The best free rendering software for architects - Blender render scene setup tutorial

this video i want to talk about something i don't usually talk too much about and that is presentation and rendering with blender blender is the best free and open source 3d modeling and rendering suite out there so why not show how you can use your models from anywhere plug them into blender and start rendering in this case here let's look at our scene that's what it looks like and i modeled a fairly straightforward and simple building mask just to illustrate how we bring this in here and how we compose it put a camera add grass add trees add water a little bit of materiality and background to make a pretty nice image so for this we're going to be using an add-on called g-scatter which is from the makers of grass walt and in case you don't know grass water pretty good grass assets where you can scatter quite a bit there's a few systems actually for blender that work as add-ons one is grass road the other one is scatter and the newer one is bagapai so g scatter again it's a free add-on for scattering but the good thing about it is that it comes with some free assets so we can grow things and make them look really nice pretty easily so if you click on download for free and you might need to register and then download the latest version then back in blender edit preferences install from wherever your downloaded version is install add-on and then you should be able to see in your sidebar a new tab called g scatter and here you can already see i have quite a few systems already set up that are what we see here in the viewport now these are only proxy so simple objects when we render this out if it actually looks a little bit more detailed but this helps keep the viewport performant so let's break down the scene i'm going to turn off most things here just so we start from the beginning of the ground plane i've modded in blenders with subdivision so it's uh literally four loops in one direction and four loops in the other direction and i've increased the crease and there's a slight elevation variation on top of the ground then we've put the building and again in this case the building massing is quite straightforward quite simple i don't want to talk too much about it because it's only there's a placeholder giving you the idea that you can get your buildings from blender from rhino from sketchup or from revit archicad anywhere else next i modeled some pads and now these are starting to take into effect summer of blender's unique and very useful features for architectural visualization so these paths are simple planes that are extruded so we have flat profiles and as you can see the edit mode they're floating a little bit so if we go to the modifier properties i've subdivided them and then shrink wrapped them onto the surface so wrap method project snap on surface z axis along the negative and positive and the target is this object which is called ground then i've done a slight smoothing because i've added a bit of bump on the ground and then solidifying them to make sure that nothing intersects with our ground plane as for the materials these kinds of images we're not going for extreme photorealism instead we want to have an image that portrays an appropriate scale so we understand the scale of our object where it sits and how it connects to the rest of the site so that's what we're showing here you know i haven't spent a lot of time in materials with the object you can clearly do a lot of that or even the grass you can use a lot more work but the people the trees even the texture that we have the materiality in this all give us a sense of scale and that's what's important about these conceptual design images is getting an appropriate sense of scale so to this material here the easiest way to do it is to add a simple procedural material with thin blender without textures because textures raster textures that are downloaded from textures.com or from somewhere else they tend to look tiled we can pause process them a bit to make him look less styled but i find the quickest way is to create a very simple texture using the brick texture note within blender changing the settings a little bit changing the scale a bit and then adding a slight variation with the noise texture so if we turn off the noise you see everything is still varied in regards to the color that comes from the brick texture but it looks a bit too uniform so we have a bit of noise then we mix in the noise and the gaps that come in from the brick texture to create a little bit of bump and that's it for this material it's using it's not even uv unwrapped it's just using object coordinates unwrapping and then slightly scaled up or down depending on the type that you use most people use point i use texture sometimes as well on top of the pads we have people and there's scattered with a very simple geometry nodes add-on these people come from sketchfab and i've downloaded a pack which is over here slightly isolated just with the people that i want make sure that they're more or less the right scale and then if we go to geometry nodes editor the setup is very simple first we get the paths object and then we distribute some points on these faces with the minimum distance and the density factor we have to be careful here because the default one is very high so you have to turn that down significantly and then instance the collection so the people collection onto those points in order for this to work properly make sure you're using original transformation enable separate children and enable reset children within the instance on point make sure you enable pick instance otherwise all the people are going to be instanced on every single point for rotation i've added a random vector value so we only want to rotate along the z so we've kept the x and the y axis for the minimum and maximum random values to zero and then change the z-axis so the people are really the way that we understand the scale of these spaces and we can add a few more if we increase the density factor here that's pretty good next added something that i thought was going to be a road but i decided to make it a canal it's flush but because we're going to have grass on either side it's going to look okay and then we have the water that's sitting a little bit further down that's a very simple plane that intersects with our ground in fact i'm looking at it and i'm thinking that it might need to intersect a little bit more in certain places so that's pretty good so that's the base setup from this point on it's about getting a camera that we're happy with so if i go to my camera review what i usually do is go around the model find an image that will represent the space well we represent the architecture well and limits the horizon line so we don't need to model or think too much about what's happening beyond so i tend to like these birdseye's views that look down and then go to view align view and align active camera to view i already have a view that i quite like and if we click on the camera and go to the object data settings i change the focal length from the default 50 millimeters to 30 millimeters 50 is a little bit too zoomed in for architectural images so 30 is the optimal one we can even go to 20 millimeters or even lower and next the world so if we go to shader editor object world we're using an hdri because we're rendering with cycles now with hdris and materials i use an add-on that's called lilly surface scraper which is free and available on github so if you go to releases and download it and then install it within blender in blender and there is a new sub tab called lily surface scraper and it tells us the available sources so we can either go to polyhaven or this other website so if i go to polyhaven and select an hdri that i like and then copy the url and then back in lily's surface scraper we click on import from clipboard it starts to import it and it tells us which variant we want i usually pick the 2k hdr and then that is already set up by the way we can do the same with materials with little surface scrapers so if i click on the paths and go to material properties and scroll down we see we have a tab called lily surface scraper there's quite a few more available sources so we can click on one of them find a texture that we quite like or material with all the textures available copy the url and then import it and then it automatically sets it up exactly like we have here for the hdri once we have the hdri we can rotate so with the mapping so this is automatic by lily surface scraper so we don't even need to worry about setting it up the only thing we can do is tweak the set rotation that gives us different lighting for the model so now we have the camera we have the background which gives us the lighting and we have the basic setup we're ready to start scattering some additional assets so in the g scatter tab i've have one two three four different systems let's start with the first one creeping bent grass first off how do you get these made so we click on this little icon here which is the g scatter asset browser these are the default ones that come with g scatter which is great thank you so much grasshopped guys for making this and let's pick on one so use this creeping bandcraft's bic which is over here and once we have a system let me turn it on once we have a system then we can go into the effect layers and there are four kind of sub tabs four categories so distribution scale rotation and geometry and we can click on each one and it has some some effect it's almost like modifier so it has its own modifier stack now all this works with geometry nodes so we don't need to worry too much about it but in case you are interested to see what's happening we can click on the object go to the geometry nodes editor and that's the setup it looks it looks very clean very modular you know they've made like each operation its own group that you can go into and figure out more with what's happening for example proximity and how it's being used we won't worry too much about this because thankfully it's been done for us so what we need to worry about is how to make this work properly with our context with our model and there are a couple of things we can do when we first add a system we only get distributed on faces we have viewport density and render density i've turned this up in this case to 65 to make it look well and kept the viewport density quite low so the viewport remains fairly performant then on top of that we have camera curling and that limit as you can see the geometry scattering the object scattering only to the area that the camera can see now we have to set the focal length here manually by default it's 50 and look what happens when it's 50. it's much more cropped in so we have to manually change this to 30. and then the other setting that's important is this buffer if it's left at zero the geometry goes exactly to the border usually we want a bit more of a buffer area so we get the shadow effects and intersections looking properly along the edges in fact let's go to something like 0.7 so we have even a bit more so that's the basis that's the setup then the next four modifiers are exclusions for these objects so they're called proximity so you can add effect layers by clicking on here and each sub tab so distribution scale rotation has its own set of effect layers it's a very neatly organized and easy to understand add-on so in here proximity i've selected the building so we we don't want to intersect with the building unfortunately this works only with edges i believe so you can see that we still have some geometry that's underneath but that's okay because we won't really get to see it we can change the distance multiplier but in my case that's okay the next one is pads so we don't want any geometry intersecting with our pads then i've created one for the water and then finally one for the road and the road one yeah it works quite all right so once we're happy with the setup of one what we can do is then duplicate the scatter item so that's going to duplicate all the settings that we have already done so you don't need to manually do this for each system because it's usually good to have a couple of systems of grass to make it look a bit more realistic so i've added a few more and again they have the same sets of proximities the only difference is the render density and the seed otherwise camera curling and the four proximities they should be fairly similar although i can see here i have a few more intersections so let's see what's happening in here maybe we can turn this up to 4 so we have less geometry showing on top of this and then i've added another system now we can also paint so that gives us a more natural if we add a weight mask layer and i believe we need to create a group or maybe does it automatically let's see but if we click on this icon it takes us directly to weight mask and then we should be able to start painting because we're dealing with a very low poly mesh we have to see where we have edges there so we only see this kind of grass in specific areas so the geometry is quite low poly for the ground if we want we can add more loop coats but i think that should work pretty well so we paint it and then we can uncheck to leave the weight mask so let's go back to our view mode here now let's do the same for this other layer that i've duplicated so all the layers are exactly the same we have the full proximities camera cooling and distributing faces so let's add another effect weight mask and click to paint for the top view i find wireframe works the best for this and let's see if we can paint different sets of areas here i think in the end they will be quite a bit similar but maybe we can add a slight bit of variety by painting okay now let's go back out so that's for the grasses so they're pretty much done so if we render out let me turn off trees and let's go and render this just so we have a good idea of what we're working with here now these renders i have a rtx 2080 card so they don't take long they take about a minute and a half so here are the settings that i use render engine is obviously cycles feature set supported device gpu compute max samples i keep them quite down something like 250 and then enable the noise and that's looking quite well over here and over here so we can carry on so the trees they're very similar system i've duplicated one of these systems and then changed some settings i changed the distance minimum for the distribution the render density and viewport density is the same because it doesn't need to be a lot in regards to the three models i've put in a collection something that i found on blend swap so in case you don't know this website definitely check it out because all the models here are free and they're all specifically made for blender in the spirit of blender and open source so i looked for trees and i found this model grass and tree system and took out the the and took out the six tree models and place them in here and then use them as a scatter with a slightly random scale and rotation which is set up here to scale randomize so with the slightly random scale and rotation which is set up in the g scatter settings so scale and then i've added a randomized xyz and then the same with rotation now when i rendered out you might have seen something else that we had here which are these bushes i've created some bushes again i got them from blend swap and there's a the ability in blender if we add a path so let's do this with a new setup here so shift a curve and it doesn't matter what we have to be honest any of them work and then if we go into edit mode there's a new tool where we can draw a freehand spline so we can erase all of this it should be all selected and then x and delete vertices and then we want to go to the tool settings and make sure depth is set to surface once that's set we can draw any kind of curve that we want and it follows the surfaces next to scatter it let's create a new geometry node setup and resample these curves shift a curve resample curve place that in here and that gives us the separate number of points and we want to change this from count to length and use something let's say one meter next shift a search instance on points so let's add that in here and we can drag the bush's collection so in this case i downloaded some bushes from blend swap as i mentioned so i can drag this collection in here and then place it into instances now that's quite crazy what's going on here so first we need to separate children reset children so they're the correct scale and then pick instance so we only get one scale and they look quite large so we can change the scale here so if we can click and hold all three we can change them at the same time and let's try 0.6 that's much better or i prefer to add a values so if we drag this and search for value and let's try 0.5 so that works pretty well so that's it that's all that this setup does then i've added some randomization of where the pads are located and set this up in a way where it always snaps to the ground plane even when we accidentally drove something like this which goes in this case on top of the building to randomize the scattering a little bit more along the path we can do a couple of things we can add a rotation randomness so add random value here and we want these x and y values to be zero and we can change this now this in this case it works in radians if you wanted to go full we should have pi and pi one should be negative and the other one should be positive and now they should be twisting everywhere we can do something similar with scale so shift a search random value and here i use the vector because we need that to only rotate along the z axis with a scale we don't need to use a vector we can use a simple value and let's change this from something like point three to point seven that's great so they all vary in their heights and to scatter them a little bit more so they're not completely linear we'll add a set position so search set position put that in here and for the offset first we want to combine xyz and next let's put in a random value again and then we can set how much we want that to be now at the moment it's moving everything it seems quite synchro well it's not quite i can see that there is a bit of a difference let's add another random value and plug that into y and change the seat and we can change the number slightly so it's a bit more varied so that's the setup that i used for the bezier curve that you see here so i'm going to hide that now let's go to our camera view make sure that everything is okay always a good idea to save before we render out so we talked already about samples then we need to talk about color management the default is filmic and for this in this case i did use look i left it the default one which is the same as medium contrast that works quite well now if we go to shader editor and then world one setting that i have changed is the strength of the background the hdri that i'm using is belfast farmhouse and i found that one is a little bit too low in fact let's put it to one so you can see so i changed that to 2.5 and that works pretty well so now we are ready to render so f12 and i'm using the default 1920x1080 resolution in this case it will take a little bit to initialize depending on the size of you because the grass is a lot of scatters and i noticed that my trees are off we can see here that they're not showing in the viewport so let's escape bring them on now let's try this again oh how wonderful i have a tree exactly in the middle of the lake so we need to change that we can do that with the seat it's interesting because here it shows up in that location so i'm not sure why it's a little bit different but it does happen every once in a while that's okay so if we go to g scatter trees distribution let's change the seed see if we can get rid of it that looks a bit better so let's try again all right so once the rendering is done we can save it alt s and then let's save it as the full open exr file so that makes sure that we have a good size that we can work with and i'll call this image03 we can also save a jpeg just to make sure that we can see what is happening then in my case i take it in affinity photo which has become my preferred photo editing software and the good thing is that it opens exrs automatically so then this is the full 24-bit or 32-bit i'm not quite sure but it has a lot of information so we see we need to post process a little bit because some of our highlights are blown so we do that with something that's called the tone mapping persona so let's duplicate this layer ctrl j just so we keep the original we don't need the alpha click on it go to tone mapping persona and the default already works quite well i'm gonna go to the detailed one so keep down compression to the max because that's the only way we get all of these details here because this object is quite wide compared to most other things that we have in the scene here let's turn up local contrast a bit and everything else can stay assist i think this is a bit too cool so i'll change it to 10 minus 10 and then apply so now we have a good base to work with that we can modify a little bit more i think that most images that come out from rendering software a little bit too over saturated so i always like to add the black and white filter and in this case we can also manipulate it in such a way by reducing the greens and the yellows so we make those areas darker so our building pops out a little bit more let's change the opacity to 50 or even a bit less now let's add curves or further refinement and brighten up the image a bit more in the mids that's working pretty well next let's add a vignette make sure it's all the way on top reduce the exposure to the minimum change this shape so it becomes a bit of an oval and increase the scale something like this now what i like to do is add a bit of fork so if we search in google for ground fork alpha we should get some quite nice images that we can superimpose onto the image so i usually like to go to tools size and change it to large so this is quite nice let's copy the image then paste it increase the size and then change to screen we can play a bit with the curves with the levels rather so we have the effect a little bit more and let's make sure it's only working with the image now i think it has to be in a very specific way and what might look even better is if this fog is flipped so right click transform and flip vertical so we have more fork towards the top and the right hand side that's working pretty well let's put this underneath the vignette so then we get the vignette effect on top of that let's adjust this slightly to 50. let's reduce this image to 60. maybe a bit less let's try 50. so again this is a very good base now it's not perfect there are a lot of things that can be changed but once again we're not looking for photo realism here what we're looking for is to have a good representation for a model for conceptual design in order to understand the model a bit better of how it sits in its site and the scale and relationship to trees to people to anything else that's going on in the vicinity within the contextual vicinity so here we can see some people so we clearly understand the scale of that we understand that this is in maybe a park land area or wild area it could be some kind of museum bridge and we understand how big the trees are in relationship to that now i would like to show you a few more examples of what's possible with blender this user does really excellent interiors if you're into interiors you can get excellent results that's the model and that's the final version of it then here's some more examples from users this is blender artist if you don't know it that's the main blender form organized by the community it's usually a lot more artistic friendly but every once in a while people do post topics related to architecture design and architectural visualization and then here's another one that's quite good so these are these are excellent renderings really about a project in both daytime night time internal and in with snow really good renderings in this case this user adrian also has written up an excellent guide of making of it's in polish but with google auto translate you can get it and it's typical of the stuff you find in the big rendering block so he goes through the whole process like mood board tools used modeling how he does pretty much every aspect of it organization and then assets and that's quite important there are a lot of assets available for blender and for scattering so i already mentioned the scatter 5 add-on which is a paid one and it's more capable than g-scatter than typical material setups so i highly recommend checking this out i'll put a link in the video description below so now if you're interested to know more about blender for architecture visualization if you are curious of how to get your sketchup rhino revit or any other kinds of models within blender or model further within blender let me know in the comments below and i'll be happy to make some more videos this file is available on patreon so you can look at it in more detail and see you next time

Channel: UH Studio Design Academy

Views: 10,508

Keywords: blender, blenderarchitecture, conceptdesign, concept architecture, architectural design, design, parametric design, rhino 3d, rhino3d, non-destructive design, procedural design, parametric, computational, visualisation, visualization, architecture rendering, render, enscape, vray, v-ray, lumion, sketchup, rhino, cycles, corona, concept render

Id: wq4YQeLJL8Q

Length: 27min 58sec (1678 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022