From the course: Rhino and V-Ray: Product Design Rendering

Learning from bad renderings

From the course: Rhino and V-Ray: Product Design Rendering

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Learning from bad renderings

In this video, we'll learn some simple strategies to avoid the curse of the ugly or cheesy renderings. So these are mistakes that I'll see from beginners, but these same mistakes can easily happen to more advanced users. I'll break them into a couple simple categories. But in this video, we'll be a little more specific and show examples of good renderings and bad renderings. So this is a bit of a recap. We'll start off with design. Of course, attention to details is important. But I also want to include not having any gaps or openings in your model. Edges should be, avoid being sharp. I'm going to give you examples later. But we want to see rounded corners or fillets or chamfers, so that we get reflections from those edges. We also talked about having, shiny materials being too close so they start to reflect. So one thing I look for is just having kind of a contrast whenever we see something that's really shiny. I might accent it with a matte material close by. So that brings us to the studio, I always like to pull the camera in close. And have a wide lens. I'm going to go back and double-click on this view port icon here, the label. And the top view you can kind of see what's going on. We have, one light above, unlock those so I can highlight those. So we have a light above and that's going to be the brighter of the three lights. And then, we have one from the side. And one from the other side. So the point here is the studio is the proper size. So the lights can kind of flood the space. And then, especially important, fade away into the background. The lighting needs to be balance in the total summation. And that means as you add more fixtures, you might have to reduce the power of the earlier fixtures. You'll notice when you place a light in this scene, the default power is 30. So after you have several more lights, they may be knocked down to 10 or 20 each. We talked about the backdrop filling your view. So it does that nicely if we go back to this view port here. We don't see any of those edges. I'm using a curve backdrop. Now this important to use a matte material. I'm going to show you an example where we had something a little too glossy. And this curve where transitions from floor to wall can look really bad if we have any reflections whatsoever. Finally, my favorite tip of all is what I sometimes nickname Still Life Without Fruit. And that basically means we get extra copies and those are going to be much more interesting in an arrangement. So I'm going to get this camera over to this is saved view. So here's dynamic view point I mentioned. We can crop off near objects. That's not a problem. We get to see the same geometry from different angles and other areas. So those are the, kind of the dos and don'ts. Let's look at a bad example first before we do the high quality rendering. Okay, in this bad example, first off there's like so many problems I don't know where to start. I'll just go by saying that this camera is like way to high. Things kind of look like they're small toys or somebody dropped them. Also notice in the camera, there's got kind of a long lens on there. It's more telephoto. Not very wide angle. If we look at these two objects over here, these copies. That was the right idea but they're kind of overlapping and the forms do not read at all. So you want to have this camera be wide angled and much lower. Now you always want to have the object to appear a little bit more monumental and majestic. So, get down at least to the center or even lower. Try to look level or a little bit up. Here is the backdrop. We're seeing the edge. And mistakes keep going here. So we don't want to see what's beyond there, which is pretty much nothing. This bright white square is actual light. That's a big mistake. You want to keep those off to the side. Just like any good photographer would. And then finally, we get down to a couple problems here on the floor. Then notice we can see some pretty bright reflections on this floor. And, since it kind of curves towards the rear, we're getting some weird lensing here. Just think of a fun house mirror where everything's distorted. Since our floor is connected to the wall and it's reflective, we've got some just weird reflections back here which are very distracting. And finally, we've got what I call little floaters. This is a cord which I guess was made, a little bit too quickly, so it's kind of hovering above the ground. So that'a a big no no. Let's go back to the rhino scene. I've got this setup, with a nice dynamic camera placement. You notice I kind of tipped it a little bit. We've got some objects close, other objects far, but everything is kind of dynamically moving around the scene. Before I launch this rendering though, this is kind of a brief refresher. I've been doing some earlier renderings that were kind of low quality, just quick tests. I'm going to bump this back up to maybe medium or high quality here. That's fine. And we have to hit the green check mark. So there's going to be dozens of settings that get modified or updated. Another thing I noticed with some of the earlier tests were a little bit too bright. So I'm going to speed up the shutter and go from a 15th of a second to a 30th. And I think that will solve my problem. So this is the physical camera, we'll talk more about later. But this is a great way to avoid playing around and tweaking with materials and lights and powers and moving them closer, farther. We can just use a camera. It's based on a real world physical camera. As long as Exposure button over here or selector is picked, then this becomes all the settings we really need. We can just go back and forth between either F number or shutter speed. I kind of prefer the shutter speed. So with those two settings done, we can close this. And I'm going to start the rendering. And we'll kind of revisit when it's complete. Okay, our rendering is done and looking quite a bit better than that other ugly one. So let's just take a quick review here. We've got some nice variation of lighting, so this is kind of a nice highlight wash. We've got other, more narrow highlights around edges of objects. We're getting some nice separation. Here's a great highlight. So this edge is cleanly reading as an object close to the camera. And you can tell that the background is a different tone altogether. So off in the distance, we've got kind of spill of light here. So it looks like we've got some fixtures. We already know that there's one on top. So that's kind of what's causing this to be a little bit brighter. But you, you can kind of sense where the lights are in the scene. They not only help them define the shade, but kind of pop them out of the background and through highlights. Making them appear little more interesting, dynamic, three dimensional so you kind of get the idea where after here. Now if I had to pick the most common mistake that beginners make with rendering. It's gotta be what I call project fatigue. This is where you become so familiar or just plain tired of the design, you no longer see it clearly. And that can just lead to bad renderings because it looks the same to you every time. Most importantly, you want to look at the scene as if you were someone who'd never seen it before. So that really help you understand where problems are and fix them quickly. So remember, try to keep a fresh eye or just ask a friend for a quick review.

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