EXTERIOR LIGHTING IN VRAY for SketchUp 3.6 with HDRI, Dome Lights, and Sunlight

who wants up guys Justin here with the sketch of essentials comp back with another Sketchup and v-ray to toriel for you so in this video I wanted to talk about some of your exterior lighting options when working with v-ray and before I get started today's video is brought to you by my supporters on patreon patreon as you know is the website where you can support creators that you like on YouTube so if you like what I'm doing on this channel maybe you're interested in supporting the show make sure you check out that link in the notes down below now let's go ahead and just jump into it so model credit for this video this model is the modern house with interior by Rachel Dee and you can download that from the Sketchup 3d warehouse and so basically what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at a couple of the exterior options for creating renderings and note that there's also a huge piece that comes with editing your materials that we're going to talk about in a future video in this video I just wanted to talk about some of your exterior lighting options alright so by default when you go into your v-ray asset editor you're gonna go into your lighting tab in order to see what lights are in your model and in this case the only light that we have in our model is our Sun light and so our Sun light basically kind of reflects the actual Sun position within Sketchup so like for example if I was to come in here and turn my shadows on then you can see how these are the shadows that the Sketchup Sun would cast in my model well if I was to do an interactive render then you can see that the shadows are lining up with what's going on with my Sketchup Sun and so like for example I'm gonna kind of drag this off to the corner but if I was to adjust the time of day you can see how my shadows are gonna adjust within my Sketchup model they're also gonna adjust within my v-ray model and so in this case the shadows for this rendering are gonna be applied based on the location of the Sun within Sketchup and so there's a few settings you can adjust in here as well so if you click on your sunlight then you go kind of off to the right then you can adjust things like your intensity you can adjust things like your turbidity in your ozone those are just the way that basically the way that the the haze shows up in the background so like let's say for example I wanted this to be brighter I could click and drag this off to the right and that would increase the intensity of my sunlight so you could make things lighter and brighter by doing that and then you can also adjust this sized multiplier and what the size multiplier is gonna do is that's gonna adjust how soft your shadows are so the larger your size multiplier the softer the edges of your shadows are gonna be so if you kind of zoom in right here across this edge you can see how the shadow gets softer the higher up I adjust this so the edges aren't as defined within your shadows when you do this and so like I said before turbidity and ozone are gonna kind of adjust the way that the haziness shows up in here so for example if I was to drag this way up then you can see how you're getting kind of a gray haze in the background so a really high value is gonna give this a very hazy look so you can also adjust your ground in color so let's say let's zoom out just a little bit you can adjust this color with this slider that's gonna adjust how white the ground is gonna be so you can adjust the way that that looks and you can also adjust the way that this blends with your horizon you can adjust kind of the angle of that so you can see how if I drag that off to the right this angle is getting higher I'm off to the side here so you can also adjust the color of your sunlight at the top here so there's a lot of different options for coming here and adjusting the way that your models gonna look using your different sunlight settings however sometimes the the built-in Sun just doesn't quite give you the look that you want and so when that happens what we're gonna do is we're gonna use something called a dome light and so when we use a dome light we're gonna we're gonna add that using the v-ray lights menu so you're basically just gonna come over here to v-ray lights you're gonna click on dome light and then you're just gonna place that somewhere in your model so in this case you can see how I place this right here one thing you're gonna notice about this is when you bring this dome light in it's also bringing in a sky background basically what this is doing is this is bringing a dome in that also has an HDRI image so it's an image that's kind of it wraps around your model and it gives you basically it contains more detailed lighting information and so in this case what we have is we have a case where we have the sunlight on and we also have the dome light on you can see how when I clicked and I added that dome light that added that to my lights list in v-ray and so what that means is right now we're applying the lighting both from the sunlight and from the dome light and in this case we don't want that we just want the lighting from the dome light and so in order to adjust that we're you're gonna do is you're gonna come in here next to your sunlight and you're gonna click the little Sun to turn that one off so we're gonna turn our Sun off in this case because we don't love both of these light sources active in our rendering and so you can also turn that off by clicking on your sunlight and then clicking a little slider right here you can turn things on and off that way as well and so what we're gonna do in this case is we're gonna take a look right now our lighting is being applied based on this dome light so basically this dome that this is wrapping around our model is what's lighting our model and so you can do the same thing that we talked about with the sunlight where you can adjust the intensity up or down in order to make it brighter or darker so I could bring that up to like a value of 3 or something like that and then the other thing you could do to brighten this up as well is if this starts kind of looking instead of like bringing this up like way high like if I was to add like a value of 10 or something like that you can see how this starts getting really washed out and kind of blown out so what you can do instead and we talked about this a little bit in our intro video is you can go into your settings and you can adjust your your exposure value to make this brighter as well so you're going to go into your settings under your camera and you can adjust your exposure value in here so in this case what I could do is I could bring this down to like 14 or maybe 13 and you can see how when I bring that in that brightens my model up as well and obviously that's still a little bit too bright but you can also use that to adjust how bright your image is going to be so that's two options for kind of brightening your model up and you just kind of have to there's a little bit of trial and error involved in figuring out exactly what you want in this case and so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to go back to my dome light and I'm gonna apply a custom HDRI image so right now when when you add a dome light v-ray automatically adds the sky HDRI image so you can kind of see in this rendering down here so this adds this image that kind of goes around in the background but it doesn't do exactly what I want like for example if I was to click on the shape and you see how this kind of stops at the horizon right now well sometimes what you want is you want this image to wrap down lower than the horizon to kind of make up your background and so what you would do is you click this little drop down and you would select the options for sphere but with this built in with this built-in HDRI image that just kind of gives me black down here and that's not what I want and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna apply a custom HDRI image to this dome and so in order to do that the first thing you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to download some HDRI images or really just one and there's a lot of different resources for that so I'm gonna list these so I'm gonna list these in my notes down below but HDR I Haven has some of these HDR I hub you can also just come in here and just do a google search for free HDR I so HDR Maps dot-com HDR I - skies there's a ton of different websites for this I like HDR I Haven because he puts up some really cool stuff and he's also just kind of running this based on his patreon so he's putting all this stuff out here for free and then he has supporters that support him but you can download any of these and what these are going to do is these are gonna download some HDRI files that we're gonna then apply to our model so in this case in order to do that you're gonna come in here in your light dome settings and you're gonna click on this little button so when you click on this little button that's gonna bring up more information about this HDRI image and in this case we're specifically interested in this option right here which is where we tell it where our HDR I file is located so if I click on this little folder so if we click on this little folder and we navigate to our folder we're restoring our HDR Fi you can bring those in as an image and you can see how these are kind of larger files a lot of these have a lot of lighting information inside of them but I highly recommend creating a folder where you start saving your favorite HDRI files so you can access them quickly in the future but in this case I'm just gonna bring in this HDRI file and as you watch in here what this is gonna do is this is gonna update with my new HDRI background and so you can see how that got brought in but my lighting is now not as good as it was and that just means we have to adjust the intensity so for the what I've found is for the default hgri file within v-ray you really only need to get your brightness up around 3:00 in the ballpark of 3:00 but then when you bring in new images like this one you have to brighten them up a lot more so let's start by dragging this up to something light let's start by dragging it up to 20 so even 20 is not super bright so maybe what I'll do is I'll just run that up to 30 and again rendering is interesting in the sense that there's a lot more trial and error involved so maybe I'll even bring that up to like 35 so we'll start there for right now and so you can see how what this did is this is lighting my image and it also brought in that background file but one of the problems that we have here is this file kind of stops at the horizon which is what I talked about before well in this case what we want to do is we want to change the shape of this from hemisphere to sphere and so when you change this from hemisphere to spear you can see what this does is this continues this down so it's almost wrapping your image in a complete sphere background and so you can see how now this blends in pretty well and you can see that you're getting reflections off of the glass using this hgri file so this really treats this like an actual background within v-ray and so I'm just gonna mess around with my brightness settings a little bit more and so that gives us a pretty good image and obviously we need to brighten it up and do some other things but this kind of gives you an overview of how you can use these hgri files in order to do this and so one other thing I want know is when you're in here you can also adjust the way that the hgri file is rope rotated within your model so let's say for example that we have our preview render up and running so if I was to rotate around you can see how this is actually a 360 degree image especially because we applied it as a sphere and so what that means is I can actually rotate this image based on or I can rotate this HDRI file around to show different parts of this image in the background and so in order to do that you're gonna have to change a setting and so the setting you're gonna have to change is in your v-ray asset editor under your dome light and what you're gonna want to do and you'll notice that I've brightened this up I ended up at about a hundred actually as opposed to where I was before and like I said each HDR I file is gonna be different but what you're gonna do is you're gonna use this option you're gonna click this button for use transform and so when you click the button for use transform what that's gonna do is that's gonna allow you to adjust that's gonna allow you to adjust the rotation of your HDRI file and that's only gonna work if you have this option selected for use transform and so what that's going to do is if I was to come in here now and apply the rotate tool to this you can see how I can actually rotate the placeholder in here for my dome light and what that's gonna do is that's gonna adjust the background of your HDR i files so it's actually rotating this around and you'll notice the brightness actually changed based on this but you can use this to adjust the background and in some cases this will adjust your shadows as well so and you can see how that did that here as well so generally speaking the direction of the arrow is showing you what direction your sun is shining so you can see how when I rotated that in this direction the shadows got bigger in this direction so if I was to rotate this back the other way then it's going to shine the Sun this way and so you can see how your shadows are cast differently based on what direction this arrow is pointing so you can use this to rotate your HDR eye around and adjusts the way that different things look and so I know there's some texturing work that needs to go on with this building but from a lighting perspective this gives you an idea of some of the lighting options that you have within v-ray we'll talk about textures in a future video so that's where I'm at in today's video leave a comment below and let me know what you thought was this helpful to you was there anything that I missed I just love having that Sketchup conversation with you guys I really appreciate some of the feedback I've been getting about v-ray so make sure you leave those comments and the notes down below if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week feel like what I'm doing in this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it now we'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 350,193

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup 2017, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, vray lighting, vray exterior lighting, vray dome light, vray 3.6, vray 3.6 dome light, vray hdri, how to use hdri, vray for SketchUp, vray tutorial, vray rendering, vray exterior rendering, vray for exteriors

Id: 51B40Ew09dk

Length: 14min 8sec (848 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018