KeyShot Animated Wireframe Tutorial

so I was experimenting in keyot the other day and I came up with this cool animated material that transforms any opaque material into a cool wireframe material you can see with some examples on screen how this material can be applied to any sort of object and it can be customized with different colors and appearances so I thought it'd be fun to share that with you and show you how to use it all right so let's get into it I've got a keyshot file here set up with three different Studios we've got a studio for a Lego minifigure we've got a studio for a universal ball joint and we've got a studio for a light fixture and the reason we have these three random objects is because they're all different sizes the lighting fixture is the biggest this one's in the middle this one's the smallest object and what I want to do is show you how you can use this animated wireframe material on different Siz and shaped models because it is going to have to be manually adjusted for the specific model that you're going to use it on now if you haven't already you're going to want to import this material that I created it is the animated wireframe material so you download that from the file Vault I have that Linked UP below then find in keyshot the folder with the left Arrow under the materials tab that is the import button go ahead and click that find the KMP that's a keyshot material package file this contains the material that I created you're going to open that up and it will import it into whatever folder you have selected so the first thing we're going to do is just drag this right on over to the Lego minifigure it's going to look a little weird but like I said this material has to be tweaked a little bit for whatever model you're going to use it on so let's double click on it to look at its material properties so you can see it is a wireframe material to start and then we have actually a label of plastic on top that has been animated so to open the animation timeline you hit a on the keyboard or press the little animation button down here and you see this little bar that means that this is animated if I scrub along the timeline you can see the plastic label covers the Lego minifigure so let's go ahead and look at this material before we do that let's create some room so I'm going to close the material panel on the left with the library and I'm going to drag this project panel over to the left which just moves this Lego guy over and I'll get into the material graph here so here we're looking at the node tree for this material we have a base material which is our wireframe and that's what's creating this appearance here in the realtime View and then on top of it we have a layer of plastic to preview this I could hit C on the keyboard and you can see this is the plastic it's just a slightly rough black plastic now as far as the animated portion of it we're doing that with something called a color gradient and a curve fade the color gradient is actually fading between white and black so if I were to preview that with C you see it's white and black where it's white it is opaque where it's black it is transparent because we've plugged this into the opacity uh socket on the plastic material and then we're using the Curve curve Fade to actually animate it over time and we're going to break all this down here so the first thing I want to do is explain to you how to get the curve fade set up basically if I double click on this we see it's got this animation curve and right now it has been correctly set up for this small Lego minifigure if we click on the first dot on the left you can see it's set to -10 and the dot on the right is set to 15 these are somewhat arbitrary Val vales that need to be adjusted for each sized object that you're going to be using this on it is related to the scale of the model and also this color gradient has a scale as well so if we look in the color gradient the scale is 1 mm that's the distance between the white and black value here so that's what's creating this fade from white to black if we preview this color gradient with C we could sharpen this up if we were to bring the black and white color stops closer together and we could make them more gradual if we spread them out if I were to increase this scale to say two then that's going to become a bigger gradient but I'm going to bring it back down to one for now and I'll move this on over as well so we have this color gradient and it's basically plugged into the opacity of our plastic label if we wanted to we could take this plastic and it could be most other materials that you can use as a label so you don't want to try to use like a glass or a transparent material that won't really work but you could use say a metal or you could potentially use like a paint or uh you know metallic paint things like that to get the different looks that you might want to let's take a look at making this look a little bit better and then I'm going to show you how we have to adjust this curve fade for some of these larger models that we'll use in a minute here so how do we get the rest of this Lego minifigure looking nice because this doesn't look that great here the thing that's interesting is this wireframe is actually drawing lines based on the topology or the actual shape of the mesh because I imported this Lego figure and well all these models as a nurbs based 3D format I have the option to retes that in keyshot so I'm going to write click on the Minifigures body and go to retes this is going to allow me to to create a new topology and topology refers to the arrangement of triangles or polygons that a surface has made of so if I hit tessellate you can see that the the body of the Lego figure here has more of these squares and triangles instead of these long spiky triangles that you see in the real time view so if I hit apply you can see I've retes slated it in the real-time View and it looks more uniform and thus looks a little bit nicer now the way you can play with this is if we increase the testation quality it will generally make smaller more accurate shapes here and when we bring this maximum Edge length down it will make again smaller uh triangles I mean if that's the look you want that's fine but it can also look a little bit too detailed so I'm finding that tessellation quality of somewhere around 0.1 and maximum Edge length of say five something like this looks pretty good but it's going to vary depending on how big the model is the unfortunate thing is there is no no way to automatically retes all the parts in keyshot it is literally a rinse and repeat action at this time so hopefully that's something luxion will address in the near future so I'm just going to go ahead and ramble on while I retest late all these parts so you can see how it works and you can get some muscle memory in if you do this too all righty so here we have retes lated our minifigure he looks a lot better now the next thing I want to talk about is this actual wireframe material and how we can modify it but we're going to go ahead and work on the next model before we do that so right now we basically are fading from wireframe material to a black plastic material or if you wanted to have it run backwards you would just basically go into those settings for the curve fade and you would replace these values so instead of going from -10 to 15 what if we go from 15 to -10 and you should see that we've basically reversed the direction that that goes okay all right so now I'm going to jump into the next studio and work on this next piece I'm going to bring up my material library at once again and just drag this material default material onto this part it's asking me if we want to link it to the other one meaning the one that we pasted on the Lego figure and I'm going to say no because we're going to make some changes and remember when you use this material it's going to need to be unique for each sized model that you use so this looks pretty cool but I'm noticing that it's it's wiping across the model the wrong direction so let's fix that how do we do that well in this case I'm going to double click on our material and we need to get into that material graph remember the actual fade is happening in the color gradient so if I preview that with C on the keyboard we bring up this black and white map and we can click the move texture button and we can simply rotate this holding shift it'll snap into 90 and that's looking pretty good we'll get out of that preview and now we are at least moving along the correct axis on this model now in order to make it span the entire length of this model what we're going to need to do is modify the curve fade so let's go all the way to the left and I'm noticing that it looks like it's a little bit uneven I'm going to go back in that move texture and rotate it a little bit more there we go okay so inside the curve fade under animation we need to move it further to the left so we're starting out with a value of10 10 let's try -20 so see how that's going the way we want let's go to -30 go to -40 and that looks like we've moved away far enough so now if we drag all the way to the right it's not going far enough so let's go and change this 15 to say positive 20 or 30 and 40 so because this is a symmetrical part we needed to go from -4 to POS 40 and it worked so now that we're at least moving in the right direction and far enough let's look at this model as well we're going to retest late this and luckily we don't have to do as many parts here as we did with the Lego minifigure so I'll go ahead and retest late these and then we'll look at how to customize the actual appearance of the wireframe material which is a lot of fun and we can actually close out the material graph we don't need to access that because we can work on the uh wireframe material right here in the materials tab so here we have a color for the wire this is going to be the most basic color setting or material setting so if you want something bright and vibrant we could change it to that uh this width is in pixels so if we want to thicken these lines here we would increase this value here so I could go from 02 to 05 and now we've got a thicker line if we go to thick then it's going to start to look a little bit messy so 05 03 maybe that's what I'm going to stick with here next we have the base and this is the color that is uh visible between all of these lines so if we were to change this to a different color then you can see we fill it in with a different color the base transmission this is a little bit odd because this is kind of controlling the opacity so if I go all the way to Black we are not able to see through the part so this may be the appearance that you want and then of course we could fill it in with you know a solid color but if we want it to be transparent then we need to set that base color to Black and then the base transmission to White and that and then it becomes see-through like that then then we have a backside base and this is a little bit confusing because it's basically assigning a color to the in between all the lines but based on the normals Direction it's going to be the surfaces that are facing away from the camera so again in this case it's going to look very confusing unless it is matching the same color as our base color and then backside wire same thing this is going to change the color of the wireframe on the surfaces that we can't see it is very confusing if you have two colors if you just want it to look I don't know interesting I guess it's fine but one thing I like to do that I think works quite well is start off with the same color that you have for the wireframe but then make it darker and um a little less saturated and sometimes that can help create some depth it really depends on the actual colors you're using it's totally up to you there's no right way to do this this is not some physically accurate material it's just a cool techy sort of look and I found generally speaking that just having a solid color wire and then the black white black black values I find these to be the most um I don't know pleasing visually the most useful I suppose so that's how we use this material and uh let's just do one more quick example so we're going to go into our light fixture and we'll hit M to bring up that material Library drag this onto our parts uh no we don't want to link this to the other ones here I'll go ahead and hit M to hide that again and right now we're seeing of course this tessellation looks kind of odd it's very very busy this is because it's a larger object and it's got a lot of curved surfaces so it's going to create a really fine mesh like that I suppose on a really complex model like this I would probably hide some of its internal components and I would also tesate the internal components at a lower resolution the first thing we need to do though is fix the animation as well as the orientation of it let's get into this material pop in the material graph I'll just go to move texture and I'm going to rotate this okay so we'll go ahead and accept that and then as far as the color fade uh this is a bigger object so we need to adjust these values here so for the negative value I think it's going to be like -75 or something looks like that was enough let's try positive 75 as well see if that works yeah that was plenty of course from here on out you would just be retesting once again I would probably like I said simplify this as much as I can because you've got all these overlapping Parts it's just going to become mess of similarly colored lines in this case I might look at the model and let's say I hide this piece let's say I hide that piece there's a part on the middle that I think I can just make invisible so I can just right click and do a hide and lock and then there's a part here that I can turn off I think I want that one but I think this one I can just do a hide and lock so go ahead and take this and I'll do the retes and again if you want it to be less of a fine mesh in this just go to a smaller value like 08 and you can see it makes it look even less detailed so I want that and then I can hide this piece and look at what's on the inside there and looks like there's a part in the inside here I don't need this guy so we'll just do a hide and lock on that and actually I don't want um any of the LEDs on there so I'll just do right click and do hide and lock let's retes late this guy here turn these parts back on so in the case of this part here that has a ton of really tiny triangles I'm going to do a retest late on this so there's still taller and skinnier than I want so I could take this Max Edge length down to something like two and now they look more uniform but then I want to take the testation quality down to a smaller value to make them bigger let's try 3% I think that looks pretty good so now that looks like much simpler mesh finally this part up top I think that's good enough and I think we get the picture there so this is what we ended up with and lastly if you want to make changes to that base material that plastic like I mentioned you can always come in here and play with the color or the material type you've got those options as well so that's how I created this animated wireframe material hopefully you found that one interesting there you have it I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and if you use this in your own work be sure to tag me on Instagram I'd love to see what you do with it till next time happy rendering

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 2,856

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance

Id: PnYzI8aoKVQ

Length: 15min 22sec (922 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 30 2023