KeyShot Exploded View Cutaway Tutorial

what's up guys will Givens here and today I'm gonna be walking you through another key shot tutorial and we're gonna create a pretty cool I caching marketing style image the other day I was scrolling through Instagram and I came across this image by I am NOT Andre and it's an exploded section view of a speaker design that really caught my eye I just loved the drama the lighting the composition and I thought this would be a great subject for a tutorial so that's what we're gonna do without further ado grab yourself a cup of coffee and let's dive in alright so here's my image that was inspired by Andres rendering and this is what I am attempting to show you how to do today and none of this was done using any Photoshop this is straight out of key shot and just to show you if I move on into key shot you can see here's the file you can see everything is set up in real time and that's what we're gonna be working towards now if you'd like to follow along with today's tutorial head on over to wil Gibbons dot-com slash downloads and you can get the project file as well as the gradient background that is going to be a key component of this tutorial alright step one is going to be choosing a 3d model and I suggest you use something interesting that's got a fairly complex assembly and is made of solid bodies so I've opened Keisha I'm going to go to its key shot cloud library in the bottom left hand corner and I'm in the models tab when I start searching through here I see this coffee grinder which I actually modeled when I used to work at Lux Eon and since I know there are all solid bodies in here and it's a fairly intricate assembly I'm going to go ahead and download this so I can use it for my scene so whether you're using one of your own models go ahead and import that in a key shot or if you want head on over to the key shot cloud library and grab the coffee grinder or something else of your choice and drag it right into your key shot scene now it's off center so we're going to deal with this hit the green checkbox hit control 1 on the keyboard to add a cube in the middle of your scene go ahead and hit the green check box then go to the scene tab select the coffee grinder at the top of the list go down to position and move tool and then you're going to pick a new pivot you choose the cube hit okay and then now snap to pivot now the coffee grinders in the middle of the scene go ahead and hit the green check box we're gonna turn this cube off and save it for later now go over to the environment tab make your environment twenty five hundred millimeters in the ground plane twenty five hundred millimeters back to the scene tab you're gonna go ahead and click that coffee grinder and then hit snap to ground now if you want to be able to see all the way through these transparent bodies we're going to want to go to the lighting preset tab and just choose product preset for now all right now the next step we're gonna want to do is create our exploded view and if you click and drag and it looks like the mouse is pivoting around something off-center go ahead and right click on the middle of your part and choose set camera target and now we should be pivoting around this object here now we're actually going to create our exploded view using animations as counterintuitive as that may seem go ahead and hit the a key on your keyboard to open up the timeline and the reason we want to use animations is because it's faster to create a little bit more precise and it's easier to edit and undo our exploded view at any time so the first thing we want to do is go ahead and click on a part that we want to animate so if I actually look in the scene tree here we have a number of sub assemblies that our assembly is made of I want to choose the grinder handle which is this top part I'm gonna right click on it and go down to animation and choose translation now we see the green bar pop-up that's our animation and it's one second long that doesn't really matter what we want to do is look at the details on the right hand side in the properties translate Y which is the up-and-down access if we hit Z on the keyboard we should see our little X Y z axis on the bottom left so that's pointing up so if we click on that green bar and change this Y from 1 to let's say 100 drag that playhead all the way to the right and you'll see that this entire assembly moves up 100 millimeters now I'm gonna actually change this to a smaller value something like 25 and see how it's just floating above the part underneath that's what we want now let's actually go ahead and right click on this animation the animation shows as a little arrow below the assembly it's affecting choose copy animation then click on the coffee grinder the very top level right click animation and paste not paste linked paste and now if we take the playhead pull back and then forward we see the entire part moves up 25 millimeters but because we have another animation happening inside that assembly we see that the handle moves up an additional 25 millimeters so consider the relationship when you're creating these that when you nest animations they all affect each other now I want the entire grinder to be quite higher off the ground we're gonna go ahead and pull this off the ground 100 millimeters to start and now what we want to do is create our exploded view which means we're going to move various components away from the center both in the up and down axis so first I'll show you step-by-step how to create the exploded view of just this handle component and then once I've done that I'll probably forward through the rest so you can create your own exploded view of the rest of the assembly so whenever you want to move apart just click on it once in the real-time view and it gets selected and then you can see in the scene tree it's highlighted I am going to right click and go to animation and paste animation and now all I have to do is pull the playhead back and then forward and we see once again this has been exploded if I click on the actual animation either in the scene tree or in the animation timeline we'll get the properties on the right hand side and then we can adjust those values as needed so if 25 is a little bit tall for me I'll go ahead and type in something like 5 and now we can see it's just been moved off this handle I want to go ahead and right-click this one and I'm going in copy it and then I'll go ahead and click on this pin and I'll go ahead and right click animation paste animation and just pull this back and forward and we see that the pin moves up so go ahead and select this and this one's probably actually going to be better sitting up at that 25 value or so now for the little pin down below the bottom I can just right click animation paste animation do the same thing and see it's moving up I actually want it down because it would collide with the handle so let's actually click on the animation and use a negative value so just put a negative in front of translate Y and now it moves down and that may not be far enough let's see points and minus seven and again we're just basically moving these away from their origin to create some space between them so our eyes can kind of understand how they relate to one another I'll move a couple other parts but really from here on out the rest is going to be rinse and repeat the same exact tactic that I'm using here for the handle I'm going to use everywhere else so this is where you're going to do this next part on your own [Music] all right so at this point we've made our exploded view basically what that means is we have all of the parts not really touching each other they're kind of separating or pulling apart from one another and I've just given some comfortable space between all of them and don't worry if everything is not exactly where you want it the whole reason we did this in animations so we can easily go back and change the position of something so if I want this acrylic part at the bottom to change its location all I do is click on it once and then in the scene tree below it I choose the animation and I can type in a new value here to nudge it up or down and if you really want to be precise about this you can go about and name all of these animations so they don't say the same thing but in our case we're just using this as a tool to position everything so I don't think it's totally necessary now step three here is to create a cutaway view and that's going to be actually cutting away half of this object so here's how we're going to do it remember that cube we had in our assembly we're going to turn that back on because we're going to use it now let's go ahead and get rid of our animation timeline for now you can just hit a and I'm gonna change this layout to be a let's see play a one by one aspect ratio next I'll grab my cube and I want to make it a lot larger so I'll dolly out and then control D on the keyboard to change the position this cube I'll go ahead and hit scale and then I want to turn off these other items click the yellow cube and click and drag to the right to make the cube larger so you want this to be a little bit bigger than our object I think that's good and then I'll hit snap to ground and then we're gonna change our camera temporarily to the top view so go to the camera tab down to top view alright then I'll choose orthographic view for my camera and then I will change turn on translate again turn off scale and I'm gonna drag this so it's intersecting with my model and I basically want this to cut the model right in half that's good enough I'll hit the green check box and now I want to go to the scene tree choose the coffee grinder hit the move tool and now we want to rotate it but we want to rotate around its central axis so if I turn on rotate and I start to rotate this you'll see it's moving around the center of the cube which we don't want because we earlier set the pivot to the cube so you want to actually go ahead and I'll hit X click on the move tool again we're gonna hit reset to reposition and now you see that the middle of the move tool is in the center of the model that's still problematic for us we want it to be in the middle of the shaft so we'll go ahead and choose pick and I'm going to search for shaft and the reason we want this in the middle of the shaft is because the shaft is the part of the assembly that everything rotates around so it's the center so I'll go ahead and hit OK and now our move tool is where it should be and we can rotate this and all I'm trying to do is move this so the edge of the cube is bisecting the little pin in the handle as well as the center of our object so this should work pretty well just like this and then I'll go ahead and hit the green check box now if we change our camera view we want to go back out of ortho back into perspective that'll do and what we want to do is turn this cube into a cutaway material so double-click it change it from the drop-down menu to cutaway and we should see half of our model disappear now there are a couple things to consider sometimes the cutaway material if our cameras inside it or if we do some other things you can get some weird artifacts so a couple things to think about real quick mmm I'm gonna put this back on to diffuse one thing to think of is the smaller your cube is the better so we don't want this to be unnecessarily large so if you were to select the cube and hit control D as in Delta and then turn on scale we could probably make this maybe not quite so tall [Music] all right so now that we've got our cube we're gonna make sure it's a cut away material once again double-click on it go down to cutaway and we want to choose inherit caps and what that will do it will warn us saying that you want to have a solid and closed volume not surfaces we say okay and it takes a second but what that means is this material should take on the same appearance that the rest of the body is made of which is good that's what we want so that will look like this has been cut away with like a saw or some sort of water jet or something so it looks pretty good now the other thing you might notice if your cutaway material is on the ground that it can create some artifacts so we want to make sure that the cube is not touching the ground just lift it off the ground a little bit let's also go ahead and make some other adjustments here so for example if we want to improve the look of the lighting on the surfaces sometimes it's beneficial in your lighting preset to add a few more GI bounces sometimes I'll put this up to anywhere between 1 and 10 this will slow it down so you don't want to go too high here and the other thing is I don't care for ground illumination I'm gonna uncheck this box here that's gonna turn off light that's bouncing off the ground plane alright step number 4 let's get our camera set up this is quick and easy we're just gonna go to the camera tab go ahead and look at your model however you want to look at it and create a new camera and then we're gonna call this render and then we'll go ahead and what I did to get that kind of acht off axis rotation was i simply twisted the camera instead of rotating my entire model that made things a lot easier to manage instead of rotating a bunch of parts and when you have multiple rotation animations on a part sometimes they can get weird and key shots so I just said a rotate the camera instead and then I wanted kind of a cool three-quarter view so I think I went in something like this so I actually want to go down here into our perspective slash focal length and increase this to a higher number I chose I think a hundred or maybe 120 even to kind of give it that orthographic kind of squashed view which is getting pretty popular in marketing imagery alright so now that we have an approximate camera saved for our final render let's go ahead and make another camera this one we're gonna take the twist down to zero because it's easier to work on our scene without it and then we can go back to that final render camera when we're ready let's go ahead and just save your new camera now before I forget I actually want to address a couple things everything in our models been cut in half but there's actually a couple components that I think I would rather not be cut in half because it looks better for example I think the spring down here as well as the shaft they kind of lose their appearance they don't look as nice being cut in half so I'm going to suggest that we go ahead and double click on our cube material on the right hand side there's this plus add excluded objects and I'm gonna search for the shaft and I'll click on it and hit OK and it's gonna add it to the list and now it's not being cut in half I'm gonna do the same thing for the spring I like the way the spring looks but I just don't want to lose it and because these are metal or metallic objects they're going to do much better reflecting the light since they're nice and round whereas the rest of these with the flat surfaces are gonna look a little bit better being cut the way they are and this is of course personal preference don't feel like you have to do this but it is one more way that you can extend the use of this cutaway material ok so the next thing that we want to do is get into our lighting so this is our boring start up lighting environment and we're actually going to do two things we are going to use an HDR eye but we are also going to use an area light to give us that nice highlight on the surfaces that we're going to be looking at so let's go ahead and hit control v on the keyboard to add a plane and you'll notice our animation goes back to the very beginning that's okay just hit the green check box for now and here's what I'm gonna recommend a on the keyboard drag your playhead to the end and now let's go ahead and hit o on the keyboard to open up our geometry view we can hit a to close the timeline and we don't need this Studios panel up and then from here what I'm going to do is use the geometry view to go ahead and move my plane so I'll right-click and the geometry view and say Center and fit models and then there we are so we see our plane I'm going to go ahead and select it right click and move part and now let's get our plane in the right position I'm going to go ahead and lift it up and we're going to pull it off to the right hand side I will rotate it a bit and I think I want to make it quite a bit larger so I'll go ahead and click scale and again click in that yellow cube and drag to the right to make it larger and this is again going to be totally up to you to choose lighting that you think looks nicest that's good enough I'll hit the green check box and the green check box in the real-time view double-click on that plane and change its material down to an area light let's go ahead and set the color to be neutral Kelvin and if yours is an RGB or something just go ahead and change it to Kelvin and somewhere near the middle and now we're gonna have our light shining on our object alright next let's go to the environment tab and we're gonna take our HDRI down to almost well nothing let's just go down to nothing so you can see right now if we go to our render camera you can see right now there's a couple issues one my light is visible let's double click on our light and what I want to do is turn off visible to camera okay we want to adjust the position of this light so let's go ahead and right click on the plane and move part and we want to rotate it around our coffee mill so we'll go ahead and click pick and I'll choose a pivot somewhere in the middle the body doesn't matter where and I'm gonna move this down and kind of rotate it and maybe I'll rotate it this way I want to bring this around to wherever it needs to be to create a highlight on mostly surfaces that I want to draw attention to and this kind of a 3/4 view is looking pretty good if you ask me and the rest is just it's it's up to you whatever you think looks good I think this looks pretty good somewhere like this so I'll go ahead and hit that green check box now it's obviously too dark the way things are so we want to go too so we'll go to our environments library and I want to grab the three panels straight for K and I'll drag that into my environment on the right hand side it's set to zero let's set it to one and you'll notice it's now fully lit but it's also too bright so we're gonna do a couple things let's go ahead and take our color for a background and set it to black and now it's still too bright so we want to reduce the brightness of our environment because we're gonna use it basically as fill light and then we want to maybe increase the contrast a bit and I'm gonna bring this down pretty low I'm relying mostly on that area light and then this HDRI is there just to fill in the gap so something like that looks pretty good I'm also going to turn off ground shadows we don't need those while we're in the lighting tab now the next thing you might be wondering is what do we do about our background in that reference image I showed you in the beginning you saw this nice cool gradient and I think that's what helps sell the image so here's what we're gonna do with that we're actually going to add another plane so go ahead and hit control v on your keyboard and let's just hit that green checkbox and back to the geometry view pretty much we're doing the same thing we did before we're gonna move that part I'm going to pull it back I'm gonna rotate it 90 degrees and I'm gonna make sure I'm on the global axis so I'm gonna hold shift and rotate it 90 degrees and I'm gonna scale it up quite large because it has to fill the background of our image I will snap it to the ground drag it down a little bit and then from the top view I want to rotate it a little bit so this red plane is our image field of view that's what our camera is seeing so we basically want this to kind of align and become slightly parallel if we can that would be the best now that I'm fairly close I'm going to go into local now the reason we didn't go to local to begin with is because it will shear your plane I wish Luxy on would fix that I don't know why it does but when you rotate on local axis it tends to shear these planes which is not helpful and last but not least let's go ahead and rotate it so we want to make sure that this is not intersecting with the cutaway box that would also cause problems if we hit the green check box and we see that our coffee mill is now back in its original position just hit a for the animation timeline and drag this all the way out and close the animation timeline now we're looking pretty good so we have this backdrop and we want to put a texture on it [Music] and the texture we're gonna use is one that I made in Photoshop you guys can use whatever you want just double click on this plane go to textures double click on the color and then load the texture that I included for download and the links down below is just this background gradient i'll hit open and you'll see if we zoom out actually let's go to our free there we go so it's it's it's kind of rotated the wrong way so all we need to do is change it from box to planar and choose Center on part and then move the texture and right here you see we can kind of rotate it we can scale it we can also if you need to we can flip it horizontal or vertical to get the gradient where we want and then from here your best option is to simply go into your render camera and adjust or scale this as needed to fill out the image so if we need to we can go ahead and just leave it where it's at and then go to the materials tab and then scale this guy up so it fills out the real time view and then we can move that texture around I'll also include a 1x1 or a square version of this texture as well in case you want it if that's more helpful the idea was to get this gradient in the bottom right to go dark to the upper-left one more thing double click on it and change it from diffuse to flat and that's gonna make it a bit brighter so believe it or not the flat material emits just a little bit of light and it's gonna brighten up this and kind of create some nice contrast in our scene the other reason we're doing it this way is because this here is clear or transparent if you render this out on a black background if we didn't have our backdrop plane this glass would render out dark like this but then if you wanted to say in Photoshop put a color behind it you couldn't do it so that's why we're actually using a backdrop that we render in key shot to get around that okay we're making it to the homestretch here before we get to the final touches I'll say this is where I would recommend you go in to your render camera and you start making any tweaks that you want so what I did for my final image is I decided this glass wasn't too important but I really wanted to focus on all these internal component so I zoomed in I got nice and closed and I kind of cropped my image the way I wanted it played around with the camera angle make sure it looked good and then I went ahead and updated that and then from here what you can do is you can go and start moving these individual parts as well as adjusting your lighting to make sure your scene looks as good as possible [Music] and now the last step here was to create some scene dressing to really kind of jazz this thing up if you will so I went with dust particles and a little bit of bloom and stuff like that and some exposure adjustments so I'll show you how to do that we're gonna go and zoom out and we're gonna add again a cube so I'll hit control one to add a cube and this cube is gonna get scaled up quite large it's going to encompass pretty much our entire scene there we go so now my camera is just looking at one side of this cube double-click on this cube to edit its materials we're gonna get into the material graph double click on diffuse change its color to like a mid gray and now we want to make dust so right click go down to geometry and choose flakes and plug that into geometry double click on our flakes and let's just hit execute geometry node 0.5 millimeters let's try that refresh it's looking better and now what we want to do is actually change the size variation maybe point let's just do two two for the size variation now we got some big in some small parts now there's too many of them so let's change our density down to point zero one and then refresh again and now we have much less or fewer pieces let's make them smaller so size is going to be point one mil and then execute again now we're getting better now I want to increase the density so I'll bring this up to say point three and all refresh and now we're looking pretty good and if they're too bright let's go ahead and take that diffuse color down a little bit so they blend in a little better now let's see what this looks like with our camera view so we'll go into our camera view render and again the animation timeline I know it's kind of annoying just drag that out I'll just leave this down here for now and so the other thing that point out is that the cutaway cube is actually probably cutting away preventing flakes from being right where this is that's actually helpful because now we don't have flakes intersecting with our parts here hopefully it's working that way and then if you want to create more contrast between these dust particles you can go ahead and just dive deeper into that material just make these you know say four instead of two for a size variation you know some bigger and some smaller pieces and then we can make the size a little smaller point zero eight or something and then what I did last but not least so they didn't look like flakes you couldn't tell is I actually animated this cube so it was falling so if you go ahead and choose the cube in the scene tree at the bottom of the list right click animation translation go ahead and set the animation to be something like negative fifteen and the Y and now you can see instead of squares they actually look like kind of stretched blurry squares so we can make them a little bigger so minus twenty and that's that's probably good enough for my liking just play with it you know and then what I also did if you thought that was cool I actually went ahead and made a smaller or another cube I just repeated that process one more time so grab that same cube right click and duplicate so now you'll have two cubes in your scene of dust and you want to take one of them and go ahead and rotate it so just hit move and then the idea with this is to have more dust particles in different orientations so they're not all moving up and down so what I did here is make sure that my cube if I turn one of them off instead of having the streaks up and down they should be going in a different directions so I can actually take this and just do say a negative 20 in this direction so now these are streaking left to right and the way this will look if you turn both on is it will look like there's dust particles moving in two directions kind of moving around your scene the other thing I did is I went back into the second cube material and I went ahead and made one of them have much smaller pieces of dusts like point zero five oops Oh point zero five and then I made the size variation smaller but the density higher so there were more of them and then this way I created more contrast in the scene so there are some big pieces some little pieces all sorts of stuff and then maybe make them a little darker whatever you need to do and if you don't like the way the way looks just go to your flakes and change the seed that'll give you a new distribution of dust so it'll move parts around and what I did is I actually did this specifically to get one big flake near the front of the screen I just did this til I found something that that looked good where there was like a nice big flake right near the front of the camera like there's a big one down here sort of and then what that meant was when I would turn on depth of field I would get kind of a big blurring effect and that would actually make it look like there is a big piece of dust floating right by the front of the camera which is pretty cool as since I mentioned it we'll go back to that camera I turned on depth of field to kind of blur out some of those pieces of dust so the way you do that is turn on depth of field set your focal point right on the part you want to be in focus and sometimes this can get confusing if you've got a bunch of pieces of geometry in here so you can temporarily turn off the cubes and make sure that your image plane the depth of field plane the focal plane is right in the middle of the part where you want it if it's not you can just play with its location by dragging this and then increase your f-stop till the two other lighter color planes move away from the the one in the middle so let's that set this is something like ten now most of my object is in focus and most of that dust is blurred out so you know keep playing with it until it's the way you want it and then I'll save it and turn on those two cubes of dust and what we should see is they look splotchy now and a little grainy that's because they're actually blurred out from the depth of field and that's going to give us that much more kind of cinematic dusty sort of look so to speak okay and we are almost finished the only things I did in that other image I showed you that I have not explained here as I went ahead and I went to the image adjustments by the way if the the dancing cubes are freaking you out the little shaky cubes it's because this motion blur is on and it's really obnoxious so just hit o to hide the geometry view if you want so I went ahead in the adjustments tab we want to go ahead and I went to the photographic style just because I like it better in them it's a linear response so then everything should look pretty much the same but from here I like to play with the exposure just to kind of play with that you can play with the exposure and contrast and then I turned on bloom and when I set that to one and then I increase the bloom radius to get this nice glow something like thirty which is a lot and then I increase the bloom threshold so that we didn't have any of that glow on anything except for the most reflective areas and then from there I totally toned it down by taking the bloom intensity down a lots like point one point two you can also play with the white balance maybe make a little cooler or a little warmer however you want that's pretty much all I did there you can play with of course the material settings I changed some of the materials for render settings here I think I left everything the same just product mode with I think 10 GI bounces there we should be fine without caustics I rendered in product mode on the CPU if you're getting too much grain and noisiness you can go into the image tab and turn on the D noiser and just set this to a small value like point five maybe or 0.25 and then for your final offline render settings all I tend to do is you know set your image resolution so let's say 1920 by 1920 PNG you want to go into you know your max samples and for something like this where there's depth of field and these little dusts and stuff like that I think I rendered mine at 500 samples which I think was was enough you do get graininess you can always increase this number and just add it to your render queue and then render it when you're ready and there you have it I hope you guys had a lot of fun during today's tutorial and I hope you use some of these tactics in some of your own work going forward if you do be sure to tag me at wil Gibbons design on Instagram I'd love to see what you're doing until the next video you might want to check out the playlist on-screen I've been doing live streams every Saturday at 9 a.m. Pacific all about freelancing so if you are even thinking about getting into freelancing I think you get a lot out of these videos but until next time guys happy rendering [Music]

Channel: Will Gibbons

Views: 13,095

Keywords: will gibbons, wil gibbons, will gibbins, will gibons, will gibins, keyshot, rendering, tutorial, animation, studio, freelance, section, section view, cutaway, cutaway view, technical, marketing image, exploded, exploded view, rendering tutorial, animation tutorial, product design, how to, industrial deisgn, keyshot 9

Id: anPv80On1iA

Length: 32min 33sec (1953 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 10 2020