Custom HDRI Lighting Setup in KeyShot

it's well documented here on YouTube why it's best to use physical lights such as area lights and spotlights in your keyshot scenes but sometimes a custom hdri setup can get you the same result much faster so in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to make a custom hdri lighting setup with three options for more realistic pins as always if you're looking for some ready to render keyshot resources make sure you head over to moment.co.uk where my team and I are building out a massive library of designer scenes and props to help you improve your visuals I'll leave the link to moment.co.uk down in the description below for now let's start the tutorial the product I'm using for today's tutorial is the bows and Wilkins formation Duo it's a beautiful speaker I will note though I have changed the body to gloss black piano black because I think it's going to be easier for us to see what's happening in the hdri editor with gloss black Reflections now most of the work we're going to do today is in the environment tab I've bought the project window over to the left hand side for this tutorial real but just bear in mind if you're a beginner this will all be on the right hand side of your UI now before we jump into the hdri editor and start building this lighting setup couple of things to change first in the lighting tab I'll make sure the product mode is enabled not basic and then in the image tab we could also make sure that we're in to graphic mode as I have done a video on but in this case I'm going to go with high contrast mode because we're building a high contrast render today with very bright highlights on the speaker we'll now go back to environment Tab and do a couple of checks before we actually do the custom lighting setup they're both on the size so under transform make sure the size of the environment is Comfortably big enough to hold your product in my case I'm going to go up to 10 meters for this speaker and then also underground shadows I'm going to increase the size of this up to 10 meters too I don't see ground shadows in this composition so it doesn't matter but in your work you will need to make sure that your ground and environment are big enough okay we can now go into the hdri editor which is this tab here and you'll see in the hdri editor it works in layers you will always have a default layer which is called background and by default that background is set to an image which is startup.hdr which is what you see in this rectangle straight off the bat I'm going to change this to a solid color and I'm going to change that color to Black essentially turning all the lights off in keyshot and giving us a clean canvas to start working with now every light source we're going to add in here is going to be done with a pin and pins can be added on this toolbar here at the top now there are a couple of rules that I follow when using hdri pins number one is that you want to achieve the best result I.E communicate in the form of your product in an attractive way with as few pins as possible if you can do that with one pin fantastic if you need four pins that's probably okay too if you find yourself needing 50 pins you've probably not been that efficient with your lighting unless you do have a very complex product form to communicate secondly in the editor is we try to avoid having overlapping pins just think of that in a photography studio would you put one light in front of another probably not so in the editor we tried to keep our pin separate with a gap between all of them so the first pin we're going to add in here is going to be the backdrop pin and I'm just going to add in a regular pin for that which is the far left button on here now that will add in a circular pin by default and this pin is going to sit behind our product now in our case we are going to render the Bowser Wilkins speaker on a black background but this pin is going to give me a little edge of light all the way around so I can communicate the form of the product you don't have to do this especially if you're on a black background but in this case I think it works really well now the setting for this pin I'm going to go with rectangular and then I'm going to make sure that fall off is down at zero so I get perfectly sharp edges now on this note we also need to change the resolution of this whole image this whole hdri here and you can do that by clicking on the background layer now under the background layer you've got resolution and on the resolution I'm going to crank it all the way up to the top one 10 000 by 5000 pixels and then the top right hand corner I can click refresh so as we add in pins we're going to make sure that the edges stay really sharp and the reflections that we get are also really sharp too now I've got this pin sat behind my product I can go back to the environment settings and change the background to be a color and the solid color is black I can then reposition this pin and go back to the editor and move it into place so I get a constant bleed of light around the product I'm going to only have a Slither on the top and then if I need to adjust the size it's under the size drop down so I can increase the Y scale and the X scale if I need to just to get that trim of light around the edge before we move on to the next light source I'm just going to do some organization and rename this pin to backdrop now the next pin we're going to add in is going to be replicating a soft box diffuser in a photography studio so again we'll go add pin and again we'll change it to rectangle now if you look at one of these lights in a studio you'll note a couple of things typically the corners are a little bit rounded not going to a junction like this because the soft boxes are made of fabric and secondly you will have a brighter spot in the middle of the light fading out to the sides so we're going to try and recreate that in key shot so we can get more realistic Reflections on the product to do this we're going to increase the rounded corner for that PIN probably up to around 0.3.2 for me and then for the fall off we're going to leave on there but the mode we're going to change to Circular so this will keep perfectly sharp edges around that but as I bring up the fall off you'll see that it starts to fade out around the side of this pin given a hot spot in the middle now we can either move this pin around to reposition the Highlight or use our set highlight feature to reposition that on the speaker now I'm happy with the position I can start to change the size I'm going to go up and last thing to do with this pin is increase the brightness I'm going to go up to eight to make that much brighter than the backdrop pin because this is a feature pin this goes on the front side of the product the next light source we're going to add is a gradient pin and a gradient pin is also a really important tool to have on your toolbar especially for glossy products to add a gradient pin you click the second button along which is ADD gradient pin and you'll see that it comes on a circular and very colorful so the color of this gradient is down here we've got the first pin that's in red I'm going to change that to White and the second one over here that's blue I'm going to change that to White also now I'm going to again go with a rectangular pin in this case which gives me a left to right gradient on this pin and I'm going to turn the fall off in this case all the way down to zero so get my Sharp edges coming back so looking at how this gradient pin works you have your color along the bottom we're going white to white and then the opacity at the top where we're going from white to black so on the brightest side I'm going to click on that pin and I'm going to turn the brightness all the way up to eight which is what we use for our pin before at the bottom though I'm not going to have it completely dark so I'm going to leave the brightness at one and at the bottom so it's faded out I'm not going to have it at zero opacity I'm instead going to have it probably about 0.1 or 0.2 so it doesn't go to complete Black over the other side again I can now move this into place either with the set highlight feature or just moving my pin around that looks about right to me now for the last pin we add we're going to take a more professional approach you don't have to use this but if you're looking for that extra five percent on your visuals and your Reflections this might be the right route for you so as I've discussed lights in photography studios aren't normally solid colors moving on from what we did with the softbox they actually have creases and lots of variation in them across that diffuser now that's very difficult to replicate in keyshot without an external resource will Gibbons produced a fantastic video on how to use assets from grayscale gorilla to create that effect on area lights I'll watch that video I loved it I got the assets from grayscale gorilla and we started using that workflow I then found out that we could use those in the hdri editor too so if I bring up my texture Library where I've loaded these assets you'll see that you've got these scans of photography lights with accurate creases and Reflections and Luminosity on there now the one I'm going to use for this top pin is this circular soft box here the dot exr files which are high dynamic range and I can simply click and drag that into the editor now even though this is an image we're dragging into the editor it works pretty much like a normal pin I can drag it around I can use a set highlight feature in this case I'm going to find that final position for this pin which is going to be more about my overhead light trying to pick up more of that top Contour again trying not to overlap other pins and then with these I found that you have to juice the brightness quite a lot they come in quite dark so for this I'm going to try I'll try brightness 8 see how that works that's probably about right actually and then put it in its final position so we have got a little bit of pin overlap here on the editor but because both these are so bright you don't really see a difference at the back and we get this finished lighting setup now just to show you as well we do have a piano black finish for the product here but if I was to double click on that and start increasing the roughness of that paint the setup will still hold so actually sometimes it's wise to do your lighting setup for the gloss version of the product because it works for the gloss it will probably work for the more rough version too so there you go start to finish making a custom hdri lighting setup with three different methods for bringing in pins I'm really happy with the outcome and hopefully you've learned something on the way thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next one foreign

Channel: Liam Martin

Views: 10,764

Keywords: keyshot, tutorial, rendering, product, design, cgi, cad, 3D, how, to

Id: rpu6cAmag5E

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2023