How to use startup studios in KeyShot to save time

tell me if this sounds familiar you set out to create a quick rendering in keyshot you start by trying out a few hdris but then you end up swapping those out with physical lights and then you're adding backdrops and props and messing around with textures and lighting and image styles and render settings before you know it you've basically fallen down the rabbit hole and spent way more time on your image than you intended to now once i realized that 9 out of 10 times i do the same exact things in each keyshot scene i came up with a plan to reduce the time spent setting up a brand new scene so after creating a new startup studio and making some small changes to my workflow whenever i launch keyshot now the work to getting a passable rendering is like ninety percent done so today i'm going to show you how to cut out nearly all the time you spend setting up a rendering and i'm going to give you my custom startup studio file for free so you don't have to make your own you're welcome to get your free project files for today's tutorial sign up for the file vault by visiting willgibbons.com and entering your email address in the form at the top of the page and click sign up the first step is going to be to download the startup studio's zip file and extract the bip file onto your desktop next you want to navigate to the keyshot directory for windows users this will be in the c drive into your users folder your personal user folder documents then keyshot 10 or whatever version you're using and i will mention that this startup studio was created using keyshot 10 it is not backwards compatible it will not work on previous versions of keyshot go into that keyshot 10 folder into the scenes folder and drag that vip folder right into the scenes next we're going to launch keyshot 10 once key shots up find the preferences go to general you're going to browse to that new startup studios file and go ahead and load it hit save changes and then restart keyshot upon relaunching you should see something like this and we're going to change our user interface to show everything we've done here hit u on the keyboard for studios and you can go ahead and dock this on the right hand side of your user interface i'll make a little bit more room and we're also going to open the geometry view with o and this can be docked on top of your libraries view on the left and we should have a small a medium and a large studio ready to go this is the basis of this file and i'm going to show you how it works next the first thing i'm going to do is navigate back to the libraries panel and over to the models tab if you didn't see last week's video on how i like to use the models library to speed up my keyshot workflow i recommend you check that out now today i'm going to render this hector lamp it's a smaller product so i want to go and select my small studio each of these studios are sized based on the size of the product in this case if we look in the scene tree we will see that this studio contains a small one by one foot box and a couple of lights and a backdrop before i bring the lamp into the scene though i want to create a new empty model set so i'll click this button here if you can't see your model sets just grab these three dots drag to the right and you're going to create a new empty model set i'll call this one lamp and i'm going to turn this off so none of the existing geometry within the active studio gets copied into the new model set i'll go ahead and hit ok so here we are in the new model set with nothing in it that's why everything disappeared next i want to drag the hector lamp right into this active model set we'll go ahead and just click ok to accept the positioning from the start the next thing i want to do is turn on our small studio so now that both of these are active we can go ahead and move the lamp into position it's easiest to do this in the geometry view i'm going to select the model set within the scene tree where it says lamp in the geometry view i'll right click and say move selection and i want to snap it to the box because the box is what the camera is focused on so in the move tool i'm going to set a pivot the crosshairs icon will give you that option and then i'll click the box within the geometry view and hit ok now i have to click this button that says snap to pivot and now my lamp is aligned with the box if i zoom in a little bit i can move the lamp on over so it's more or less centered within the box and it looks like it's too low on the ground so i'm going to move it up i can change my geometry views camera to either the right or the left to give me a better understanding of where the lamp is positioned and then from here i just need to grab the move tool and drag the lamp up in the right position once it looks like the lamp is not sticking through the ground i can go ahead and push the lamp further back or bring it more toward the camera but i'm just going to leave it centered with the cube for now now you can see the lamp is a little too big because it's quite a bit bigger than this box it's about twice the size so in this case we just need to move our camera back if we go to our camera tab you'll see small front is active and it's locked so i'm going to unlock it and just drag the distance slider to move it away from the lamp a little bit and i'll middle mouse click and drag to more or less reposition this where i want it from there i'll go ahead and save the small camera and lock it back up now back in the scene tree we're going to hide and lock the small cube right click to hide and lock and now that's gone now that we've got our lamp positioned i get to run you through all the fun different ways we can modify this studio to get the look that we want in the studios panel grab these three dots and drag up and you'll be able to play with all the different settings let's click on the small studio and the lamp disappears that's because we need to make some changes to the settings within the small studio let's start off by ensuring that the lamp model set is active so now both of those are showing up and then from here we can play with things like different multi-materials for example our backdrop is starting with a white color but we could try gray or we could go for black if we want a really dark look i think that the white looks pretty good overall for this kind of modern product the other multi materials we have are the lights so for example we can take the front lights and change them from neutral which they are now that's a white color to cool so this gets a little bit more blue or we could choose a warm color which is a little bit more warm now of course you can change these i wanted them to be subtle and not overly saturated so because the lamp itself puts out a warm color i'm going to choose the cool front lights and then for the overhead light i can also go to the cool overhead light and now we have this nice kind of blue backdrop the environment we have active i'll show you those real quick there are two options there's dark and bright and this just fills in some of the ambient light so you could change it from dark to bright but of course it's going to blow our scene out so let's go back to dark from here the other thing you could do if you wanted to is you could turn off individual parts so for example if i don't want the overhead lights on i could just turn that off and since this is a lamp we get a lot of light from the lamp as well i'll turn it on for now now if i want to render a new thumbnail i just click on render thumbnail and all those settings that we just assigned to the studio will stay when we navigate away and then come back to it so just to show you a few more examples next i'll go to the medium studio and i'll go to my library of models and the next thing i want to render is this armchair or it's a chair it doesn't have arms in order to do that of course we want to create a new empty studio so i'll call this chair i will not copy any existing geometry into it here we are in the new empty model set let's drag the chair into the scene okay i'm going to just leave that where it is for now and i'm going to activate that medium sized model set set the chair model set to be active using the drop down accordion there we go and back to our geometry view so in our geometry view we can see this studio is much larger than the one we just used if i go to the scene tree we'll see that there's a medium three by three foot box let's go ahead and grab that new model set right click in the geometry view and move selection and same thing we're going to set the pivot to be the box or the cube and we'll snap to that pivot so our chair is aligned from a bird's eye view i'm going to rotate this chair to a nice kind of a 45 degree pleasing sort of angle there we go and i'm going to hide and lock the medium three by three foot box height and lock that's a right click and the scene tree and our chair is not touching the ground let's grab it go to position and just snap to ground that'll look a little bit better and in this case i actually want to bring our camera a little bit closer let's go ahead and unlock it now the reason these cameras aren't perfectly set up is because i don't know what you're going to render or what i'm going to render every time so they're set up to be approximate and then you just make a subtle change go ahead and save it and you're good to go within our medium studio options of course we could go and play with the lights or the backdrop so what if i want a gray backdrop could set that and then for our lights i could go with say warm lights and that's looking a little dark for me so i'm going to go for neutral this time the neutral again is just a white color and then if we go to medium overhead that's in neutral as well no i'm going to go with cool and when i'm happy with this i will click and render the thumbnail now let's go ahead and see what we've got one more time for the large studio example expose the model sets and we want to create a new empty model set this time i'm going to call it car and we'll turn off everything else inside the new empty model set i'm going to drag a car model that i have saved to my library hit ok to position it so next i'm going to select the large studio and underneath its model sets i want to turn on the car model set so that's in there too back to the geometry view we're going to use the geometry view to place the car i'll select the car right click in the geometry view to move selection could snap it to the cube again but this one's pretty easy to position just by looking at it i don't think we need to snap into position and then really it's just a matter of placing it onto the ground because again this one doesn't seem to want to snap to the ground every model is going to be a little bit different in that way just depends on how it was imported and all that now i want to hide the large 6x6 foot cube i'm just going to right click hide and lock and this is pretty cool looking although i think it's kind of blending in too much the background so i'm going to change the backdrop to something darker like black and honestly i think i like the lights being neutral the white because if i change them to blue or a cool or warm light then the car is not going to look light anymore so i'll go ahead and render this thumbnail i'm pretty happy with this one i think i want to change the camera angle let's do that just a little bit it's a little too low for my liking and i'm going to bring it a little closer i think that's good i'll go ahead and save that and just like that in a few minutes we're able to drop some products into our scene and if you don't have your library models ready to go to drag in you can drag new models from your computer into a new model set just make sure on the import settings that you choose to place it in the new model set and what's great is if we were to go out to render these of course in our queue we could add all of the studios and they are ready to render this frame count shows that three images will render out now before i let you go i do want to mention that of course the positioning of these lights are all just a starting point so if we look at the geometry view you can of course at any point grab one of these lights and move it around to customize it so if we want to move this front panel i can hit move selection of course we can choose to pivot around the car or the large 6x6 foot box if we want to and then we can just rotate this light panel around so we can just light the car from the front and the back that can be pretty cool too but again the sky's the limit and of course if you want to edit any of these materials that are applied to the lights just give them a double click and you can make them brighter or change their color just as you would in any other keyshot scene one more thing i'll mention before you go i've already taken care of setting up the render settings of course if you're rendering something that requires caustics turn that on but otherwise you're in product mode and i've gone in and created a photographic image style you can see without it what it looks like it just adds a bit more contrast it uses a little bit of tone mapping a little bit of bloom and denoise again these are settings i use almost all the time so i bake them into this scene so they're always active ready to go pretty cool right hopefully you found this one helpful and i want to reiterate that this isn't going to work for every product and every single scenario if you have specific needs you can of course make your own startup studios or modify the one that i provided you with and then go from there and it will take quite a bit of the work out of setting up each image but again it's not going to do all the work for you i just found that this would streamline and cut down on a lot of the effort i put into getting a quick rendering and in most cases it's going to work well enough so until next time happy rendering

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 25,426

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance, studios, startup scene, startup studios, industrial design, product design, render, workflow, keyshot 9, keyshot 10, keyshot 11, 3d rendering

Id: zgBfZJLFjuM

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 17 2022