Enscape Photographic Approach | Modulus Render

[Music] hi everyone this is vlad from modulus render and in today's tutorial we're going to talk about how to apply a photographic approach to your lighting and rendering using sketchup and enscape let's look at our scene inside of sketchup we have this room with a big corner window over here some curtains and some furniture again from norm architects these are really really interesting and simple pieces of furniture and i have this room with a big window and i've put a section plane in the back or on the back wall so i can see inside now the point of this scene is to achieve really soft shadows i wanted the mood to be very like a cloudy day even some fog in the distance and i didn't want the sun to be shining through so i wanted it to have really really soft shadows softer than the um enscape sun can provide and i want to show you how i did that let's just start and scape and see what we have so far without any special lighting set up so let me just start and scape and we can take a look and this is how it looks without any additional lighting set up so we just have the hdri on the outside and the sun and that's about it so it looks pretty dark and we're going to take care of this but first i want to take a look at the hdri i used so that's the kind of mood that i would like on the inside or on the whole image just you know cloudy and because it's cloudy the the shadows that are cast inside would be very very soft so here we actually don't have any shadows on the inside no contact shadows so let's see in the settings how it looks first of all i've turned off auto exposure because i'm looking straight at the window so with auto exposure it would get very dark so this way it's just like using manual on your camera you don't want the auto exposure to affect your lighting so we have more control over that by disabling it and i've used the sky box which is this hdri that you can see outside and also i haven't ticked the brightest point as sun direction because i want to control that separately and now i wanted to see the actual sun and i wanted to show you guys how the shadow sharpness even if it's zero it's still not soft enough and in this case i actually move the sun out of the way so the sun isn't shining through um here but let me just move the sun i mean change the hour so we can see a little bit of shadow let me make this brighter aha there it was maybe i'll just have to change the north yeah so let's say something like this so these are the this is the default sun right from escape so we want the shadows to be very very soft now even if i go with the slider down to zero right it's still too sharp for this kind of a environment that i'm looking for so i might lower the intensity or bring it really really low something like this but then it looks very uh night like so i mean at night but it's like very very strong right the light is very i mean the shadow is very sharp around here and i want even softer shadows than this so let me just put this back to around 30 and and take a closer look so they're very as you can see it's very very sharp and doesn't match my outside lighting so what can we do we can use escapes lighting to make our own sun so let me just put the north back back in its place so the sun isn't coming through uh this window so now it doesn't matter uh how bright or uh how strong the sun is because it's not affecting my uh my lighting and now what i want to do is make my own sun so how can we do that first of all i want to draw the direction right of my sun so maybe something like this just using lines as a guide but maybe i want this kind of angle for my uh let's say photographic sun or fake sun however you want to call it so i'm going to use these guidelines to cast my light inside and for that or for the fake sun i'm going to use spotlights because i can adjust the angle i can adjust the intensity and you'll see by adjusting the angle you can get sharper or softer shadows so let's say i want to use this direction and i'm just going to select my line light and directed on the guideline right there and you're going to see that even if i put the intensity way up high one spotlight is not enough so i'm going to use multiple spotlights and multiply them maybe six or nine and all of these with the guidelines i'm going to put in a group so i can move it around change the angle and let's see if we play around with the intensity and the angle what effect we have so i'm just gonna push the intensity way up so we can see in the image that shadows are starting to appear right we have even like this very very soft shadows around the table we have some contact shadow here around the legs of this bench and we have really like big lights coming from the curtain we're going to talk about the materials in a second but i just want to talk about the lighting now so we have a hint of what we want we have some soft shadows and now the beam angle is 60 degrees so if i if i push the angle up to have 90 degrees uh you'll see especially here the the holes in the curtain are getting really really big because the angle is bigger so the the shadows are very soft now if we bring the angle down let me just lower it you'll see the shadows are sharper so this is what i mean by making my own sun so now by adjusting the angle here the the bigger the angle the softer the shadows but now i can really gain control over this shadow over the softness of it so i can really bring it way lower than the the sun settings allow me to so you see something like this can make it even softer so now it's just a matter of taste of looking at reference images and choosing um a setting that looks good in your image or in your specific render and as i said this sun this fake sun or photographic sun can be moved right we can adjust the angle you can see what what looks good i think i want some light coming in through here and just casting over to this wall if we look at the plant shadow it looks really really soft and nice very fluffy shadow so that's that's what we're looking for so before adding any other lights let's just take a look it looks pretty good now let me just delete this and turn on the layer that i have here with my sun and you'll see there's uh a little bit more um spotlights than the other one but this is the principle that i applied here about 30 degrees for the beam angle and maximum intensity and we have something like like this we have some streaks of light coming in of course we can see some issues here with the curtain material so it's very of strong i mean it looks very the pattern is very big on the wall so we don't want that and we have some really dark uh parts of the image which we're gonna solve with some fill lights so we have our light direction and we have our fake sun over here and now it's time to add some some fill lights now for the fill lights i used uh some line lights and some plain lights and i'll show you over here i have them all on a different layer so these are the fill lights and you'll see how these affect the overall look of the image because we need some some lights to brighten up the interior and show some details on the materials so for the fill lights i use some some plain lights in the windows and on the back wall i've put some line lights and uh plain lights together so i have these three lighting up everything and then on the staircase over here i want to have some detail on the wall let me just zoom in here and you see that light coming through over there that's from these fill lights that i've put on the top of the stairwell so we could have some highlights on this texture the wall texture now we still haven't gotten rid of this uh type of strong shadow over here i mean i like the soft shadows on the floor you see you can barely see them but that's the that's the look i want uh and this shadow from the curtain or coming from the curtain is really really big so i mean it's dark and it's it's like a stain on the wall so we need to fix that but i'm pleased overall with the lighting so far but we need a little bit more light and here we have to address i mean in order to correct that shadow on the wall over there we need to take a look at the curtain material and let me just open up the settings now for the curtain material i've used a translucent material or the foliage option not the generic so the foliage there is no where is it there is no uh i mean the opacity is 100 percent so it's um it's not transparent from the sketchup uh settings i've added a bump map a fabric bump map to it let me just go closer so we can look now the foliage makes it a little bit transparent right the foliage material as long as this is one-sided if the curtain has some thickness to it then the foliage material will not have a transparent look so it has to be just one-sided there shouldn't be any thickness to the curtain so it has a little bit of translucency when we apply foliage now apart from foliage i've added a little bit of bump i'm just going to go really close so you can see this pattern here is from the bump map and i've added an alpha map to the translucency or to the transparency of the material and we have this map that cuts through our curtain and these holes are generating this type of shadow now i'm not going to modify the curtain you can adjust the transparency of it by adjusting the brightness of the image so if i go lower and it's darker then you'll see the image i mean the curtain becomes really really transparent this is a great way to treat your curtains in in your renders because if you change the opacity from here you'll have this weird shower curtain look to curtains that are supposed to be made out of fabric and they should look very light and very transparent so something like this like 80 uh 85 86 percent translucency or transparency but it's still not enough because we have these weird looking shadows and the curtains don't look so real so what i like to do with materials that i treat as translucent materials i like to add lights so i need a backlight and a front light so i'm gonna basically put some lights here in the back of the curtain on the outside of the building and then some lights on the inside of the building and i want to just go back a little bit and show you what that does so i have i call them curtain lights because well they're close to the curtain but it's again these uh line lights which i find give very very soft shadows and help me eliminate some shadows that i don't want in the image and you'll see what i mean when i turn on the the curtain lights so let's just turn those on and you see what happens i'm just going to turn them off and back on again so you can see this is without the curtain lights i mean without backlights and front lights around the material and this is with the curtain lights so without and with and all of a sudden the curtain material looks a lot better and we don't have that strong ugly looking shadow over here on the wall and i'll show you so on the outside we have these three line lights or backlights over here so we have more emphasis on that translucent effect and in the front we have again a few lights in the front these three and these three and then i've used this one light over here and i'll show you why let me just delete it so you can see uh the effect that it has on this shadow over here so let's just look at this spot in the image and i'll just delete the the line line so you see because of the fill lights that are on the outside and on the inside this shadow disappeared or it got a lot brighter so it doesn't uh affect the image it doesn't look weird so we still have the shadow but it's very light but now that shadow in the back is very dark because these lights cast the light onto the surface of the curtain and of course they will create a shadow behind it over here so in order to get rid of that shadow that is very dark over there i just put one light and lower the intensity until i have softened let's say that shadow in the back or there's some light in there brings up some of the details in the materials and get rid it gets rid of that shadow over there that's why i use it so i'm just putting lights wherever i need them trying to control the overall look of the image so it's not too dark and not too bright so i'm looking at highlights and i'm looking at shadows so let me just turn them all off and try to recap what we did so we did a custom sun made with spotlights and by arranging or by modifying the beam angle we can uh control the softness of the shadows then we put some fill lights on the inside to bring some light uh to have more light more details in the shadowy areas and then we noticed we had some weird looking shadows generated by these lights and then we added some lights around the material that is generating that those weird shadows and it might seem a little bit complicated but what what you're actually doing is uh painting the render with lights so just looking at the shadows controlling the shadows and then arranging the lights in such a way that it looks natural and it doesn't look fake so uh a lot of people think that if i put this uh these uh fill lights on the inside it will look good in any scenario but it doesn't so you have to be careful to put the fill lights close to the windows or uh out of the camera frame so you don't see them and it's just a matter of getting the right balance between your fill lights and the overall look of the image another thing that i did i know that enscape doesn't cast colored shadows or caustics so i i've made a little bit of a caustic effect on the wall here using again some lights let me just zoom in and you'll see what i mean so i have this glass material that is a little bit of has some green in it and i've added some some bump let me just show you the material so it's just a this material is applied on the surface of the 3d model and then i have some bump and then there's also some transparency added with this map roughness zero and i've given the glass a green tint so i would like to have some green shadows on the uh on the wall over there now i know the sun or you know my fake sun isn't strong enough to create realistic shadows over there but a green hint of a shadow would be nice and for that i made this pack of caustic lights which are basically ies lights that are green so i've put these lights over there to mimic right it's not a detailed shot i'm looking at the scene from over here so it's not extremely accurate but it gives a hint of caustics being scattered from this green glass and some you know some caustics on the wall over there or some colored shadow so for that i've just put some ies lights over here it looks crazy but it gets the job done and you you want to mimic the shape of the bottle in this case or of the glasses so you want to mimic the shape that's generating the caustics so i've put these to kind of mimic the the bottle and two more down there to mimic the the glasses so it's just a little you know trick i use to have some color in the shadows and mimic some caustics let me just turn it off and on so it's ies lights again not for a detailed shot they won't look good if you're looking in uh in a close-up but for my purpose it looks pretty decent so we have some caustics over there now the materials i'm not going to go into uh detailed uh material explanations because i honestly didn't do anything special it's just reflection maps some bump maps some normal maps and that's it the only thing that i would recommend um is to use high quality textures so uh either take pictures in high res resolutions and you know make your own textures or invest in buying some quality textures let's just take a look at the floor and open the material tab and i think the floor is like 4k or 6k but it's just a normal map so i can see the the planks individually and then i use the reflection map and sometimes i affect the brightness of the reflection map to have more reflection or less reflection or i sometimes invert them now for the carpet i've wanted to have this kind of pattern and to have a 3d carpet and for this i used scatter version 2. so in this case let me just show you i've modeled this little polygon here that looks like a like a pez or a little small cylinder with some chamfering and then i've spread this using scatter onto the carpet and i use these two rectangles to mask out these portions of the carpet let me just see here so we have scatter 2 and i use the carpet as my host and then i scattered that little object and i think yeah i left it at 100 so it's the right scale and then distribution is grid and 0.3 centimeters in between them one centimeter from left to right and 0.3 centimeters up and down a slight rotation because they're all facing basically the same way but a little bit of rotation and some scale so now that we have our lighting set up and we have our materials set up we just need to render out our image and another thing i like to do before rendering is to uh create the effect of a c-log image or an s-log image which basically means i want a very neutral image that doesn't have very dark shadows or very high exposed areas or it doesn't have a lot of bright highlights so it's a very neutral image that i can later take into photoshop and apply some color corrections and some contrast and have my image looking right so i just looked up some c-log or s-log images so you see on the left here there that's the c-log and then there's the exposed image or graded image but the c-log basically means a very neutral image that doesn't have strong shadows or strong highlights so it's a very gray looking faded out image now of course you can skip this step and just render up as it is but i'd like to add some color correction to the image and you know having more control over the final image so in order to do a c-log render or something similar i usually don't use auto exposure so i look at the highlighted parts over here you know i don't i don't want them to be very very bright so we might bring the exposure a little bit lower and then another thing is i don't use auto contrast so i bring the contrast down to about uh minus 50 percent in the highlights and minus 50 in the shadows and it looks pretty pretty bad so now i don't have a lot of contrast i don't have a lot of exposure maybe bring it lower and i also bring down the saturation of the image because the the wood is looking too yellowish right now and the walls too so i bring this down to about 80 percent and now it's starting to look like a c log or an s log image or an f log image where i want some color very neutral um looking image as far as shadows go or highlights and then i add to the image also a little bit of vignette like 15 percent maybe no chromatic aberrations i'll just leave them on you can't really see those but i want this kind of an image you know a very faded image for my c log effect so because i want a very photographic looking image i want to use these techniques and see what we get so no contrast or no auto contrast just bring them down to minus 50 bring the saturation down to 80 and lower the exposure so it's not uh overexposed and you have this kind of a neutral looking image that will render out and open in photoshop to color grade and this is the image that we have that looks similar to a c-log and then here we can add uh different types of effects like contrast or lookup tables that we have or sharpness and i'm just going to show you here the stack that i used to color grade this image now i see in the recording i'm in the way so i'm just gonna move over here and i'll show you so i have uh a brightness and contrast layer that i've added and then i have two lookup tables that i used to give the image the effect the photographic effect this one and another one to increase the contrast a little bit and then some sharpness and with maybe a selective color we can control the overall color of the wood so we can make it a little bit more uh brown or warmer like this maybe something like this we can just select all of our layers and copy them to the other images and get the same effect or in this case we can save all the color grading that we did into a lookup table of our own and just use that in our rendering so basically we go to file and export color lookup tables and it will export a file a lot file and then we just add that to our images and get the same effect now these are some of the images that i did using this technique if you found this information useful don't forget to subscribe and hit that like button and i'll see you in the next tutorial [Music]

Channel: Modulus render

Views: 321,374

Keywords:

Id: SciP2ol8gFI

Length: 36min 26sec (2186 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 05 2021