Can Blender + K-CyclesX replace Keyshot?

hey guys chip here so i'm going to talk to you today about the difference between a program many of you may have heard of called keyshot and the one i now use which is blender and specifically the k cycles x version of blender along the way i'll be also showing off some very basic add-ons the goal is to show how you could use blender to create similar renders as keyshot and these are typically product or industrial design type renders so first off i'd like to mention that keyshot is an absolutely incredible product i purchased every version of it up until just a few years ago and at that time it was by far the fastest renderer on the planet and if what you're looking for is the absolute best steel frame product rendering solution and money is not an issue then keyshot is probably your best bet they have absolutely a great set of materials their own hdri maps and custom hdri generator along with a very friendly and easy to use interface another primary benefit of keyshot is they have many different translation add-ons and plugins available for different cad and 3d modeling programs so when i first started using blender a number of years back i tried to create a scene with a shadow catcher and reflection catcher and i didn't get very good results in fact if i recall correctly the reflection catcher which is part of the shadow catcher never did really work but that's all changed now the new blender 3.0 now has a built-in shadow catcher that does a great job with reflections it also can do some things like throw lighting onto the background picture in a scene which is actually pretty cool not only is the new blender 3.0 better with regard to the shadow catcher feature it also has a significantly faster cycles render engine the new version is called cycles x both cycles x and keyshot are photorealistic rendering engines and both are very fast and take advantage of the new faster gpu cards that are available so let's talk about a few advantages that blender has one of them is you can make edits to the mesh very easily another one is that you can actually create and edit uv maps for your mesh which can be important as most cad packages don't export with any sort of uv mapping and blender has superb volumetric effects including smoke and fog and if you use k-cycles x you'll also get even better denoising than the regular blender 3.0 denoiser of course cost can be a huge issue for many and with blender and kcycles x and a few add-ons your monetary outlay will be significantly less of that of what you would spend on keyshot so we'll go over how you can use different asset management tools like kit ops to quickly tweak your model and apply materials and of course if you already own keyshot you can use those exact same hdris to light your blender scene plus there are a number of free and paid hdris available as well one of the biggest pluses is the fact that blender has a huge community and with it comes tons of tutorials and tons of add-ons and other tools that makes things much easier and not to mention blender's animation tools are significantly better as well and it has a built-in compositing workflow that gives you a lot of flexibility in how your final render will look and then there's k cycles x k cycles x is a custom build of blender that is focused on adding not only more speed to the cycles x rendering system but it also has some really good post effects that are shown directly in the viewport which is not possible in blender with its superb speed and special effects not to mention great support by the author himself you'll find it can fit right in with your workflow so let's take a look how we might use k cycles x and a few blender add-ons to create a scene like one you might find in keyshot okay here we are in blender 3.0 actually we're in the k-cycles version of blender 3.0 you can tell by the little k over here and i've imported this object now you can import a lot of different formats into blender you can use obj or stl or fbx typically you'll probably use fbx or obj there are actual importers and add-ons that you can get for blender that can bring in stuff like step and other file formats but for now i'm going to assume that you already know how to get a file in here and one thing i should mention is once you get in here you might want to go to these normals and make sure that your geometry data is set to clear clear custom split normals right now we don't have any so but if it looks kind of weird you might want to do that and the other thing is that you know of course if you shade something flat it's going to look like this and you'll see that and so what you'll want to do is shade smooth and go over here and make sure this auto smooth is turned on if you don't you're going to get you might get some artifact i set it easier to 35 degrees now we're going to look at how we apply materials to this object so here's a picture of the object that we're going to be rendering today i'm not going to render this particular image this is actually a photograph from their website okay so now we're back into blender so a couple things we want to do is one let's talk about these icons up here this first one right here is just x-ray so you can see inside of things and can we turn that off second one is our wireframe you can see what's going on there this is the solid view and if i look in this settings i can actually turn on wireframe if i want to to see that and i'll turn that back off this is what's called ev an eevee is a really fast almost game type renderer so you can do near photorealistic renderings in eevee and this is k cycles x or cycles x um and this is pretty much the same thing as you would see in keyshot it renders incredibly fast i'm on a 30 90 rtx 39 in case anyone's wondering so i've got this set up i've got it set up with a clay material and if we look at this material you see it's just set up with two different nodes this is the principal blender bsdf node which is every material has just about and this is an ambient occlusion i just added an ambient cushion to the to the base so i turn it off see it doesn't have much ambient occlusion so i just i just add that there and i'm just using that just to be able to see that see the model so now what i'm going to do is i want to go ahead and start adding some materials to this model and to do that i'm going to use a product called kit ops and there's two versions this kit ops free and kit ops pro and you can use kit ops free for this uh in fact that's what i'm gonna do i'll be using a lot of the kit ops free stuff in here so let's click this uh this body object and actually this is a we'll go to cw plastic plus plant now this is a a k pack so you can get these k packs online this is from the eevee material system i'll put a link in the in the description but it's got a lot of really good especially industrial design kind of materials in it and we'll talk about that in a second but i'm gonna go ahead and hit this and say add material to this surface so okay so there it there it is it comes in here now i'm gonna move it up and i'm gonna go into the eevee mode so i can see it a little faster and with it set right here i will go in and just this little color i'm gonna just change it turn the saturation all the way down and let's move it you know kind of almost all the way to white something right about there so that's really good okay and then that's uh that's pretty cool so now we have our white object and if i go back into this mode you'll see what it looks like and then i'm going to come under here and i'm going to look for some of these metals so i'll go cw metal this is also part of the eevee materials system so we're going we'll grab this chrome shiny and i can basically select let's like that object and say add material and you can see it puts a chrome shiny material on there i'll grab this little this little grid add material to that so i'm going to go around and add this chrome shiny and i can also actually there might be like i might also want to use a steel like for instance this handle might be might be steel and not chrome see it's going to have a little bit of a different look to it it's got she's got a little brushed area on it and up here this might be you know chrome if i want to i can just basically go in here and click on my materials and you'll see i'll have my chrome right there i can just add them that way too so i can just go in here at any time and let's grab let's grab this and i'm going to make him a plastic so i'm going to go back into the cw plastic plus paint and i'm going to grab something kind of like this plastic dapple and say add material to that that's going to put if we zoom up all the way on this you'll see that puts kind of a mold tech texture it's a little too big so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go back into my ev so i can see it a little better there it is and i can just pull this up and i'll look at that material that and here's the scale so if i just set this in set of 2 let's make it 10 you see that makes it a lot smaller so that may be more more like what we want there uh and then this is one of the free and one of the best glasses is actually in a free k pack which are called the ko specials and in here this special mat has the very first one is this glass and i'll add that material to here and that'll set the glass in there and then if i come over here i can hit the period key on my numcad and i'm going to find that one that's that right there so i'm going to hide that and then this right here is gonna be some kind of coffee so i think i'll just go over here again to my free materials and say this plastic paint let's just grab that and let's grab something that like a dark matte and we'll add that material so it's kind of a dark color there it is so and then if we go back into our cycles you'll see that it's starting to work pretty well i'm gonna put a link to this file in the actual description of the video so you can actually take this file apart i'm not going to be able to put in the commercial materials but i'll even the free ones and you can see how that works i'll also leave in this custom hdri map that i have that i'll talk about here in just a little bit so i'm going to go grab this guy right here and i'm going to make him that plastic dapple right there and let's go over here and this is a wood let's grab this shiny wood add material to that add that material there too that's going to be the plastic dapple so go add that material there another way that i can do is i can basically select everything like i know that i want that to be white and this i select this one last and when i do that i can just say copy materials to selected so that's kind of a nice quick thing like for instance i know i want this to be a kind of a chrome and that to be a chrome and this to be a chrome and that to be a chrome and then click that one last and go over here and say copy material selected so that gets all those to chrome also so you can see what's going on okay and then we'll come up here and i think we'll make that wood material now let's make that a rubber so i'll go and grab other leather rubber let's just do that we'll add a dark rubber on there that works pretty good and then you can see that we have these little divots and these are probably chrome so i just go in here and say chrome shiny that gets those and lastly let's kind of zoom in here see if we have some other stuff here let's click this hit the period button on the numpad to zoom all the way in there so that's what i did let's grab this and that i know is going to be chrome and here's another free set of colors which are these these uh emissive colors let's drag this little dot and that we're going to make him green there and then i have one up here same thing i hit the period button and we'll click this add material and this will go ahead and add chrome and there we go so now we've really done a pretty good job of texturing now the other thing i want to do is i want to add a couple screws in here because i didn't put those in there so i'm going to select this object and i'll go into one of my k packs and this is again using kit ops and using the kit-ups free version i'll grab this little screw right here and i'll add the insert and when i with this selected when i add it and i drag it over here it's going to actually position it wherever i want to and i can just you know click and then just drop it in there and i'll punch a hole in it first that's kind of cool it actually put a hole directly in there and a little radius around there go back into ev mode and let's click on this which is going to make me in the orthographic mode if i hold the alt key down it's going to snap to different places i'm going to snap to right here and with this i can actually just go into the scale button and just move it down just a little bit and then i can shift d which is the same as duplicate so shift d and let's move that right over to here let's move it somewhere like this so and with that being selected i'm going to take that and i'm going to go over here and just hit this mirror on the x and we'll see it puts it over there and click on this one and mirror that on the x also and it puts it over there so that's just another some of the kit-op stuff that you can do and you can with kit ops pro you can create your own inserts and do all kinds of stuff so next thing i want to do is i'm going to put a decal on the side of this and so i'm going to go into one of the k packs that i have that has some decals on it and here's this logo and i can just add that insert right on it i'll add this insert right here and now notice it's coming in at an angle and so what i might want to do is i can scroll the mouse wheel and when i do that it just changes the size but if i hold the alt key down it's going to actually change the actual angle as well so i can come in here like this and let's go ahead and scroll it down a little bit and make it kind of tiny and we'll just stop it right there and i can go like this and we'll select the object again that we want to insert it on add the insert and we'll do the same thing scroll it around and drop it in here and then this and this are going to be the same material which is shiny wood so we'll go cop materials now one of the things you might notice is that we have this object which is completely wooden the whole thing is and we know that this is all going to be chrome here so how do we fix that well we can tab into this object and that means that we've got to go in here and just click off of it and i just want to select like oh these this is selecting a vertice this is selecting an edge and this is selecting a face so i'm going to hold the up alt key down and kind of select this i'll get that whole loop and then control plus or i can go under select select more or less so i can go more so control number so i go control plus plus plus plus plus so i'm gonna i'm right about there plus and i think yeah so i'll go control plus plus plus plus i'm gonna get all that wooden so that's the wood right there so i've got that set so i'm going to select the inverse of that right so select invert so i have the rest of that i'll go over here and this is my materials my shiny wood i'm going to add a slot let's hit plus and i will in that slot i'm going to put the chrome and i'm going to sign it hit the assign button now i assign it to that i'll tab out of that you'll see we just fixed this so we have the chrome in here and there let's just go back into this view we can see a little better in there so that worked really well and we need to do the same over here we'll grab this and that's going to be chrome shiny we can just grab all of these and select that one last and remember we just say copy material to select it and they're all there okay so now that this is done we need to set up our render so that's what we'll do next okay before we get on to rendering just want to show you one more thing about blender and and how it renders materials so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into kit ops and i'm going to add a insert on top of this object so i'll hit add insert scale it up a little bit something like maybe like this and move it forward that red color you see is that i have showing back faces so i don't want to i'm going to turn the face orientation off and then you can see what we have here now we have this object so we just added this little cutter a special cutter now if you notice i'm gonna hide these things you can see that and there's no bevels on this anywhere so let's go back to evie and i'm gonna go in here and i will just delete this material so i hit this button select this delete it now after i've deleted i'm gonna create a new material i'm gonna zoom up on it and let's just make this metallic so one in the metallic and zero in the roughness so it's very shiny metallic and you can see how that looks so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna do the thing that keyshot does and that is i'm gonna add a bevel to this i'll go add input bevel and i'll just drag it down here and now where does the bevel go well it's gonna go with the normal so i'm gonna let's just move this up you can see what's going on here here's the bevel so i just hooked that directly up to the normal and i want samples to be 16 and now i'm going to move it back down and let's look at this now we don't see any bevel here because we're an ev mode but let's go over into cycles mode and we can take a look and you can see how big that bevel is it's too big actually point zero zero five let's try that all right maybe point zero one there we go so you can start to see how that bevel works let's go ahead and adjust the roughness just a little bit so you can get a little more and if i click this button here i turn off all those overlays so you can see what it looks like this will render in cycles and it won't render an ev but it looks pretty darn good okay let's talk about rendering now so here's our object we're looking at an eevee and it looks pretty good and by the way i went ahead and kind of added the rubber and some chrome to the back areas right here adjusted the color just a little bit and if we go into here we will see that we have under object something called whirl and i've set this up this world up uh in a way so that you can see the hdri so when we go in here you can see that there's the hdri that's in the cycles we go back to ev you won't see it but that's because we have this standard viewport shading that we can choose any one of these hdris but i'm going to use the scene lights and the scene world so now this is eevee and this is what we're seeing so we're seeing pretty much the same things we would in cycles just not quite as nice so what i want to do is i want to show you this little trick here i'm going to take this mix shader and as you can tell right now we have this is the hdri this is the image that we're using this three panel straight that's the image this is how we rotate the image right there you can see it rotating and what i'm going to do is i'm going to hook this up and this is going to basically say keep the same lighting from this hdri but use a background you can use any color background you want too so let's just move the background to something like this that looks good and then what i want to do is i want to go ahead and rotate this and i'll rotate it around to where i like the actual way that the color is working now if i want to add another hdri i can come in here and i can just hit the x button say open and i have an hdri folder and you can click thumbnails and you can just you know you can go through and add anything you want this is the one i just was using um if you go to hdri heavy they've got a ton of really really nice hdris that are worth looking at as well so maybe i'll grab this this one right here and then i can again rotate that around so to get what i want so i might like go for something like that and then i'll check it in ev see what it looks like and that looks pretty good i like that so we're going to leave that the way it is then i'll go over select my camera and under view under cameras i'm going to say active camera which is numpad 0 and that shows me what the framing looks like for this and then under this view let's go into view here i want to make sure this camera to view is selected if it's not selected anytime i move it out i'm going to lose that camera so i hit the numpad 0 again i'm going to click camera view select my object and now i can i can move it around inside this view once that's done i'm gonna just lock it down and by clicking this button right here then i'll go into this object and and this is the floor and i'm gonna basically select the object and it was remember it was clay i'm gonna turn that off and i'm gonna create a new one and this i'm just called shadow catcher and i think i'm just going to turn that one we're just going to turn the roughness down to something like there something like that so it's kind of got a little bit of reflection in it maybe i'll adjust the color just a little bit too maybe move the color down about something like this okay and that's good so that's a shadow catcher now go over here to the to this tab right here and scroll down and under visibility i'm going to say make that a shadow catcher and you can see that instantly creates a shadow catcher right there so ideally this base color right here might should probably be pretty much the same as whatever the background color is going to be so if i adjust this i can just hover over this and say control c like copy and i can go back into world and i can come back over here and control v paste and so i get to you know get the same so there's my shadow catcher for this uh particular i'm gonna turn off this now so that's so that turns off the hdri so let's go ahead and add some area light so i'm going to go in here and turn all of these on and now i have this empty and here's the empty now if i rotate this you'll see that i've got this z and i'm going to rotate it this way and again i'm going to go back into here so i can see it a little better and i want to rotate my lights in a way that is going to look best on on this model like that and once i get them done then i'm going to adjust 0.4 something like that and we'll come back and i can adjust the lights by just simply coming in here and looking at a light in the light that's a thousand watts so i might make it 750 and the same this one 750 watts so you see what see what's going on let's go back into my cycles view and you'll see uh what we have here and that looks pretty i don't have as much contrast as i might like so now i can come back into cycles and go all the way to the bottom and we have this thing called color management and we can use this filmic and we can make it very high contrast or medium contrast you know i'm gonna make it uh high contrast and i'm gonna adjust this down a little bit so i can get a little bit i can get the reflection but i don't get too much of the lighting and i'm gonna take that empty again i'm gonna rotate him around just a little more see if there's anything else yeah it might be a little better get a little a little more contrast in there so we'll do it like that now that we're done here let's go into our k cycles part now this is the cool part right this is the part where we're going to add effects to the scene i'll click this to turn this off and i'm going to basically go in and say we turn on our ultra denoiser and then under post effects right here i'll turn on bloom and bloom's going to punch out some of these highlights and the way i can check that out is i'll click on here and i'm gonna take the blend and move it all the way to one okay and then i'm gonna take the intensity and move it up and you can start to see when i do that you know how much bloom we're adding and then take the blend and i'll go down to 0.5 again and now we've added a nice little bloom over here and over here and so i'll leave that alone then i'm gonna go into tone mapping now when i start doing toe mapping it's going to affect this shadow catcher but it won't affect the final rendering but i'm going to just adjust the exposure just a little bit so i get a little more con and a little more contrast so i'm starting to get this you know i can just start playing around with this now this is not available in blender none of the stuff that i'm doing here is available in blender this is why i use k cycles for this right i can't use the doesn't have the bloom stuff and this contrasting now you can do it in the compositing tab after the render but it's much easier if you can do it up front also um and and and things like this bloom is a really good bloom compared to what you get in blender so i'm going to take this white balance i'm going to jack it down just a little bit so it's a little cooler and i can blur the image for light or sharpen the image if i want but for the most part i'm not going to mess with that i can also go in and add depth of field if i want and then what i'll do is under lens so i'm going to go ahead and add this vignette so i'm going to put it to 1 and then make the intensity one and notice how the vignette's taking over the whole viewport which i don't want so i'll come back over here and i'll hit this render region and now the vignette comes it kind of comes in here and that's a little too dark for me so i'm gonna go back in here and just say okay the vignette intensity i'm gonna just bring it down something like that there okay and let's look at my sampling i've got 128 so let's do 256 and uh i'm going to go ahead and power say to save this save iteration of this so this is my render i'm going to put some text over here but but this is going to be my render if i hit f12 now or i just say render image it's going to do a rendering for me and it's a 1920 by 1080 render and you can see it took 13 seconds let's go ahead and just for the heck of it i'll close this let's instead of making it 1920x20 let's let's make it a 4k render so let's multiply it by 200 see how long it takes to render this in 4k so i'll hit f12 again and that was what 50 52 seconds and we can see if i hit the one key that's the actual resolutions so i went back to the original hdri map because i found out that the one i was using was giving me some artifacting in this glass area up here and as you can see the object looks really good i did adjust the lighting a little more rotated them a little more and as you can see the image is pretty good and as i said the 4k was still rendered in under a minute with 256 samples and ultra denoising turned on it all looks really good so one thing i will mention is that there's also a way that you can use a background image in here and there's also a way that you can set up a scene like a tabletop scene or or use the regular hdri those are options that you do have it's just we don't have time for all that in this particular presentation if you're interested in this i would definitely suggest you take a look at k cycles as it really does speed up things and it helps you with a lot of this post effect stuff and then of course kit ops can help you in terms of adding materials along with eevee material systems so thanks for watching and we'll see you online bye [Music]

Channel: Chipp Walters

Views: 13,650

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Id: i6Iuc8PfnWc

Length: 26min 21sec (1581 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 10 2021