of the original HDRI.
| | 02:45 | Smaller size means that less memory will be
used during the rendering process and the
| | 02:50 | blurring ensures that we get
smooth lighting in our environment.
| | 02:54 | We will be free from any small noise problems.
| | 02:58 | Add our image, let's click on the swatch.
| | 03:01 | Navigate to where we have our HDRI saved and then
just add our lighting image into the control slot.
| | 03:07 | Now before we exit out our Texture Editor,
there is one tweak that we need to make to
| | 03:13 | the parameters in here, if we come up to the
top you can see we have this UVW Type option.
| | 03:19 | In here, we need to use the dropdown to
switch from UVWGenChannel to UVWGenEnvironment.
| | 03:25 | This just tells V-Ray that the image file
we're working with is not for texturing with,
| | 03:30 | but is to be set as an environment map.
| | 03:33 | Depending upon the format of the HDRI we are
working with, we may need to make a change
| | 03:38 | to this mapping type.
| | 03:39 | You can see in the drop down we
have a number of options available.
| | 03:43 | As our map is indeed spherical, we
can just work with the default.
| | 03:47 | One of the settings worth pointing
out is this Horizontal Rotation value.
| | 03:51 | If we want to rotate the lighting in our scene,
then we can do so by means of this bitmap control.
| | 03:57 | as we're finished with our lighting setup, we
can just OK to exit out of the Texture Editor.
| | 04:02 | Of course, we may want to add our High Dynamic
Range Image as the background for our render
| | 04:07 | at the same time as setting up the lighting.
| | 04:10 | To do that we can just put a check in the
Background (BG) Color option, coming to the
| | 04:14 | map slot, find our TextBitmap node and this
time add our full High Dynamic Range Image
| | 04:22 | into the control slot.
| | 04:25 | Naturally we don't want a blurred
background image for our renders.
| | 04:29 | Again, we need to come and make a change to our
UVW Type and switch that over to Environment.
| | 04:34 | Now we can click OK, exit our Options dialog
and see what we have by way of scene lighting.
| | 04:42 | What we get of course is now an illumination
setup and a backdrop to our renders that match
| | 04:47 | one another perfectly.
| | 04:49 | We can see coloration matches and we can see
illumination shifts that really are very nice indeed.
| | 04:55 | Do keep in mind that the settings for our
Global Illumination controls are very low
| | 05:00 | indeed in terms of quality.
| | 05:02 | We just want nice quick test renders at this
moment in time, so if we wanted to clean up
| | 05:06 | some of the noise that is present in the scene,
we could certainly go and improve things by
| | 05:11 | means of our GI controls.
| | 05:13 | However, one thing that our GI controls will
not fix is the fact that we really are missing
| | 05:17 | any strong directional light in the scene.
| | 05:21 | You can see that we do have a sense of the
direction of the light as our shadows are
| | 05:25 | just traveling away over to the left-hand
side of the image a little bit being cast
| | 05:30 | by our table object here, but still we don't
see anything that would convince us that we
| | 05:34 | have sunlight in the scene.
| | 05:37 | Certainly in terms of directional light our rendered
image is not matching what we see in the backdrop.
| | 05:43 | Of course, we cannot add our V-RaySky map into
the equation s that we can use the sunlight
| | 05:48 | plug-in there, because well our slots are
both taken by our High Dynamic Range Image.
| | 05:54 | All is not lost however, because we can play
a little trick inside of V-Ray for SketchUp.
| | 05:59 | If we just come back to the Options dialog,
we can come into the Global Switches rollout
| | 06:05 | and you see here we have
this Default Lights option.
| | 06:08 | This allows us to enable or disable
the default lights in the scene.
| | 06:12 | Now in SketchUp the default light is the sun.
| | 06:15 | This means if we put a check in this box, we have
essentially turned sunlight on in the scene.
| | 06:22 | The problem we have is that because of our
current Camera Exposure settings our sunlight
| | 06:27 | would very much overpower the scene; it
would totally wash out our HDRI lighting.
| | 06:32 | There are a number of ways we could try to
tackle this problem, the simplest of which
| | 06:37 | is the one that we will use, which is to
simply alter our current Exposure settings.
| | 06:42 | So let's first of all close-up our Global
Switches rollout and open our Camera rollout.
| | 06:47 | In here you'll notice that we have our
Film Speed or ISO value set fairly high.
| | 06:53 | This is really to bring out
the lighting in our HDRI.
| | 06:56 | And fortunately it would also contribute to our
sunlight being extremely bright at this moment in time.
| | 07:02 | So let's set this to a value of 100.
| | 07:06 | Of course, now our image based lighting will be
subtle in the scene as to not really be seen.
| | 07:11 | It would not contribute enough to get a
nice natural look to our light setup.
| | 07:15 | To compensate for that fact we can close our
Camera rollout and we can just use these multiplayer
| | 07:20 | values inside of our Environment controls.
| | 07:23 | In this instance I am going to set
these to a value of around about 16.
| | 07:28 | That should take care of things very
nicely, of course you can set these to suit.
| | 07:32 | Again, we'll close our Options dialog and
see what kind of a change we have made to
| | 07:37 | our lighting setup.
| | 07:40 | What we get now is of course a very natural
looking daytime light setup in our scene.
| | 07:46 | We still have the subtle shifts in skylight
illumination coming from our High Dynamic
| | 07:51 | Range Image, but at the same time we have nice
strong directional light coming from our sun.
| | 07:58 | If you're finding that the directional shadows
in your scene, the shadows coming from your
| | 08:02 | sunlight are not really matching up with
those coming from you High Dynamic Range Image,
| | 08:06 | all you need to do is use SketchUp shadow
controls to alter the position of the sun in the sky.
| | 08:12 | That way you can very easily
match the two sets of shadows up.
| | 08:16 | As we've many things in the V-Ray, getting
image-based lighting up and running is a quick
| | 08:21 | and easy process once we know how it is done.
| | 08:24 | The end result is oftentimes a subtlety of
lighting that would be very time consuming
| | 08:28 | to set up, if indeed at all
possible, using any other methods.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Bouncing Our Light AroundWorking with irradiance mapping| 00:00 | Because Global Illumination is such an important
part of the V-Ray artist toolkit, we're going
| | 00:05 | to spend the entirety of this chapter examining
most of the GI engines available to us in V-Ray.
| | 00:11 | In this particular video, we're going to
focus on using V-Ray's irradiance mapping engine
| | 00:16 | and just create a basic global
illumination solution for our interior start scene.
| | 00:22 | This scene has once again been
somewhat artificially engineered.
| | 00:26 | We are making use of the V-Ray Sun and Sky
system to provide our daylight illumination.
| | 00:31 | However, we have disabled
Indirect Illumination in our scene.
| | 00:35 | This of course means that our interior at this
moment of time is in almost complete darkness.
| | 00:39 | In fact, if we just come up to our V-Ray
toolbar and use the Start Render icon, you will be
| | 00:44 | able to see exactly what we mean.
| | 00:48 | What we have at this moment of
course is a direct-light-only render.
| | 00:52 | Now, this of course can be very handy in
terms of setting up our scene lighting.
| | 00:56 | We are able to see exactly
where our direct light will fall.
| | 00:59 | But of course this is not really a usable
lighting solution at this moment in time,
| | 01:04 | so really, we need to go into our indirect
illumination controls and turn V-Ray's GI systems on.
| | 01:11 | We do this by coming up to, first of all, our
Options Editor icon. We want to then come
| | 01:15 | into our Indirect Illumination
rollout and put a check in the On box.
| | 01:20 | With the GI systems enabled, if we just scroll
down a little, you will see that we get some
| | 01:25 | default settings already added in by V-Ray
that allow us really to just instantly start
| | 01:29 | taking global illumination
renders from our scene.
| | 01:33 | As you can see, we have Irradiance Mapping set
as our Primary Engine, whilst our Secondary
| | 01:38 | Engine slot is occupied by
the Light Cache system.
| | 01:41 | Of course, as we are wanting to focus on
Irradiance Mapping in this particular video, we're just
| | 01:45 | going to go and set our
Secondary Engine to None.
| | 01:49 | Just before we start any test renders in the
scene with our GI systems enabled, I just
| | 01:53 | want to draw your attention to one particular
option inside of the V-Ray Options Editor.
| | 01:59 | If we just come up to Color Mapping rollout,
you can see that at this moment in time we
| | 02:03 | have disabled this Linear Workflow option.
| | 02:06 | Now by default, this is
enabled in V-Ray for SketchUp.
| | 02:10 | This control automatically linearizes, or
degammas, the colors from both incoming bitmap files
| | 02:16 | and color swatches that we may
have in our material types.
| | 02:20 | Now, unless we have a real need for a
completely linearized workflow and we understand what
| | 02:26 | is happening behind the scenes with this particular
option enabled, for general rendering situations,
| | 02:32 | I would suggest that you may want
to disable this particular control.
| | 02:36 | Certainly take some time to just do test
renders in your scenes with this option both enabled
| | 02:41 | and disabled and see which end result
most closely matches your expected results.
| | 02:48 | So with that pointer out of the way, and of
course with GI systems enabled, let's go and
| | 02:53 | take another test render.
| | 02:55 | Now, as the render starts, we can see that
V-Ray runs through a number of irradiance
| | 03:01 | map passes. That is what we're
seeing inside the V-Ray Frame Buffer.
| | 03:04 | It does this in order, obviously, to calculate
a GI solution. Each part will refine and add
| | 03:10 | samples to the irradiance map as and where they are
needed. Of course then, we get our final render.
| | 03:17 | The ability to see this calculation process
as it occurs can be a big timesaver for us.
| | 03:24 | It gives us the opportunity to quickly
evaluate lighting levels in our scene and so cancel
| | 03:29 | the render at an early stage if we
determine that our lighting is not really working.
| | 03:34 | At this moment in time, whilst our scene
lighting is most definitely more realistic now than
| | 03:39 | our previous direct-light-only render,
we are still seeing a limitation.
| | 03:43 | We're running into a limitation of
the Irradiance Mapping system itself.
| | 03:48 | You see, irradiance mapping can only produce a
single bounce of light; this is why radiance
| | 03:53 | mapping is not available as
a secondary bounce engine.
| | 03:57 | So at this moment in time, any light entering
this room from our daylight environment really
| | 04:02 | is only bouncing once and then terminating.
| | 04:04 | This is why we see these
unnaturally dark areas in our scene.
| | 04:09 | You can see even behind our curtain here, we are
not getting any light bounce, no interaction,
| | 04:13 | so we get some unnaturally dark splotches.
| | 04:16 | Now, this single-bounce behavior is of
course not how light behaves in the real world.
| | 04:21 | The falloff, or decay rate, of light
there allows it to just keep on bouncing.
| | 04:26 | Of course, with each bounce light
loses a little bit of its overall energy.
| | 04:30 | Clearly, computing such a complex calculation
would be extremely expensive in terms of the
| | 04:36 | raw computing power required.
| | 04:38 | And that, generally speaking, translates
into slow or even very slow renders for us.
| | 04:44 | For speed reasons then, V-Ray splits HDR
calculations into two parts: primary and secondary bounces.
| | 04:52 | Each can be handled by a completely
different global illumination engine with differing
| | 04:57 | quality settings.
| | 04:58 | The thing is they both work together to
produce a complete lighting solution.
| | 05:03 | Really, I suppose the important point that
we're trying to make here is that irradiance
| | 05:07 | mapping on its own will never really
give us a realistic lighting solution.
| | 05:12 | We really need to add a secondary engine
into the mix, so as to get those extra bounces
| | 05:18 | of light in our environment.
| | 05:20 | For the moment though, with only Irradiance
Mapping enabled, we can focus on just refining
| | 05:25 | our irradiance map solution a little more, before
we go and add a secondary engine into the mix.
| | 05:31 | So let's see if we can improve things a
little bit. Let's see if we can clean up some of
| | 05:34 | the noise, the blotchiness that we are seeing
inside of our solution at this moment in time.
| | 05:40 | To do that of course we need to go
into our Irradiance Map controls.
| | 05:43 | Let's go into the Options Editor, let's close
the Indirect Illumination rollout, and let's
| | 05:48 | scroll down and just focus on
our Irradiance Map controls.
| | 05:52 | Now to improve things a little, we could
increase our irradiance map's resolution.
| | 05:57 | That would be handled by
these Min and Max Rate values.
| | 06:01 | At this moment in time, you can see we are
actually undersampling our irradiance map.
| | 06:06 | If we set these values to 0 and 0, we would
be sampling our irradiance map at the same
| | 06:11 | resolution as our final rendered output.
| | 06:14 | So if we were rendering at 1280 x 720 and
we set these Irradiance Map controls at 0
| | 06:21 | and 0, we would be
rendering our irradiance map.
| | 06:23 | We would be calculating our
irradiance map at 1280 x 720.
| | 06:28 | As with all map types, that high of a resolution
would naturally translate into higher quality,
| | 06:34 | but the quality would come at a cost,
and the cost would be render time.
| | 06:39 | And to be honest, if we only increase the
resolution of our irradiance map, we oftentimes
| | 06:44 | don't see a corresponding
increase in the quality.
| | 06:48 | Really, to get an acceptable solution, we
need to balance out a number of irradiance map
| | 06:52 | settings in order to really get the best
balance of speed and quality from our scene.
| | 06:58 | And in this particular instance, we will
increase our Irradiance Map resolution a little, so
| | 07:02 | we'll set our Minimum Rate to a value of
-2 and our Maximum Rate to a value of -1.
| | 07:09 | But we will also need to work with our
Hemispherical Subdivs control and our Samples setting.
| | 07:15 | The Samples control determines the number
of irradiance map samples that V-Ray will
| | 07:20 | interpolate, or blend between.
| | 07:22 | Do be aware that as with all blurring
operations, we will lose some detail from our scene.
| | 07:28 | A higher Interpolation Sample setting means
that irradiance mapping will be less accurate
| | 07:33 | when it comes to pulling
geometric detail out in our scene.
| | 07:37 | Now, the Hemispherical Subdivs control handles
the number of rays, or samples, that are cast
| | 07:42 | from each of the initial irradiance map
samples that V-Ray will have placed in the scene.
| | 07:48 | These rays travel out from each
sample in a hemispherical manner.
| | 07:52 | They are sent out to test the level of
illumination found in the surrounding environment; that
| | 07:57 | of course would come from
light sources in the scene.
| | 08:00 | To get a reasonable solution in our current
scene, we're going to set our Hemispherical
| | 08:05 | Subdivs value up to 125 and we're just going
to increase our Blending, our Interpolation
| | 08:11 | a little, by setting our
Samples to a value of 30.
| | 08:15 | Do remember though, every scene is different;
the values that you will probably need to
| | 08:19 | use for your particular
project may differ considerably.
| | 08:23 | Just be sure to start with low settings and
work your way up until the desired quality
| | 08:28 | level is reached.
| | 08:29 | If we start using higher render settings than
necessary at the beginning of our project,
| | 08:34 | we will only eat away at our available time.
| | 08:37 | Well, with those changes made, we can of
course dismiss our Options Editor and see whether
| | 08:42 | or not we have improved our
irradiance map lighting solution.
| | 08:47 | And clearly we have
improved matters considerably.
| | 08:50 | You can see the noise on the floor, the mottling.
The blotchiness is definitely much cleaner
| | 08:55 | than in our previous render.
| | 08:57 | And because of the higher sampling rates that
we are using, V-Ray is now more accurately
| | 09:01 | able to gauge the illumination in the scene,
and so even interaction between objects is
| | 09:07 | a little more accurate. You can see we've lost some of that
unnatural darkness between our curtain and wall, and
| | 09:12 | of course, the area in this little
recess here is looking much more natural.
| | 09:16 | Not again that we could say that this is a
final lighting solution, we still clearly
| | 09:21 | have noise problems.
| | 09:23 | We can still see the blotchiness, the mottling
that occurs in some areas of the scene.
| | 09:27 | And of course, we still have these unnaturally
dark areas, due to the fact that we only have
| | 09:32 | a single light bounce.
| | 09:33 | Fortunately, both of these
problems can be solved in a single step.
| | 09:38 | You see, for the reasons stated, it would be a
very rare, if ever occurring, occasion where
| | 09:43 | Irradiance Mapping would be used on its own to
provide a suitable GI solution for a scene.
| | 09:49 | As we've said, we don't get accurate
real-world behavior from that system. With a single
| | 09:54 | bounce of light we're not representing how light
distribution ought to work in a scene of this scale.
| | 10:00 | For that of course we would need our secondary
bounces, and in an interior setting such as
| | 10:05 | this, the preferred option
would be the light cache engine.
| | 10:09 | So let's go into our Options
Editor and enable that system.
| | 10:13 | Just close up Irradiance Mapping, open up
Indirect Illumination, and if we come down,
| | 10:18 | we can use the dropdown list to set
Light Cache as our secondary engine.
| | 10:22 | We do need to make a little tweak in
terms of our Secondary Multiplier.
| | 10:26 | If we want physically correct behavior from
our secondary engine, we do need to set this
| | 10:31 | multiplier to a value of 1.
| | 10:33 | I also want to make a little tweak to our
Light Cache settings. Instead of the default
| | 10:37 | 800 set in our Subdivs value, I want
to set this up to a value of 1000.
| | 10:42 | Now, we can go and see what
we've done to our GI solution.
| | 10:49 | As you can see now, we have clearly
improved matters quite considerably.
| | 10:54 | We've very nicely cleaned up the noise in
our scene. What little bit of blotchiness
| | 10:58 | is left in our GI solution would very easily
be hidden behind scene material, so that would
| | 11:03 | not be something to worry about at all.
| | 11:06 | We have also drastically improved the
quality of lighting in our environment.
| | 11:10 | Our light bounce now feels much more natural.
We're getting much more expected behavior.
| | 11:14 | As you can see, we have some lighting even in these
very recessed areas, and in this recess to the right
| | 11:19 | you can see we get what feels
like natural light bounce.
| | 11:23 | And if you've been following along with this
exercise file, you will notice that this particular
| | 11:27 | render was considerably faster than our
previous irradiance-map-only version.
| | 11:33 | And of course, improved render
times can only ever be a good thing.
| | 11:36 | So we have seen how we can quickly and
easily create a usable irradiance map solution.
| | 11:42 | We have tweaked a few of the quality controls
available in the Options Editor for that system.
| | 11:47 | Of course, we have also learned that the
Irradiance Map engine on its own is not really capable
| | 11:52 | of producing a complete indirect
illumination solution for us.
| | 11:56 | Rather, it needs some help
from a secondary bounce engine.
| | 12:00 | For interiors, Light Cache generally would
be the preferred solution due to its ability
| | 12:04 | to bounce lots of light
around very quickly indeed.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a light cache solution| 00:00 | In this video, we're going to be working
with our same interior scene to create another
| | 00:05 | global lighting solution, this time using V-Ray's
Light Cache system set as our primary engine.
| | 00:10 | We're going to follow the same procedure
as with our irradiance mapping exercise.
| | 00:15 | Let's see what kind of solution we can
create using the basic Light Cache controls.
| | 00:20 | So with our Ch03_GI scene file loaded,
let's once again go and enable V-Ray's GI systems.
| | 00:27 | To do that we need to open up the Options
Editor, come down into Indirect Illumination
| | 00:32 | rollout, and again put a check in the On box.
| | 00:35 | Then of course, we need to go and setup
our Engine Type, so let's scroll down.
| | 00:39 | Let's set Light Cache as our Primary Engine and as
before, we need to disable our Secondary Engine.
| | 00:46 | And if we just scroll down, you can see that
the system gives us some default settings
| | 00:50 | so that we're literally ready
to render with Light Cache.
| | 00:53 | The problem with these default settings is
that they really are assuming that we're using
| | 00:57 | Light Cache as a secondary bounce engine,
which really is its recommended role, and
| | 01:03 | we'll mention that a couple of
times throughout this video.
| | 01:06 | If we just dismiss our Options Editor though,
we can take a test render for ourselves, and
| | 01:10 | we should see a couple
of things straightaway.
| | 01:13 | Firstly, we notice that with those default
settings, once the Light Cache calculation
| | 01:17 | actually starts, it create a
GI solution very, very quickly.
| | 01:22 | We should also notice in the final render that we do
get a lot of light bouncing around our environment.
| | 01:26 | In fact, we're getting almost as much light
here with Light Cache only as we did with
| | 01:31 | both Light Cache and Irradiance
Mapping in our previous exercise.
| | 01:36 | This is because Light Cache rays don't just
bounce once; like photons from which this
| | 01:41 | technology is derived, Light Cache rays, once
they have been cast out into an environment--
| | 01:46 | that happens from the camera's point of view--
they will actually perform multiple bounces
| | 01:51 | automatically, and they can
do that very, very quickly.
| | 01:54 | In fact, this is Light Cache's big strength.
| | 01:58 | Unfortunately, you can see, as well as getting the speed
and lots of light bouncing around our environment,
| | 02:03 | we also get a very noisy
end result in our render.
| | 02:07 | So clearly, we're going to need to revisit
our Light Cache controls to see if we can
| | 02:11 | improve the situation a little bit.
| | 02:13 | Well, probably the first control we would
think of working with is this Subdivs value,
| | 02:18 | which again can be thought of as
quality control for Light Cache.
| | 02:22 | This really handles the number of rays, or
samples, that the Light Cache system would
| | 02:26 | use in its GI calculations.
| | 02:29 | So let's see what would happen
if we doubled our default value.
| | 02:32 | Let's set a Subdivs value of 1600 in
there and again, let's take a render.
| | 02:39 | Well, there is no doubt, looking at the final
render, that we have most definitely improved
| | 02:44 | our noise situation.
| | 02:46 | But if you're following along with this
particular exercise file, you'll have noticed that that
| | 02:50 | render took considerably
longer than our previous attempt.
| | 02:53 | And of course, while we have improved things, we
can see that we still have lots of blotchy
| | 02:58 | noise present in the scene.
| | 03:00 | You'll also notice that the transition areas
between our direct and indirect illumination
| | 03:05 | are also looking extremely rough.
| | 03:07 | Naturally, at this point we would be tempted
to go and increase our Subdivs value a little
| | 03:12 | bit more, see if we can get a little
bit of extra quality out of the scene.
| | 03:16 | But truth be told, even if we increase that
Subdivs value up to something around about
| | 03:20 | 5000 to 6000 in this scene,
| | 03:22 | we would still encounter these particular
problems, and of course our render times
| | 03:26 | would increase by an even greater margin.
Can we then, as with our Irradiance Map exercise,
| | 03:32 | work with some of the other Light Cache
controls in order to improve the solution?
| | 03:36 | Well, let's go back into our Options Editor.
| | 03:40 | One option that we may decide to work with, or may
try to work with, would be these Filter Samples.
| | 03:45 | Essentially more filter samples would mean a more
blurry, and so less noisy, Light Cache solution.
| | 03:51 | As filtering doesn't really add
an awful lot to render times,
| | 03:54 | let's bump this up to something quite high,
like a value of 30, and again just close down
| | 03:59 | the Options Editor and test that out.
| | 04:04 | Well, quite clearly, we have been able to smooth
out our noise problems by quite a considerable
| | 04:10 | amount; however, we now run into the problem
that always occurs whenever we increase blurring
| | 04:15 | or interpolation
operations inside a GI system.
| | 04:19 | You can see we really are starting
to lose definition in our scene.
| | 04:22 | It is very difficult to pull out scene detail.
| | 04:25 | We are getting lots of flat-looking areas
simply because we're now creating such a large
| | 04:30 | blurring operation inside the solution.
| | 04:32 | Now we could counter this a little bit by
going and enabling Ambient Occlusion inside
| | 04:37 | of our Indirect Illumination controls.
| | 04:39 | This is found just towards the top of
our Indirect Illumination rollout.
| | 04:44 | That would add a little bit of
definition back into the system.
| | 04:47 | But still, we would encounter the problems
that we see. Coming from Light Cache, we would
| | 04:51 | still see some of that loss of definition,
and of course, our transitional areas between
| | 04:56 | direct and indirect illumination
are still looking very rough.
| | 05:00 | Again, we could try tweaking some of the
controls available to us, so we could try and work
| | 05:05 | with our Filter Type inside
off the Light Cache rollout.
| | 05:09 | We could try and work with our Filter Size
a little bit to fine-tune the filtering.
| | 05:13 | But ultimately, we would just have to
acknowledge that Light Cache just does not work very well
| | 05:18 | when set as the primary bounce engine,
which of course is not at all surprising,
| | 05:24 | as really this technology has been designed
to function as an excellent secondary balance
| | 05:28 | engine, which of course it is.
| | 05:29 | In fact, you saw I've demonstrated
in our Irradiance Mapping exercise.
| | 05:34 | So again, in this video we've spent a little
bit of time showing you how we can quickly
| | 05:38 | and easily create a Light Cache GI solution.
| | 05:42 | We have demonstrated a couple of the quality
control settings available to us, but ultimately
| | 05:47 | we have discovered the Light Cache is just not
very good when set as a primary bounce engine.
| | 05:53 | Do remember though, all of the controls,
everything that we've talked about here, are applicable
| | 05:57 | to Light Cache when it is set as
a secondary bounce engine also.
| | 06:02 | Let's move on then to our next video where
we'll take a look at the last of V-Ray's GI
| | 06:07 | systems that we'll consider in this course.
| | 06:09 | This is the Deterministic
Monte Carlo, or DMC, Engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using the DMC engine| 00:00 | Because photon mapping is generally regarded
by V-Ray users to be the weakest of V-Ray's
| | 00:05 | GI Lighting tools, and so is
hardly ever utilized in that role,
| | 00:09 | we're going to skip over using photons as a
GI tool and look instead at the last of
| | 00:14 | V-Ray's GI options available to us, this being
the Deterministic Monte Carlo, or DMC Engine,
| | 00:20 | as we will refer to it from this point on.
| | 00:23 | As we've done a couple of times in this chapter,
we need to go and enable V-Ray's GI systems
| | 00:28 | to have a look at the DMC engine, so let's
come into our Indirect Illumination rollout,
| | 00:33 | let's put a check in the On box and then let's
scroll down and set Deterministic Monte-Carlo
| | 00:39 | as our Primary Engine, and of course, we want to
disable our Secondary Engine by setting it to None.
| | 00:44 | Then, scrolling down just a little way, you can see
we've our Deterministic Monte Carlo GI rollout.
| | 00:50 | In here, we have really only one parameter with
which to work in order to produce our Primary
| | 00:55 | light bounce solution, this
being our Subdivs value.
| | 00:59 | The Bounces parameter you see here is only
ever utilized when DMC is set as a Secondary
| | 01:05 | Engine, so we can just ignore that for now.
| | 01:08 | At this point it probably is worth noting
that very few experienced V-Ray users would
| | 01:13 | generally choose to use the DMC engine for an
interior GI solution, unless, that is, there
| | 01:19 | was a very specific need for it.
| | 01:22 | Although excellent for exteriors, it is by far
and away the slowest and hardest of V-Ray's
| | 01:27 | GI engines to clean up on interior renders,
| | 01:30 | and so, as we say, would only be used
when there was a very specific need.
| | 01:34 | Now that could be if we have a
scene with lots of geometric detail.
| | 01:39 | The DMC Engine is extremely good at
pulling that out in our renders.
| | 01:44 | As DMC is a lot slower than both the
Irradiance Map and the Light Cache engines in V-Ray,
| | 01:50 | whenever we make parameter changes in this
video, we're going to utilize some pre-rendered
| | 01:54 | images that will just demonstrate the changes
that would occur with those parameter alterations.
| | 02:00 | So, as our current settings are the defaults
inside of the DMC Engine, let's switch over
| | 02:05 | to Adobe Photoshop and have a look at the
render that these settings would give us.
| | 02:10 | As you can see, what we get is
not very pretty-looking at all.
| | 02:15 | We've lots of extreme noise in the scene, and in our
recesses we have some really unnatural darkness.
| | 02:22 | Now these dark areas exist because, like
irradiance mapping, the DMC Engine, when set in the Primary
| | 02:28 | slot, only gives us a single bounce of light,
so we have no secondary rays being traced into
| | 02:34 | these recessed areas.
| | 02:36 | With regard to the noise found in our render,
we could improve this in a couple of ways.
| | 02:41 | We could either work with our DMC Subdivs
value or because with the DMC engine we are
| | 02:47 | essentially looking to just clean up noise
in the scene, we could just as easily use
| | 02:52 | V-Ray's Image Sampling
control to deal with this problem.
| | 02:56 | First though, let's jump back into SketchUp and see
if we can deal with these unnaturally dark areas.
| | 03:02 | Now we could of course increase
our initial Subdivisions value.
| | 03:06 | Because we would have more single or initial
light bounces in the scene, there would be
| | 03:10 | a chance that we would actually trace more
initial light paths into these dark recessed areas.
| | 03:17 | To be honest though, in order to make any
significant difference, our Subdivs value
| | 03:22 | and our render times would be much, much
higher than is practical or even necessary.
| | 03:28 | Here again you see we run into the absolute
need for a secondary engine in V-Ray, if, that
| | 03:33 | is, we want to get a timely high-quality
solution out of the V-Ray's GI systems.
| | 03:39 | So let's do just that.
Let's enable a secondary engine.
| | 03:43 | The question is, which one would we choose?
| | 03:45 | Well, one option would be to use Deterministic Monte
Carlo for both the Primary and Secondary Engines.
| | 03:51 | Of course, don't forget once we
initialize the Secondary engine,
| | 03:55 | if we want physically correct behavior from it,
we just need to make certain that that Secondary
| | 03:59 | Multiplier is set to a value of 1.
| | 04:02 | Now of course, our Bounces parameter is
coming into play, and we're basically saying that
| | 04:06 | we want three extra
bounces of light in our scene.
| | 04:10 | So let's have a check at how that
would change things inside of Photoshop.
| | 04:15 | So we would go from a single bounce of light
with DMC as the Primary Engine to extra bounces
| | 04:21 | of light using the DMC Engine in
both the Primary and Secondary slots.
| | 04:26 | Now as you can clearly see, we've made quite a
significant difference to the light distribution in our scene.
| | 04:33 | We're certainly seeing some light trace
into those unnaturally darkened areas.
| | 04:38 | In fact, as we compare renders, you can see
that particularly around the curtain interaction
| | 04:42 | with the wall over here, and in this darkened
recess to the right of the image, we are getting
| | 04:47 | what almost looks like
naturalistic light behavior.
| | 04:50 | Of course, we still have some problems at the
far end of the room, and of course we clearly
| | 04:55 | still have an excessive amount
of noise in our GI solution.
| | 04:59 | Well, we have mentioned a couple of times already
in this chapter that when it comes to interior
| | 05:03 | rendering, the preferred choice for Secondary
Engine would typically be the Light Cache system.
| | 05:09 | So let's jump over into SketchUp and see what
enabling that particular option as a Secondary
| | 05:14 | engine will do for us.
| | 05:15 | So once again, we need to come to our Engine
Type dropdown, and this time we will set Light
| | 05:20 | Cache. And we'll just accept the defaults
and go and check our Photoshop render.
| | 05:25 | So from our DMC and DMC Render to our DMC
and the Light Cache solution, and you can see
| | 05:31 | there is quite a significant difference in how the
light is now bouncing around this environment.
| | 05:36 | In fact, because we're getting a better
tracing of light, we're also cleaning up the noise
| | 05:41 | in a much more timely fashion.
| | 05:43 | The only drawback to using the Light Cache
system for the Secondary engine, if we just
| | 05:48 | keep an eye on some of these contact areas,
you can see that with the DMC and DMC engine,
| | 05:53 | we get very nice contact shadows, occlusion
shadows, but as soon as we add the Light Cache
| | 05:58 | engine in, we start to lose a little
bit of that quality and definition.
| | 06:02 | But again, as we can add that contact detail
back in by enabling Ambient Occlusion inside
| | 06:07 | the system, we're probably going to stick
with our Light Cache solution here, as we're
| | 06:11 | clearly getting a much more naturalistic
bouncing of light in this environment.
| | 06:16 | Of course, we still need to deal with our
noise problem, so let's go back into SketchUp
| | 06:20 | and see what we can do about that.
| | 06:22 | Probably our first port of call
would be the DMC Subdivs value,
| | 06:27 | so let's go and set that up to a value of 24.
So, we've considerably increased what we're
| | 06:32 | getting in terms of samples in the scene.
| | 06:34 | And again, let's go and see how
that would alter our current render.
| | 06:38 | As we make the switch here, remember we are
examining the noise in the scene, so keep
| | 06:42 | an eye on some of the areas where the noise is
quite prominent, particularly in the foreground
| | 06:47 | on the floor; obviously, that's quite noticeable when
it comes to this particular shot that we've set up.
| | 06:52 | So we would go from this to this, which as you
can see, is quite a considerable clean up.
| | 06:59 | Now of course, we're well aware that increased
render quality is usually going to cost us
| | 07:03 | in terms of increased render times,
| | 07:06 | so let's just go and take a take a look at
the times we've been getting from our renders
| | 07:10 | up until this point.
| | 07:11 | So let's go all the way back to our initial
image. So I'm just going to hold the spacebar
| | 07:15 | and then left-mouse-click and down in the left-
hand corner, you can see we have our timestamp.
| | 07:19 | And our original render was
3 minutes and 13 seconds.
| | 07:25 | Our second render with DMC and DMC enabled
came in at 5 minutes and 16 seconds, so we've
| | 07:31 | definitely increased quite a bit there.
| | 07:33 | When we switch over to Light Cache, we dropped
all the way by down to 3 minutes and 36 seconds.
| | 07:40 | So not only did we improve the quality of our
scene, we actually improved the render times.
| | 07:46 | Now when we add our extra Subdivs in to
really clean the scene up, we go back up to just
| | 07:52 | short of 6 minutes, which in terms of the
quality that we are getting and given the
| | 07:57 | fact that this is a 1280 x
720 render, is not bad at all.
| | 08:01 | Now of course, we did say that there was
another way that we could tackle the noise problem
| | 08:06 | in our scene, using V-
Ray's Image Sampler controls.
| | 08:08 | So again, let's jump back into SketchUp and
see how we would set that up for ourselves.
| | 08:13 | The first thing I want to do is make certain we
reset our Subdivs inside of the DMC rollout.
| | 08:18 | In fact, I'm going to drop this
all the way down to a value of 1.
| | 08:21 | Then of course, we need to locate
V-Ray's Image Sampler control.
| | 08:25 | So up near the top, we have
our Image Sampler rollout.
| | 08:28 | I'm going to leave Adaptive
DMC set as the Engine Type.
| | 08:31 | We've got our Minimum Subdivisions set at 1,
which we will leave there, but I'm going
| | 08:35 | to increase the Max
Subdivs up to a value of 12.
| | 08:39 | I'm also going to lower this Color Threshold
so more of those Maximum Subdivs, more of
| | 08:44 | those samples, can actually be used.
| | 08:46 | So a value of .005 should work
very nicely for us in this instance.
| | 08:51 | And again, back over into Photoshop and
we'll see what that has done for us.
| | 08:56 | So now we go from our increased
Subdivs render to our Image Sampling.
| | 09:01 | And as you can see, there isn't a huge
amount of difference between the two renders; we
| | 09:05 | have still reasonably cleaned
up the noise in our scene.
| | 09:08 | If we go back to our initial state, we can
see we've lots of noise on the beams here,
| | 09:12 | and when we go our Image Sampling, you see
that that has cleaned up reasonably well.
| | 09:16 | Of course, our Subdivs render is much cleaner,
so you may think that that clearly is the
| | 09:20 | way to go, and in some instances
that would be absolutely true.
| | 09:24 | Do remember, however, that our image sampling
approach would benefit every aspect of the scene.
| | 09:29 | We're not just cleaning up noise inside of
the GI system; those increased samples would
| | 09:34 | be used for everything,
including materials and geometry edges,
| | 09:37 | so we would get a much cleaner look,
although probably with scene materials, our render
| | 09:41 | times would increase by quite a bit.
| | 09:44 | In fact, we haven't looked at our render
times for this particular render, so let's just
| | 09:47 | check that, and you can see we're all the way
up to just a little bit over 8 minutes with
| | 09:51 | this particular render, so
quite an increase in render times.
| | 09:55 | Now, whilst we've seen that the DMC Engine is
probably not going to be our first choice
| | 10:00 | for a GI solution when we're working with
interiors, we have hopefully seen just how easy
| | 10:05 | it is to work with, especially when you
consider its simplified control set.
| | 10:09 | And don't forget that this particular GI engine
is extremely good at pulling out scene detail.
| | 10:16 | We noticed that with our occlusion shadows.
| | 10:19 | Ultimately of course, the choice of which
of the three GI engines we have examined
| | 10:23 | you choose to use will depend entirely upon
the type of scene you're working with and
| | 10:28 | to some extent, upon your
own artistic expectations.
| | 10:32 | If it is that we want lots of light bouncing
around inside of an interior and we still
| | 10:36 | want a reasonably high degree of
physical accuracy to our light bounce,
| | 10:40 | well maybe Irradiance Mapping and
Light Cache would be the way to go.
| | 10:44 | If however we had lots of detail in the scene,
then maybe DMC and Light Cache would be the way to go.
| | 10:50 | Certainly, if we have scenes that have a high
memory requirement, we might even want to
| | 10:55 | use DMC as both the
Primary and Secondary Engines.
| | 10:58 | You see, DMC only keeps the buckets
currently being rendered in memory.
| | 11:03 | That course can actually mean the difference
between our scene rendering or crashing SketchUp.
| | 11:08 | In the end, whichever Global Illumination
setup gets us the shot that we want in the
| | 11:13 | time that we have available for it,
well, that is the right setup for us.
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|
|
4. Working with the Physical CameraOverview of the physical cameras| 00:00 | Modern 3D applications and render engines
are often employed as virtual photography
| | 00:05 | studios these days, so it is fitting that V-Ray
offers us an extremely photographic approach
| | 00:11 | to rendering in the form of
the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 00:15 | Now because the V-Ray Physical Camera adheres
very closely to the workings of real-world
| | 00:20 | cameras, familiarity with the controls of
either a film or a digital camera can help
| | 00:25 | us greatly when it comes to working with the
V-Ray Physical Camera, and of course creating
| | 00:29 | our final renders.
| | 00:30 | If it is that we're unfamiliar with the use
of cameras, I would highly recommend watching
| | 00:35 | Ben Long's excellent Foundations of Photography
series here on the lynda.com online training library.
| | 00:42 | Pretty much everything covered in those courses can
be transferred over to the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 00:48 | For this video though, we're just going to
spend a few minutes, really getting a quick
| | 00:52 | overview of some of the controls
available on the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 00:56 | To access those controls, of course we need
to open up our Options dialog and then we
| | 01:01 | can come into the Camera rollout.
| | 01:03 | Here, as you can see, we have quite a number of
options for controlling the camera in V-Ray.
| | 01:10 | The majority all of our physical camera
controls are housed in this CameraPhysical grouping,
| | 01:16 | although if we look down below, you can see
that we do have Depth of Field, Bokeh Effects,
| | 01:20 | and Motion Blur, each with
their own control groups.
| | 01:25 | The first option we see is
a simple On/Off toggle.
| | 01:28 | This means we can work with a V-Ray physical
camera, which is on by default inside of V-Ray
| | 01:33 | SketchUp, or we can indeed just treat this as a
standard 3D application camera if that is what we want.
| | 01:40 | Down below, you can see we have the ability
to set the type of camera that we want to
| | 01:44 | work with: we have Still,
Movie, or Video available.
| | 01:48 | If you just keep your eye on the Shutter and
Latency controls below as I cycle through
| | 01:53 | these particular options, you'll see that
these open up different sets of controls to us.
| | 01:58 | Really, we just need to choose the type
of camera that we want to work with.
| | 02:02 | If we have a need to match a particular film
type or the effects of a particular shutter
| | 02:07 | type in a camera type, then these
options can be very handy indeed.
| | 02:13 | Another two options that can allow us to
match up existing footage are the Override Focal
| | 02:18 | Length and Specify Film Width controls, each of
them titled in a very self-explanatory way.
| | 02:24 | Of course, our Zoom Factor tool
also has a very descriptive title.
| | 02:28 | This really allows us to create an
offset from our current SketchUp viewport.
| | 02:34 | If we increase the parameter, if we increase
the value in here, we will get an increased
| | 02:38 | level of zoom in our final renders.
| | 02:41 | Of course, this will not
affect your SketchUp viewport.
| | 02:44 | It is only a render-time effect.
| | 02:47 | Because we're working in a physical camera
setting, we'd expect to have to work with Exposure
| | 02:51 | controls just as we do on a real-world camera,
and the V-Ray Physical Camera is no different.
| | 02:57 | We have three parameters: the F Number or F-
Stop value, the film speed or ISO control,
| | 03:04 | and of course our shutter
speed with which to work.
| | 03:08 | As well as controlling exposure, we do have to
remember that two of these controls--namely
| | 03:12 | the Shutter Speed and the F-Stop value--do
control other elements of our rendered images;
| | 03:19 | specifically the F-stop or F Number will
control the Depth of Field effect and our Shutter
| | 03:24 | Speed would handle any motion blur
that we wanted to add into the scene.
| | 03:28 | Now we say that these three controls will
handle exposure inside the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 03:33 | That is if this particular option
is checked, the Exposure control.
| | 03:38 | Again, we can disable this if we want to,
and now all of these three settings will have
| | 03:43 | no effect on our image's
overall brightness at all.
| | 03:48 | Another affect that we can burn into our
final renders if we so desire is the Vignetting
| | 03:52 | effect, that darkening around the edges of our
images that we oftentimes see in camera lenses.
| | 03:59 | A common digital camera control
is this White Balance option.
| | 04:02 | This really gives us the ability to set which color
inside of our render is to be considered as white.
| | 04:09 | We do need to note that only the color hue
is taken into consideration. The brightness
| | 04:14 | of a color is completely
ignored in this setting.
| | 04:17 | Now our Lens Shift control is something that
we're going to look at in another video, so
| | 04:21 | we're just going to jump over this particular
option for this moment and have a look at
| | 04:25 | the Distortion control.
| | 04:26 | This again, as the name suggests, allows us to
build distortion into our final rendered images.
| | 04:33 | Positive values will give us Barrel Distortion;
negative values give us Pillow Distortion.
| | 04:38 | As you can see then, the V-Ray Physical Camera
offers a genuinely photographic approach to
| | 04:44 | rendering in V-Ray and offers
lots of control over the process.
| | 04:48 | Having the ability to take real-world camera
and lighting experience and apply it to a
| | 04:53 | 3D rendering package has
obvious benefits to it.
| | 04:57 | Anything we learn in real life, even if we're
working with just a modest digital camera,
| | 05:02 | can be taken and applied
to our rendering engine.
| | 05:05 | And of course, anything we learn inside V-Ray
can be taken out into the real-world and applied
| | 05:10 | it to our photography, which is not
about exchange of information at all.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Understanding the Exposure controls| 00:00 | In the real world, photographers use exposure to
control the brightness of their photographic images.
| | 00:07 | This means they can create images that not
only look technically correct, but that are also
| | 00:11 | able to evoke a response from their viewers.
| | 00:14 | In chapter 2 of this course we looked at how
the V-Ray Sun and Sky combined to create a
| | 00:19 | physically accurate daylight simulation.
| | 00:22 | As they are designed to create the same level
of illumination as the actual sun and sky,
| | 00:27 | they are, in layman's terms, extremely bright.
| | 00:31 | In fact, if we were to render in V-Ray
without the use of Exposure control, we would get
| | 00:35 | an image that was essentially a whiteout.
| | 00:38 | In fact, let's go into our Options Editor we can
show you just what we mean by that statement.
| | 00:43 | So let's come into our
Camera rollout. Down here
| | 00:46 | you can see we have an Exposure checkbox.
| | 00:49 | If we disable that and then take a test
render--let's just dismiss our options dialog--
| | 00:55 | you'll see exactly what we mean.
| | 01:00 | In this instance, as you can see, we don't
even need to let our render finish, so I can
| | 01:04 | just left-mouse-click to get focus on my
V-Ray Frame Buffer and then just use the Escape
| | 01:09 | key to cancel our render.
| | 01:11 | Our GI pre-calculation shows us that really,
we're not going to get anything usable out
| | 01:16 | of this particular render.
| | 01:18 | Clearly, use of exposure control is extremely
important when we are rendering with a V-Ray
| | 01:24 | Sun and Sky, or a daylight system in place.
| | 01:27 | There are of course other ways we could
handle our illumination levels in the scene.
| | 01:32 | We could, for instance, go into our Options Editor
and instead of coming into the Camera rollout,
| | 01:37 | we could come in to the Environment
rollout and come into our GI Color Map Slot.
| | 01:43 | If you remember, in here, we have a TexSky
node with the SunLight enabled and we have
| | 01:48 | lot of controls that allow us to alter the
appearance of our sun and sky in the scene.
| | 01:53 | One of those controls is of course this
Intensity setting, which means we can essentially turn
| | 01:57 | down the illumination coming from our sun.
| | 02:00 | The problem is this will essentially break the
physicality or the reality of this lighting system.
| | 02:07 | If we want realistic light behavior from our
environment lighting, if we want realistic
| | 02:13 | light bounce in the scene, then we need to
keep the physicality of the system intact.
| | 02:19 | That is why, more often than not, making use of
the V-Ray Physical Camera's Exposure controls
| | 02:24 | makes a much better choice.
| | 02:26 | Now of course not everyone is going to be
comfortable with the idea of using real-world
| | 02:31 | camera controls to deal with
illumination levels in a 3D render.
| | 02:35 | For this reason then, we are just going to
spend a few minutes examining each of the
| | 02:39 | controls that make up our exposure triangles
and just see if we can get a better idea of the
| | 02:44 | role that they play.
| | 02:46 | First off, we will take a look
at our Shutter Speed control.
| | 02:50 | One important piece of information we need
to keep in mind with regard to this control
| | 02:53 | is that any values we set in
here are fractions of a second.
| | 02:58 | So at this moment in time our Shutter
Speed is set to be 135th of a second.
| | 03:04 | That really is a vital piece of information.
| | 03:07 | Now the shutter speed determines how long the
shutter on our virtual camera will stay open.
| | 03:13 | As with a real camera, lower numbers mean a
slower shutter speed, as they represent a
| | 03:19 | larger fraction of a second.
| | 03:22 | Now, that can take a little bit of thinking
about, just to wrap our heads around that,
| | 03:26 | so we'll just go over that again.
| | 03:27 | Lower numbers mean a slow shutter speed because
they represent a larger fraction of a second.
| | 03:34 | Now slower shutter speed of course means that is
more time for light to enter into a virtual camera.
| | 03:40 | More light getting in means that over
images will ultimately be brighter.
| | 03:45 | The inverse is also true.
| | 03:47 | Higher values placed inside of this field
represent a small fraction of a second.
| | 03:52 | That means we have less time for light to
enter the camera because we have a faster
| | 03:57 | shutter speed and so our final
render will be somewhat darker.
| | 04:01 | Bear in mind also, that our shutter speed
will determine the level of motion blur that
| | 04:06 | gets applied to our render if we
have the Motion Blur feature enabled.
| | 04:10 | Let's jump across then
to our F Number control.
| | 04:14 | Now the F Number, or F stop, handles the size,
controls the size, of our virtual aperture.
| | 04:20 | Again, the numbers can be slightly puzzling,
particularly if we have no camera experience,
| | 04:25 | as small F Numbers represent a larger aperture,
a larger opening in our camera, which in turn
| | 04:32 | allows more light in. That will
in turn give us bright images.
| | 04:36 | Again, the inverse equation is at work.
| | 04:39 | Larger values set in here will give us a
smaller aperture, and a smaller aperture means less
| | 04:45 | light into the camera, which
results in a darkened image.
| | 04:49 | As with the Shutter Speed, the F number also
has all the duties that it performs inside
| | 04:55 | of the V-Ray Physical Camera setup.
| | 04:57 | It will handle our depth-of-field effects.
| | 04:59 | It will determent the way a depth-of-field
effect is working in our renders, again, if
| | 05:03 | we have that particular feature enabled.
| | 05:06 | The final value in our exposure
triangle is the Film Speed or ISO parameter.
| | 05:12 | Now the Film Speed value is the only part of
the exposure triangle that doesn't control
| | 05:17 | any other critical effects in the
scene, any other camera effects.
| | 05:22 | This fact makes it probably the best choice to
be used as a quick dial for exposure changes
| | 05:27 | in the scene. Now, the fact that we can set any
value in here that we like also add to its appeal.
| | 05:34 | This of course is
different from real-world cameras.
| | 05:37 | Oftentimes if we set high ISO values,
the images can suffer from excessive noise problems.
| | 05:44 | Thankfully, that is not a limitation.
| | 05:46 | That is not a problem with
the V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 05:49 | In the V-Ray Physical Camera then, we have
a tool that has been designed to mimic the
| | 05:54 | kind of controls and effects available to
real-world photographers and camera operators.
| | 05:59 | If we approach lighting in now scenes in a
physically accurate manner and use the exposure
| | 06:04 | controls available to us, we will most
certainly be able to capture the desired lighting, the
| | 06:09 | desired illumination results from, or in, our rendered
images. And hopefully this very quick overview
| | 06:16 | of the V-Ray Physical Camera's exposure controls
can go some way towards helping us feel comfortable
| | 06:21 | using this process.
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| Handling perspective correction| 00:00 | Oftentimes, when producing visualization
renders, a SketchUp artist maybe asked to mimic the
| | 00:05 | use of a perspective control or shift lens as
employed by many visualization photographers.
| | 00:12 | These lenses can actually be
moved parallel to a camera sensor.
| | 00:16 | The basic idea being that they give a photography ability
to control the appearance of perspective in an image.
| | 00:23 | Architectural photographers often use this
functionality to avoid convergence of the
| | 00:28 | vertical lines in tall buildings,
| | 00:31 | but of course the functionality can be used to
straighten the verticals in any perspective photograph.
| | 00:36 | If we take a render of our perspective start
scene, we may see why this piece of functionality,
| | 00:42 | the ability to straighten verticals, could be
a desirable to for our rendering process.
| | 00:49 | Straightaway we can see that we have a number of lines
in our rendered image that are leaning quite badly.
| | 00:55 | This perhaps may not be
what our client expects.
| | 00:58 | They want to make certain that all of the verticals
in their architecture really do look vertical.
| | 01:03 | Now you may be thinking well, that isn't a
problem, because SketchUp has perspective correction
| | 01:08 | tools of its own.
| | 01:09 | Well, that it true; the problem
is V-Ray does not work with them.
| | 01:13 | At render time we would still have an image
identical to that scene in the V-Ray Frame
| | 01:17 | Buffer this moment in time.
| | 01:20 | The good news is that V-Ray does give us a
tool of its own with which we can work.
| | 01:25 | To access it, we need to come up to our Options Editor,
or Options dialog, and into the Camera rollout.
| | 01:31 | The control we want to work with is
down in the CameraPhysical group.
| | 01:35 | It is this Lens Shift option that we
did say we would be coming back to.
| | 01:39 | Now as you would expect from a single
parameter, this tool works in a very simple way.
| | 01:44 | Positive numbers cause our
vertical lines to diverge.
| | 01:48 | This makes objects appear
to lean towards the camera.
| | 01:51 | Negative values will force them to converse,
or appear to lean away from the camera, which
| | 01:55 | is the problem see in our current render.
| | 01:58 | Now, for your scene, where we are using a
30 mm lens setting, a Shift value of about
| | 02:04 | 0.23 ought to be sufficient to make our lines
appear to stand vertical. With that change,
| | 02:11 | we can dismiss our Options dialog.
| | 02:13 | Now if you're not certain which lens settings
you are working with, or rendering with, inside
| | 02:18 | SketchUp at this moment in time, if you just
come across to the SketchUp Zoom tool, left-
| | 02:22 | mouse-click on that,
| | 02:24 | you'll see over here, in the bottom right-
hand corner of the interface, we get a readout
| | 02:28 | in millimeters of our current focal length.
| | 02:32 | Now of course, we need to take another
render to see if that has corrected our problem,
| | 02:38 | which of course, it clearly has.
| | 02:40 | It has been said, oftentimes the
simplest tools save us the most time.
| | 02:44 | Now we could've performed these perspective
corrections in an image editing application
| | 02:49 | such as Photoshop, but as we have such an
easy-to-use and readily accessible control
| | 02:55 | on our V-Ray Physical Camera
it makes sense to use it.
| | 02:58 | It makes for easy perspective correction,
taken care of right here at render time.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up for a depth-of-field effect| 00:00 | When it comes to adding a photographic
depth-of-field effect to our renders, there are
| | 00:05 | a couple of options available to us
whilst rendering with V-Ray in SketchUp.
| | 00:09 | We could for instance render out a Z-Depth
G-Buffer image that could be used in a post-production
| | 00:15 | application such as Photoshop
to add blur after the fact.
| | 00:19 | But if for some reason we need physically
accurate depth of field, then we will need
| | 00:24 | to use to V-Ray Physical Camera and its
built-in depth-of-field capabilities.
| | 00:30 | When we are looking to create in-scene effects
such as depth of field with the V-Ray Physical
| | 00:34 | Camera, we really need to keep in mind the
fact that many of the choices we make for
| | 00:40 | our camera setup, such as the focal length of
our lens, camera placement for composition,
| | 00:46 | lighting, and exposure requirements, all of
these will affect how we create and ultimately
| | 00:51 | control depth of field in our scene.
| | 00:54 | We also have a choice over the
behavior of our V-Ray Physical Camera.
| | 00:59 | It can be used exactly like a real camera
in that depth of field is always a factor
| | 01:04 | of the focal length, or we can override this
behavior for a simpler setup and a more artistic,
| | 01:11 | rather than realistic, approach to
creating the depth-of-field effect.
| | 01:15 | Because we do have this flexibility, we
should note that any numeric values we work with
| | 01:20 | in this video really are specific to the
scene and the shot that we have composed.
| | 01:25 | You will need to adapt the values to work
with the exposure of your scene, the focal
| | 01:29 | length of your lens, and the type of
depth of field you want in the shot.
| | 01:33 | But perhaps one of the first things that we
will need to decide is just what the point
| | 01:38 | of focus is in our depth-of-field shot.
| | 01:41 | In other words, what do we want in and
what do we want to be out of focus?
| | 01:46 | In our case we're going to work with our pool
ornament as the in-focus part of the scene
| | 01:50 | and we're going to create a subtle
depth-of-field effect on our table.
| | 01:54 | Of course we do need to go and enable depth
field on our V-Ray Physical Camera, so let's
| | 01:59 | come into the Options Editor, into the Camera
rollout, and if we scroll down, you can see
| | 02:04 | we have the depth-of-field
controls and we can just switch that on.
| | 02:08 | A problem I have at the moment is that in the
free version of SketchUp we actually don't
| | 02:12 | have any easy way of measuring the distance
from our camera in the scene to our point
| | 02:18 | of focus, to our garden ornament.
| | 02:21 | There are indeed free scripts that will allow
us to measure the distance from our SketchUp
| | 02:25 | camera to certain points in our scene.
| | 02:28 | As we don't have any of those scripts installed
though, we are going to be working with just
| | 02:31 | the tools available with the default
SketchUp and default V-Ray installs.
| | 02:37 | Because that is the case, as well as turning
on our depth-of-field effect, we also want
| | 02:41 | to go and enable this
Override Focal Distance control.
| | 02:45 | This will allow us to set a specific distance
in our scene from the camera, at which our
| | 02:50 | point of focus resides.
| | 02:53 | What we can do now is engage in a little bit of
educated guessing with the help of SketchUp's
| | 02:58 | Tape Measure tool.
| | 03:00 | The first thing I want to do is come and
dismiss our Options dialog and I want to come over
| | 03:05 | to SketchUp Zoom tool, because I want to
reset my camera view to a 50 mm lens.
| | 03:12 | This setting roughly approximates human vision,
and it will allow us to make a rough estimate
| | 03:17 | of where, behind this table,
our camera is positioned.
| | 03:21 | So if I just left-mouse-click to select the
Zoom tool and then just enter 50 mm on my
| | 03:26 | keyboard and use the Enter or Return key,
you can see we have now set a 50 mm focal
| | 03:32 | length in our view.
| | 03:34 | Now, as we say, we can roughly tell where,
behind the table, our camera might be.
| | 03:39 | Because we of course need to measure the
distance from our pool ornament to the approximate
| | 03:44 | position of our camera, we are going to use
SketchUp's Tape Measure tool. First of all
| | 03:49 | I want to come up to the Camera menu, come
to Standard Views, and go to a Top view.
| | 03:54 | Then I just want to middle-mouse-scroll out
and then grab the Hand tool and just pull
| | 04:00 | everything into place, just so that we
can use the Tape Measure tool very easily.
| | 04:05 | If we go and grab that tool,
we can take a measurement for ourselves.
| | 04:08 | So, first click to approximate where
our point of focus is in the scene.
| | 04:13 | Then if I just use the left arrow key on my
keyboard, I can constrain to the green axis,
| | 04:18 | and we can take a rough estimate of
where in the scene we think our camera is.
| | 04:23 | So if we say something around about there,
we have a measurement then of roughly just
| | 04:28 | short of 48 feet, which is
what I will round things up to.
| | 04:33 | To dismiss the Tape Measure tool, I am
just going to press once on my spacebar.
| | 04:36 | Now before I go and enter any values in our
depth-of-field controls, I do just want to
| | 04:41 | click on our depth-of-field camera
tab here, just to reset our view.
| | 04:46 | This of course takes us
back to a 65 mm lens as well.
| | 04:50 | Now with that set, I can go back into the
Options Editor and we can work with our Override
| | 04:56 | Focal Distance parameter.
| | 04:58 | One thing we do need to keep in mind about this
Override parameter is that it works in scene units,
| | 05:03 | so we need to enter a value
in inches into this field.
| | 05:07 | Do bear in mind that no matter what display
unit we are currently using, SketchUp behind
| | 05:12 | the scenes always works in inches, and this is
the measurement that this particular parameter
| | 05:17 | will always require.
| | 05:19 | So, a quick use of the calculator will tell us
that 48 feet is the equivalent of 576 inches.
| | 05:27 | So now we have our point of focus set in the scene, but
of course we don't have our depth-of-field effect.
| | 05:32 | Just as with a real camera, we need to set
our F Number, or F stop value, so that it will
| | 05:37 | give us a depth of field effect in the scene.
| | 05:40 | In this instance, I am going to set a value
of 2.2 in here. Of course, something we need
| | 05:44 | to keep in mind is that with this Exposure
option checked, our F Number is also handling
| | 05:50 | exposure in the scene.
| | 05:52 | For this reason then, we're going to need to
compensate now for the change in brightness
| | 05:56 | values by altering one of the
other exposure parameters.
| | 06:01 | As the ISO value doesn't really control any
other effects on the V-Ray Physical Camera,
| | 06:06 | generally speaking, this is the
parameter that I choose to work with.
| | 06:10 | In this instance, we are going to set
it all the way down to a value of 5.
| | 06:15 | Now we should have a scene that is ready to
render with a depth-of-field effect enabled,
| | 06:19 | so let's dismiss our dialog and take
another test render to see if that is the case.
| | 06:26 | And our render reveals that it
most definitely is the case.
| | 06:29 | You can see we have a very nice subtle
depth-of-field effect working on our table.
| | 06:34 | Of course, if this is a little too subtle
for us, we can increase the depth-of-field
| | 06:38 | effect, if go back into our Physical Camera
controls. We could lower our F Number; of
| | 06:43 | course that would mean we would need to
compensate by altering our Exposure controls once again.
| | 06:48 | There is another option for increasing the
strength of our depth-of-field effect, and
| | 06:54 | this is to work with the
Override Focal Length option.
| | 06:57 | This will allow us to override
SketchUp's lens value and enter one of our own.
| | 07:02 | Now remember, at this moment in time, we are
working with a 65 mm lens in the SketchUp
| | 07:07 | viewport, but we can alter that by changing
this to something really strong, like 120 mm.
| | 07:13 | Now of course, typically speaking, changing
the focal length of our camera would completely
| | 07:18 | change the framing of our shot.
| | 07:21 | But with our Override Focal Distance
option enabled, this actually doesn't happen.
| | 07:28 | We get the depth-of-field effect increased
as if we had to 120 mm lens on our camera,
| | 07:34 | but the framing of our shot will not alter.
| | 07:36 | In fact, let's take a render and
show you that that is indeed the case.
| | 07:41 | Well, clearly, we have dramatically increased
the strength of our depth-of-field effect,
| | 07:48 | so much so that our table is
becoming almost invisible in parts.
| | 07:52 | And you can also see that we have not
changed the framing of our shot at all, which can
| | 07:56 | be really, really handy in certain instances.
| | 07:59 | Again, it is not physical behavior,
but certainly it is an override that can help us out in
| | 08:04 | many, many cases.
| | 08:06 | So, depth of field with the V-Ray Physical
Camera works exactly as per real-world cameras.
| | 08:12 | The only difference really is that we have to
deliberately enable the effect in our V-Ray
| | 08:17 | Physical Camera to get it working, and we
do have a couple of non-physical overrides
| | 08:21 | that can help us out, that can give us some
very fine artistic control over our depth-
| | 08:26 | of-field effects.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. It's a Material WorldIntroduction to V-Ray-specific materials| 00:00 | When it comes to outputting high-quality
renders one of the things we have to recognize is
| | 00:05 | that a lot of the finished quality, a lot of
the power and functionality housed in our
| | 00:10 | rendering engine of choice, comes from the materials and
maps that are written specifically for that engine.
| | 00:17 | Our final renders would be nowhere near as
appealing or convincing if not for the engine-
| | 00:21 | specific materials and maps that they use.
| | 00:25 | V-Ray is of course no
exception in this regard.
| | 00:27 | This is why it installs with a number of its
own material and map types, designed to help
| | 00:33 | us, quickly and somewhat easily,
re-create complex surface properties.
| | 00:38 | Now as familiarity with the tools available
oftentimes opens up options to us, we just
| | 00:43 | want to spend this video familiarizing ourselves
with the V-Ray material types available in SketchUp.
| | 00:48 | To look at or indeed to add a new V-Ray
material to our scene, we first of all need to open
| | 00:54 | up our V-Ray Material Editor.
| | 00:56 | So let's come up to the V-Ray toolbar and right
at the end, you see we have this large M icon.
| | 01:01 | This is for our Material Editor, so let's
left-mouse-click to open that up for ourselves.
| | 01:06 | Straightaway in the Materials list, we will get
a comprehensive list of all of the materials
| | 01:12 | currently in model.
| | 01:14 | At this moment in time, we only have three
that are available to us, but if we have 10,
| | 01:19 | 15, 25 materials at work in our scene,
then they would all be listed in here.
| | 01:24 | Now you will notice that
there are no menu items.
| | 01:27 | There are no icons inside of the
V-Ray Material Editor that we can use.
| | 01:31 | There is no functionality available in any
of those typical fashions, but we get access
| | 01:36 | to lots of controls or commands inside the
V-Ray Material Editor by means of right-clicking.
| | 01:42 | So for instance, on a material itself you
can see, if we right-click, we get quite a
| | 01:46 | number of commands available to us that
are specific to that material itself.
| | 01:52 | If we right-click on the Scene Materials label,
however, you can see we get a number of different
| | 01:57 | commands available.
| | 01:58 | One of these is the Create Material option
and if we just hover over that, you see we
| | 02:02 | get a flyout listing all of the available
V-Ray materials that we can work with.
| | 02:08 | As we want to just briefly look at each of
these material types inside this video, I
| | 02:12 | am just going to go and left-mouse-click to
select my Angle Blend material, and then I
| | 02:16 | am just going to come to that material.
| | 02:17 | Good practice always to name our materials so
that they have something descriptive in the title,
| | 02:23 | so I am just going to right-
click on that new material.
| | 02:26 | You'll see it's named DefaultMaterial1, but
we want to change that and we are going to
| | 02:29 | rename this to Angle Blend, just so that
we know which type of material it is.
| | 02:36 | And if we just give that a second or two,
you can see that it updates nicely.
| | 02:40 | Now the Angle Blend material is a kind of
falloff material that just makes use of Start
| | 02:46 | and Stop Angle parameters--in fact, these
Start and Stop Angle parameters here--to just
| | 02:51 | blend between two existing scene materials.
| | 02:54 | If we just come to our material swatches,
we can just click on them, and you can see
| | 02:58 | we get a dropdown list housing the
available materials in the scene.
| | 03:02 | So let's put the Blue material
in our Material (Mtl) 1 slot.
| | 03:05 | We'll put the Red material in
our Material (Mtl) 2 slot.
| | 03:09 | And now, based on these angle settings and
based on the setting that we have in this
| | 03:13 | Blend function, we can take a preview, and
you can see just what this material does.
| | 03:19 | As you can imagine, we can create some
interesting two-tone effects using this material.
| | 03:23 | Now the next material in our Create
Material list is the SketchUp two-sided material.
| | 03:29 | Again, we'll create one of those and then go
and right-click and rename this material, and
| | 03:36 | we'll call this Sk Up 2 Sided.
| | 03:40 | And again, just give that a second to update.
| | 03:44 | Now, this particular material is very similar in
appearance and functionality to the similarly
| | 03:50 | named V-Ray Two Sided material. Or if we
just go back to our materials list, we can see
| | 03:55 | down at the bottom we
have a Two Sided material.
| | 03:58 | These two are very, very similar in
nature and indeed in functionality.
| | 04:02 | There is something interesting though. If we
just select our SketchUp 2 Sided material,
| | 04:06 | and if we just, again, show you that we can
place any of our existing scene materials
| | 04:12 | in the slot. So we have the Blue one, we have
the Red one, and now we can essentially assign
| | 04:16 | this material to either a polygon face or
indeed an object and different sides of that
| | 04:22 | face or object will have a
different material applied to them.
| | 04:26 | The interesting thing about SketchUp Two Sided
material, if I just go and delete one of these,
| | 04:31 | is that it can actually be applied with only
one material defined. We can leave our second
| | 04:36 | material slot blank if
that is what we want to do.
| | 04:40 | This means if we applied this to, say, a wall in
a building that we could essentially define
| | 04:45 | our front side as having our Blue material,
so the interior would have a blue wall, but
| | 04:50 | the outside would have no material at all,
which would essentially make it see-through.
| | 04:56 | The brilliant thing is that any global
illumination calculated inside of the environment would
| | 05:01 | still be physically correct.
| | 05:03 | But if we were to take a render from outside
of the building, if we were to look through
| | 05:07 | the wall, we could actually see straight through
to the interior to that full global illumination
| | 05:12 | render, which as you can imagine,
can come in pretty handy at times.
| | 05:17 | Next on our Create list, again, if we just
right-click and come to that, is the V-Ray
| | 05:22 | Standard material.
| | 05:23 | Now the two test materials that we've
already got in the scene, our Test Mat 1 and Test
| | 05:27 | Mat 2, are indeed standard materials. And again,
we just want to go and right-click and rename
| | 05:32 | this to Standard, let it
update, and there we go.
| | 05:38 | Now Standard material is really the workhorse
of V-Ray texturing inside SketchUp. In fact,
| | 05:44 | in other applications such as 3ds Max and Maya,
this material is simply called the V-Ray material.
| | 05:50 | This is the material we will be using to
create the majority of our surface properties for
| | 05:55 | the remainder of this chapter,
| | 05:57 | so you're going to be seeing quite
a bit of the standard material.
| | 06:00 | Next, if we just come back to our list,
you can see we have the Toon material.
| | 06:04 | And again, we want to create one of those.
| | 06:07 | Select it, right-click and we
can just rename this Toon.
| | 06:11 | Now this is a very simple material that produces
cartoon-style outlines around objects found in our scene.
| | 06:18 | It essentially can be
thought of as an inking material.
| | 06:21 | It inks outlines on geometric surfaces.
| | 06:25 | Now, although the Toon material is not intended
to be a full NPR--that is non-photorealistic
| | 06:30 | rendering, system, it can be used to
create some very nice NPR effects.
| | 06:34 | We can get some nice sketch look or
technical drawing looks from it.
| | 06:38 | Indeed, that is something we will demonstrate
with the Toon material later in this course.
| | 06:43 | Now the final material, if we just go and
right-click and look at our list, you can
| | 06:47 | see is the Two Sided, or V-
Ray Two Sided material.
| | 06:50 | And again, as with all of the other materials,
we will just go and rename this so that we
| | 06:57 | know which material we are looking at.
| | 06:59 | As you can see, very similar in nature to
our earlier SketchUp material, it does work
| | 07:04 | in much the same way.
| | 07:05 | We can apply two materials, one to the front
and one to the back of either a polygon plane
| | 07:13 | or an object in the scene.
| | 07:16 | One big difference though between the two
materials is that this material has to have
| | 07:20 | both definitions filled in; we have to have a
material defined for both the front and back options.
| | 07:26 | However, this particular Two Sided material,
unlike the SketchUp one, does have a very nice
| | 07:31 | Blend option, so we can use this Color swatch
to just blend--use this grayscale value to
| | 07:36 | blend between the front and back colors.
| | 07:39 | In fact, if we switch over to complete white,
we would effectively reverse both materials,
| | 07:44 | so the Blue material would become the front
material and Red material would become the back one.
| | 07:49 | Very nice, very handy little trick for blending,
creating a nice pseudo-translucency effect
| | 07:54 | as front and back materials
blend between one another.
| | 07:57 | And of course, we can use a map and the
spin value to create that blend if we want to.
| | 08:01 | Now if you're wondering what this Force One-
Sided option is, really this is here to counteract
| | 08:07 | some functionality that is a part
of the V-Ray standard material.
| | 08:10 | So if I just go and select our Test Mat 1
material, you see in the Option section, one
| | 08:16 | of its checked parameters, one of
the default options, is Double-Sided.
| | 08:20 | This essentially means any V-Ray standard material
applied to a polygon plane will appear on both sides.
| | 08:26 | Of course, oftentimes when you are using a V-Ray
Two Sided material, that's not what you want.
| | 08:31 | You want to be able to set each individual
material to go in the front and back as you
| | 08:36 | have determined them.
| | 08:37 | So if we set this Force One-Sided option,
everything should work just as expected.
| | 08:42 | All in all then, V-Ray in SketchUp offers us a
number of options when it comes to creating
| | 08:46 | material types for our renders.
| | 08:49 | Of course, we don't want to forget that
there are a whole range of V-Ray procedural map
| | 08:53 | types also available for use within our materials;
we access these through material map slots.
| | 08:59 | And again, if I just go and select one of
our test materials, we can show you how you
| | 09:03 | do this. So in the Diffuse slot, we'll click on
the map button and you can see in our Texture
| | 09:08 | Editor, we get a number of
procedural maps available to us.
| | 09:12 | We can even add bitmap files
as textures if we so desire.
| | 09:17 | As we mentioned, over the next few videos,
we are going to focus very closely on V-Ray's
| | 09:21 | Standard material and show how it can be used
to create a number of different surface types.
| | 09:27 | We'll look particularly at how the component
path, that is, the layers that can be added
| | 09:31 | to a Standard material, can combine to create
complex and realistic surface materials that
| | 09:37 | will massively enhance the
quality of our final rendered output.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating diffuse surfaces| 00:00 | In this video, we are going to start working
with our V-Ray Standard Material by focusing
| | 00:05 | initially on creating just the diffuse, or color,
properties for the floor geometry in our scene.
| | 00:11 | The steps we use for this one material of
course can be applied to creating the diffuse
| | 00:16 | properties for all of our scene materials.
| | 00:19 | Up to this point in time, all the geometry we
have in model has had a default gray V-Ray
| | 00:25 | Standard Material applied to it.
| | 00:27 | In fact, if we come up to our V-Ray toolbar
and click on the Material Editor icon, you
| | 00:32 | can see we have a single
material in our Materials List.
| | 00:36 | And if we come and select this, you can
see it is indeed a V-Ray Standard Material.
| | 00:41 | The Diffuse, or Color, properties for this
material type of course is being handled by
| | 00:45 | this set of controls
housed in the Diffuse rollout.
| | 00:48 | As this is a V-Ray Standard Material, we could
of course edit this particular material and
| | 00:54 | apply it to our floor geometry.
| | 00:56 | But as I always like to have a default gray
material in my Materials List, that's not
| | 01:02 | what we're going to do.
| | 01:04 | Instead, we're going to create a new
material and build from scratch.
| | 01:08 | Now, of course we could do this from
right here inside the V-Ray Material Editor,
| | 01:13 | but what if we are a SketchUp user who likes
to make use of the default materials that
| | 01:18 | come with SketchUp?
| | 01:19 | Maybe we've even built up a material library of
our own SketchUp materials over a period of time.
| | 01:25 | Well, if that is a case, then we can just
quickly demonstrate a very nice feature of
| | 01:29 | the V-Ray for SketchUp engine for you.
| | 01:32 | To do this, I first of all just want to close
our V-Ray Material Editor and then come across
| | 01:36 | to our toolbar and click
on the Paint Bucket tool.
| | 01:40 | This of course opens up
SketchUp's Material Browser for us.
| | 01:44 | In here, we of course have a wide range of
default SketchUp materials that can be used
| | 01:48 | to paint our models,
| | 01:50 | only these aren't just SketchUp
materials when we are rendering with V-Ray.
| | 01:55 | To show you what I mean, let's go
to one of the Materials sections.
| | 01:59 | Let's go, for instance, into our Stone section,
and just click one of the bitmap files, and
| | 02:04 | then using the Paint Bucket tool, let's just
left-mouse-click to apply that material to
| | 02:09 | our floor geometry.
| | 02:10 | As you would expect,
that is instantly applied.
| | 02:13 | It shows up in our viewport, all set at the correct
UV mapping scale. So, nothing surprising there.
| | 02:20 | What we might not have expected though
is what has happened behind the scenes.
| | 02:24 | If we just close our Material Browser and
again open up V-Ray's Material Editor, you
| | 02:30 | can see, not only has our SketchUp material
been added to the Materials List, but it has
| | 02:35 | been created as a V-Ray Standard material
with the bitmap file plugged into the Diffuse
| | 02:41 | channel. Of course no other material
properties such as Bump or Reflectivity have been set
| | 02:46 | up, but if we are happy to use SketchUp's
default materials or materials from our own
| | 02:51 | SketchUp Material Library, I'm sure you'll
agree that this makes a very nice way to jump-
| | 02:56 | start the creation of a realistic material
that is ready to be rendered with V-Ray.
| | 03:01 | Now unfortunately, this is not the material
that we want to create for our floor geometry,
| | 03:06 | so I am just going to go and select our default
gray material and once again paint-bucket-apply
| | 03:10 | that to our floor geometry.
| | 03:13 | Now we can go and select our SketchUp material
in the list, right-click, and just simply use
| | 03:18 | the Remove Material option,
which we can say Yes to.
| | 03:23 | With that cleared out, we are now ready to
go and create a new V-Ray Standard Material
| | 03:27 | that can be applied to our floor.
| | 03:29 | So, with the Scene Materials label selected,
let's right-click, come to the Create Material
| | 03:34 | option, and from the flyout,
let's choose a Standard Material.
| | 03:38 | Keeping up our good workflow practices,
we instantly want to rename this material.
| | 03:42 | So again, let's left-mouse click to select
it, then right-click, and come and use the
| | 03:46 | Rename Material option. I am just going to give
this a nice descriptive name, such as Wood Floor.
| | 03:54 | And once that updates, we are now ready to go and
set up the Diffuse properties for this material.
| | 03:59 | In this instance, we want to
add our own custom bitmap.
| | 04:03 | To do that, we can come up to the Diffuse
rollout and just click on the Map button next
| | 04:07 | to the Diffuse color swatch.
| | 04:09 | As we are wanting to work with an image file
for our Diffuse component, we need to add
| | 04:14 | the TexBitmap node in here.
| | 04:16 | This of course gives us a set of control
parameters that will allow us to load and control the
| | 04:21 | bitmap file for use as a diffuse texture.
| | 04:24 | We do of course need to
add an image file in here,
| | 04:27 | so let's scroll down to the file slot.
| | 04:29 | Let's click on the button, and we will be taken
to our Exercise_Files and Texture_Files folder,
| | 04:35 | if, that is, we have set up our
options as per our introduction videos.
| | 04:40 | If you haven't, then just navigate to your Exercise_Files
and you will find the Texture_Files folder in there.
| | 04:47 | Once in there, we can just go and
select this WoodFloor_Diffuse.jpeg file.
| | 04:51 | Now, of course, we could just accept all of
these defaults, click OK, and our Diffuse
| | 04:56 | component would be set up.
| | 04:57 | But I just want to use the controls in our
texture editor to make a little bit of a tweak
| | 05:02 | to our bitmap file.
| | 05:04 | I want to darken down the
midtones just a little bit.
| | 05:08 | To do that, I first of all need
to set my color_space value to 1.
| | 05:12 | This means I can now use this Gamma
option to control the midtones in my bitmap.
| | 05:17 | As I want to darken my bitmap, I of course
need to go below this default value of 1.
| | 05:22 | In fact, I am going to set
a value of 0.5 in here.
| | 05:25 | Now, we can click OK, and with our Paint Bucket tool
and our Wood Floor material both still selected,
| | 05:32 | we can just go and apply that
material inside the SketchUp viewport.
| | 05:36 | Instantly of course, we can tell that we
have a Diffuse color component at work for us.
| | 05:42 | The problem is I'm not actually seeing the
detail that I know should exist inside of
| | 05:46 | this particular bitmap file.
| | 05:49 | This is because SketchUp doesn't know at what size
this particular bitmap is meant to be interpreted.
| | 05:54 | It doesn't know what scale
the UV mapping is meant to be.
| | 05:59 | To set that up, we of course need to come
back into SketchUp's Material Browser,
| | 06:02 | so once again, click on
the Paint Bucket tool.
| | 06:05 | Let's come and make certain that we are
looking at our in-model materials and make certain
| | 06:09 | that our Wood Floor material is selected.
| | 06:11 | Then of course we can come into the
Edit tab and make some alterations.
| | 06:15 | Now, you can see by default, SketchUp has
given us a UV scale of 10 inches, which is
| | 06:21 | clearly not enough for this particular bitmap.
| | 06:24 | In fact, I know that I need a
value of 7 feet entered in here.
| | 06:28 | We could of course just enter that value
straight in, or we can indeed give SketchUp the value
| | 06:32 | in inches, which I know is 84, and let it do
the conversion. As you can see, we get
| | 06:37 | a 7 foot by 7 foot UV scale.
| | 06:41 | And straightaway inside of our SketchUp viewport,
you can see things are now looking much more realistic.
| | 06:47 | It's time then to take a test render and see how the
Diffuse component of our material is looking.
| | 06:56 | As you can see, our Diffuse
component is working very nicely indeed.
| | 07:00 | In fact, we are getting some very nice and very
natural color bleed coming from the obviously
| | 07:05 | color properties of the bitmap file,
courtesy of V-Ray's GI systems.
| | 07:10 | Do keep in mind that the settings inside of
this scene file are really designed to give
| | 07:14 | us fast feedback from our test renders, so
our GI settings and our Image Sampler settings
| | 07:20 | are both quite low at this moment in time,
so we could definitely improve the quality
| | 07:24 | of our render if we increase the
quality settings in both of those systems.
| | 07:29 | Before we leave material creation behind for
this particular video, I just want to add
| | 07:33 | one extra component to my
material in the form of a bump map.
| | 07:38 | Now, a bump map is a grayscale image that the
render engine can use to simulate the appearance
| | 07:43 | of depth, or bump, in a material.
| | 07:46 | Often times a texture artist, when working on the
diffuse component of a material, particularly
| | 07:51 | if they are working with bitmaps, will also
add the bump map in. This is typically because
| | 07:56 | the two images will
share the same source file.
| | 08:00 | This means with the UV Mapping scale set up
to apply our diffuse texture, it is a very
| | 08:05 | easy matter to go and
create and add a bump map also.
| | 08:09 | To do that, let's go up to our Material
Editor and open that up for ourselves.
| | 08:13 | Then we just need to scroll down in our Wood
Floor material until we come to the Map slot.
| | 08:18 | Of course, do make certain that you
have your Wood Floor material selected.
| | 08:22 | If you have one of the other materials selected,
you may be adding the map in the wrong slot.
| | 08:26 | In here, you can see we have the option for
a Bump map, so let's put a check in the box
| | 08:30 | to enable that, and then go and add our image.
| | 08:33 | To do that, we click on the Map button.
| | 08:36 | In the Texture Editor, we want to add our
TexBitmap node, and again, we want to go and
| | 08:41 | browse for our file.
| | 08:43 | Once we are inside of our Texture_Files folder--
and of course again, if you are not automatically
| | 08:48 | taken there, you can go to Exercise_Files >
Texture_Files--and in here, you will see
| | 08:53 | we do have a WoodFloor_Bump map, that we could use.
| | 08:57 | This particular material, this particular
map, is a little bit noisy for my taste.
| | 09:01 | It adds a little bit too much
information into the final render.
| | 09:04 | I'm instead going to work with this
WoodFloor_Disp, or displacement map.
| | 09:09 | This is just a little bit more
useful in this instance as a bump map.
| | 09:13 | So, let's click to select that, select OK,
and then there is one final tweak. I just want
| | 09:18 | to dial the strength of this bump map down
a little bit, so I am going to set a value
| | 09:23 | of 0.2 in the Bump multiplier.
| | 09:26 | And that really is everything we want
to cover in this particular video.
| | 09:29 | So, with our Diffuse color properties taken
care of now, we can actually move on to adding
| | 09:34 | perhaps a little bit more
realism into our material.
| | 09:38 | We can do this by showing you how to add
reflection controls to your V-Ray Standard material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating reflective surfaces| 00:00 | As pretty much every material in the world
around us has at least some level of reflectivity,
| | 00:06 | there is a very high probability that when we
want to create realistic-looking materials
| | 00:12 | then we will spend at least some time on each
project working inside the Reflection controls
| | 00:17 | of the V-Ray standard material.
| | 00:19 | In this video, we're going to continue working
with our floor material and show you how you
| | 00:24 | can add reflection controls to that
material in the V-Ray Material Editor.
| | 00:29 | We also want to work with the controls given us to
at a level of realism, a level of believability
| | 00:34 | to our reflections that
may not be there initially.
| | 00:38 | As you can see, the start scene for
this video has been upgraded a little.
| | 00:43 | We've used the same process as with our floor
material to essentially apply the diffuse
| | 00:48 | components to all the objects in the scene:
some are using bitmaps and some are using
| | 00:53 | straight colors inside of the materials.
| | 00:56 | Now if we were to take a render at this
moment in time, we would see that whilst
| | 01:00 | our diffuse maps and colors really do help
us see perhaps what type of surface we're
| | 01:04 | meant to be looking at--
| | 01:05 | they definitely give us the overall
color scheme for our environment--
| | 01:10 | Still we would feel that there was something
lacking in terms of believability in the materials.
| | 01:15 | This would be because there is no reflectivity
applied to any of them at this moment in time.
| | 01:21 | So let's change that by adding a
Reflection layer to our Wood Floor material.
| | 01:26 | To do that, of course we need to open our V-Ray Material
Editor, so using the icon on the toolbar we can do that.
| | 01:32 | We of course need to make certain that our
Wood Floor material is the one selected; we
| | 01:36 | don't want to add our reflection layer
inadvertently to another material at this moment in time.
| | 01:40 | And then with it selected, we can just right-click,
go to the Create Layer option, and in the flyout
| | 01:46 | we want to choose Reflection, and
incidentally we get a Reflection layer added to the top
| | 01:51 | of our Material controls.
| | 01:53 | Now a feature of the Material Editor that we can
take advantage of right now is this Preview option.
| | 01:58 | So if we click on this, we get a render of
the material as it would appear in the scene
| | 02:03 | at this moment in time, which as you can
see, is perhaps not what we really want.
| | 02:08 | We appear to have a fully
reflective chrome-like material.
| | 02:12 | This is because by default our Reflection
layer is added with full reflectivity enabled.
| | 02:19 | The level of reflection is controlled
by this set of Reflection controls.
| | 02:23 | We can control it by
means of our color swatch.
| | 02:25 | We can use our Multiply value in
conjunction with the Map Type as well, if we want to.
| | 02:31 | Basically V-Ray uses a grayscale value to
control or determine the level of reflectivity.
| | 02:38 | So a completely white value, as you may have
guessed, gives you a completely reflective
| | 02:42 | material. If we set this to black, we would have
a completely matte, non-reflective material.
| | 02:47 | And naturally, we want to set a value
somewhere in between those two extremes, so I'm just
| | 02:51 | going to use the Value setting inside the
Hue, Saturation, and Value spinners to set
| | 02:55 | a value of 60 in here. As you can see, that
updates the R, G, and B Channels automatically.
| | 03:01 | Now what we'll do, rather than using the
Preview option in this instance, we'll go and take
| | 03:05 | a render of the full scene so we can really
evaluate how our reflections are working.
| | 03:13 | Well, we can clearly see that we have
reflections working on our floor material.
| | 03:19 | We can even see the Bump map we added in our
previous video at work and causing breakup
| | 03:24 | in these reflections.
| | 03:25 | However, we would still have to say that our
reflections are definitely lacking a level
| | 03:30 | of believability.
| | 03:32 | Two factors in particular
are contributing to this.
| | 03:36 | One of them is the evenness of
the reflectivity that we see.
| | 03:39 | In the real-world reflectivity, or the level
of reflections that we see in a material, can
| | 03:44 | often be governed by the angle
at which we view a material.
| | 03:48 | At this moment in time you can see we're
getting a completely uniform level of reflectivity
| | 03:52 | all across this floor, and that is not
something that we're typically used to seeing.
| | 03:58 | Fortunately, V-Ray gives us controls to
handle this in the form of a Fresnel map type.
| | 04:04 | To add that map, we need to obviously open up
our Material Editor, and in the Reflection
| | 04:09 | controls, we need to come to our Reflection
Options. If we click on the Map button
| | 04:13 | we can come into our Texture Editor. And this
time, in the dropdown list, we're looking for
| | 04:18 | this TexFresnel node.
| | 04:20 | In here, as you can see, we can control the
level of reflectivity based on these two IOR
| | 04:26 | values, and we also get a Grayscale control, a
Grayscale slider, for handling the Perpendicular
| | 04:32 | and Parallel level of reflectivity.
| | 04:34 | Now typically speaking, the Parallel option
always works best when set at a very low value--
| | 04:39 | typically zero or something very close to it.
| | 04:42 | In our case, it is the Perpendicular option
that we want to change. So let's click on
| | 04:47 | the color swatch, and in the Value this time,
I'm going to drop the level of reflectivity
| | 04:51 | down a little bit; in this case we're
going to put a Value of 35 in here.
| | 04:57 | With that done, we can click OK in the Color
Swatch and OK in the Texture Editor, and once
| | 05:02 | again go and take a test render just to see what a
difference that was made to our floor's reflectivity.
| | 05:08 | Now as we don't need to render the entire
image in this instance, I'm going to select
| | 05:12 | the Render Region option in the V-Ray Frame
Buffer and just select a Region and then go
| | 05:16 | and click Render.
| | 05:22 | Straightaway we can see that we get a
more believable set of reflections now.
| | 05:26 | We don't have that completely uniform
spread of reflectivity right across our floor.
| | 05:31 | Of course, things are still not looking quite
as they should. We're not getting the type
| | 05:35 | of reflections we would expect from the
surface we're currently working with.
| | 05:39 | Our reflections are much
too crisp, much too clean.
| | 05:43 | Well, as you would perhaps expect, the V-Ray
Standard Material gives us a set of controls
| | 05:47 | that can fix that problem for us.
| | 05:49 | So if we again come up to our Material Editor,
| | 05:52 | this time we want, in the Reflection control
rollout, to work with this Glossiness value.
| | 05:57 | This essentially will allow us
to blur out our reflections.
| | 06:00 | At a value of 1 we get completely clean,
completely crisp reflections. As we drop down
| | 06:06 | this value, we will increase the
level of blur inside of them.
| | 06:10 | Now you'll notice we have a Highlight and a
Reflection control, so we can just blur
| | 06:15 | the reflection or just the highlight.
Typically, you will want to work with both of these in
| | 06:19 | tandem, as it is not too often that
you get a difference in the two.
| | 06:24 | We can also use a texture map to
control these Glossiness changes as well.
| | 06:28 | Well, in the Glossiness Highlight and
Glossiness Reflection parameter, I'm going to set the
| | 06:32 | value of 0.85. Then we'll just Tab across add
the same in there. And that should pretty
| | 06:40 | much take care of our problem for us.
| | 06:42 | It is as easy as that to add blurry
reflections into a V-Ray Standard Material.
| | 06:47 | So once again we're going to want to test render
and see how that has affected our reflections.
| | 06:56 | Now you see we get the kind of scattered
reflections that we would perhaps more typically associate
| | 07:01 | with this type of wood flooring.
| | 07:03 | And of course because of the Fresnel map we
can see the level of reflectivity varying
| | 07:08 | inside the image.
| | 07:09 | In connection with our blurred reflections
though, there is one other option that we probably
| | 07:13 | need to take note of. Inside of the
Reflection controls we have this Shader Type. At the
| | 07:19 | moment it is set to Blinn.
| | 07:21 | The other two options in the dropdown will
change the way our blurred reflections work.
| | 07:25 | In fact, if we choose the Ward option, we will
get very scattered, very blurred reflections.
| | 07:31 | So as you can see, adding and controlling
reflections in the V-Ray Standard Material is a reasonably
| | 07:36 | straightforward matter.
| | 07:38 | We can use not only grayscale values but also
map types such as Fresnel to exercise a high
| | 07:43 | degree of control over the look and
feel of reflections in our material.
| | 07:47 | And again, everything we've looked at in this
video can be applied to the Reflection properties
| | 07:52 | of most objects in our scene.
| | 07:54 | Well, time now to tackle yet another aspect
of everyday material types, this time in the
| | 07:59 | form of refractive materials.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating refractive surfaces| 00:00 | As refractive objects are one of the handful
of material types that we come into contact
| | 00:05 | with pretty much every day, the chances that
we will want or need to re-create them at
| | 00:09 | some point, probably in a number of
different ways, really are quite high.
| | 00:13 | In this video, we are going to work at
creating a couple of glass materials, really as a way
| | 00:18 | of demonstrating how we create
refraction inside the V-Ray Standard Material.
| | 00:23 | Now one of the glass materials we want to
create is for the glazing in our scene.
| | 00:27 | Now, at this moment in time,
we don't have our geometry available,
| | 00:31 | so we do need to go up to the Window menu,
select that, come down to the Layers option,
| | 00:36 | and open the Layers dialog up.
| | 00:38 | In here, we need to put a check in the
Skylight Glass and Patio Glass layers, just to bring
| | 00:43 | that geometry into the scene. Then of
course we can close our Layers dialog.
| | 00:48 | Now I am just going to middle-mouse-scroll
out of our view, just so we can get a little
| | 00:52 | bit of a better view of
what is going on in scene.
| | 00:54 | I am going to hold Shift key and hold down
the middle-mouse button just to pan across.
| | 00:58 | And now I just want to Ctrl+Click and select
all of our glazing geometry in the scene,
| | 01:06 | just so that we can add our
material to it when we have created it.
| | 01:10 | With that done, of course we can go
and reselect our Glazing camera.
| | 01:14 | To create the first of our Glass Materials,
we of course need to open up the V-Ray Material
| | 01:18 | Editor for ourselves.
| | 01:20 | You will once again notice that our start
scene has been somewhat upgraded; not only
| | 01:24 | do we have our diffuse components in place
now, but also all of the reflective aspects
| | 01:29 | of our materials are in situ.
| | 01:31 | Of course, at this moment in time, we don't have
any refractive materials set up in the scene,
| | 01:36 | so let's go and add a glazing material for
ourselves. So with the Scene Materials label
| | 01:40 | selected, let's right-click, go to the Create
Material option, and we will choose a Standard Material.
| | 01:47 | Now of course that's going to be added to
the bottom of our Materials List, so let's
| | 01:51 | scroll down, select the material, right-
click, and use the Rename Material option.
| | 01:57 | Sticking with descriptive names,
I'm going to call this Glazing.
| | 02:01 | Now with the geometry still selected in the
scene, we can simply right-click and use the
| | 02:06 | Apply Material to Selection option.
| | 02:08 | Now Glass of course is a material that doesn't
really have any Diffuse coloration. Even should
| | 02:14 | we want to create colored class, it wouldn't
be the Diffuse slot in our V-Ray Standard
| | 02:19 | Material that provides the color information.
| | 02:22 | These controls are really just for surface
light interaction, whereas the coloration
| | 02:27 | in glass comes from inside the volume, and
we'll see how to handle this inside the V-Ray
| | 02:33 | Standard Material in just a little while.
| | 02:36 | This doesn't mean, however, that we can
just completely ignore our Diffuse layer.
| | 02:40 | Essentially, in order to create a glass material,
we need to disable the Diffuse component of this material.
| | 02:47 | Now, you may wonder why
this is a necessary step.
| | 02:50 | Well, if we just go to our Glazing material,
right-click, go to the Create Layer option,
| | 02:55 | and create a Refraction layer for ourselves, you'll
see that it sits underneath the Diffuse layer.
| | 03:02 | This means with Diffuse information inside
our Diffuse controls, we are not actually
| | 03:07 | going to see the effects of
any refraction in our material.
| | 03:11 | This is why we need to
disable the Diffuse layer.
| | 03:13 | Now the easiest way to do this is to set our
material to be completely transparent, using
| | 03:19 | the Transparency controls.
| | 03:21 | However, there is a problem if we
just use the default color swatch.
| | 03:24 | If I just click on that, set our Color value
all the way to pure white, which would make
| | 03:29 | it completely transparent, and click OK,
| | 03:32 | you can see our scene
objects actually disappear.
| | 03:35 | Now, thankfully we have them selected at this
moment in time, but if they weren't, we perhaps
| | 03:40 | wouldn't even know that
they were there in the scene.
| | 03:43 | So clearly this method of adding transparency
could have some potential problems with it.
| | 03:48 | Thankfully, there is another way.
| | 03:49 | Let's just go and set our Transparency color
back to black so that our scene objects reappear,
| | 03:54 | and we can instead use the Map slot.
| | 03:57 | So if we click on the Map button to bring
up the Texture Editor and in the dropdown
| | 04:01 | list, if we use the first option, this TexAColor
option, we can now go and set this to be white.
| | 04:07 | This of course will control the transparency
on our Diffuse layer. You see our scene objects
| | 04:13 | remain unchanged.
| | 04:14 | They will, however, be
completely transparent at render time.
| | 04:18 | This then is typically a much better way to set
our Diffuse layer to be completely transparent,
| | 04:23 | or in real terms, we've disabled the color
information from this particular layer.
| | 04:28 | Of course, we still don't have a Glass Material
as of yet. There are other components we need
| | 04:33 | to add--specifically Reflection. Glass is,
as well as being a refractive material, a
| | 04:39 | highly reflective material.
| | 04:41 | So let's go to our Glazing Material, right-click,
go to Create Layer, and this time we want to
| | 04:47 | add a reflection layer.
| | 04:49 | As you may recall from our reflection lesson,
by default, the Reflection layer comes in
| | 04:53 | with full reflectivity enabled; this white
value ensures that. And if we scroll down
| | 04:58 | to our Refraction layer,
you'll see that it does the same.
| | 05:01 | It uses the same control
mechanism for handling refraction.
| | 05:06 | So we now have a fully reflective, fully
refractive material. And if we just use the Preview Render
| | 05:11 | option, it perhaps won't be any
surprise to us the reflectivity wins out.
| | 05:16 | It is, after all, the top-level layer.
| | 05:19 | We need then to be able to tell our material
that it is both reflective and refractive.
| | 05:24 | We can do this by adding a Fresnel map into
the Maps slot for the Reflection layer.
| | 05:28 | So again, let's click on the Map button; in
the dropdown, let's choose TexFresnel; and
| | 05:34 | in this instance the defaults of white and
black for Perpendicular and Parallel and the
| | 05:39 | IOR values of 1.55 will
work very nicely for us.
| | 05:44 | So again, let's accept that and click OK.
| | 05:46 | Now V-Ray knows that the Reflection versus
Refraction options will be determined by the
| | 05:52 | viewing angle of the camera.
| | 05:54 | If we view one of our windows straight on,
we will get lots of refraction, so we will
| | 05:59 | see through the material. If we view our glass at a very
sharp angle then we will get lots of reflectivity.
| | 06:05 | And again, if we use the Preview button
inside of our Material Editor, you will see that
| | 06:10 | we do indeed now have a refractive and
reflective material. In fact, better still, let's go and
| | 06:16 | take a render of the scene, so we can
see how our glazing is working out.
| | 06:24 | What we now have is a very nice glass material
that has both reflective and refractive properties.
| | 06:30 | And you can see, as the viewing angle becomes deeper,
the reflectivity becomes more and more pronounced.
| | 06:36 | With our glazing working nicely then, we can
see that creating a clear glass material is
| | 06:41 | a pretty easy thing to do, using
the V-Ray Standard Material.
| | 06:45 | What, though, if we wanted to create that
colored glass that we mentioned earlier?
| | 06:49 | Well, let's do that inside
of our scene right now.
| | 06:52 | The first thing we are
going to do is switch camera.
| | 06:54 | We are going to focus in on our garden ornament,
our butterfly, and let's see if we can turn
| | 07:00 | it into a beautiful piece of colored glass.
| | 07:03 | Now, as we're simply creating a variation of
our glazing material, there really is no need
| | 07:08 | to go through the whole process from scratch.
| | 07:11 | Instead, let's open up
our V-Ray Material Editor.
| | 07:13 | We'll find our Glazing material. Right-click on it, and
we will just use the Duplicate Material function.
| | 07:20 | Now if we scroll down, you can
see we have a Glazing1 material.
| | 07:24 | We of course are going to want to rename this,
so let's right-click and go to Rename Material,
| | 07:29 | and we'll call this, very
descriptively, Butterfly Glass.
| | 07:35 | Now, if we go and select our object in the
scene, we can right-click on our material
| | 07:42 | and use the Apply
Material to Selection option.
| | 07:44 | Of course rendering at this point would
simply reveal that we have a clear glass statue.
| | 07:49 | That's the type of material
that we created for our glazing.
| | 07:52 | So how do we create our coloration?
| | 07:54 | Well, we have already stated that we don't use
our Diffuse components to create colored glass.
| | 08:00 | Instead, we want to make use of some
controls found in our Refraction layer.
| | 08:05 | Specifically, we want to make
use of these Fog controls.
| | 08:08 | These will allow us to add a
coloration to the volume of our Glass object.
| | 08:13 | To set the color, all we need to do is click
on our color swatch and then choose the RGB
| | 08:18 | values that we want to work with.
| | 08:20 | In this instance, we have got some very
specific values we just want to use, so we are going
| | 08:23 | to use a Red value of 141, a Green value of
40, and in the Blue channel, we are going
| | 08:29 | to leave everything set to zero.
| | 08:31 | So we get this nice burnt-orange look.
| | 08:34 | With that applied, let's take a test
render and see how things are looking.
| | 08:39 | What we get from that very small parameter
tweak is a very nice colored glass effect,
| | 08:45 | one that, as you can see, actually takes into
account the density of the geometry when it
| | 08:50 | comes to determining the
coloration that it applies.
| | 08:53 | You can see where the body of our butterfly is.
The thicker geometry, we get a much deeper
| | 08:57 | color, where we get the thinner part, we get
a much less saturated version of the color.
| | 09:02 | If we wanted to increase the strength of the
coloration effect here, if we just come back
| | 09:06 | to our Material options, you can see we have
this Multiplier option, which really acts
| | 09:11 | as a strength control for the Fog effect.
| | 09:15 | So we've seen then how we can create refractive
materials inside of the V-Ray Standard Material,
| | 09:21 | and remember the steps that we have gone
through here to create glass can just as easily be
| | 09:25 | used to create water that could
be applied to our pool geometry.
| | 09:29 | We've even seen just how very easy it is to
add a coloration effect to the volume of our
| | 09:34 | refractive object.
| | 09:36 | Time now to move away from working with hard
surface materials and take a look instead
| | 09:41 | at our tablecloth geometry.
| | 09:43 | In the next video, we are going to show you
how we can create a nice translucency effect
| | 09:47 | using nothing more than a couple of V-Ray
Standard materials and a V-Ray Two Sided material.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating translucent surfaces| 00:00 | Although the V-ray Standard Material does
have its own translucency controls--ones that
| | 00:05 | are designed to help us to
create thin object translucency--
| | 00:09 | getting them to work and work well can
take quite a bit of trial and error.
| | 00:14 | In this video we're going to walk you through a
very quick way of faking translucency using
| | 00:19 | a couple of V-ray Standard Materials along with a V-
Ray 2 Sided material that we'll wrap those inside of.
| | 00:25 | To begin with, let's open up our V-Ray Material
Editor by coming up to the V-Ray toolbar and
| | 00:30 | clicking on the icon.
| | 00:31 | Now, what we want to do as a first step is
essentially create two V-Ray Standard Materials
| | 00:37 | that will serve as the front and
the back of our tablecloth object.
| | 00:42 | We're going to paint different colored
materials onto each side of the tablecloth.
| | 00:47 | Now we're just using straight colors; you
could of course use bitmap files if that is
| | 00:51 | what you want to do.
| | 00:52 | So let's come to our Scene Materials label,
right-click, come to Create Material, and create
| | 00:58 | a new standard material.
| | 01:00 | Straightaway of course, we're going to want
to rename this, so let's right-click, go to
| | 01:03 | Rename Material, and we'll call this first
one TC_front. Once that updates, we can go
| | 01:11 | and create another Standard Material. Of course,
we need to be on our Scene Materials Label.
| | 01:18 | Create Material, Standard.
| | 01:20 | And as you what expect, we will go and rename
this one, so right-click, Rename Material, and
| | 01:26 | we'll call this TC_Back.
| | 01:31 | So now we have the two materials that we want
to apply to either side of our tablecloth.
| | 01:36 | We could think of it as
inside and out materials.
| | 01:38 | We're just calling them front and back because
that essentially is how V-Ray will see things;
| | 01:43 | it is applying these materials according to what
it thinks is the front and back of the geometry.
| | 01:49 | Now we need to go and create
our V-Ray Two Sided Material.
| | 01:52 | So again, up to the Scene Materials Label,
right-click, Create Material, and this time
| | 01:57 | come down to the 2 Sided Option.
| | 01:59 | Now I use the designation V-Ray 2 Sided
Material for two reasons: one, because that is what
| | 02:04 | it is called in all the applications that I've
used V-Ray in, and secondly, to differentiate
| | 02:08 | it from the SketchUp 2 Sided Material.
| | 02:11 | So let's select that, and again, we want to
go and rename it, so let's use the Rename
| | 02:17 | Material Function, and I am just
going to call this one Table Cloth.
| | 02:21 | Now as you can see, this material
has a very simple control set.
| | 02:25 | It has two slots named Front and Back, and
as you would perhaps suspect, this is where
| | 02:29 | we add our front and back materials.
| | 02:32 | So let's go and select our TC_Front
Material for the Front Slot, and let's go and select
| | 02:40 | our TC_Back Material,
naturally, for the Back slot.
| | 02:44 | Next, we'll select our Table Cloth geometry and
then right-click on our Table Cloth material
| | 02:50 | and apply the material to the selection.
| | 02:52 | Now initially of course, nothing will change
too much in the SketchUp viewport, simply
| | 02:56 | because our two V-Ray Materials, the Front and Back
Materials, just have a gray value added to them.
| | 03:02 | So let's go and make a change in here.
| | 03:04 | Let's go to our Front Material and let's set
this to a nice obvious red color. That of
| | 03:09 | course, we can see update in the SketchUp
Viewport. And let's go to our Back Material
| | 03:14 | and let's add a nice pale blue in there.
| | 03:18 | Now you may wonder why I'm
using a red and blue color.
| | 03:21 | These are simply debug
colors that I like to use.
| | 03:24 | They make it very obvious to me
what is going on in a scene.
| | 03:27 | You can of course assign finished colors if
you want to, or as we mentioned, you can even
| | 03:31 | use bitmap files. Now, if we were
to take a render at this moment
| | 03:34 | in time, we would not see any kind of a
translucency effect, although it'd be good just to test
| | 03:40 | now, to make sure that our materials are
mapping on the front and back of our geometry as
| | 03:45 | we would expect them to,
| | 03:46 | so let's just click on this start render
button. And our test render clearly shows that our
| | 03:54 | two materials are mapping
exactly as we wanted them to.
| | 03:58 | Of course, at this moment in time, we're not
seeing any kind of a translucency effect.
| | 04:02 | This is because there are still a couple
of options that we need to work with.
| | 04:06 | So again, back into our V-Ray Material Editor,
we do want to do choose our Table Cloth, or
| | 04:10 | V-Ray Two Sided Material.
| | 04:13 | To get V-Ray to blend between our front and
back materials, we need to work with this
| | 04:18 | Color option; this essentially controls the
blend between our front and back materials.
| | 04:25 | The default value of black, which is what
we have at this moment, doesn't allow any blending
| | 04:30 | between these two materials; they are only
allowed to sit on the respective side of the
| | 04:34 | geometry to which they are assigned.
| | 04:36 | Either of their extreme values, black or white,
would not allow any kind of a blend to take place.
| | 04:42 | If we set a white value in our color swatch here,
we would just essentially flip our two materials.
| | 04:48 | As you would expect, if we set a mid-gray
value in here, we would then get a 50-50 mix
| | 04:53 | of the two materials.
| | 04:54 | However, when it comes to creating the
illusion of translucency, we generally want a fairly
| | 05:00 | small amount of color to
bleed through the material.
| | 05:03 | So we just want to select our color
swatch and in the Value Setting here,
| | 05:07 | I'm going to set a relatively low value of
something around about 14, and as you can
| | 05:12 | see, that updates our R, G, and B channels.
| | 05:15 | With that option set, we can take another
test render and see if that has improved our
| | 05:19 | translucency effect.
| | 05:24 | Now, whilst our render shows a definite shift
in the colors assigned to our materials, we
| | 05:29 | still couldn't honestly say that we've
anything that looks like translucency.
| | 05:34 | To understand why this is so, we need to take
a look at the default settings of the V-Ray
| | 05:38 | Standard Material.
| | 05:40 | So let's just open up our Material
Editor and select our TC_Front Material.
| | 05:45 | And if we take a look inside the Options rollout,
you can see one of the controls checked by
| | 05:50 | default is this Double-Sided option.
| | 05:53 | This tells V-Ray that both sides of any
polygons to which this material is assigned need to
| | 05:59 | be rendered opaque, which of course isn't
what we're trying do with our V-Ray Two Sided
| | 06:05 | Material; we're trying to create a blend.
| | 06:07 | So we can either disable the Double-Sided
option in each of our V-Ray Standard Materials
| | 06:13 | or we could instead come and select our V-Ray
Two Sided Material, our Table Cloth Material,
| | 06:18 | and put a check in these
Force One-Sided option.
| | 06:21 | This, as you can imagine, forces each of the V-
Ray Standard Materials to act as a one-sided,
| | 06:27 | not a double-sided, material.
| | 06:29 | Now of course, we should be able to see our
translucency effect, so let's again take a
| | 06:33 | test render and see if that is the case.
| | 06:37 | What we get now of course does indeed resemble the
passing of sunlight through a thin piece of fabric.
| | 06:43 | We can even see where the
folds in the geometry occur.
| | 06:46 | The brilliant thing of course here is that
we have two completely separate materials that
| | 06:50 | can have different
properties assigned to them.
| | 06:53 | The downside of course is that this is just
a material trick; we don't actually get any
| | 06:58 | light passing through this material, so any shadows
underneath this table would not be affected at all.
| | 07:04 | If we wanted to give the impression that the
shadows were being lightened by sunlight passing
| | 07:08 | through, we would need to use
extra lights in the scene.
| | 07:12 | So there we have it. We've seen how we can
use our V-Ray Standard Materials to create
| | 07:17 | thin object translucency.
| | 07:19 | Of course, this doesn't just apply to fabric.
| | 07:21 | We could think of items just as foliage, paper,
indeed, any object that would allow direct
| | 07:27 | light to pass through it to some degree.
| | 07:29 | All we have to do is wrap our V-Ray Standard
Materials in a Two Sided Material, tweak a couple
| | 07:34 | of options, and we'll have a
very nice effect for ourselves.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
6. The Quality Control DepartmentUsing fixed-rate sampling| 00:00 | As V-Ray is a ray-trace rendering engine, and
because image sampling we live the heart of
| | 00:07 | the ray-trace rendering process,
| | 00:09 | we can see perhaps why choosing which of
the V-Ray's three image sampling engines to use
| | 00:14 | in our scenes those become a fairly
critical decision that needs to be made wisely.
| | 00:20 | For this reason then, over the next three
videos we're going to give you a quick overview
| | 00:24 | of the controls for each engine type, as well
as reviewing how using these controls will
| | 00:30 | affect both the speed and
quality of our rendered images.
| | 00:34 | If you're unfamiliar with just what the image
sampling process is all about, you can check
| | 00:39 | out the Introduction to Image Sampling video in
chapter 6 of my V-Ray 2.0 for 3ds Max Essential
| | 00:47 | Training course, here on lynda.com.
| | 00:49 | To get started, let's open up
our Options dialog for ourselves.
| | 00:53 | You'll notice in here we have an Image Sample
rollout and if we use these dropdown, you
| | 00:58 | can see the options available to us when it comes
to choosing an Image Sampling Engine in V-Ray.
| | 01:04 | As the first option is the fixed-rate engine,
this is the one that we will be looking at
| | 01:08 | in this particular video.
| | 01:10 | Now I do want to draw your attention to the
fact that in order to focus on just what the
| | 01:14 | image sampling engines are doing,
| | 01:16 | we've turned off our anti-aliasing filters.
| | 01:19 | Now this, generally speaking, is not something you
will want to do as you're rendering. Filtering
| | 01:24 | contributes an awful lot to
the final look of our images.
| | 01:28 | But because we don't want any extra
contribution from our filters and because they do add to
| | 01:34 | our render times, we have just
disabled this option for now.
| | 01:38 | Just to note also that as we examine our
image sampling engines throughout this chapter,
| | 01:43 | we're going to be making use off pre-rendered
images to view the changes that our parameter
| | 01:48 | changes would make in our rendered images.
| | 01:52 | This is because, firstly, as we're going to
be increasing the quality settings inside
| | 01:57 | of each of our image sampling engines, that means
that our test renders will get longer and longer.
| | 02:03 | So rather then wait around for those, we decided
that working with some pre-rendered images would
| | 02:08 | be beneficial there.
| | 02:10 | It also means that we can quickly swap between
our renders and just test; we can just check
| | 02:15 | the changes that are occurring as we make
changes to our Image Sampling controls.
| | 02:21 | On to our fixed-rate sampling engine then.
Well, the Fixed-Rate Sampler performs its
| | 02:25 | task in a very straightforward manner.
| | 02:28 | It uses, as you would perhaps have guessed
from the name, a fixed number of rays, or samples,
| | 02:33 | per pixel to gather the information
that it needs from our 3d environment.
| | 02:39 | With this subdivs value set to 1, as it is
here, a single sample is taken or cast from
| | 02:45 | the center of each pixel
required for our output resolution.
| | 02:49 | Whatever objects in the scene that Ray
encounters or hits, well, that will determine the Color
| | 02:55 | value for that particular pixel.
| | 02:57 | And if we just jump over into Adobe Photoshop,
which we'll be using as our image viewer,
| | 03:02 | we can see the render that
we'd get from this setting.
| | 03:06 | Now as you can see, what we get is not incredibly
impressive, in terms of finished quality, which
| | 03:12 | is not surprising, seeing as we're using the
very lowest value available inside of the
| | 03:17 | Fixed Rate Sampler.
| | 03:18 | But what we do see is that we can very
quickly make an evaluation of many aspects of our
| | 03:24 | scene at this moment in time.
| | 03:26 | We can easily gauge the level and quality of
illumination and global illumination that
| | 03:31 | we getting from our lighting.
| | 03:33 | We can easily gauge camera composition.
| | 03:35 | We can tell whether or not that is working for
ourselves. And to some extent, we can decide
| | 03:40 | whether or not our materials are
going in the right direction.
| | 03:44 | Of course, we do have a lot
that is wrong with this image.
| | 03:47 | We can see we have a huge noise problem that is occurring
here, which to be honest, is actually our own fault.
| | 03:54 | We have used the DMC GI
solution for this particular interior render.
| | 03:59 | We've chosen that deliberately because it
does add an awful lot of noise into the scene,
| | 04:04 | and so we want put our image sampling engines
through their paces and just see how they handle
| | 04:09 | cleaning up this noise, as well
handling the materials and the lighting.
| | 04:14 | Of course, the noise isn't the only problem.
| | 04:16 | If I just used the Ctrl+Plus keyboard shortcuts
to just zoom in a little on our image, you
| | 04:22 | can see that a lot of the materials are
not really resolving too well either.
| | 04:27 | Our lines sphere here really, we're not getting
nice clean straight lines as they should be.
| | 04:31 | We are getting a lot of breakup in there.
| | 04:34 | You can see that our reflections too are suffering from
noise problems; they are very bitty, very broken up.
| | 04:40 | So clearly there is a lot of room for
improvement in here, but the interesting thing--if I just
| | 04:46 | use the spacebar to just pan down to the bottom
left-hand corner, you can see we've a timestamp
| | 04:50 | here--the interesting thing is that
we're only at a minute and 23 seconds.
| | 04:56 | So from the point of view of just being
able to gauge some of the aspects of our scene,
| | 05:01 | just being able to figure out what is going on,
| | 05:03 | the feedback that we're getting and the
render times, very acceptable. Of course, we do
| | 05:08 | want to improve the quality of our render,
| | 05:10 | so again, let's jump back into SketchUp and see
what happens as we increase our Subdivs Value.
| | 05:18 | Let's double this up to a value of 2.
| | 05:20 | This means that we're now getting four samples evenly
distributed across each off the pixels in our render.
| | 05:28 | These four samples will be averaged together
by the rendering engine to produce a final
| | 05:32 | color value for that pixel.
| | 05:34 | Now again, let's jump back into Photoshop,
just to see what a difference that has made.
| | 05:39 | So we go from a Subdiv of 1 to a Subdiv of 2
and as you can see, we do start to clean up
| | 05:46 | some off the problems that we
have in our original render.
| | 05:50 | Particularly if we take a look at the lines
on our sample sphere here, you can see that
| | 05:54 | they start to resolve very nicely.
| | 05:56 | We start to get something
that looks much cleaner.
| | 05:58 | In fact, again, if we use Ctrl+Plus just to zoom in,
you can see how they are starting to clean
| | 06:03 | up and straighten out quite a bit.
| | 06:07 | We are also cleaning up some
of the noise on our walls.
| | 06:10 | You can see very, very grainy there, and obviously,
although not a finished quality again, we're
| | 06:15 | seeing that things are cleaning up nicely.
| | 06:18 | You'll also notice, if you take a look at our
noisy sample materials--so we have a couple of
| | 06:23 | materials that are very
noisy, very bitty indeed--
| | 06:27 | if you watch those, you'll see that we actually start
to find more detail inside each of those materials.
| | 06:33 | Now this is because with very, very low sampling settings,
we're actually skipping over information in the scene.
| | 06:40 | The render engine just doesn't have enough
samples to be able to capture the fine detail.
| | 06:45 | But now that we're increasing the sampling, we're
starting to see things clean up very nicely.
| | 06:50 | Obviously, we'll be interested in what
has happened to our render times now.
| | 06:54 | So if you remember, if we just go and check,
you can see that we were at a value of 1 minute
| | 06:59 | and 23 seconds for our single subdivision.
| | 07:03 | And now what we're finding is that we've
actually gone up to just over two minutes, which of
| | 07:08 | course is not a tremendous increase at all.
| | 07:11 | What would happen then if we continue to increase
our Subdivs value inside of the Fixed Rate Sampler?
| | 07:17 | If we were to go from a value of 2 to a value
of 8 inside of that control, we would go from
| | 07:22 | this render to this,
| | 07:25 | which, as you can see, does start to clean up
some areas of our scene very, very nicely
| | 07:29 | indeed, particularly if you keep an eye on
the reflections in our sample sphere here.
| | 07:34 | You can see that they go from very noisy, very
grainy, to very nice and quite smooth indeed.
| | 07:38 | In fact, again, the same is true
for many other aspects of the scene.
| | 07:42 | We notice things cleaning up as
we increase our Subdivs value.
| | 07:46 | Again, the noise, the fine detail in our
noisy materials, you can see, we start to capture
| | 07:52 | even more and more detail.
| | 07:54 | And of course, the noise on our wall does
clean up a little more, although still a problem
| | 07:59 | there. You can see we're
increasing like improving that situation.
| | 08:04 | Of course that does come at a cost. If we
again just pan down to the bottom of our render,
| | 08:09 | you see we're now up to 8 1/2 minutes, which
in terms of percentage, is quite an increase.
| | 08:15 | But still, given the quality that we're getting,
that probably is quite an acceptable render
| | 08:20 | time, given the fact we're working at
1280x720 in terms of resolution here.
| | 08:27 | Let's take one final jump from a value of 8
Subdivs up to 16, and we would go from this to this,
| | 08:35 | which as you can see, starts to clean up even
some of the real problem areas in the scene,
| | 08:40 | such as the noise that
we're getting on our wall.
| | 08:43 | Of course, many of our materials don't improve
a tremendous amount, except if you see this
| | 08:47 | very, very finely detailed sphere down in
the bottom right, if you keep an eye on that,
| | 08:51 | you can see that those clean up very nicely
indeed, in terms of really pulling out the
| | 08:55 | detail that is in the material.
| | 08:58 | Of course again, the increase in quality
comes at a high cost, because we're all the way
| | 09:03 | up to 32 minutes and 19 seconds now.
| | 09:07 | But again, given that we've deliberately set
the scene up so that it has lots and lots
| | 09:11 | of noise that would need to be cleaned up,
| | 09:13 | that still is a fairly
respectable render time.
| | 09:16 | Now you may wonder why our render times increase so
dramatically as we increase our Subdivs value.
| | 09:23 | This highlights the weakness of the Fixed
Rate Engine; you see, there is no adaptively
| | 09:27 | whatsoever in this system.
| | 09:30 | V-Ray will always use this fixed value of
samples or rays per pixel whether our scene,
| | 09:36 | whether our image, requires them or not.
This of course leads to long render times and still
| | 09:41 | oftentimes can leave those with an
unsatisfactory level of quality in our renders.
| | 09:46 | You can see even in this image, we still have
noise very obviously present on that back wall.
| | 09:52 | For these reasons then, the Fixed Rate
Engine is probably best suited to being used for
| | 09:57 | quick and easy test renders.
| | 09:59 | It is very, very simple to use.
| | 10:01 | All we have to do is choose the engine type
enter a parameter into the Subdivs value,
| | 10:06 | and away we go.
| | 10:07 | There is nothing else that we need
to worry about or tweak at all.
| | 10:10 | So, having looked at the Fixed Rate Engine,
let's move on in our next video to examining
| | 10:14 | a system that does have adaptivity built
into it, and this is the Adaptive DMC Engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Working with the Adaptive DMC engine| 00:00 | As the name suggests, the Adaptive DMC image
sampling engine adds adaptivity into the image
| | 00:07 | sampling process.
| | 00:09 | This means that based on some user input parameters,
the engine can make some very deliberate choices
| | 00:14 | about where and how it places
samples in our scenes.
| | 00:19 | Again, to set up the Adaptive DMC
engine, let's come into our Options dialog.
| | 00:24 | Let's come into the Image Sampler rollout
and this time, if we use the Type dropdown,
| | 00:28 | we can see that Adaptive DMC
is the second on the list.
| | 00:32 | The Adaptive DMC engine is indeed the
default inside of V-Ray for SketchUp.
| | 00:37 | So if you start a new scene, chances are you
are going to be working with the Adaptive
| | 00:40 | DMC engine straightaway.
| | 00:43 | Now whilst we don't have an awful lot in the way
of control parameters for this image sampling
| | 00:47 | engine, clearly we have a little
bit more than our fixed-rate engine.
| | 00:51 | One set of parameters that control how this
engine works are these Min and Max Subdiv values.
| | 00:57 | These really are what give V-Ray the
ability to play samples over a number of passes,
| | 01:03 | passes that refine and optimize
the sampling solution as they go.
| | 01:08 | The specific number of passes used will be
controlled by the number of steps between
| | 01:12 | the Min and Max values and
this Color Threshold setting.
| | 01:17 | In its first, or initial, pass V-Ray will always
place the minimum number of samples, as set
| | 01:22 | by the Minimum Subdivs parameters.
| | 01:25 | Then using this Color Threshold value as a
control mechanism, V-Ray can and will add more
| | 01:31 | samples when needed, working up to either the
Maximum Subdivs setting or indeed the cutoff
| | 01:36 | point that has been determined
by the Color Threshold value.
| | 01:41 | One note of warning here:
| | 01:42 | we never want to set our Min and
Max Subdiv rates to the same number.
| | 01:47 | If we do that, we effectively kill the
engine's adaptivity, and the DMC engine will simply
| | 01:53 | function as per the fixed-rate engine.
The renders we get will be identical. The render
| | 01:57 | times that we get will be identical.
| | 02:00 | Now the values we have here are the defaults for
this particular engine type, but for production
| | 02:05 | purposes, we generally want our defaults to
give us fast feedback, particularly in the
| | 02:10 | early stages of a project.
| | 02:12 | All we really need is a render that will give
us a general idea of how the scene is looking.
| | 02:18 | For this reason, we may want to actually save
out some settings of our own from the Options
| | 02:22 | Editor using lower values. So we could for
instance set a Max Subdivs value of 3 and
| | 02:29 | then we can come up to our Options Editor
menu and just click on the Save icon, save
| | 02:34 | those options out, and then whenever we want
to work with fast test renders, we could just
| | 02:38 | load those settings back in for ourselves.
| | 02:41 | As the first of the renders we will examine
inside of Photoshop use these particular settings,
| | 02:46 | a Min value of 1 and a Max value of 3,
| | 02:48 | we are going to stick with
these for this moment in time.
| | 02:51 | Now before we look at our render, just to
reiterate the process again, as we have now set the Max
| | 02:57 | Subdivs value to 3, V-Ray will check the
information it receives from the first, or initial, pass
| | 03:03 | that it makes using the Min Subdivs value.
| | 03:05 | It will measure that information against the
threshold value, and if it decides that more
| | 03:10 | samples are needed, then it will proceed on
to a second pass, subdividing our pixels and
| | 03:15 | placing more samples in the needed areas.
And it will continue to do that until the maximum
| | 03:20 | number of subdivisions is reached or again,
until the Color Threshold cutoff is reached.
| | 03:26 | With these settings then, let's jump into
Photoshop and have a look at our first render.
| | 03:31 | As you can see, we get something very comparable to
the initial renders from our fixed-rate engine.
| | 03:38 | We get a pretty good idea of
how our scene is progressing.
| | 03:41 | Again, we can check things of just lighting,
composition, and materials without any real trouble.
| | 03:46 | We can make some good evaluations of these.
| | 03:50 | We do still of course have a lot of noise in
the scene, which again we are going to need
| | 03:53 | to progressively clean up.
| | 03:55 | And if we just have a look at our render times,
so if I just use spacebar and if we just pan
| | 04:00 | down, you can see we are slightly higher in
terms of render times than our first fixed-
| | 04:05 | rate render, which is not surprising really.
Because we have so much noise that needs cleaning
| | 04:10 | up in our scene, V-Ray at this moment in time
is not using our minimum subdivision setting.
| | 04:16 | Clearly we are using the three subdivs
that we've set in our Max parameter.
| | 04:20 | Hence the slightly cleaner render that
we have and the increased render time.
| | 04:24 | Now if we just zoom in to have a look at our
materials, you can see our lines on this particular
| | 04:30 | sphere are looking much cleaner
than our initial fixed-rate render,
| | 04:33 | so we can tell most sampling is going on there.
And we can see just generally that the materials
| | 04:38 | are looking a little bit better, although
the diagonal lines on our lead sphere here
| | 04:42 | are not looking too good
at this moment in time.
| | 04:46 | Let's go back into SketchUp and see
what we can do to improve this situation.
| | 04:51 | To do this, we are naturally going to want
to increase our maximum Subdivs parameters.
| | 04:55 | Now you may be wondering why we are not
increasing the minimum subdivisions.
| | 04:59 | Typically speaking, we want to leave this as
low as possible, in order to give the engine
| | 05:04 | the ability to be adaptive.
| | 05:06 | The general recommendation is that we have
at least three steps in between the values
| | 05:10 | set in the Min and Max Subdivs setting.
| | 05:13 | For this demonstration, however, we are just
going to keep our Minimum Subdivs set to 1
| | 05:17 | as we increase our Maximum Subdivs value.
| | 05:20 | With 1 and 8 set then, let's jump into
Photoshop and let's see what we get.
| | 05:26 | Here we go from our 1 and 3 render to our
1 and 8, and you can see, things do, as we
| | 05:32 | would expect, clean up quite considerably.
| | 05:35 | The noise on our wall cleans
up very, very nicely indeed.
| | 05:39 | The reflections in our materials also
improve quite considerably, as do the lines on our
| | 05:45 | lead sphere here. And again watch for the
small noise in our materials; you can see
| | 05:50 | that we definitely pick up a lot more detail
there also. And our shadow edges clean up nicely.
| | 05:55 | We can see that that there is a lot less noise, a
lot less grain contained inside those as well.
| | 06:01 | As you would expect though, the improvement
in quality comes at a cost, so we are now
| | 06:05 | at 8 and a quarter minutes,
which is quite high.
| | 06:09 | We've made quite a jump in terms of render
time percentage, just as we did of course
| | 06:14 | with our fixed-rate engine.
| | 06:16 | Now again, because of the noise inside of this
scene, we are not really getting a chance for
| | 06:21 | V-Ray to do any adaptive sampling.
| | 06:24 | This scene really is not the best one in
terms of showing off how the adaptivity works.
| | 06:28 | What we are seeing though is just how well the image
sampling engines can handle a difficult scenario.
| | 06:34 | Lots and lots of noise, fine-line detail, very
fine specular detail in some of our materials,
| | 06:39 | and yet our image sampling
engine can handle that nicely.
| | 06:42 | Well, again let's
increase the sampling quality.
| | 06:45 | Let's go from 1 and 8 to 1 and 16 now, and
we would go from this render to this, which
| | 06:51 | again, as you can see, doesn't affect every
area of the scene quite so obviously.
| | 06:56 | The noise on our wall clearly cleans up quite
considerably, but our materials don't seem
| | 07:01 | to do an awful lot.
| | 07:03 | Although if we just zoom in, and again if
we go to our 1 and 16 and use Ctrl+Plus on the
| | 07:08 | keyboard to zoom in, you will see that we are
definitely getting cleanup in the reflections.
| | 07:13 | We are losing some off the noise that we
still have in here, and if you keep an eye on the
| | 07:17 | fine noise detail here, you'll see that we do pick up
quite a bit more detail with our 1-and-16 render.
| | 07:24 | So we are definitely making a difference.
| | 07:26 | And of course, those are
reflected in our render times.
| | 07:29 | We are now at 27 and a quarter minutes.
| | 07:32 | Although, if you remember, when we used our
fixed-rate engine, when we had 60 subdivisions
| | 07:37 | there, we were at around about 32 minutes.
| | 07:40 | So for comparable quality, we are actually
dropping down the render times now, as V-Ray
| | 07:45 | as it reaches the limit of what it needs in
terms of samples to clean up the scene, as
| | 07:50 | V-Ray now is able to actually bring
in a little bit of that adaptivity.
| | 07:54 | And that of course is making a bit of
difference to the render times now.
| | 07:59 | If we just jump back into SketchUp, one of
the things we of course have not explored
| | 08:04 | up until this point is the
Color Threshold value.
| | 08:07 | Well, let's make a change now.
| | 08:08 | Now that we have such a high setting--and
remember, we are actually working with not
| | 08:12 | 1 and 8, but 1 and 16 at this moment in time.
| | 08:15 | Now that we have those high settings in there,
because remember, with a maximum Subdiv of
| | 08:20 | 16 set, we are actually working
with 256 samples, or rays, per pixel.
| | 08:27 | Well, with that setting, let's go and
make change to our Color Threshold value.
| | 08:31 | Let's set that to 0.003, and again, let's jump
back into Photoshop to see what that would do.
| | 08:38 | This means we would go from our
standard 116 to our Color Threshold version.
| | 08:44 | And on initial comparison,
there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference.
| | 08:50 | Both of these images look to be producing
pretty much the same result, although again,
| | 08:54 | if we just zoom in on each of these images, you will
be able to see that we are using extra samples.
| | 09:01 | If you just keep an eye on the reflections
in our lead sphere here, you can see that
| | 09:05 | they do clean up quite considerably, really.
There is quite a bit of fine noise detail
| | 09:10 | in there, and those extra samples that are now
being allowed to work by the Color Threshold
| | 09:15 | setting are actually cleaning that up very nicely.
| | 09:19 | And if we just zoom out, you can see that we
are indeed using more samples in the scene,
| | 09:23 | because our render time has gone up by a
number of minutes, which again demonstrates to us
| | 09:28 | that by lowering the Color Threshold value
we are allowing V-Ray to make more use of
| | 09:33 | that Maximum Subdivision setting.
| | 09:36 | So the adaptivity then clearly at work, even
in this difficult-to-render scene. And as
| | 09:41 | we say, this really is not the best of scenes to show
off the quality of the adaptivity in this engine.
| | 09:47 | Really, what we would want is a scene that
has lots of clean areas to it, maybe just
| | 09:51 | straight block colors without lots of noise.
Then you would see quite a difference in terms
| | 09:55 | of the render times between the
Adaptive DMC engine and the fixed-rate one.
| | 10:00 | But we do have adaptivity working.
| | 10:02 | We can see that a little bit,
even in this difficult scenario.
| | 10:05 | And adaptivity really is what makes this
engine, in my humble opinion, generally speaking, the
| | 10:10 | best choice as a sampling engine
for most production situations.
| | 10:16 | One extra benefit of the ability of this render
engine to work adaptively is that it gives
| | 10:21 | excellent results in terms of quality and render
speed whenever there are blurry effects in our scenes.
| | 10:28 | By that we mean whenever global illumination,
depth of field, motion blur, or blurry reflections
| | 10:33 | and refractions are at work.
| | 10:36 | On top of that, the fact that the DMC sampler
doesn't need to hold sample information in
| | 10:40 | memory can be a huge benefit, particularly
if we are rendering scenes that have high
| | 10:46 | memory requirements.
| | 10:48 | SketchUp of course being a 32-bit application means
that use of memory is at a premium at all times,
| | 10:54 | so just that simple fact alone can make it
an excellent choice just to be able to get
| | 10:58 | our scenes rendered.
| | 11:00 | Incidentally, the same is also
true of the fixed-rate engine.
| | 11:03 | It too doesn't hold
sample information in memory.
| | 11:06 | Now in terms of weaknesses, there really aren't any as
such that I would ascribe to the Adaptive DMC engine.
| | 11:12 | It is capable of producing the very highest
quality, but it can also be configured to
| | 11:18 | work a little bit more speedily for us if
that is what our current project needs.
| | 11:22 | In fact, the only thing that we could say
against this particular engine is that whilst
| | 11:27 | it is clearly capable of being adaptive
in its sampling approach, it is not able to
| | 11:31 | perform any kind of
undersampling or infrasampling.
| | 11:36 | In our next video we will take a look at of
course the last of V-Ray's image sampling
| | 11:40 | engines, one that is indeed capable of performing
under- or infrasampling, and this is the adaptive
| | 11:46 | subdivision engine.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling the Adaptive Subdivision sampler| 00:00 | The Adaptive Subdivision engine is an extremely
powerful image sampler that in certain circumstances
| | 00:06 | has the ability to save us lots of render time
while still delivering lots of render quality.
| | 00:12 | To examine its control set, we of course need
to go into our Options Editor, into the Image
| | 00:18 | Sampler rollout, and in the Type dropdown we can set
the Adaptive Subdivision as our image sampling engine.
| | 00:25 | Now this particular engine works little
differently than the Fixed Rate and DMC engines in that
| | 00:31 | instead of creating and subdividing a pixel
array internally, the Adaptive Subdivision
| | 00:36 | engine instead creates a grid, set to the
same resolution or size as our rendered output
| | 00:42 | that it uses to position or
place samples in the scene.
| | 00:46 | Again, this all takes place internally.
| | 00:49 | After making a first pass and placing samples
according to the Minimum rate setting, a comparison
| | 00:55 | is made and if the difference between any
two samples is greater than the value set by our
| | 01:01 | Threshold control, then the grid will be
subdivided and more samples will be added as required.
| | 01:08 | The Min and Max Rate values also work a little
differently than the Min and Max Subdiv settings
| | 01:14 | inside of the Adaptive DMC engine.
| | 01:17 | In fact, if we are not careful with these controls,
we can very easily bring our system to a crawl.
| | 01:22 | You see, when we are using a Rate value of 0
in this particular engine, we are actually
| | 01:28 | using a single sample per pixel to
gather information from over scene.
| | 01:33 | If we set a Rate value of 1, we are
now using four samples per pixel.
| | 01:38 | But by the time we move up to using a Rate
value of 3 in the Adaptive Subdivision engine,
| | 01:44 | which of course would be 9 samples per pixel
in the Fixed Rate and Adaptive DMC engines,
| | 01:50 | we would actually be working with 64 samples
per pixel. And that kind of exponential increase
| | 01:56 | in the number of samples used continues as we
increase our Rate value, just even by a single step.
| | 02:03 | Hopefully, you can see then that we cannot
use the same kind of Rate values inside of
| | 02:08 | the Adaptive Subdivision engine as we would
use in the Min and Max Subdivs inside of the
| | 02:14 | Adaptive DMC system.
| | 02:16 | If we did, we would possibly bring our system
to its knees, simply because of the sheer number
| | 02:21 | of samples that we would
be asking it to compute.
| | 02:25 | Now, the values that we currently have inside of
our Adaptive Subdivision controls are indeed
| | 02:30 | the defaults inside of V-Ray for SketchUp.
And again, as with the Adaptive DMC engine,
| | 02:35 | for starting out with test renders inside of a
project, these are little high for my tastes.
| | 02:41 | So for the purpose of looking at over test
renders, we're just going to make a little
| | 02:44 | tweak to these settings.
| | 02:46 | We will leave our Minimum
rate at a value of -2.
| | 02:50 | This means that we can undersample areas of the
image if our image sampling engine determines
| | 02:55 | that that is acceptable.
| | 02:57 | With a Rate of -2, we are using just one single
sample for 4 pixels in our rendered output.
| | 03:04 | What we really need to
change is our Max Rate setting.
| | 03:07 | This we want to drop down all the way to 0.
| | 03:10 | This means we are just using one single
sample per pixel for our Maximum Rate.
| | 03:16 | So leaving our Threshold value at its default
setting, let's jump into Photoshop and have
| | 03:20 | a look at the render that
these settings would give us.
| | 03:24 | And as you've perhaps come to expect by now, you can see
that over initial render is extremely low quality.
| | 03:30 | It is extremely noisy indeed.
| | 03:33 | But again, as with our previous engine types,
we can still make a fair evaluation of what
| | 03:38 | is going on in the scene.
| | 03:39 | We can very readily tell what's happening with our
lighting, our GI, and to some extent, our materials.
| | 03:46 | What we do of course want from such
low quality are fast render times,
| | 03:49 | so let's choose our spacebar and then left-
mouse-click to pan down and have a look, and
| | 03:53 | you can see we getting this render at just
over a minute and a half, which for a 1280 x
| | 03:58 | 720 render, is very fast indeed.
| | 04:02 | So with those initial settings, yes, we are
getting low quality, but of course we are
| | 04:06 | getting very fast feedback, which is
perfect for the start of a project.
| | 04:10 | Naturally though, we're going to want to
step up the quality level a little bit.
| | 04:14 | We're going to want to see what we can get if we
just increase our Max Rate settings a little bit.
| | 04:19 | In fact, we will set our Max Rate up to value of
2, and we would go from this to this, which
| | 04:26 | as you can see, is a reasonable jump in quality.
The noise on our wall cleans up quite nicely.
| | 04:31 | We start to see much more detail in our noisy
materials, and of course the reflections start
| | 04:36 | to take shape very nicely indeed.
| | 04:40 | With the Adaptive Subdivision engine, however, the
problem can come in terms of render time.
| | 04:45 | So let's check what we get here, and you can
see, now we've jumped all the way up to just
| | 04:48 | over 5 and a quarter minute.
| | 04:51 | Now that may be acceptable, because we have
taken a reasonable step forward in terms of
| | 04:56 | quality and still, five and quarter minutes
| | 04:58 | is not a huge amount of time just to get a
nice reasonable-quality test render back.
| | 05:04 | Again, if we just zoom out
and back in to recenter that,
| | 05:07 | of course, what we have at this moment in
time is not acceptable as final render quality.
| | 05:12 | We would need to step things up a little bit
more than this before we could say we were
| | 05:16 | happy to show this to a client as
a proposed final piece of work.
| | 05:21 | So how would we do that in the
Adaptive Subdivision engine?
| | 05:24 | Well, our first thought would probably be
to increase over Max Rate value, but we've
| | 05:29 | already mentioned how dangerous that can be in
terms of the system resources that we can eat up.
| | 05:36 | The answer to improved quality in fact lies not
with increasing our Max Rate value at each
| | 05:41 | step, but rather, looking at balancing out our
maximum rate setting with our Threshold value.
| | 05:47 | So let's jump back into SketchUp
and make a tweak to that parameter.
| | 05:53 | What we will do then is instead of accepting
our default setting of 0.15, we will drop our
| | 05:59 | Threshold setting all the way down to .01.
| | 06:03 | With that change, let's jump back in to
Photoshop and see what a difference that has made.
| | 06:08 | Now remember, as we make the switch between
these two images, we have not increased our
| | 06:12 | Max Rate setting at all.
| | 06:14 | What happened now is we would go from
this to this, which as you can see, is indeed
| | 06:20 | quite a dramatic cleanup.
| | 06:23 | The noise on the walls
cleans up very nicely indeed.
| | 06:26 | We get lots more detail
from our noisy materials.
| | 06:29 | You can see lots of the gaps that were there
in our previous render are all now filled
| | 06:33 | in with some very fine detail, and of course
our reflections are looking much cleaner.
| | 06:39 | Now you can see what a difference that
Threshold setting has made to the number of samples
| | 06:43 | being used when we examine the
render time for this image.
| | 06:47 | So remember, we were at just over five
minutes with our previous render.
| | 06:51 | In this instance, we are all the way up to 22.5
minutes, which is quite a considerable jump.
| | 06:58 | Clearly, you can see how sensitive the
parameters are inside of the Adaptive Subdivision engine
| | 07:03 | and why we need to be very careful with
the values that we are using in there.
| | 07:07 | Well, let's just recenter our image, because we
have one more quality jump that we want to make.
| | 07:12 | We want to increase now our Max Rate setting up
to a value of three. We're keeping our Threshold
| | 07:17 | 8.01 and if we do that, we would go from this
to this, which if you keep an eye on the noise
| | 07:25 | that is appearing on our back wall,
you can see, does make quite a difference.
| | 07:29 | We really do clean that up very nicely indeed.
| | 07:32 | However, our materials may appear not to
really increase in terms of quality too much. But if
| | 07:38 | we just use Ctrl+Plus on
the keyboard to zoom in,
| | 07:41 | just keep your eye on these reflections.
| | 07:43 | And let's again switch our image, and we do
of course want to zoom in and then just make
| | 07:48 | the comparison. And you can clearly see that
the noise does indeed clean up very nicely.
| | 07:56 | Of course, again render times
are going to be important to us,
| | 07:59 | so let's zoom back out on that particular
image and take a look at the render time,
| | 08:03 | and you'll see that now we're all the way
up to an hour on 60 minutes, which is quite
| | 08:09 | a render time, which if we're being honest,
was wholly expected for this particular scene.
| | 08:15 | The Adaptive Subdivision engine was never going to
perform too well in this particular environment.
| | 08:20 | As we mentioned, we have forced lots and lots
of noise into this particular render, and that
| | 08:26 | is not something that the Adaptive Subdivision
engine copes with very well, especially not
| | 08:31 | in conjunction with lots of blurry
reflections, which we do have on our materials and our
| | 08:36 | floor, and of course we have noise
coming from our area shadows as well.
| | 08:41 | The Adaptive Subdivision engine really
functions well in scenes that have lots of flat color.
| | 08:46 | In those situations, it can make use
of its undersampling capabilities.
| | 08:51 | This means it can give is both
quality and speed in our final renders.
| | 08:56 | Whilst render times may clearly be an issue
in certain instances when we use the Adaptive
| | 09:02 | Subdivision engine, there is another weakness
that we need to point out in connection with it.
| | 09:07 | This is the fact that the Adaptive Subdivision engine
needs to hold all of its sampling information in memory.
| | 09:14 | This means that if we have scenes that already
have high memory requirements, well, we could
| | 09:18 | find ourselves running into out-of-
memory crashes very, very quickly.
| | 09:23 | In this chapter then, we have examined all
three of V-Ray's image sampling engines.
| | 09:28 | Hopefully, we have demonstrated that they all
capable of producing high-quality renders.
| | 09:34 | Of course, there are differences in the way
that each of these engine types are working
| | 09:38 | that may make them suited to one particular
project whilst not suitable for another form.
| | 09:44 | And of course the choice of which
one you use is entirely up to you.
| | 09:49 | Project requirements, the time you have available,
maybe even artistic preferences, all of these
| | 09:55 | will play a part regarding the choice, regarding
the settings that you use when you working
| | 10:00 | with V-Ray's image samplers.
| | 10:02 | Hopefully though, the overview we've given
in this chapter will be able to serve as a
| | 10:06 | nice strong foundation from which you can
build you own knowledge and understanding
| | 10:11 | of V-Ray's image sampling engines.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Exploring subdivs and the DMC Sampler controls| 00:00 | One thing you may have noticed when you first
started using V-Ray for SketchUp is the prolific
| | 00:05 | use of the term subdivs in many parts of
the renderer's user interface elements.
| | 00:12 | Understanding what that term refers to and
how our numeric subdiv values will affect
| | 00:17 | the quality of our final renders is, in my
opinion, an essential piece of the puzzle regarding
| | 00:23 | our ability to use V-Ray for
SketchUp in a production environment.
| | 00:27 | Now, as I am going to be talking about the
rendering process, I just want to open up
| | 00:31 | the Options Editor for ourselves so we
have access to V-Ray's control parameters.
| | 00:37 | Whenever we start a render in V-Ray, we are
really initializing the ray-tracing process.
| | 00:43 | During this, our render engine collects
information from our 3D scene by means of rays that are
| | 00:49 | cast and then traced through that environment.
| | 00:53 | Our image sampler, sometimes called anti-aliasing
controls, are the ones that actually determine
| | 00:58 | the number of primary or I rays
that will be used during this process.
| | 01:04 | However, depending upon the setup of our scene of
course, secondary rays may also need to be traced.
| | 01:12 | Secondary rays are required to produce many
of the blurry, or noisy, effects that ray-trace
| | 01:16 | renderers such as V-Ray are so good at
producing, effects such as blurry reflections, blurry
| | 01:22 | refractions, depth of field, motion blur, area
or soft-edge shadows, ambient occlusion,
| | 01:29 | and well, quite a bit more.
| | 01:32 | The number of secondary rays used to calculate
these effects, for the most part, will be controlled
| | 01:38 | by our subdiv values.
| | 01:41 | This is why a Subdiv setting is
present in so many V-Ray tools.
| | 01:46 | Something that is worth noting here is that
the values we set in our Subdiv fields don't
| | 01:52 | actually describe the number of samples
being used to create a particular effect.
| | 01:57 | Rather, they represent the square of them.
| | 02:00 | So, a subdiv value of 8, which oftentimes is
the default in many V-Ray tools, could more
| | 02:06 | accurately be described as 8 multiplied by 8.
| | 02:10 | That would of course give us a total of 64
samples, or rays, that could be used to create
| | 02:16 | a particular effect in our
scene, such as blurry reflections.
| | 02:21 | Now we used the word "could" very deliberately
here, because there are actually another set
| | 02:27 | of controls in V-Ray that will determine just
how many of those potential 64 rays, or samples,
| | 02:33 | are actually used in the final render.
| | 02:37 | These controls are found in
the DMC Sampler rollout.
| | 02:41 | When creating blurry render effects,
internally, the VRay renderer is making extensive use
| | 02:47 | of a class of randomized computational
algorithms that are known as Deterministic Monte Carlo,
| | 02:54 | or DMC, algorithms.
| | 02:56 | This of course is a term that we've
already encountered in our use of V-Ray.
| | 03:01 | So, whenever it is that we see any of these
noisy effects being rendered in a scene, well,
| | 03:07 | DMC algorithms are being heavily
utilized by V-Ray in that process.
| | 03:13 | The brilliant thing about our DMC Sampler
controls is that they allow us to tune just
| | 03:18 | how finely our DMC
algorithms work in these instances.
| | 03:23 | For this reason then, many VRay users ask
just what parameters should be used inside
| | 03:28 | of the DMC Sampler rollout.
| | 03:30 | Well, of course every scene will have unique
aspects that can and will affect pretty much
| | 03:35 | every setting we use in VRay,
including our DMC Sampler controls.
| | 03:40 | So really, the best we can do is to
give you some general-usage guidelines.
| | 03:45 | Hopefully, these will serve as a foundation from
which you can fine-tune each of your scenes.
| | 03:50 | Generally speaking, for the most part, we can
leave everything inside of the DMC Sampler
| | 03:56 | rollout set at its default.
| | 03:58 | Of course if we have a need to set a minimum
number of subdivisions higher than the default
| | 04:03 | setting, then we can most definitely do that.
| | 04:05 | But as we say, generally speaking, we can
leave everything at its default in here and
| | 04:10 | just work with this Noise Threshold value.
| | 04:14 | This really can be used to switch between
what I think of as draft and final render
| | 04:19 | settings inside of our DMC Sampler.
| | 04:22 | If we are working on test or preview renders,
then Threshold values of between 0.1 and 0.01
| | 04:30 | are generally pretty good.
| | 04:32 | These values mean that we will very rarely,
if ever, make full use of the settings used
| | 04:37 | in our Image Sampling and Subdiv controls.
| | 04:40 | What we will get, however,
are very fast renders.
| | 04:44 | When it does come time to create our final
rendered output, well values of between 0.008
| | 04:51 | and 0.002 tend to work very well.
| | 04:54 | In fact, my default starting
point is a value of 0.005.
| | 04:59 | From that, I then fine-tune my scene.
| | 05:02 | These settings will allow V-Ray to make full
use of the values that have been set in our
| | 05:07 | Image Sampling and Subdiv parameters.
| | 05:10 | Of course, as with any increase in quality,
we are bound to experience slowdown in our renders,
| | 05:16 | but the images we get back will be extremely
clean with regard to the blurry effects, or
| | 05:22 | noisy effects that are contained within them.
| | 05:24 | Now it has to be said that this brief
overview of the Subdiv and DMC Sampler controls may
| | 05:29 | be a little dry, a little bit technical for
some, but we have to reiterate that the DMC
| | 05:34 | Sampler plays a critical role
in the V-Ray rendering process.
| | 05:38 | All too often, it is tweaked just a little as an
afterthought or maybe even ignored by many users.
| | 05:45 | Hopefully though, this brief overview of these
controls will help you avoid making just such a mistake.
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| Manipulating color mapping| 00:00 | Color, or tone, mapping is an internal process
that VRay uses to map the color values needing
| | 00:07 | to be shown in our rendered images.
| | 00:10 | Particular focus is given to the
brightest and darkest values inside of an image.
| | 00:15 | Color mapping does actually have a number of
similarities to a camera's exposure control
| | 00:20 | or the responses of the human eye to light levels
found in the environment, as V-Ray's color mapping
| | 00:25 | has been designed to map the colors in our
pixels to a range that is usable by, and/or
| | 00:30 | viewable on, a computer display device.
| | 00:34 | Of course, color mapping in some form is
something that all render engines do.
| | 00:38 | Without a final translation of information
collected from the scene to RGB color values,
| | 00:44 | well, we would never get any
images from our renders.
| | 00:47 | One of the nice things about V-Ray, however, is
that it allows us to make some prerendered
| | 00:52 | choices as to just how we want
this color mapping to work.
| | 00:56 | To take a look at the Color
Mapping options available in VRay,
| | 00:59 | we need to open up the Options Editor and
then come into the Color Mapping rollout.
| | 01:03 | Here, as you can see, we have a number of
controls that will affect how color mapping
| | 01:07 | is working in our renders.
| | 01:10 | In this video, we just want to focus on the
different color mapping types available to us.
| | 01:16 | Each of these has been designed to deal
with a particular color mapping problem.
| | 01:20 | This means they each have their strengths,
but naturally, that means they each have their
| | 01:24 | own drawbacks as well.
| | 01:27 | To examine how these color mapping types are
working, we are once again going to make use
| | 01:31 | of Adobe Photoshop to just make a
comparison between a number of test renders.
| | 01:36 | The only options we won't give any attention to are
the Gamma Correction and Intensity Gamma types.
| | 01:42 | These really are just legacy options left
over from the days when V-Ray didn't have a
| | 01:47 | Gamma option available in each
of the Color Mapping modes.
| | 01:51 | As this is no longer the case, we can just ignore
the Gamma Correction and Intensity Gamma options.
| | 01:56 | So let's jump over into Photoshop
then and see what our renders reveal.
| | 02:01 | As we've already mentioned, the real focus
of color mapping is really the brightest and
| | 02:06 | darkest values found
inside of a rendered image.
| | 02:09 | It's not surprising, therefore, that when we
switch between our renders, you can see that
| | 02:14 | really, the biggest changes occur in those
areas, particularly in the brightest values,
| | 02:21 | or the brightest areas we
find inside our rendered image.
| | 02:25 | That really is the big difference that
you see between these Color Mapping modes.
| | 02:29 | Linear Multiply is an excellent mode
for using in a compositing workflow.
| | 02:34 | The mathematics behind it are
very straightforward and simple.
| | 02:37 | The problem is, oftentimes we find extremely burned
areas inside of an image that has bright light sources.
| | 02:45 | Because of this, many users lean towards using
the Exponential Color Mapping mode, which as
| | 02:50 | you can see, does not
suffer from that same burnout.
| | 02:53 | If we just switch between the two, you can
see there's quite a bit of difference between
| | 02:57 | those color mapping modes.
| | 03:00 | The difference occurs because rather than
multiplying samples as the Linear Multiply
| | 03:04 | option does, this particular mode simply saturates a
color based on the brightness of the samples taken.
| | 03:11 | The problem is that whenever you increase
the saturation of a color, you naturally push
| | 03:15 | it towards white.
| | 03:17 | As you can see, our bright areas are
definitely pushing towards white values.
| | 03:23 | If this is a problem for us, we may want to
try the next of our Color Mapping modes, which
| | 03:27 | is HSV exponential.
| | 03:30 | This, as you can see, works to preserve the color's
hue and saturation, even in the bright areas.
| | 03:37 | And as you can see, we definitely don't have
that push towards white that exists inside
| | 03:41 | of our Exponential render.
| | 03:43 | The problem with this mode can be that the
color preservation inside of those bright
| | 03:48 | areas can look a little bit unnatural.
| | 03:50 | Oftentimes they don't seem to balance with
the brightness of the environment in which
| | 03:54 | they are being rendered.
| | 03:56 | If this is a problem for us, we may want to
try Intensity Exponential instead, which as
| | 04:02 | you can see, looks a little bit more natural in
terms of how the bright areas are being mapped.
| | 04:07 | Again, this mode is similar to Exponential.
| | 04:10 | In this case though, we preserve the ratio
of the RGB color components, and only the
| | 04:16 | intensity of the colors becomes affected.
| | 04:19 | This means the falloff of the RGB intensity in our
bright spots does look a little more natural.
| | 04:25 | It behaves a little bit more as expected.
| | 04:29 | This particular mode is in fact my personal
favorite if I am not using the Linear Multiply
| | 04:33 | option because of going into
a compositing application.
| | 04:37 | Now, our final render is taken from the
Reinhard Color Mapping mode, which is in fact a hybrid
| | 04:43 | of two existing color mapping modes in V-Ray.
| | 04:46 | This option actually gives us the ability to
blend between a Linear Multiply and Exponential
| | 04:52 | Type render, which oftentimes
can be very useful indeed.
| | 04:57 | We can still keep the brightness of a
linear multiply image if that is what we want,
| | 05:01 | but we can tone it down by just sliding things
over towards an Exponential Render a little bit.
| | 05:08 | The problem we have is that this appears to
be a little bit broken in V-Ray for SketchUp
| | 05:12 | at this moment in time.
| | 05:13 | The parameter that controls
that switch is the Burn value.
| | 05:17 | However, that appears to be missing
inside our V-Ray for SketchUp's interface.
| | 05:21 | No doubt, that will be corrected in
future updates of V-Ray for SketchUp.
| | 05:26 | Because then our use of the Color Mapping
controls will affect not only the way our
| | 05:31 | images look once they've been rendered, but
also to some extent what we are able to do
| | 05:35 | with our renders in post-production, it is
really important that we start our V-Ray rendering
| | 05:40 | sessions having made
sensible color mapping choices.
| | 05:44 | Now, that of course will depend entirely upon the
needs of the project and the final deliverables
| | 05:49 | required of us.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
7. Adding Some Pizzazz to the Rendered OutputAdding displacement to materials| 00:00 | One of the big reasons for working V-Ray as
a rendering engine in SketchUp is of course
| | 00:06 | its ability to create and render
extremely realistic materials.
| | 00:11 | One common element in material creation is
the use of grayscale images to produce the
| | 00:16 | appearance of bump, or
surface, detail in our objects.
| | 00:20 | This goes under the
descriptive name of bump mapping.
| | 00:24 | Oftentimes this simple render engine trick
isn't of to add the desired level of extra
| | 00:28 | believability to our scenes.
| | 00:31 | At other times though, we may need, or indeed
want, something that adds a little bit more.
| | 00:37 | At such times displacement mapping may be
capable of providing that extra quality for us.
| | 00:43 | Now initially, the two can appear to be very
similar, as they both make use of grayscale
| | 00:48 | images to produce a particular effect.
| | 00:51 | The final rendered result, however, will show
that what is going on behind the scenes is
| | 00:55 | really very different indeed.
| | 00:58 | Whereas bump mapping is just an optical
illusion created by the render engine--something that
| | 01:03 | gives us the impression of
height or depth in a material--
| | 01:08 | displacement, or render-time displacement to be more
accurate, gives us real geometry in the scene.
| | 01:14 | It gives us depth to our meshes.
| | 01:16 | This of course means that scene lighting and
material elements such as reflections and
| | 01:21 | refractions can appear much more
believable than with simple bump mapping alone.
| | 01:27 | In this video we're going to step through
the process of adding a little extra realism
| | 01:32 | or life to the outdoor portion of our scene
by adding some displacement to the geometry
| | 01:37 | of our pool water.
| | 01:39 | Of course at this moment in time it would be
a good thing to go and take a test render,
| | 01:43 | just to see what we have, so we can see the
difference between our base render and what
| | 01:47 | we end up with in our displacement effect.
| | 01:51 | Whilst our pool water is behaving realistically
in terms of its reflections and refractions,
| | 01:59 | it is looking a little bit
lifeless, a little bit artificial.
| | 02:03 | That's what we hope to cure by
means of displacement mapping.
| | 02:06 | If I just dismiss our V-Ray Frame Buffer and
select our water geometry, I'm just going
| | 02:11 | to select the Move tool and just show you
that this is indeed just a single-plane object.
| | 02:17 | So if I just Alt+Backspace to revert that
back to its original position, this is just
| | 02:23 | a single-plane object, but it
has been converted into a group.
| | 02:27 | For displacement mapping to work with V-Ray,
the object must be a group, even if it clearly
| | 02:32 | is not a group of separate objects.
| | 02:35 | We can do that quite easily by just
selecting an object in V-Ray, coming up to the Edit
| | 02:40 | menu, and clicking can Make Group, which of
course is grayed out at this moment in time
| | 02:45 | because our object already is a group.
| | 02:47 | Now because displacement mapping is in
effect that is created through our materials, we
| | 02:53 | need to go and open up
our V-Ray Material Editor.
| | 02:55 | So up to the V-Ray toolbar, click
on the M for a Material Editor,
| | 03:00 | and in the list of scene materials, we
want to come and select Pool Water.
| | 03:03 | Now one thing you may be wondering about is the
file that clearly from our SketchUp viewport,
| | 03:08 | there is a Diffuse material
applied to our water geometry.
| | 03:13 | This is been applied so that we can
set the UVW scale for our texture.
| | 03:18 | This is the same texture that we'll be using
for our displacement mapping, but if we just
| | 03:23 | come up to our SketchUp Paint Bucket tool,
and if we come into the In model material,
| | 03:29 | you'll see we have out Pool Water material,
And if we come to Edit, you can see our UVW
| | 03:34 | scale is already set up.
| | 03:36 | We need to texture in
here to be able to do that.
| | 03:38 | We've however made certain that this
Diffuse Map does not show up at render time.
| | 03:43 | We've done this by coming down to the
Transparency Slot and in the Map Slot, you can see we've
| | 03:49 | added a TexAColor.
| | 03:51 | We've set this to a value of pure white,
which means we have complete transparency, so far
| | 03:56 | as the diffuse channel in concerned
in connection with our material.
| | 04:00 | And of course, you've already seen in our test
render that this map doesn't show up at all.
| | 04:05 | To create displacement on our material, we
need first of all, scroll all the way down
| | 04:10 | to the bottom of our Material Options,
until we come to this Maps rollout.
| | 04:15 | As you can see, one of the options
is to create displacement mapping.
| | 04:20 | To enable that of course, we need to put a
check in the box, and then we can come to
| | 04:24 | our Map Slot to add the
required displacement image.
| | 04:27 | Now we could choose a Procedural Map from
the list, but in this instance we want to
| | 04:31 | work with a bitmap image,
so we're going to choose the TexBitmap node.
| | 04:36 | Of course, in here we need to scroll down
until we can see our File Slot here. We just
| | 04:41 | click on the swatch, and if we just navigate
to our exercise files, you'll see there is
| | 04:46 | a Texture Files folder in there also.
| | 04:49 | And if we just scroll down, you can see we have
a Water Displacement image. Just left-mouse-
| | 04:53 | click to select that and we've now
added that image as a displacement map,
| | 04:58 | not that we're quite finished in our Texture
Editing yet though. We do need to be aware
| | 05:03 | that the Gamma Options we choose for our incoming bitmap
will affect how displacement works in our scene.
| | 05:11 | If for instance, we have a map that has come
from an image editing application, such as
| | 05:15 | Photoshop, there is a very high probability that the
data in the image has already been gamma corrected.
| | 05:21 | To be more precise, it'll already have an sRGB
color profile assigned to it, which is almost,
| | 05:27 | but not exactly the same as a 2.2 gamma curve.
| | 05:31 | So inside our Texture Editor options, if we
leave this Color Space Value set at 0, V-Ray
| | 05:38 | will use the image's built-in
gamma or built in color profile.
| | 05:43 | What I actually want to do with my incoming
bitmap is really to use these controls to
| | 05:48 | brighten it up a little bit.
| | 05:50 | I want to even out the contrast and
thereby flatten out any resulting displacement.
| | 05:55 | Now to do that, I need to set my
Color Space option to a value of 1.
| | 06:01 | This means now we can use this Gamma option to
either increase or decrease the midtones in our image.
| | 06:08 | In this instance I am going to set a value of
1.5, just to brighten up my incoming bitmap.
| | 06:14 | If we want, we can of course use Preview
Option just to take a quick render of the map and
| | 06:18 | see how the grayscale values are working.
| | 06:21 | As I'm quite happy with that, I'm just going
to click OK to accept those changes. Back
| | 06:26 | then in our Material Editor, in the Maps
rollout of Pool Water Material, you'll notice down
| | 06:32 | here at the bottom we have quite a number of
controls for handling or dealing with the
| | 06:36 | displacement that we are wanting to create.
| | 06:39 | One of the options in here
is this Use Global setting.
| | 06:42 | With these checked, we're essentially telling
V-Ray to let the Global controls of displacement
| | 06:48 | in V-Ray handle how this
displacement mapping will work.
| | 06:52 | With this option checked, V-Ray will always use
its Global Settings to handle the displacement
| | 06:58 | mapping that we're setting up here.
| | 07:00 | Now if you're certain where the V-Ray's
Global Displays controls are, if we just come up
| | 07:05 | to our Options Editor, you'll see right down at
the bottom we have a Displacement rollout.
| | 07:11 | These are V-Ray's global displacement controls.
| | 07:14 | Now in this particular instance, we're not
going to work with these settings, although
| | 07:18 | you'll notice that they are pretty much the
same as the ones housed in our Maps rollout.
| | 07:24 | Instead, what I'm going to do is uncheck Use
global and work with our local set of displacement
| | 07:30 | controls instead.
| | 07:32 | Working this way oftentimes can be very
useful, especially if we have more than one
| | 07:37 | displacement map in our scene.
| | 07:39 | When we're using Displacement Materials, it's
highly unlikely that we would want two different
| | 07:44 | materials to use the same set of controls
and have the same settings, so being able
| | 07:49 | to work in a local sense
can be very handy indeed.
| | 07:53 | Of course, because of the memory requirements
associated with displacement mapping, it'd
| | 07:58 | perhaps be unwise to have too
many such materials on the go.
| | 08:01 | Generally speaking, one or two is more than
enough inside of a single SketchUp scene.
| | 08:06 | Now straightaway, inside of my displacement
setup, I want go and change my Displacement
| | 08:12 | value to around about not
75, but around about .75.
| | 08:17 | This value really tells V-Ray to
either add to or subtract from the Displacement
| | 08:23 | values already set up in our grayscale map.
| | 08:26 | Of course, using the Grayscale values, V-Ray will
determine and measure an amount of displacement,
| | 08:32 | and this multiplier can either add to or as
we say, subtract from. So I'm just going to
| | 08:36 | dial things back a little bit by
setting a value of .75 in here.
| | 08:41 | The thing I want to do is come down to my
Edge Length parameter. In here, I'm going
| | 08:45 | to set a value of 2.
| | 08:48 | This option tells V-Ray the maximum length
that any edge can have inside of our displaced
| | 08:54 | mesh. Smaller numbers mean smaller edges,
| | 08:58 | and smaller edges will give us a higher quality
of displacement, but those come at the expense
| | 09:04 | of much more geometry added
into the scene at render time.
| | 09:09 | This naturally will slow down the rendering
process, and it'll eat up more and more our
| | 09:14 | system's memory resources.
| | 09:16 | Generally speaking, we'll want to start testing
with the default value of four and then slowly
| | 09:21 | drop this value down in small increments,
all the while comparing the quality of our
| | 09:27 | displaced and result with the impact that
we're having on our system's resources.
| | 09:32 | A parameter that is tied to our Edge Length
value is this View Dependent checkbox. View
| | 09:38 | Dependent means that we're
currently working in pixels.
| | 09:42 | If we uncheck this box, we'll be looking in
scene units, which would obviously have quite
| | 09:47 | a significant impact on how our
displacement would turn out.
| | 09:52 | So currently, we are setting a maximum edge
length in our displacement of two pixels,
| | 09:57 | which should work fine for our purposes.
| | 10:00 | What we can do now then is take another test
render and see whether or not our displacement
| | 10:05 | is actually working for us,
which of course it clearly is.
| | 10:13 | Now our water surface gives the impression of
being disturbed by a surface wind or a surface
| | 10:18 | breeze of some type, which in turn makes our
reflections and our refractions so much more believable.
| | 10:24 | So, although not something that we'd want to
overuse in our scenes, due to the strain
| | 10:30 | it puts on system resources--and we can very
easily crash SketchUp if we're not careful--
| | 10:36 | we can see that selective use of
displacement on objects that will benefit from it can
| | 10:41 | go a long, long way towards adding to the
final quality and realism of our V-Ray and SketchUp renders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using caustic lighting effects| 00:00 | Objects rendered in a 3D application, to take on a
genuine level of believability in a viewer's mind,
| | 00:07 | they really do need to interact
correctly with the environment around them.
| | 00:11 | Adding real-world lighting effects such as
caustics can oftentimes make all the difference
| | 00:17 | in the world when it comes to
creating a believable shot.
| | 00:20 | In this video we're going to make use of photon
mapping in V-Ray and show you how we can generate
| | 00:26 | realistic caustic effects in our scenes.
| | 00:29 | As the V-Ray sun is currently the key light in
our scene, it is going to play an extremely
| | 00:35 | important role in helping us
create this particular effect.
| | 00:38 | Of course, one of the first things we need in
our scene is a surface type and a material
| | 00:43 | that we would expect
caustics to be generated from.
| | 00:47 | Typically, these would be
refractive objects or materials.
| | 00:51 | For our purposes, we're going to use the old
chestnut of caustic demonstrations and work
| | 00:56 | with our ornamental pool water.
| | 00:58 | We already of course have the perfect material
in place here, as we have our refractive water
| | 01:04 | surface along with
displacement mapping added to it.
| | 01:08 | Now displacement mapping will be important
in the generation of our caustic effects,
| | 01:13 | really it is the displacement on our surface
that will generate the caustic patterns for us.
| | 01:18 | It'll shape the caustic patterns, and a little
bit later on, you'll see just how true that is.
| | 01:23 | Let's start creating our caustic effect then by
first of all going and turning on the Caustic
| | 01:28 | systems in V-Ray.
| | 01:29 | So let's open up our Options Editor, and down towards
the bottom you'll see we've a Caustics rollout.
| | 01:35 | To enable the system all we need to
do is put a check in the On box.
| | 01:40 | This now tells V-Ray that light objects in the
scene need to be generating caustic photons.
| | 01:46 | It probably is worth just highlighting here
that V-Ray keeps the Caustic Photon and GI
| | 01:51 | Photon systems completely separate; this
affords us much greater control over each of these
| | 01:57 | lighting elements.
| | 01:59 | Now even though we have enabled our caustic
system, taking a test render at this time
| | 02:04 | would reveal that we don't necessarily get
any viewable caustic effects in the scene.
| | 02:10 | First of all, we need to go and perform a
little bit of a tweak to our V-Ray sun settings;
| | 02:14 | we did say it would play a key role in
the creation of this particular effect.
| | 02:19 | So let's come up to our Environment rollout and
we want to come into the Map Slot of our GI
| | 02:25 | Color controls.
| | 02:27 | In here you'll see we've this Sampling section
inside our SunLight controls that basically
| | 02:33 | handles the generation of caustic photons.
| | 02:36 | The value we initially need to tweak
in here is this Photon Radius setting.
| | 02:40 | This value sets an area in scene units inside
of which caustic photons will be generated.
| | 02:47 | Outside of that area, there will
be no photons cast into the scene.
| | 02:51 | This really helps save both time and memory.
| | 02:55 | Of course, we need to set this value high
enough so that our entire pool area is encompassed.
| | 03:01 | In here then, I'm going to set a value of 600.
Remember, this is working in SketchUp's
| | 03:05 | scene units, which will be inches.
| | 03:08 | So with that tweak made, let's see if we
actually get any caustics in our scene now.
| | 03:13 | So let's take a test render.
| | 03:17 | Very clearly, you can see that we do indeed
have caustics being generated in our scene.
| | 03:22 | If we look on the bottom of our pool,
you can see these soft lighting patterns that
| | 03:26 | are playing across the bottom of the pool.
And you can see we are generating caustics
| | 03:31 | from our glass butterfly,
| | 03:33 | so we're getting two sets of
caustics for the price of one here.
| | 03:37 | Clearly though, what we have are not the typical sort of
patterns that people expect from a caustic effect,
| | 03:43 | so we really need to improve things a little
bit here before we can call ourselves finished
| | 03:48 | with this particular lighting effect.
| | 03:50 | Our first port of call then will be our sun
controls, so let's go into our Options Editor,
| | 03:56 | the Environment rollout, and into our GI color map
slot, and let's again go to our Sampling controls.
| | 04:03 | This time we want to alter the value in our
Caustic Subdivs setting, so we're going to
| | 04:07 | up this to a value of around about 6,000.
That's quite a high setting. This essentially
| | 04:13 | is quality controlled again
for our caustic effect.
| | 04:17 | Essentially what this setting does is really
allow V-Ray to calculate more complex light
| | 04:22 | paths; it'll use more caustic photons,
essentially adding more detail to them.
| | 04:28 | So a value of 6000 should work very nicely there.
We may also want to brighten our caustics up a little bit.
| | 04:34 | Obviously, we have to be very careful with
this, because we need to match the brightness
| | 04:37 | of the caustics with the level of direct
illumination that is visible in the sense.
| | 04:42 | But if we up this to a value of about 1.2,
that should just make our caustic effect
| | 04:47 | stand out a little bit more clearly.
| | 04:50 | So those are the settings we
want to tweak on our V-Ray Sun.
| | 04:53 | We do want to come back to our Caustic
rollout and make a couple of changes in here,
| | 04:59 | the first of which will be to
decrease our Search Distance value.
| | 05:02 | I'm going to set this to
something around about 5.
| | 05:05 | We'll now get less averaging
between photon samples in a scene.
| | 05:10 | V-Ray will not look as far out in scene units
in order to gather new photon samples that
| | 05:15 | it will average across.
| | 05:17 | This should have the effect of
sharpening up our caustic patterns.
| | 05:22 | Of course, if we want to blur our patterns,
then increasing the Search Distance would do that for us.
| | 05:27 | We also want to make a tiny
tweak to our Max Photons.
| | 05:30 | We'll set this to a value of 25.
Again, we're now using less photons in the creation of
| | 05:36 | each caustic pattern.
| | 05:38 | This again will have the effect
of sharpening our caustics up.
| | 05:42 | And once again, if we wanted to blur our
caustic patterns, then increasing the Max Photons
| | 05:47 | would probably do that for us.
| | 05:49 | So with those changes made,
let's once again go and take a render.
| | 05:55 | What we have now of course is a
much more typical caustic effect.
| | 05:59 | These are the sort of patterns that people
expect when you talk about adding caustic
| | 06:03 | effects into a scene.
| | 06:05 | Now of course, we can very clearly see that
connection between our caustic patterns and
| | 06:10 | the displacement map that we're using.
| | 06:11 | You can see that the bright spots in our
caustic effect very much map to brighter spots in
| | 06:17 | our displacement map.
| | 06:19 | So if it is that we want a less noisy caustic
effect, then certainly the type of displacement
| | 06:24 | that we use would have a huge impact on that.
| | 06:28 | Not that we need displacement in order to
generate caustics; you can see we are getting
| | 06:32 | some very interesting caustic patterns coming
from our glass butterfly, and that of course
| | 06:37 | has no displacement applied to it.
| | 06:40 | We don't even have to have refractive materials;
we did mention earlier on that a refractive
| | 06:44 | material is typically one that
would generate caustics, which it is.
| | 06:48 | But reflective materials can
generate caustics just as easily.
| | 06:51 | So metals, glass mirrors, those sorts of
materials would definitely generate reflective, instead
| | 06:56 | of refractive, caustics.
| | 06:58 | In fact, if we just take a look at our poolside,
you see, because of the reflective nature of
| | 07:03 | our water material, we are
some reflected caustics also.
| | 07:08 | Keep in mind also that every scene will be
different; the settings that we have used
| | 07:12 | to generate our caustic effect will not
necessarily work on projects of your own.
| | 07:17 | You may need to be prepared to do a little
bit of experimentation in order to find just
| | 07:21 | the right mixture of
settings that work for you.
| | 07:25 | Finding these extra little nuances to add
into our scenes can most definitely go a long
| | 07:30 | way towards our ultimate goal of producing
high-quality unbelievable renders from the V-Ray engine.
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| Creating occlusion effects| 00:00 | One of the big challenges that any artist
faces when creating any kind of an interior
| | 00:06 | render is the capturing of detail that
oftentimes only gets highlighted or becomes noticeable
| | 00:11 | in a render because of shadows in the scene.
| | 00:14 | Now, rather than shadows created by light
sources, what we're referring to here are
| | 00:19 | really occlusion shadows, that is, a surface
darkening that is caused by the close proximity
| | 00:24 | of one object to another.
| | 00:26 | This causes the general environment lighting
to be somewhat obstructed or occluded, hence
| | 00:31 | the name ambient occlusion.
| | 00:34 | We have of course already seen how difficult
or at least time-consuming it can be to try
| | 00:39 | and pull out small details in the scene
using our global illumination engines,
| | 00:44 | although certainly that is possible, especially
if we use the Deterministic Monte Carlo engine.
| | 00:49 | A somewhat quicker option that is available to
us can be found in the Indirect Illumination
| | 00:54 | rollout of our Options Editor,
| | 00:56 | so let's go and open that up for ourselves.
| | 00:58 | If we open the Indirect Illumination rollout,
you can see we do have an Ambient Occlusion group.
| | 01:04 | By default, this option is disabled inside
of the render engine, so if we want to use
| | 01:09 | it, we would need to come and turn it on and
then of course work with the Radius, Subdivs,
| | 01:14 | and Amount controls to get the
kind of effect that we wanted.
| | 01:18 | This option is understandably very easy to
work with and can add a nice bit of extra
| | 01:22 | punch when it comes to pulling out
details for our interior renders.
| | 01:27 | The only problem with using this option is
that our extra occlusion will now be baked
| | 01:32 | into the final render.
| | 01:34 | If we want to make any kind of a change to
that effect, then we would have to re-render
| | 01:38 | our entire scene.
| | 01:40 | This is why oftentimes artists prefer to
work with an extra occlusion-only render, an
| | 01:45 | extra pass that can be added over the top
of a beauty render inside a post-production
| | 01:50 | application such as Photoshop.
| | 01:52 | Now, when using V-Ray in other applications
such as 3ds Max or Maya, this is a pretty
| | 01:57 | straightforward task.
| | 01:59 | Then we have an extra text render element,
or V-Ray Frame Buffer Channel, if we want to
| | 02:04 | use V-Ray for SketchUp speak, that
allows us to create custom element renders.
| | 02:09 | This means we can use a V-Ray dirt map to create an
ambient occlusion pass or element for ourselves.
| | 02:15 | The problem is V-Ray for SketchUp doesn't have such
an option in its VRay Frame Buffer Channels list.
| | 02:21 | In fact, if we just close our Indirect Illumination
rollout, we can open up the VFB Channels rollout
| | 02:26 | for ourselves and have a look.
| | 02:28 | And as you can see, as we look down the list,
we don't have a V-Ray dirt map or indeed an
| | 02:32 | Ambient Occlusion channel
that we can work with.
| | 02:36 | Because this is so, we're going to take a
slightly creative approach towards creating
| | 02:40 | our own ambient occlusion element.
| | 02:43 | Indeed, what we're going to do is
use this Diffuse channel option.
| | 02:48 | Because this particular channel doesn't make
use of scene lighting in its creation, it
| | 02:52 | provides a very nice approach for creating
an occlusion render pass for ourselves.
| | 02:57 | Of course do keep in mind that we really are
creating a workaround here, and so the workflow
| | 03:02 | is a little bit clunky, but the end result that
it produces is definitely very, very usable.
| | 03:07 | So, the first thing we're going to do is go and
create an ambient occlusion material for ourselves.
| | 03:12 | So, let's open up our V-Ray Material Editor.
| | 03:15 | I am just going to select the Scene Materials
label, right-click, go to Create Material,
| | 03:20 | and add a new standard material to the list.
| | 03:22 | Straightaway of course, I am going to go
down to the bottom of the list where that
| | 03:26 | new material has been added, right-click on
it, and use the Rename Material function.
| | 03:31 | And, as always, we're going to use a nice
descriptive name; AO should work very nicely
| | 03:36 | for us in this instance.
| | 03:39 | Inside the Texture Editor, we can use the dropdown,
and you can see we have this TexDirt node.
| | 03:44 | This is essentially a V-Ray dirt map.
| | 03:46 | Now, there are quite a few controls in here
that we can work with; however, in this particular
| | 03:51 | instance, we only need to
make a change to a few of them.
| | 03:53 | The first change we'll make
is to our Subdivs value.
| | 03:57 | Again, this can be thought of as quality control
regarding the noise inside our ambient occlusion effect.
| | 04:03 | So, I am just going to
set that to a value of 24.
| | 04:07 | The next option we want to
work with is our Radius value.
| | 04:10 | If we want a nice subtle effect inside this
particular scene, a value of 10 or slightly
| | 04:15 | lower would work very nicely. But as this
is a demonstration, I am just going to push
| | 04:19 | this effect a little bit and make it
very, very obvious for ourselves.
| | 04:22 | I do want a little tweak to
be made to our Falloff value.
| | 04:26 | I am going to set this to 0.5.
| | 04:28 | Of course you can set it to a value
that suits your particular taste.
| | 04:31 | And then finally, I want to
uncheck this Ignore for GI option.
| | 04:36 | I have done this because we get a much smoother
ambient occlusion result with our GI systems enabled.
| | 04:43 | This of course means we need to uncheck Ignore
for GI because we don't want this particular
| | 04:47 | map to be ignored inside
of those calculations.
| | 04:51 | So with that final tweak
made, we can now click OK.
| | 04:54 | Naturally, we now need to apply our AO
material to all of the geometry in the scene.
| | 05:00 | So, let's come up to the Edit menu.
| | 05:02 | I am just going to choose
the Select All command.
| | 05:05 | And before I try and apply this material,
I am just going to right-click on the geometry
| | 05:09 | and use the Explode function.
| | 05:12 | Do bear in mind, if you have nested groups in
your scene, you may need to run the Explode
| | 05:16 | command on them a couple of times.
| | 05:19 | If you're wondering why we are exploding our
geometry, this is just simply to make applying
| | 05:24 | our material a one-click process.
| | 05:27 | Having used the Explode command then, I just need to
go and use the Select All function one more time.
| | 05:33 | Then we can just come to our Paint Bucket
tool, click on our scene geometry, and as
| | 05:39 | you can see, our AO material is applied
to all of the geometry in the scene.
| | 05:44 | Of course, we're still not
ready to render just yet.
| | 05:46 | We need to make certain that we have all of the
channel elements that we need to work with.
| | 05:50 | So again, I am just going to use spacebar to
go back to my regular Select tool, and we're
| | 05:54 | going to open up the
Options Editor for ourselves.
| | 05:58 | And inside the VFB Channels rollout, we can
just click to select the options that we need.
| | 06:02 | So we can enable our RGB color.
| | 06:05 | It will be rendered in there anyway.
| | 06:07 | We can left-mouse-click to add an alpha channel,
and of course we also want a Diffuse channel
| | 06:12 | for ourselves. If you want to deselect any of these,
then you just again left-mouse-click on them.
| | 06:17 | Again, just to be certain, RGB Color, Alpha, and
Diffuse are the channels that we need to work with.
| | 06:23 | We do also need to point out that our
image sampler controls are important.
| | 06:27 | We need to make certain that we are
getting a good level of quality out of them.
| | 06:31 | This will affect our alpha channel and the ambient
occlusion effect inside of our Diffuse channel.
| | 06:37 | So, I am just going to set our
Type, our engine, to Adaptive DMC.
| | 06:41 | I am going to make certain that we've got a
reasonably high quality setting in here of 1 and 10.
| | 06:47 | We should probably also point out that
although we have our indirect illumination systems
| | 06:52 | enabled, the actual settings we're using
inside both the Irradiance Map and the Light Cache
| | 06:57 | are very, very low indeed.
| | 06:59 | We're not going to use the RGB
Color channel from this render.
| | 07:03 | We're not going to really get anything usable, so
low-quality settings in there do not matter at all.
| | 07:08 | Well, now with those tweaks made, we are
ready to go and enable a test render.
| | 07:13 | So let's close our Options Editor
and use the Start Render icon.
| | 07:17 | Now, once our render is finished, clearly,
as we said we would, we get nothing usable
| | 07:23 | from our RGB Color channel.
| | 07:25 | But if we just come to our VRay Frame Buffer
Channels dropdown, you can see, first of
| | 07:29 | all, we have our alpha channel.
| | 07:31 | We're going to need this when we
come to our compositing application.
| | 07:35 | This will allow us to reclaim our environment
background. And we also see that we have our
| | 07:41 | diffuse channel, and if we click on that, you
can see we get a very nice ambient occlusion
| | 07:46 | render indeed, although, as you can see, our
environment is rendering as black, which is
| | 07:50 | why we need the alpha channel for use
inside a compositing application.
| | 07:56 | As we said, this is a workaround and so it
does leave a little bit of something to be
| | 08:00 | desired in terms of its ease-of-use, but still,
we can very quickly and very easily create
| | 08:05 | a very nice ambient occlusion effect for
ourselves that can be used to add a little bit of extra
| | 08:10 | punch to our finished renders.
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| Creating a non-photorealistic render (NPR) with the Toon material| 00:00 | One last effect that we want to create before
we wrap up our SketchUp Rendering with V-Ray
| | 00:05 | course is a non-photorealistic
rendering, or NPR for short.
| | 00:11 | What we'll do is use two V-Ray material types,
in tandem as it were, to create a very nice,
| | 00:17 | very stylized NPR setup for ourselves.
| | 00:21 | To do that, of course we're going to
need to open up V-Ray's Material Editor,
| | 00:24 | so let's go up to the toolbar and
click on the Material Editor icon.
| | 00:29 | In here, you'll see we have one scene material, which
is the default gray material currently applied.
| | 00:34 | Of course, we need to create a
couple of materials for ourselves.
| | 00:38 | The first one will be a V-Ray Standard material,
| | 00:40 | so let's right-click on the Scene Materials
label, go to Create Material, and select Standard.
| | 00:45 | As is our practice, we are instantly
going to go and rename this material.
| | 00:50 | We'll give it a descriptive name.
| | 00:51 | So, right-click, go to Rename Material, and
we'll just call this NPR_Base, because this
| | 01:00 | essentially is going to be our base material.
| | 01:03 | The first thing we will do is set up our diffuse
coloration, and we're going to use a bitmap for this.
| | 01:07 | So, let's come up to the Diffuse map slot.
| | 01:09 | We'll click on that to open the Texture Editor,
and we'll go and select the TexBitmap node.
| | 01:15 | As we've done a number of times already, we're going
to go and add a file into this particular node.
| | 01:20 | Once we click on the swatch, we're going to
want to navigate to our Exercise_Files and
| | 01:25 | Texture_Files folder.
| | 01:27 | And as you can see, we have a
couple of NPR map types in here.
| | 01:30 | I'm just going to choose this
orange version from ourself.
| | 01:33 | And once that's loaded in,
we can just click OK.
| | 01:36 | Now, perhaps one word of caution that it is
worth sounding here is with regard to the
| | 01:41 | type of base material that we create.
| | 01:44 | See, we're going to apply this material
to every single object in the scene.
| | 01:48 | So, if we create a material that looks as
per a real-world surface, then that could
| | 01:53 | be a little bit confusing visually.
| | 01:56 | If we create a material that looks like some
kind of metal surface, and then we apply that
| | 02:00 | to scene objects that clearly
are not meant to be metallic,
| | 02:04 | that tends to be a little
bit confusing visually.
| | 02:06 | Generally speaking, it is much better to stick
to map types that really lend themselves to
| | 02:12 | non-photorealistic rendering, in other words,
something that doesn't look like a real-world surface.
| | 02:18 | That's not to say of course that we
can't add effects into our base material.
| | 02:21 | We can add reflections and refractions if
we feel that will add to the NPR effect.
| | 02:27 | In this instance, I'm just going to use a
bump map, so let's put a check in the box
| | 02:31 | and let's go and use the map slot available.
| | 02:34 | We're going to again add a bitmap in
here. I'll scroll down to the File slot.
| | 02:39 | Again, we'll need to navigate to our Exercise_
Files > Texture_Files folder, and the map I'm going
| | 02:45 | to choose is this OutsideWall_Bump.
| | 02:48 | As we don't need to make any changes to the
options in here, again, we can go and click OK.
| | 02:52 | Now, of course we need to go
and create our second material,
| | 02:56 | so again, go to the Scene Materials label,
right-click, Create Material, and this time
| | 03:01 | we're going to use a V-Ray Toon material.
| | 03:03 | Again, as is the custom, we're going to go
and rename this, so select, right-click, go
| | 03:08 | to Rename Material. And essentially we're
going to use this material to provide our
| | 03:12 | ink lines over the top of our bitmap effect,
| | 03:15 | so let's call this one NPR_Ink, just
so that it is nice and descriptive.
| | 03:23 | Our first step to setting up this material
is to of course go and add our base material
| | 03:27 | into the base material slot.
| | 03:29 | Now, when we select our Select Material dialog,
in this dropdown we will see a list of all
| | 03:34 | current scene materials.
| | 03:36 | Of course, as we only have two, then that really is
not surprising that that's all that's in our list.
| | 03:41 | So, let's choose our NPR_Base and click OK.
| | 03:45 | Now, at this point, we could go and make many
changes to the parameters that make up the
| | 03:50 | V-Ray Toon material.
| | 03:52 | But we only need to work with a few of the
basic parameters at this moment in time.
| | 03:56 | For instance, I'm just going to
change our line color a little bit.
| | 04:00 | Oftentimes most people prefer to work with
a black or very dark gray line material, but
| | 04:05 | I'm just going to go and I'm going to choose
a purple material, and then I'm just going
| | 04:08 | to slide that very much towards
the black end of the spectrum.
| | 04:12 | So, we've got a really nice dark purple.
| | 04:14 | So let's click OK to that.
| | 04:16 | We're going to alter our
Line Width just a little bit.
| | 04:19 | We will increase this value to 1.5.
| | 04:23 | I'm just going to add a little bit into our
Distortion parameter, and that pretty much is it.
| | 04:28 | We could of course experiment with
all of the other options available.
| | 04:32 | We would encourage you to do that. And you
can see that for many of these parameters,
| | 04:36 | we can actually use other
map types to drive them.
| | 04:39 | That is a very powerful
feature of the V-Ray Toon material.
| | 04:42 | But as we are complete here, let's
close down our Material Editor.
| | 04:46 | Well, actually, we do need to keep the
Material Editor here, because what we want to do is
| | 04:50 | just go and select an object in our scene,
and then I'm going to use the Ctrl+A keyboard
| | 04:53 | shortcut to make certain that every
object in the environment is selected.
| | 04:58 | Then I'm going to come to my NPR_Ink material,
right-click, and then apply a material to selection.
| | 05:05 | And instantly in the SketchUp viewport,
you can see that that is exactly what happens.
| | 05:10 | Now we can dismiss the Material Editor, and
we can of course take a test render and see
| | 05:14 | how our NPR effect is working.
| | 05:20 | As you can see, our NPR effect is
indeed working and looking rather nice.
| | 05:24 | There is detail missing in the scene,
| | 05:26 | however. I know that my bitmap
file has texture detail in it.
| | 05:30 | There is visual detail that I
am not seeing in my render.
| | 05:34 | At this moment in time, it looks very much
as if we have just chosen a solid color, and
| | 05:38 | we're not really seeing
anything from our bump map.
| | 05:41 | Now, this is because there is of
course a step that we neglected to take.
| | 05:45 | We haven't set up the UVW
mapping scale for our textures.
| | 05:49 | So let's go and do that.
| | 05:50 | Let's choose SketchUp's Paint Bucket tool,
which will of course bring up our SketchUp
| | 05:53 | Materials Editor.
| | 05:55 | Let's make certain we're
looking at the materials in model.
| | 05:57 | We want to be certain we have our NPR_Ink
material chosen, and let's go and edit.
| | 06:03 | In here, you can see currently our UVW scale
is set to just 10 inches, which is not enough
| | 06:09 | to bring out the detail in our bitmap.
| | 06:11 | So, let's set this value
to something much higher.
| | 06:14 | I'm going to use 120 inches,
which of course is 10 feet.
| | 06:19 | And if you look in the SketchUp viewport,
you can see that we now see detail from our bitmap.
| | 06:23 | This is a very easy way to judge whether or
not Scale setting is going to work for us.
| | 06:28 | Now let's take another test render and
see what kind of an effect that has had.
| | 06:35 | Just that little tweak to the scale then has
clearly helped us enhance our NPR effect.
| | 06:41 | We just have a textury feel now to
the render that was missing before.
| | 06:45 | What we're left with of course is a very nice
stylized render that can easily be used to
| | 06:49 | show off the qualities of any architectural space,
and of course we don't have the distractions
| | 06:54 | of colors and materials in the scene.
| | 06:56 | That really is the power of
non-photorealistic rendering.
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ConclusionWhat's next?| 00:00 | So, we have come to the end of our
SketchUp Rendering Using V-Ray course,
| | 00:04 | but there is still plenty you can do to
continue building your V-Ray rendering skills.
| | 00:10 | One excellent option is to
simply practice what you've learned.
| | 00:15 | If you have access to the exercise files and
the example scenes used in this course, well,
| | 00:19 | so much the better.
| | 00:21 | Do pay attention also to real-world photography
courses here on lynda.com; especially be sure
| | 00:26 | to check out The Foundations of
Photography series by Ben Long that we mentioned.
| | 00:31 | Then of course you need to take what you
learned regarding the principles of photography and
| | 00:35 | apply it to working with V-Ray, and in
particular the V-Ray physical camera.
| | 00:39 | You can also check out our V-Ray 2.0 for 3ds
Max and V-Ray 2.0 for Maya Essential Training
| | 00:46 | courses found here on lynda.com.
| | 00:49 | Although the host applications may be different,
the essentials regarding how V-Ray works are
| | 00:54 | still very much the same.
| | 00:56 | Finally, you may want to check out the wealth
of V-Ray information that can be found on Chaos
| | 01:01 | Group's own Internet forums.
| | 01:03 | These are found at www.chaosgroup.com
| | 01:05 | Well, I certainly hope that you have found
this course to be both helpful and informative
| | 01:12 | when it comes to getting up and
running with V-Ray for SketchUp.
| | 01:16 | My name is Brian Bradley, and I
will say take care and bye for now!
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