5 Areas to Improve your Renders Instantly (Beginner Keyshot Tutorial)

hi guys i'm shane and in today's video i'm going to cover five key areas you should focus on to improve your renderings these tips should help you to transform your renders from looking something like this to this so let's get into it so i'm going to go over five key areas that you should focus on if you're trying to improve your renderings and some of the techniques that i would use these are just the sort of things i wish i'd knew in my first year of uni to get me started on the right track now i'm using keyshot but most of these techniques and principles can be applied across all rendering platforms so one common shortcoming in beginner renderings is a lack of contrast contrast is a great way to clearly separate all the elements of a render it also makes for a more interesting render and helps to direct the focus of the image you can add contrast to your renderings using lighting materials and color but first we're going to focus on materials if we jump into our scene here you can see i've got some basic materials already applied i've got a solid glass material with a fractal noise to add some subtle imperfections i've also got a liquid material with the same fractal noise and a bit of color as well as a plastic material being used as the ground plane the scene is lit using a custom hdri with one small key light providing most of the light for the scene as i mentioned we're going to start with materials to add some contrast to our scene at the moment i've got very smooth glass and liquid being used so one way we can add contrast is to add some imperfections and roughness to our ground plane you're more than welcome to use external websites to get your materials like polygon i'm just going to be using the textures that are built into keyshot showing how you can quickly improve your renders using the things that are already built into the software in most 3d softwares you should be able to use image textures to control the diffuse bump and roughness you'll want to click the material graph button to open up your material graph as this is what we're going to be using to build our custom materials the first thing i'm going to do here is change my ground plane material type from plastic to metallic paint i think the metallic paint material is great for ground planes and it's a little bit more visually interesting than the standard plastic we're then going to go into our textures tab and grab the dull ceramic texture this will be used to control our color our bump and our roughness all using one texture first we want to sort out the scale of the texture so if we double click and press c on your keyboard you'll be able to view the color information of the map this will make it much easier to scale down we'll then want to connect it to the base color and as you can see here it makes a very subtle difference this creates a bit of color variation across the ground plane so it's not just a flat color which makes it a little bit more realistic and visually interesting one thing i am going to do is right click go to utilities and add a color adjust and i'll use this to control the saturation of the texture i'll reduce the saturation down as i don't want the color of the texture to distract from the color of the whiskey next we're going to connect the texture to the bump channel bump or normal maps are texture maps that simulate bumps to give depth it doesn't affect the geometry therefore it doesn't affect the render times whereas a displacement map would affect the geometry and increase render times with bump maps quite often less is more so don't go overboard as this will result in an unrealistic looking material you'll see here that i'll just play with the value that just adds the subtle imperfections to the ground plane next i'm going to connect it to the metal roughness this will help add some variance to the roughness of our material i'm then going to add another utility called color to number this utility is very important i use it in almost every render so i would recommend getting to know it well the color to number node converts your texture to a grayscale texture it also works very similarly to the levels adjustment layer in photoshop where increasing the input from will increase the coverage of the blacks and decreasing the input 2 will increase the coverage of the whites the output from will control the intensity of the black making them more gray as you increase the value and the output 2 controls the intensity of the whites making them more gray as you bring them closer to zero when working with roughness a completely black texture will result in no roughness being used at all whereas a completely white texture will result in maximum roughness we're going to change our output 2 to 0.5 as we still want it to have a little bit of sheen to it we don't want to be completely rough and we're going to give our output from a very small number of 0.025 just to give it a bit of roughness even the smoothest materials will still have a little bit of roughness to them next we're going to take a little look at lighting in keyshot you can use physical light by using something like the area light or spotlight or you can use a hdri and even create your own you'll find that physical lights are more accurate but using them will increase your render times to tie back in with the contrast that i mentioned earlier we're going to use a physical light to help frame our subject and direct the focus so go up to edit and add geometry and you're going to want to add a plane you're then going to want to make this a spotlight and adjust the positioning i want it to be coming from the direction that my key light is coming in at the moment this will create some nice angular lighting and we're going to use a stencil to give it a hard edge which will make for an interesting composition i'm then going to change my power type to lumen as this is more accurate than watts and i'm going to open my material graph and add an image texture to create a stencil as you can see with mesh texture here if the texture is black no light will show through and if it is white 100 of the light will show through as i just want a hard edge i went ahead and made this texture earlier all it is is a white rectangle on a black background you could achieve the same with the mesh texture but i just thought it was quicker to make it myself this technique can be used for all sorts of stencils all you have to do is make sure that it's in black and white and you can have window frames foliage and many more i'm then going to add a bit of fall off and a bit of radius just to soften that hard edge just a little bit i'm then going to open the color and click blend with color this allows me to give it a natural temperature which helps with realism i'm going to do this by using the kelvin drop down in the color menu this gives us a range of colors on the kelvin temperature scale this will mean we get accurate color temperature of our lights i like to use a warm color for my key light cooler color for my fill light this again creates some contrast with the colors now we're going to take a look at composition disregards how the image is arranged the first thing we're going to do is add a grid using our camera we're going to set this to thirds this breaks our image up into equal thirds horizontally and vertically this will allow us to arrange our image according to the rule of thirds the rule of thirds is a basic guide to help you arrange your compositions you would use it by placing points of interest along the intersections of the lines i knew there was going to be a highlight on the rim of the glass and i wanted that to be one of the points of interest so i adjust the position of my camera to ensure that it's on one of the intersections next we're going to adjust the perspective of our camera a lower perspective will give you a more fish-eyed look whereas a higher perspective will give you a more flattened orthographic look i usually use something between 80 and 120mm for this render i'm going to use 80 to make it a little bit more dynamic lastly we're going to use some depth of field again to add some contrast between the background and our focal point depth of field is the distance between the nearest and furthest objects the nearest objects will be nice and sharp whereas the further ones will be blurry if you click the target next to focus distance you can use this to click on the part of the product that you want to be most in focus this can be used in varied intensities to give quite an artistic look again with depth of field i think a little goes a long way increasing your f-stops will increase your aperture this will widen the area of sharpness next we're going to have a look at the image effects you can add in keyshot we're going to change our lighting type to jewelry this will enable caustics caustics are the refracted light rays that you see on the ground plane they often occur when you have a small bright light source and you're using a material such as glass liquid or even metal they sometimes don't show up too well in dark environments like we're using here but i'll show you a technique to accentuate these in post we're then going to go over to the image tab and key shot and change from basic to photographic personally i think this photographic mode is great and i use it in pretty much all of my renders in this particular render you can see how it flattens out the blown out areas but it also gives us great control over the exposure white balance contrast and allows us to tone map our image within keyshot saving you some time in post-production i knew i wanted the overall temperature of the image to feel a little bit cooler because i felt this would contrast quite nicely with warm colors in the light and the whiskey and i can do this in the photography tab just by adjusting the white balance to a value of 0.01 you can see here just by playing around with the exposure and the curve as well as the contrast our image has instantly transformed whenever i switch back to basic the difference is night and day there are other tabs in this image tab which can be quite useful like denoise to take some noise out of your image i also like to use the bloom bloom is an effect that blurs your bright light sources giving it almost like a bit of glow increasing the bloom threshold means that the bloom won't be applied to everything only the brightest again a little goes a long way i do still like to use it in key shot but sometimes if i think it needs it i'll accentuate the bloom in photoshop after you can also see me playing around with the vignette this is something that more often than not i'll just add in photoshop as it gives me a bit more control now i'm going to show you a couple steps that you can use to accentuate your caustics in post caustics work better in a brighter environment and they don't tend to like the physical lights too well so you're going to hide your current ground plane go to your ad geometry and add a new one give it a diffuse material and make it quite a bright color you can already see the difference that's having on the caustics you're going to hide your physical light duplicate your current environment and use a hdri pin in this case i'm going to use the key light and really bump up the brightness you're then going to raise the overall brightness of the environment and you can see there massive difference then you're going to want to render this out making sure that you have the layer and passes option for caustics enabled this means when you render it the image won't look great but you will have a caustics pass which you can drag and drop and combine with your final render in post once this is all done and you've rendered out your final image you're going to want to open it up in photoshop for post production for post processing all i tend to do is clean up my image so this is cleaning up any defects fireflies things like that which are common in rendering i use it to enhance certain parts of the render whether this is the texture or the details and i also do a little bit of color grading so you can see here i'm just cleaning up my image using a technique by asbinox home sorry if i butchered the pronunciation there he came up with this great technique for cleaning up fireflies using the dust and scratches filter i'm going to leave a link to his tutorial so that you can watch that and fully understand what i'm doing here to accentuate your course sticks using the technique we used earlier you're going to want to open up the file which has that caustics pass in it you can then drag it across into your image and change the blend mode to screen and you can see here just by duplicating it a couple times that those caustics really now pop another thing i like to do in my renders which you might have seen in my previous video is use the camera raw filter if you want more information on that then go and check out my last video as i cover it in a bit more depth another thing i wanted to do here is just accentuate some of the lighting so i'll do this by adding a black layer and a white layer i'll then draw over the parts of the image that i want to accentuate and adjust the blend modes the darks i usually use something like overlay or soft light and for the lights i'll usually use soft light and i'll adjust the opacity so that these effects are minimal i'll then add a little bit of grain and add a color lookup this uses pre-made lookup tables to color grade your image for you i usually change the blend mode on this to soft light color or just keep it on normal but i'll always reduce the opacity as sometimes the effect is too much and that's our final image there i hope you found some of these tips helpful if you have any questions please feel free to ask me down in the comments below don't forget to follow me on instagram at shanespence design and visit my website shanespensdesign.codk for more tutorials rendering resources and to keep up to date with my work also don't forget to like and subscribe for more [Music] you

Channel: Shane Spence Design

Views: 34,587

Keywords: keyshot, tutorial, keyshot tutorial, rendering, render, render tutorial, product design, industrial design, beginner rendering, beginner keyshot, keyshot lighting, keyshot camera, keyshot materials, keyshot material graph, composition, rule of thirds, shane spence, shane spence design, bump map, roughness map, design education, photorealism, product visualization

Id: pxNso7Ck3eY

Length: 13min 50sec (830 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021