Advanced Automotive Material and Lighting in KeyShot

all right welcome everyone we still got people coming in wanna thank you for joining us today on another key shot webinar we are very honored to have our very special guest tim fair here presenting he's the director of creative services over at keyshot studios if you're not familiar with tim uh he's an automotive industry veteran and a long time keyshot user nay keyshot master he is the man so you're definitely in for a treat today if you're not familiar with keyshot studios you want to check that out it's the premier resource for firms and people who need to outsource their existing visualization needs you can learn more about that over at keyshotstudios.com check that out and with that mr tim fair take it away sir uh thanks josh i just want to thank everyone for taking their time today and uh joining us on this webinar um i'm gonna go over a few different things when it comes to automotive um the key parts of creating a a good image one is uh a lot of times a lot of people ask questions on the tire materials how to create tire materials uh metals and the paint i'm gonna go right into this right away um right in right into it so if uh if you need any other support you know i would go to uh keyshot's youtube channel or on their site to look at some tips and tricks um to to learn a bit a little bit more but um well without further ado i'm gonna get going here um so the first thing we're gonna do is work on tires and how do i set up tires uh for for rendering purposes um this is what i have right now this is a tire that's all kind of done up um this is what we're gonna work on um the sidewall that i have here is just a generic sidewall has nice big lettering and big serrations because i really want everyone to see um what's going on here so first things first before i start doing my tires i have to get a tire map i usually get your tire maps from the oem or a vendor um so i'm gonna go into photoshop here real quick and show you how this works when i get a tire map sometimes it's just a flat mat like this or sometimes it's a ai file with all vector lines i love the vector um versions because i can go in there and pull all these lines and make this map as big as possible um sometimes if you get a a single image like this you're kind of stuck with whatever resolution they gave you but any case the very first thing i do is i do not use this map i will go in here and i break this out into little pieces and that's what i'm going to show you right now so first thing i did is i ripped out these sections of the map this is where the serrations on the tire will go now that dictates on the manufacture of the tire and where those go but for this uh demo this is the area that we're going to put serrations serrations in so the first thing is this is the alpha mat that i'll be using and then i've created a bump map for that let me zoom in here a little bit once i have that done i'm going to pull the letters that go inside the serrations so that's my next map here which is the the lettering so if i go back to this one that's going to be these letters here and after that i will make a bump map for the lettering so either it's raised or recessed into the tire depending on the design um after that i um make a map for the main lettering of the tire goodyear bridgestone whatever they they may be and then i also make a bump map uh of that and all my my maps are really just black and white um one trick i do with my bump maps is so i will create my outline lettering for the bump and then what i like to do is go into gaussian blur and just add a slight blur to that and what that does it gives you a nice ramp on the sides of that lettering so when you apply the bump you get some nice um you get a better bump out of the out of the map in fact it just left it all white so that's a little trick that i do that seems to uh work very well once i have all that created and saved i usually save them as pngs um if you save them as jpegs that also will work but you'll get some artifacting just due to compression purposes so i save all my maps in png when when possible or when i remember of course um so now we're going to go into a key shot here and i'm going to switch over to a tire that has not been done yet i have everything saved in different studios so we'll just pretend this is the tire that we're doing and we've just imported it into key shot uh the very first thing i'll do with the tire is i'm going to look to see if it's separated you will see here that when i select on it the whole tire is one big file or one big model so what i like to do is actually separate this tire up a little bit so i have control over the side wall over the tread and um over the in the the ridges inside um so what we how we do that in key shot is we just right click on the part and i'm going to separate by surfaces sometimes you can separate by model it all depends on the how the designer put the uh the file together if you kept the shells or not when he saved it so as we're waiting for this sometimes this happens very quickly sometimes it takes a minute all depends on the the size of um poly your poly uh poly count inside your model and all i have i i usually start off with just a basic uh plastic material on the tire and then we'll go from there okay so this window pops up and i'm going to select on the tire on the this face or the sidewall so this is actually grabbing more than what i want all i want is the sidewall itself i want it separated from these uh this tread so i'm at 45 degree angle i'm going to go down to 10 and you see that just moved everything that's that's the sidewall that's the piece i want so i'm going to hit split and now that has split from the model and then what i do is i go inside here and i select these these ridges because this is what gives you some depth in your tire if you're able to keep these a little bit darker than the rest that helps i'm going to split that and now you'll see those are a separate piece of geometry now and then i will also go inside here sometimes and pull these um these ridges or these valleys out too i'm not gonna do that today but that is another um step i will do most of the time i'm gonna hit apply and now i have my tire separated so let's get right into this sidewall um i am going to apply just a basic plastic let's see here there we go hard plastic rough i'm just going to drop that right on there okay i'm going to double click on this plastic and i am going to go into the material graph this is going to be a layered material um so the first thing i would do here is i'm going to add a little bit of bump to the tire there's always some type of bump so almost all materials except yeah almost every material so i'm just going to do a texture i'm going to apply that to the bump here if you hit c on your uh keyboard you can see what the bump is on the part and now i will scale it down a little bit increase the magnitude let's see and i'm just looking for just a little bit of bump going on in there just helps with realism okay once i have that done what i'm going to do is make another plastic material i will just copy this plastic if you just right click on that plastic material and hit duplicate it will duplicate that and i'm going to apply it as a label on top what i'm going to do right now is i'm just going to make this a different color because i want you everyone to see what's happening here so right now we have a layer on top of your original uh material and i'm gonna put an opacity map on this because what i'm what i'm gonna be pulling out here is the serrations of the tire so i'm gonna double click in there go to my opacity and i will go into my sidewalls here we go um i've already made a bump out of it so we got uh here we go serration alpha i'm gonna hit apply and right now it's uh it's not a uv map this tire is not uv mapped um it's always nice to have uv map tires but if you don't that's okay we can still get to the destination we need i'm gonna switch this to a planar map and then i'm also gonna switch from model to part now when i hit um move texture i'm going to use the x and as you can see here now this is being projected squarely on that side wall and now it's just a matter of sizing it to the tire itself um i'm going to go to 71 and we're going to call that done so that one is done for right now and now we're going to duplicate this material once again duplicate and i'm going to connect it to a label there so now we have label number two i'm gonna make this a different color i'll make this green and then now we're gonna change this map to the [Music] the lettering so we want the serration lettering there we go uh that's planar might have to flip tell you what we're gonna reset go to [Music] thought they would go right in we'll just rotate that around i guess i just have a um i'm probably having a brain fart here and then i'll remember what i'm supposed to do here in just a minute all right uh go to 71. all right so there's that we are going to copy this again apply it as a label and then this one is going to have the main lettering main lettering alpha there we go we're going to make that a planar map make that part and we'll just scale that up i i know this isn't um going in the right direction but for explanation purposes so uh what we have here right now are um is basically a layered material where i have full control over each section of the tire sidewall so we're going to go back to the the serrations and now i'm going to add that bump not funny all right you know this isn't working the way i envisioned it hold on i'm gonna go to this tire here this is what it's supposed to look like when it's all done i don't know why it's um i don't i don't want to waste time here um on this so let me open up this material graph so here's the the basic material graph this is your main we have our uh isn't that interesting there we go geez had the wrong material graph up okay sorry um so what we have here is i'm gonna make this a different color you can see this is the um the serrations so what's important here is we're able to uh have all these materials on top of each other if we just supplied um one material with just a bump map you can't control these different um aspects of the tire so now if i take the serration area and let's say i want to make it duller i just i can change the um the specular color and now i'm making the tire a little bit uh darker in that area and usually serrations show a little bit more shine so i can also make this have um the roughness is less so you can see more of a shine on there um seeing with the uh the tire main birdie if we where am i it does get a little confusing when you start having um all these these maps going oh that's my uh that's my dirty map i'll show you that in a second so now if you had white lettering you can um you can make that white and still everything else is black so you have a lot of flexibility when you set up your uh your to your tires in this fashion and nut the last thing i usually do is add some dirt to the tire and i have a map that's just called dirt uh wipes and again that is just that's your very last label that you you apply so if i apply that right now it's a label i zoom in here you can start seeing as this rez is up you can see a little bit of dirt marks yes while you're if you're zoomed in very far close like we are now you know there's more work to be done but for a shot from a distance just adding a little bit of the the dirt to the tire helps with the realism um and then the same thing applies for this tread so why do i have the tread differently you see a lot of photo on a lot of photos the tread are usually a lot lighter than the sidewall um so now that we have this separated um i also have um the tire as a color and then i also put a dirt on top of it so if i make this dirt even brighter we'll make it red you can see that we can mess around with the colors and you know make that match into the ground colors that your car is sitting in i also like to do is i'm going to turn that off for a minute is i don't do a straight color when it comes to the the tire material itself like this is pure black what i like to do is add a texture to that and i usually use the camouflage and i'm going to attach it to the diffuse so as you can see here you know if you look at a tire it's not totally pure black i mean there's there's wear marks there's you know some of the tire is a little bit duller than air is because of wear and tear so i do this and when i go into this camouflage i keep it as green and then i go through here and i work on distortion and i add some spray to it and then um from this point um i do a little mix i'll go in here and i'll make everything we'll say that number one is going to be five percent black color number two we'll say is ten percent black and then color number three we'll say is fifteen percent black and let's get rid of the color here or i also do dark browns but as this res is up you can see that the tire now is not all perfectly black there is some slight color variations and you don't want these to be drastic from one another you just want subtle changes and tones on the tire and that again that helps with some realism it's not perfectly all one color and perfectly smooth and then and then once you add the dirt layer on top of it that just really sets everything in into place into the scene so that's a basic tire again this is you know my money went quick through this but it's really just you you're working at it and if you have these basics of how to layer to create a material then you have full control over your your model um so that that's what i want everyone to get out of this demo is um not so much uh you know there's no secret formula it's still the person behind the computer that's doing all the little tweaking of the uh with the colors and light and specular that really makes the the tire pop but don't be scared to make this material graph grow and grow more layers you put on the dirtier it gets all depends on the look that you're looking for um so that's thing number one and of course if i've gone too fast and you have any more questions you can get my email off our website and email me and i'll be more than happy to answer your questions and help you out there too uh another thing that's important for uh cards is metal right and a lot of times a lot of questions on what do i do about chrome so i make on chrome i don't use the chrome out of uh keyshot just because i want control over everything i'm just a control freak i guess but i want to be able to control every aspect of the material um and with the chrome that's in there i can't really control too much of it um so i i create my own so right now what we have here to create a chrome from scratch i use metallic paint and then from that metallic paint you will take the metal coverage and put that at one and then you're going to take the metal roughness and you're going to put that at zero clear coat is at zero reflection is at 1.5 and your clear coat thickness is at one so this you know it has has the reflective uh properties of chrome but the nice thing about this is i can i can control everything about it so let's say i'm in a shot and the wheel's kind of blown out and i just want to add a little bit of darkness to it if i go into this chrome and i just add a little bit of roughness and then i'm able to play around with some of these colors here i can work on making that chrome just a pinch darker so something like that so it's it's subtle but now i do have tones in this white area of the reflection so if i had to in post i have pixels there that i can manipulate inside photoshop to enhance this area even more if i use the straight chrome from uh out of keyshot you lose that capability of adjusting these little uh fine details and then from here i can make any any metal material um from here so if i go into the clear coat and i add just a little bit of warmth to it you know we can start going into you know a gold wheel or just an off nickel type material and then if let's say this is uh one of those um it's like a painted type surface i just got to go in here now and i can adjust my metal roughness um you can adjust your thickness it should that changes the look and it's it's just a matter of playing with these sliders uh to get the look that you want and all my metal is created this way i have a whole library of you know chrome black chrome yet nickel color type you know reflection like that we have the the uh the doll wheels the shiny wheels painted wheels and so i'm able just to go into my library and just slide things over and already have the material created but even even at that once you put the dome on you might have to do some adjustments to the material but everything's done with the metallic shader for your metal and then of course you can go into the material graph and you can add scratches um things of that nature to enhance the how how how real do you want everything to look so that's kind of like on that that's that's going to hit on the metal another thing i want to talk about is paint and this is uh this is a a large topic you know how do you create paint and make it the most accurate and again it's really it's playing around i use again metallic paint no matter if i'm doing a flat paint if i'm doing a was a pearl paint a metallic paint um it all can be done with the metallic paint shader so if i want more of a flat paint um without any metallic in it all i have to do is take your metal coverage put that at zero and take your roughness metal and put that at zero and now this is a a flat material a flat paint not flat paint but um i'm trying to think of the right word here um it's it's not a metallic paint now if i want to add metallic to this i'm going to increase my metal coverage and what does metal coverage affect it affects the metal color so let me make this color red all right i am i am just having a hard time today for some reason there we go all right there we go cheese pizzas okay uh metal coverage what that is is the um the metal color channel and then your metal roughness so right now this is really shiny i'm gonna add a little bit of roughness to that and you'll see that the light spreads across the paint a little bit more um so depending on how how rough you have this will determine you know how much spread this color has on your paint um so you can definitely change your paint um through here but there's always more than one way to skin a cat um a lot of times what i like to do is i am going to make this red and i will make this red i'm going to go into the material graph here and i'm going to add a color gradient let me show you what this does i'm going to attach that to the base color no i'm going to attach it to sorry the clear coat color let me turn this back to gray okay with this clear coat color right now it's at white and black and what does this mean uh the most important thing when you apply this for when you're doing um car paint is you want view direction and what that means is if i make this white a red and i make this color white whatever is directly pointing at the camera will be the red color and then as the parts move away from the camera it slowly goes into the white so as i rotate this you can see that the paint is changing colors so once at the camera it's white and as it goes away from the camera it turns um red why is that um or when it's going away from the camera it's turning white at the camera it's red um why do i do that that adds a lot of depth to your uh your paint so let me turn this into red and i'm going to make this red darker so you can see now that we have a nice nice rich red and it goes to dark and back to red because we're doing like a metallic paint if i turn this off actually we should probably do another material let me duplicate this and do it two ways this one here i am going to [Music] make this red darker that red brighter grass okay so here is the uh the paint um doing it with using these two up here the body color and the metal color which looks good um but when i attach this type of gradient to the clear coat color you actually get a lot more depth out of your your paint and then you still can control how metallicy do you want it so as i increase the metal roughness and leave the metal coverage alone this is getting to be more of a plain red and if i decrease the roughness metal roughness you start getting more of the metallic color so definitely when you're playing and creating paint materials you know use make your color through your clear coat and then try it through your base color and your metal color and see what the differences are another thing is don't be afraid of is i'm going to get rid of this because it makes my tree really big all right so let me get rid of this for a minute um so let's make this we'll go red again and we'll make this we'll make that yellow just for funsies and now we're going to make the clear coats like blue so now even though this makes totally no sense right now um you get a really cool color um as you know depending on how you're looking at it it changes color um so that's a fun way of playing with paint um and then you just kind of go through here and you can slide to make different colors too so again and just play around with that and play around with this color gradient um that's always fun and you'll get more depth out of your uh your paints um let's talk about clear coat roughness now everyone loves the orange peel um i just want to say with orange peel it's one of those things that you don't want to see um unless you're super close up so if you are doing an image that the camera is far away from the uh from the camera and you crank up that orange peel so you uh you see it it's it's really too much the only time you would really see the orange peel is if you had a close-up shot of the paint and that will also um determine on how heavy you have this and if i'm doing orange peel this is going to be a very subtle subtle bump on that i don't usually use orange peel very often just so you know um another thing when it comes to flake flake is another funny thing um if i go into my roughness here what you want to do with your flake is i usually crank it up to one and then increase the flake size and again if you're further away from the camera you're not going to really see the flake the only time you'll see flake if you see it at all would be in the brighter areas of the uh the paint um now if you get zoomed in you obviously this is like too much flake at least for cars i mean if you're doing a bass boat this is probably perfect but for cars if you zoom in now you're going to probably have to adjust your your flake size and visibility of it so you just want to you want to tone that down and tone down your flake um what's important here is you know don't be afraid to crank up the uh the flake size because that's where you're going to start seeing the flake come out and when it comes to paint on cars at least as this paint goes into shadow or in the darker areas you shouldn't really see the flake the flake should be only concentrated in the brighter tones of the paint and if you want to see the flake a little bit more you just want to increase the flake visibility the highest you can go is one so i just crank it to one and then slowly move it back in smaller increments is uh is key and what i usually do if i'm doing a close-up shot and i want to see some flake and to really understand what's happening here i will do a region and i will just let that res up and see if i can still see the flake or i do a little test renders and see what the runner looks like with the flake because sometimes when you render it this does smooth out a little bit too much so you'll have to do some adjustments but that's just some quick ways of seeing what's happening with your uh your material with the flake along with your uh your bump okay so that is that i kind of want to touch base a little bit on the hdr um so let's just say we are going to be doing this car and we're going to do a studio now studio scenes are um it varies from client to client and it's a a subjective look so you really just need to listen to your uh your client on what they're looking for but for our purposes what i'm going to do here is what i usually do straight up is i'm going to go to my library and what i like to do is add a environment type of dome so i will go to come on hope i didn't lock up there we go so what i do here what reason why i do this is um i wanted some foreign color i love foreign color i know a lot of times when you do studios they take all the foreign color out and it's just about the lighting and that's fine too but i usually start off this way because i can always go to a more sterile look but i will put a dome on here and then go to the hdr editor and i will increase the blur to 5. and this so there we go so what i'm doing here is i'm looking for a lighting that's going to give me shape to my uh my sheet metal and that's all i'm doing here so this is um this is i want my light source on this side of the vehicle so it's nice and bright here it fades out we have a little bit of bright light going over here and now inside here inside your editor i can take some of the color out of it so it's more of a subtle color and once i'm happy with that that's when i'll start adding lights to get all that rich reflections back so one of my favorite ones to use is the gradation light you click on it here um i will go to uh rectangle and i'm going to cut that in half and i want to do is put a light a nice little horizon line across the the shoulder of this car so right now you can see that this gradation is going from left to right i want it to go from bottom to top so i'm going to go down to angle i'm going to type in negative 90 and if i turn off my half you can see now that the my gradation is going from bottom to top um and now i want where this cuts off it is i want this to be really hot so i am going to take this and slide it up and i'm going to cut it in half and now you can see that there's more blue in this area so i keep it in this these colors because now what i'm going to do now is place the light i want it into this side of the vehicle if you click on this button here on the hdr editor and then click onto your part it will place that light on the dome so as i move my cursor around on the car it's moving my lights in the hdr editor so i'm gonna go back to here and say yep that's what i want and now i'm gonna go in and change the colors so i'm gonna go to here i'm gonna make this white and then this red i am just going to make it a darker color because on this editor or on this particular light you can control the opacity of the light and then you can control the colors of the light so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this white and i'm going to make the brightness even brighter so now i have a nice hot light going across here and then it wraps around now you can go inside here and play with the size how long you want it how far up it goes if i want to rotate this around i usually use the azimuth of the light so now you can rotate this around and you're just gonna move it to the area you want which that's the area i wanted okay so now that we have that i want another light right here because i want to pull out this highlight of the vehicle and now again i'm just going to copy this light just to a duplicate i have this selected and now i'm going to click in this area of the vehicle and now it moved that light on the dome so it's affecting this area now sometimes this light might be too big and it's affecting other things so that's when you would just go in and you could control the the width of the light and how high it goes up but i just want to get a little a little liquid edge right over here um another thing to do with the hdr editor i want to make this darker on this side so i'm just going to add a another light and i'm going to turn this into an alpha and then i'm going to take all the color out of that alpha when you do that it turns into a black light we'll call it black light or it just takes out all the the lighting information in the dome so now i'm going to move that light into this area and these are just some nice uh nice ways to get that dark and light next to each other to play off each other um key with lighting is you have a light then you have a dark and then you have a light and you have a dark and that's what helps uh make the image pop um so if i turn off this light now the car looks a little flat and muddy you add a little bit darkness in there now you're starting to get some shape and depth out of the paint and again now that you have that down you can add another light on top of that duplicate that move that above the black light and now i can move a light on top of it so i can add a little bit of light to these dark areas if you needed to pull out shape in that area and of course another key thing when lighting a vehicle is you don't want all your lights to be the same intensity so i'm going to go over here and we are going to make the whole light darker because you want to be able to um you still want your eye the goal when lighting a vehicle is you want the spectator's eye to move around the vehicle if the car was lit with the same intensity light around the whole vehicle the vehicle looked flat and the eye won't know what to do but if you have this is my hot spot let's just say this for this particular shot this is my hot spot i want this to be the brightest and then i want this to be bright but not as bright so my eye is going around the whole vehicle and you create depth and shape out of uh out of your lighting and again this is a lot of playing around with these lights use this editor um you can create some amazing lighting with it that's for uh studio and then you can always go back to this background even though i put this environment here if i go to gradient now we're in into a solid just black and white type environment and we can uh we can do a gradation over here and now you're starting to get to that other type of studio lighting where it's just black and white and grays and you start adding so you can go back and forth with some color without color and just play around and then one more thing i know we're running short on time here is back plates um real quick here i have a dome and a back plate combined in here and a lot of times like how do i get the angle i love personally using the back plate match so i'm gonna do that and show you how i go about do that doing that i'm gonna turn the model off because it gets in my way sometimes if i go to camera match back plate i usually do two point perspective but of course you can do three point and what i'm going to do here is i am going to find lines to put these x and z lines on and this is going to help me get the the focal length that i need for this particular camera i try to stay away when i can away from the ground um when doing these because even though we do have lines um i don't know how this ground was laid um so if these were gone at a diagonal those lines would be would be off and you won't get the right camera so i try to find solid objects inside the back plate that i know are true and luckily if these buildings are they they should be true true rectangles and squares otherwise the building would fall but anyways so this is the first thing i do and now i'm going to turn my car back on in my ground so it looks like we are at about a 25 focal length if i go to my library and look at this particular back plate which is this one it says my focal length is 22. so i'm off by a few degrees but um but that's okay i mean this this is really close enough so now how do i place this car in the scene without ruining the camera so the first thing i'm going to do is what type of shot do i want for this um so we're just going to do a front three-quarter we'll say like this but i want this car pushed back into the scene um before i set my camera and before i say okay over here i go to absolute and now i'm going to move this vehicle into the scene so under my x it's at negative 300 some i go negative 400 and now that's pushing my car back into the scene and then if i go to my z we'll say negative 200 wrong way negative 400 500 so that's pushed in the scene the car looks a little bit small that's where i go to my y and i'm just going to move this car up a little bit so let's see what 80 does let's just say that's the the angle i want so what's important here is i'm moving this car after i set my perspective for my angle i don't go in here let me save this real quick i'm gonna hit okay and hit save what's important here all right cool let me go back into this once i set these lines down i'm not going in here and moving the car this way trying to get it front and back how i'm moving the car is through my absolute because i want to be able to keep my perspective so as this pr gets closer to the camera that's when you're going to get this you know this weird look to the vehicle but as this car is being pushed into the scene that's when the car should start flatting out and make it look uh fit into the scene that you want so that's really important when using the back plate match is you you get the the angle first and then move your car in your scene through position i know i went over a lot of stuff today and it's already almost an hour and we should probably have some questions and answers um so i think i'm done for now and i'm ready for any questions if anybody has anything yeah we do wonderful tim thank you so much for a reminder for folks that that came um potentially late uh tim is at uh keyshot studios so they do a number of work with automotive firms and and uh people on a consulting basis so uh great stuff from tim as you can see kind of knows the stuff backwards and forwards so thank you for coming and kind of letting your expertise for us today tim uh so i'll jump into questions um i think this is on the earlier model made that model uh how you apply the the black paint section on the hood so how you kind of got the um i guess they're asking kind of how you maybe either broke out that section or how you kept the black paint on the hood separate from the other other paints so yeah this particular model this is already separated but we can obviously do this still even if it was attached and you're going to tank it the same way as how i showed how we did the tires i would lay down the the red paint first and get that paint the way you want it and then i would put down another paint and apply that as a label and then i would have an opacity map to the shape that i want on the car does that make sense totally yeah uh and you obviously talked a lot about kind of the different environments and how you dial it in one person's asking um you know obviously i should sort of change the environment you'll get different effects with the paints do you kind of have a particular environment that you start with that's sort of the this is my environment that i'm going to dial my my paints in on that i know will give me kind of consistent results in other environments now that that's a really good question um what i usually do is i do everything in the the basic studio that comes when a key shot launches uh believe it or not that is even though everything's soft that is a very good dome for lighting purposes for darks and brights darks and lights so i'll do all my materials there and then i'll apply whatever dome or if i have to create a dome and that's when i start creating my domes now of course when i'm creating the dome that doesn't mean i'm not going to go back to that material and do a little tweaks here and there but that is a good start great uh and then in terms of the models that you're working from both the the tire models and the car models um obviously keyshot imports a ton of different file formats uh over 30 different kind of cad and dcc file formats what do you usually get from the manufacturers is it usually solidworks what's or is just kind of all over the place depending on the on you know the part in the manufacturer so usually um most cases the manufacturer obviously they do the cars in cad right um catia or solidworks wherever that may be but then they will convert it to poly um so and then usually they have they call data preppers and they will prep the model inside maya or 3ds max or whatever their workflow is and then saved out and then that's those are the models we get so it's usually a uh a maya file um but uh trust me i've done cars that are step files too but a lot of times reason why they actually go through that extra step is because the interiors of the cars that's all soft modeling that can't be done through cad i mean they have cad models of it but it's very hard stiff because they just want the shape um so they usually have a modeler go in and model all the soft parts so it would be your seats your steering wheel um your armrest center console where you know where where the leather is at so that's usually all modeled um in a 3d program like max or or maya and then and then do you usually pull out all the interiors to kind of you know make the file more lightweight when working with it uh back in keyshot one i did but i don't remove anything anymore okay uh just to give you a little uh idea um we uh of one vehicle with all kinds of trims and stuff um you're looking at you know uh 10k or a 20 gig or 10 gig file keyshot file and keyshot runs buttery smooth great um one question people has um on actual automotive light material so headlights tail lights um accent lights uh and how you approach those okay that's a good question so once i get a a my base lighting down um [Music] let's go to here so now that we'll just say this is the lighting that i i wanted what i will do next is i will add a ies light um do we have time can i just do it real quick okay so i'm gonna add a is light and with these is lights i am only using them to enhance the image not light the image i i can't stress that enough um again these are just these the subtleties that help with the image so i usually put a sphere in there let me go to my library go to materials go to lights i go to my go to light that i usually use almost on everything when i when i use an is light no and then let me just turn this up a little bit so we can all see what's happening and we'll go back to my angle so with this is light i am only going to be using it to pull out subtleties of the car the shape so if i turn this light off you know it looks nice but it's still you don't quite know what's happening in here how does this how's the sheet metal bend and turn and get to the wheel well how does it go down in here you're kind of missing this little crater where the light sits in so if you add a little is light that helps pull out these little surfaces and changes of the sheet metal um and obviously this would be more of a white light or all depends on my scene and i might move that up higher so it spreads out more but these lights are just put in there just for little accents to pull out shape more you can really see it in that headlight and so if you want to actually you know uh make the headlights themselves kind of have brightness like you know to mimic the headlight being on or turn or you know the the rear camera how would someone do that yep got it um so what i'm going to do again it's the same idea but this time i am going to be using this light for purposes of lighting turn that down i would make spheres and then i would move that down and that's what's going to be reflecting onto the ground and only thing i'm doing inside this light is i want to um mimic that the light is on so i will put a a bulb or a sphere inside the glass turn that on let me hit okay here hide all right darn it hi part um just for explanation purposes i'm going to turn this glass into a area light now this area light again um depending on how it's reflecting and refracting i'll leave ahead i'm really strong or i might have just that 10 because i just want to simulate that the lights are on what's giving the light that look is this light hitting the ground now to add a little bit more realism to it you can add a scatter medium put a square a black in here add a scatter medium and play with the density and that will start showing some of the beam but i usually do that in post to be quite honest with you just due to not that key shot can't do it because it can it's just that it's faster for me to do it in post and wait for the render um time is uh is very important to us so even though it can be done in a program sometimes we'll do it in another application just because we're it's quicker you know time management type of thing great and so a couple questions about that scene is uh what uh what's the black background you're using in that studio shot and then also how are you managing the plane under the car is it is there a special material you're using to kind of get those reflections okay so the material is the ground material um there's uh that has nothing i didn't do anything to that except when the ground comes in it's gonna be pure black and it will be zero reflection um so it looks like nothing happened when you apply a ground plane um what i will usually do if i don't have squish on the tires this is a cheap um if you turn clipping plane on and let's move this ground plane up you can actually you know cut the car so we'll usually put a ground plane in there and then we cut a little bit of the tire just to show that it's there's weight to the car um if they're if it's not modeled in there we usually don't like tires modeled with squash just because if you want to do animation then you would have a flat thing moving around and around of course that's not what you want so you can cheat that by using a ground plane now how do i get reflections on that ground plane i am going to go to the ground material i'm going to make this white and now you can see that there's a reflection now because it's the specular is a color now and now i'm just going to add a little bit of roughness to it and that will determine how much fall off i have on the reflection and then you also can mess around with the contrast and that usually helps when you have lighter backgrounds and this kind of fades away so let me let me switch that over to a lighter background okay so if i go back to the default you don't really see a reflection because you're on you know a white background but if you add just a little contrast to it let that res up you can start seeing the car come into uh into light so that's when i would use the contrast depending on your color background also don't be afraid to use the codes because you can bounce light off the coves and that gives you nice effects of light going around the car and also bounce light into the car and we had collusion type of stuff that's great one person was asking just uh if you very quickly sort of show how you that black light um again sort of how you got that that kind of darker contrast um light set up over on the left-hand side oh okay yeah yeah yeah okay so um all that is go back to the map under your hdr editor i created a light where is it i gotta find it first one there we go okay um let me just turn that off i'm gonna start from scratch so i'm going to add a light and right now that light is set to add so it's it's it's throwing light into the scene what i'm going to do is turn that into an alpha right now the alpha has made no difference because the alpha is at pure white so it's showing 100 light if i make the brightness of that light to zero it turns it into black or takes out all light now i'm going to click on this area to move the light because i can move it by clicking and then you just move that into a position that you like and that's subtracting light away from the dome to give you these these hard and light type scenarios it also can be done with the other uh the gradation light so again we can use this light this is kind of neat because since this light has a opacity to it meaning that the top of the light is pure there's no light at all at the bottom it's pure if i turn this into a alpha and get rid of all light now you can see that this particular alpha it's black here and it does have a nice gradation because there's no pixels in here so you do have light showing through so you can get some nice effects that way too especially if you cut the light in half and then you know you can mess around with the rotate and that's you know these are the small fine details what makes lighting is these small enhancements and changing and there's again there's no easy explanation of how to do it except you just need to do it and after you do it over and over again you get into a rhythm and you have your own process um it's easier for me to tell you what these lights do but it's hard to tell me where to put them there's no easy answer to that well and and i love what you talked about with the idea of like you know moving the eye right and kind of you know you know understanding what you're trying to achieve with the image as you're doing it um and and kind of where you want your your highlights to be and kind of artistically where you want the user to kind of move their eye around um so some people are asking about kind of general lighting sessions so if you go on our youtube page there are uh we recently had our virtual key shot world there were two sessions one on kind of lighting basics and one on wedding advanced if you really wanted to tim's point understand more about the tools themselves and environment lighting and hdr lighting i recommend strongly that you check out those uh youtube videos to really get a full understanding of of lighting and then i think when you come back and sort of see you know how an expert like tim does it you can kind of understand how he uses all those tools to as he says kind of you know get get that look that he's trying to achieve through you know expertise but also trial and error and an artist's eye one question folks we're asking is so you have this set up now you want to do it saying xr render how does something like that change your lighting in terms of you know simplifying things for something like an xr okay um so again that's a really good question there's two ways of handling that one way is very difficult the other way is a little bit easier um if i'm going to do an xr and i want this thing to be spinning around i will actually do the spin you can do the xr where the dome stays stationary but the part moves so i will light it for that angle so this is the angle right so you can control the xr by telling it to either have the dome rotate with it or have it stationary if you have the dome rotate with your scene when you let me apply a um let me apply this so as you can see the lighting's changing right it's it's brighter on this side and then as you get to this side it gets dark and i think that's where a lot of the a lot of the questions come in how do i um how do i fix that um if the client if we're doing a 360 and the environment is spinning with it we have to light the car so even on this side we have to uh manipulate the hdr to bring out some of these highlights of the car um if it's a xr and it's a studio type lighting there's no environment rotating with it you know you see buildings moving with it then we would do a stationary lighting meaning we will light this vehicle like just like you do in photography on products a three-point lighting system let's just say and now the part or the car will move but the lighting stays so that lighting is consistent throughout the whole spin so there's a couple different ways of attacking that if you do it with the hdr again there's a lot of work to do with your lighting and what's really hard to um get to explain to the clients is not every frame of the xr is going to be perfect and and then explain to them that people aren't viewing it as here's a frame here's a frame here's a frame they're actually viewing it moving it around so that the the lighting even though it doesn't look perfectly perfect at this angle it's okay because the car is in motion that's very hard to um get that point across because a lot of times they're like well this frame i don't like the lighting over here then you got to go in there and you try to fix the lighting um so there's a lot of education and there is a little bit of work there great um and so kind of well we're over time here so i'll go to one last question for you to wrap up so one person's asking i think you kind of touched this a bit but kind of deciding how much you do in keyshot versus what you kind of save for post is there kind of any sort of you know hard and fast rule where certain things um like like the light beam of the headlights you know you'll focus more on post or is it really just on a kind of per uh per asset per job basis uh it's another good question so in my uh younger years when i first started in cg i did a lot of fixing and post um i do not do that anymore the the the software has come such a long way that i can get a scene 95 to 98 done so in post all i'm doing is enhancing the uh the image um so i will try to do everything i can to get it in the render the reason for that is people the industry right now is everyone needs everything very quickly so if i do a product or a vehicle because we do a lot of product stuff too and i get that almost 100 percent with the render if the client comes back to me six months from now i know all i have to do is open up that scene switch out whatever part's been updated i can hit render and i can get that um that project back out to the client very quickly if i did a lot of post work now i have to pull out my old psds and then i gotta try to remember everything i did to fix all the issues that i had in my lighting or my materials so the answer is i do as little post as possible lights on uh lights i will always add to enhance them or add a little bit of smoke to areas just so you can tell that there's a light on but for the most part it's done in keyshot great did that make sense perfect yeah one final softball question for you are you using the gpu rendering in keyshot nine uh and and what do you think of it no i use if i use uh cpu that that's where all my horsepower is at on these these on on our machines i have a nice graphics card uh for me i i still like the look of the cpu it's it's reliable it's always there it works every time um gpu i'm while you get great results it gets a little finicky at times and i just don't have time to be to be playing with uh you know updating drivers and stuff um but so yeah to answer your question this this type of work is all cpu obviously if we get into when we do xr and vr stock we're all gpu but um wherever i can i use cpu great well and that's why keyshot's great because you have your choice either way exactly well tim thank you so much as we mentioned everyone please please subscribe to our youtube channel this is on there all of our great content on there if you want to learn more about keyshot uh either in terms of a feature basis like things like lighting or on a more uh industry basis like tim is showing about you know the specifics of how to great get great automotive renders cannot recommend enough to join our channel i want to thank tim again from keyshot studios if you need any assistance if you're someone out there who you know needs additional help setting assets up or outsourcing renders as you can see tim truly is a keyshot ninja so please check out keyshotstudios.com for further information we thank all of you for joining especially tim and we will see you again next month thank you [Music] you

Channel: KeyShot

Views: 22,809

Keywords: keyshot, cg, 3d rendering, 3d animation, engineering, product design, marketing

Id: UFcL7W4zPms

Length: 68min 45sec (4125 seconds)

Published: Fri May 29 2020