Rendering Transparent Objects in KeyShot

so you'll want to know how to render products with transparency so you can easily place them on different colored backgrounds and posts if you've tried rendering a PNG with Alpha you may have gotten something that looks like this in this video I'll show you how to accomplish what you want and why rendering products with transparency isn't as straightforward as you think it should be first let's get on the same page with some terminology an opaque material is one that you cannot see through like this and a transparent object is one that light passes through like the lenses in my glasses Alpha is a word we use to describe empty pixels within a digital image if we render with Alpha this allows some parts of the image to remain empty which lets you see through that layer revealing the pixels of another image underneath it now jpeg is the only image format and keyshot that does not support Alpha so in this exercise we'll be using pngs exclusively to tell keyshot to render empty pixels we need to take this box include Alpha transparency here I have a simple scene setup which you can download from the file Vault I have a piece of solid glass and a sphere on a white background and the background color has been set in the environment settings I'll render this image without Alpha and with Alpha and then we'll compare the results in Photoshop I've got a solid color fill layer underneath my rendering notice how the image with Alpha lets us see the fill layer below but not in the glass region we also have some light gray pixels on the ground which are a combination of Shadows and Global illumination that's been tinted by the white background color we have in keyshot out of all the transparent materials in keyshot the only one that will render empty pixels is the basic glass material so I'll change it from solid glass to basic Glass by default it's not refractive so let's tick that box to make it look more correct we'll go ahead and re-render this as basic glass with Alpha and see how it looks in Photoshop while we've solved the transparency of the glass our ground still has those light gray pixels let's try rendering it on a black background and see how that looks foreign so that's looking better right well this is probably what you're hoping to achieve I want to share a few drawbacks and explain further why I don't often recommend taking this approach to rendering transparent objects I'll render the same image this time without Alpha I'll be sure to use the same color background we have set in keyshot that we have in Photoshop When comparing these two images you'll notice the image I rendered without Alpha is more correct the surface of the glass is more reflective the version rendered with Alpha lacks reflection and in return the shadow underneath the sphere also looks too bright there are a few other drawbacks to rendering basic glass with Alpha that you should consider first basic glass is a very simple material with limited texturing capabilities next basic glass doesn't simulate transparency distance or color density which is why glass gets darker and more saturated as it's thicker have you ever noticed that glass appears dark green or blue when looking at its Edge that's what I'm referring to in this case also the appearance of a transparent material is heavily defined both by refraction and reflection the color and appearance of reflection and refraction are a hundred percent impacted by the color and light surrounding the object any refractions or Reflections in or on your transparent object will be a result of the environment it was rendered in by placing the object then on a solid background of a different color you run the risk of an obvious mismatch between the glass or transparent material and its background speaking of environments if you rely on a backplate for the background color you may end up with some odd Reflections as seen in this example and finally the method I showed you in this video really only works with white or non-colored glass mixing colored glass on a different colored background will likely produce some odd results hopefully it's clear why there isn't an easy way to Simply render a transparent object in keyshot the actual appearance of that material relies so much on the color and light from the environment Within the scene so there's no easy way to separate those elements and give you an accurate image now if you want to try resolving this with some clever compositing check out the video I made about that Linked In the description below if you just need a simple mock-up for internal pitches or presentations then sure this basic glass technique I share with you should work just fine but if you're going to be rendering public facing images for packaging e-commerce or any other application spend the extra time to render out each image in keyshot without Alpha you can still render clown passes for help with selection and masking in post [Music]

Channel: Will Gibbons | 3D Rendering

Views: 7,840

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

Id: uhud-v4LYoA

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 14 2022