This is D5! You guys have asked me a ton to review it. I knew it had so much potential
but I didn’t expect this much. It honestly blew all of my expectations! I have a lot of stuff to talk
about this rendering engine... significant things I noticed that are
interesting, but also there are many small perks here and there across the
UI and engine that honestly takes this software to a whole other level. The images that you saw in the intro
are from my first test using D5. And the project shown is
from Vaga Arquitetura. I’ve reached out to some friends to
get ahold of quality local designs. So I can show visualization tips and
tricks, with real and interesting designs. I’ll leave their info in the
description if you want to check them and see more about the project. As I mentioned, this has been long
requested by you, and it has been on my video to-do list forever. So I’m super happy that D5
is sponsoring this video. Sponsors allow me to continue creating
these free YouTube videos, and don’t worry because as always with all
sponsored content here, I’ll give my true and honest opinion about D5. So a quick summary up front, I’m
really into D5 at the moment. Especially this new 2.5
version that just came out. Again regardless of this
being sponsored or not. It’s powerful, it’s got a lot
of flexibility and control over the more advanced stuff. The library, just amazing... And D5 emphasizes on the free pricing
version, which is enough for most people. I’ll cover this and a lot
more during this video. Obviously, there are some things that are
not that great that are worth mentioning in case you’re considering using this
engine as your main visualization tool. So watch it until the end
to get the full overview. Make sure to subscribe to the channel
if you enjoy this type of content. And now let’s begin with
my in-depth thoughts on D5. And please, let me know
your thoughts on it. You guys always leave valuable
insights in the comments section, so I’m eager to know what you think. First thing to address, the
real-time rendering experience. It’s a seamless workflow with
D5 where there a no effects to be added to achieve realism. It’s about setting up materials,
changing up the lighting and that’s it. You can work with “effects”, but these
are to achieve a different mood and not really enhance the render quality. I’ve always thought about a render
engine as a stand-alone tool where you’d have to wait to see a render
evolve into a finished product. Yes, the term real-time rendering
means that it’s in real-time. But with D5 I’ve noticed that
this gap between the final result and what’s actually on the screen
while you work is much smaller. This sure comes at the cost of requiring
a powerful setup, so keep that in mind. You can however change the
display mode to static and smooth to keep things running fast. It’s here under "display" that
you easily change the mode. And I actually have found these
settings to be so so helpful. I didn’t know I actually needed this. But look. If you’re trying to align something,
let’s say a light source for example. You can then add the light. Then switch to wireframe. Change the camera view
to "Front" or "Side". And with the light source selected hit
Z on your keyboard to zoom into it. And easily line things
up with the axis control. By the way, the gizmos is fantastic in D5. They recently updated it,
and it’s smooth to use it. Quick tip, hit V on your keyboard to
change from move to scale, and therefore easily change an object's size. Next up, advanced controls
in material editing. This should be a standard option
across the industry, but it’s not. And when I saw that D5 allows
you to have pretty much all the control in material creation. It’s definitely a win for me. You start by selecting a
material template, which almost always is going to be custom. And here it allows to import
all of the channels to work with PBR materials in full. It uses the roughness workflow, so if your
PBR library of materials uses Glossiness, you just need to click the button that
D5 makes available to invert the texture. It’s the same as going into Photoshop
and hitting Ctrl + I to invert it. But this just saves time. A so useful slider that D5 has on their
material settings is this one: Under the base color map you can expand more
options and besides having the option to change hue, saturation, and black values. You can add contrast, to the right
for more contrast and left for less. This is a game changer and I
found myself using it a ton! The material template offers
many other ready-to-use presets. I’m going to add a few links in
the video description in case you want to learn more about this. Each one has a specific set of sliders. For example, "Cloth" to add
a falloff to fabric textures. Glass materials are
very well handled by D5. I like to add a normal map
with a very tiny amount so that reflections have some imperfections. Also worth mentioning... "caustics" has been added to D5. UV’s issues are easy to fix with
this toggle of triplanar projection. Although it doesn’t fix every
type of issue, and honestly, I felt that customizing the UV was
a bit hard on some occasions. But since D5 is constantly pushing
out updates and how much the software has improved over these
past years, I’m certain they will add more control on Uvs in the future. To wrap up the topic of materials,
"round corners" is present. This helps a ton to
break those sharp edges. And make sure to use the shortcuts
“i” and “o” to copy and paste materials from object to object. I’ve got a whole list of useful
shortcuts, tips, and tricks that I was thinking of making a list of things
every architect should know about D5. Let me know in the comments below
if you’d be interested in that. The fast output [images and videos],
and the ease of creating animations. I found it to be quite easy to
export images and videos with D5. Scene creation is integrated over the
main UI and not as a separate area. Everything happens within this
viewport and the settings are all available on the sides. You see it all in a glance. Now, it’s important to me to be
able to tweak the model and overall settings while fine-tuning the scene. So another big win for me was when I saw
you can enable here under preferences and widgets, this "advanced camera tools". Still in beta, but you can then
physically add cameras and see their view picture in picture mode with
tons of advanced settings here. This allows you to move and place things
on the scene and instantly see how they appear on the framing you have. Outputting videos has always been
challenging with rendering engines. But creating a keyframe in D5 made
this process very enjoyable and quick. And you can add all of your
clips to a render queue, and then render them all at once overnight. Again, images, videos, and any settings
are dealt with here on the main viewport. It’s all collapsable so they
don’t take important screen real state when not in use. The new 2.5 version of D5
now includes the D5 Studio. A cloud workspace to store
presets and other resources. Enviorement, brush and path presets
to improve your work efficiency. You can also check out some
of D5’s curated presets to get a head start on a scene. It’s a quick way to change the atmosphere
of an image, but I always recomend then further tweaking your settings to
really customize it to fit your project. Okay, now it’s time to talk about
one of the best things in D5. Their huge library of assets. Models and materials. It’s got an insane
selection of everything. I wasn’t expecting so many
different options and even different variations of the same model. So it’s easy to avoid that repeated
look when adding vegetation. An enormous selection of
decoration objects as well. I usually prefer using custom
materials and having my own library of textures, but these materials
here make your life much easier. So that those not-so-important
materials don’t have to be custom and you can get them done really fast. Now, I would love to see some more
controls over the asset library, for example, to be able to filter
out downloaded models, or by color. It could have a tagging system
apart from the favorites only. Also, D5 has a scatter tool which works. But, it’s not the best. Whenever you need to change
any of these settings here. You need to delete the
whole thing and start over. You get the hang of it eventually,
but it definitely needs improvement. Anyways, their library
of assets is a big plus. But the whole engine is powerful
regardless of this library. I’m saying this because that’s
mostly what sets the D5 free version from the Pro version. So let’s talk about pricing. It’s a crucial thing to consider, right? Sure, output quality, overall render
speed, and all of that are important. Which D5 sure takes care of... But pricing model... pricing is vital. When I was looking more into D5 and
even after getting on a call with D5’s team, it’s clear to me that
they emphasize on the free plan. This rendering engine
is actually free to use. And there’s no trick here. It doesn’t limit the output
resolution, or effects, or anything. There are no watermarks as well. It’s a fully functional
rendering engine for free. However, the D5 Pro is not that
expensive, especially compared to other rendering engines out there, right? They list here all of the differences, but
I’d say, especially after being immersed in this software these past weeks,
one of the biggest differences is the enormous library of materials and models. Therefore, if you have your own
library of assets and you won’t use the pro features yet, you can
stick with the free version forever. Quick note, if you’re school. They’ve got the educational
version, which is basically a Pro version that you can get for free. Alright, last, but not last let’s do a
rapid fire for other updates that just came out on D5 apart from everything
that I already mentioned previously. But feel free to check D5’s
website for the full list. D5 now supports livesync for SketchUp
[and a converter for most 3D software]. Section tool is now implemented
on D5 allowing us to be really creative with the engine. And "D5 teams" is also here,
collaborative visualization can be quite handy for larger projects and teams. If you’re interested in trying out
D5, be sure to head to their website and get going with the free version. Then if you want to upgrade to the Pro
version to get access to all the extra features, I have a link to the video
description that gets you a 5% discount. It’s an affialite, and by using the
link you also support this channel. I hope you enjoyed this video. Don’t forget to leave your
input down below about D5. I’m looking forward to continuing this
discussion over the comment section. Oh and for those that got to the
end of the video, I’m working on a rather important and new thing
with Steven from Show It Better. We’re planning to release
it in a month or so. I don’t want to spoil too much,
but make sure to follow me on Instagram to not miss it! In case you haven’t watched my last video
where I visited Bjarkle Ingels Group in New York City, click here to watch it.
