Getting Started Rendering in Vray (EP 7) - RENDERING WITH VRAY PROXIES in SketchUp

whoo what's up guys Justin here from the rendering essentials comm back with another VA for sketchup tutorial for you so in this video i want to talk about how you can use v-ray proxies to speed up your Sketchup model so let's go ahead and just jump into it so one of the kind of funny things about Sketchup in and one of the things that can make rendering and Sketchup a little bit difficult is it's actually not super good at handling super high polygon models so the more faces and the more geometry you have in your model the slower everything's gonna run it just doesn't handle all of that geometry very well and so the problem is though a lot of the time you really need a high polygon high detail models within your Sketchup model in order to create a realistic rendering and so what v-ray has it has a tool called proxies that basically allows you to export your objects out of your model and replace them with a low polygon preview model and then when you actually do a rendering v-ray will reference those files externally it'll bring them in there called meshes it'll reference those meshes externally without you having to show them in your model and so the first thing I want to know is this actually isn't for speeding up your renderings this is actually for speeding up your actual models and so I'm gonna use these trees as an example and basically these trees these are three models that I brought in from extension called scatter and so I want to do another video on scatter in the future but it's basically designed to randomly scatter different objects within your models so it's great for scattering things like rocks and trees and kind of organic things that don't happen on a grid and so these are three models that come along with that and they're very very detailed and so if I was to come in here for example into a preview render and I was to zoom in you can see how this creates very detailed trees within your rendering so just the way the geometry is in here these look very realistic but the trade-off with these is they're very high polygons so if I was to stop my interactive render and then go up to window model information and I was to look at my model information you can see that these trees have something like 260 mm faces in them and six hundred thirty thousand edges if I was to look at my file size for this model you can see how just these three trees take up 70 megabytes just by themselves and that's without having a building model in here or anything else and so obviously Sketchup is really gonna start to slow down when you try to display all of that geometry and so let's go ahead and take a look at V rays proxy creation tools and I'll kind of walk you through what they do and what you can do with those um I do want to note that scatter also has some built-in tools for creating those render only objects that I want to talk about in the future but I'll leave a comment below let me know if you're interested in landscape rendering type tutorials but for right now what I want to do is I want to create a v-ray proxy and so within v-ray you're gonna want to go into your v-ray objects toolbar and so that's one of the three toolbars that's included in beer a three point six and I do want to note this is important that this is a v-ray three point six so the older versions may not have all of these different options in here and they're gonna look different so but in v-ray three point six what you're gonna do is you're gonna find an object and you're gonna click on it and you'll notice when you select your object your component you can see how this option becomes dark so if you're not clicked on an object for example that's gonna be grayed out but if you click on this it's this it's then gonna allow you the option to export a proxy and so basically what that means is that means that whatever object you have selected in this case this tree component it's gonna export this as what's called a vr mesh file and that's basically a file that v-ray can read when it's creating a rendering and so when you click on that you're gonna get a couple different options and these are all gonna affect the size of the object that you're going to be able to create and replace this object with and so there's three options in here for how this proxy is created and we'll take a look at each one of them so if you click this drop down you can see you get an option for face skipping you get an option for refined clustering and you get an option for vertex clustering and so basically what that's saying is that saying okay these are the different ways that we can create a proxy and so each one of these creates it in a different way and so the first one I want to look at is the face skipping and what the face skipping is going to do is this is going to be the fastest lightest weight proxy you can create and so it's just going to display random faces from your original mesh and so in this case I'm going to set my folder for where I want to save this file and I'm gonna set this to face skipping and you'll notice when you do this there's an option in here for faces in preview so that you can drag this slider and that's gonna affect how many faces are created within your proxy so if you remember we had something like two hundred and sixty thousand faces so if each one of these had if each one of these had something like ten thousand faces we'd still be significantly smaller and then these last two options are just override existing files is if you have a file in that folder with the same name it'll just override it and then replace object with proxy will basically replace this object in your model otherwise this will create a proxy but it won't swap it out so let's go ahead and click the export button and see what this creates what's base skipping and so with face skipping what this does is this just randomly takes faces from your object and it leaves them within your model so if we take a look at this we zoom around you can see how this has significantly less geometry than this but it still has a bunch in here and in this case this is actually a pretty fairly decent approximation of what this tree looked like and so if we were to go back in though and we were to do an interactive render you'll notice that this object still renders as this tree and the reason for that is because v-ray actually references that VR mesh file that you exported when it creates your render so even though this is in here looking like this you're actually still rendering the geometry that was in here before and so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna undo this and let's go back in and again on this same tree so let's export our proxy and in this case drag our faces in preview option down to something like a thousand and then we'll click the export button and so that's gonna overwrite the proxy that was created in that folder but you can see how now what this does is this creates a much less detailed preview of what this object is going to look like and even though it creates a less detailed preview if you were to do if you were to do another preview render of this object it's still gonna render the same way so this is still gonna get rendered as your tree geometry in here even though you've replaced it with this kind of funky looking um proxy and so now let's take a look at what the other two proxy creation types create so let's start with this middle one and so basically these you basically pick between these you're kind of trying to do a trade-off between how much detail you want to keep in your model and how lightweight you want this to be so in this case you have two other options there's a vertex clustering and refine clustering and so the vertex clustering is kind of in the middle this kind of uses a grid to reduce the amount of geometry in your proxy model it doesn't necessarily keep all of the fine details but it's gonna be more detailed than the face skipping so if I was to come in here for example and let's go ahead and we'll drag this down a little bit and let's say we create like 3000 faces in the preview for this one and I go ahead and I export that you can see how this is gonna treat this geometry a little bit differently than the face skipping did and so in this case you can see how these are rectangular the reason they're rectangular is because each one of these leaves is actually in here as kind of a transparent material applied to a rectangular face but you can see how this still gives you a fairly detailed view of what your tree is gonna look like and again if we go in and we do an interactive render you can see how that's still rendering as your tree even though this is in here as much lighter geometry and I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna undo that and let's go ahead and create a proxy in here using the vertex clustering has more faces so let's go ahead and export it with the ten thousand faces so you can see how in this case that doesn't really look that much different and I do want to note that these are in here as components so let's say for example I was to make a copy of this object off to the side this is going to act like any other component within Sketchup so you can see how as I created a copy over here and I move this around this copy of the proxy is gonna show up within my model as well so you can create copies of proxies and easily add things into your renderings and so for the last option let's go ahead and take a look at the refine clustering and so the refined clustering is going to be the most detailed kind of proxy you can create and basically it uses the vertex clustering to start and then it finishes the proxy off with more of an algorithm so this creates more detailed proxies but it's also going to be the slowest so let's go ahead and export one of those and see what that proxy is gonna look like so you can see how in this one it kind of took all of your it created all of these rectangles but then it kind of inference some lines in here as well so you can see how all of these are procs are ways that you can reduce the amount of geometry within your model so now if I was to go in and look at my model information you can see how instead of having 262 thousand faces or whatever I had in here before now I have something like nine or ten thousand so this is gonna be significantly smaller so if we were to go in and look at this file you can see how this v-ray proxy trees smaller file that we created is significantly smaller and more lightweight and so basically what we've done is we've reduced the size of this file while still being able to come in here and do an actual rendering of our real geometry because basically what this is doing is this is referencing those VR mesh files that we created and within this model you can also import those mesh files back in now I will know and I'm gonna do another video on this a little bit later if you try to import these into another model you're gonna have to do some stuff with the materials in order to get that to load properly because all the materials basically get loaded up into a material like a multiple material file off to the side we'll talk about that in another video and so the only other thing I want to talk about real quick is just want to talk about the way these proxies preview within v-ray so right now you can see how each one of these is previewing basically just as the proxy that we created and so that's fine you can see how if you go in here for example and you can see how each one of the proxies that we created shows up in here in your geometry section your v-ray asset editor but basically you can adjust that preview type so let's say for example that we were to adjust the preview type of let's say the full number 3 and we were to select that as a bounding box option so basically what that's gonna do is that's gonna create a box basically within the boundary of the object within v-ray so you can see how you can adjust the way that these proxy look you can show the full proxy the bounding box the origin point a couple different things you can also show the whole mesh you'll notice that you get a warning over here that this displays the original mesh so this will display the original object in here but it's really slow and if you're not careful you can crash your model when you do this so I wouldn't recommend doing much with the whole mesh but you can see how if you want to you can go ahead and preview this as a whole mesh in here so proxy preview is just going to show your proxy basically as you created it bounding box is going to show a box basically around the perimeter of the object on point and origin will show four points or eight points basically at the boundaries of the box made up by the object as well as the origin of the object and then the last option is the custom preview and theoretically the way the custom preview is supposed to work is it's supposed to let you change the proxy file without updating the preview geometry so there's also a function in here for animation and my understanding is you can use this to create animated proxies but you have to use proxy files created from like 3ds max or another program I believe so so this is a great way to bring in detailed geometry into your models without having to show all of the geometry and really slow down your Sketchup model so that's roman in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought did you like this video did you find it helpful I just love having that conversation with you guys 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 rendering tutorials every week but as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Rendering Essentials

Views: 42,182

Keywords: rendering tutorials, SketchUp rendering, Vray Rendering, the rendering essentials, therenderingessentials, rendering lessons, photorealistic rendering tutorials, architectural visualization, vray proxies, vray proxy, vray proxy rendering, working with vray proxies, sketchup render proxy model, sketchup vray proxy

Id: eF2SoZO7-YI

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 12 2018