V-Ray for Rhino – Quick Start: Exterior Lighting

welcome to this exterior lighting QuickStart tutorial for v-ray for rhino in this video we take a look at rendering and architectural exterior scene using v-ray Sun and sky workflow as well as using a dome light with an HDR open the scene file q so3 start found in the downloaded assets from the tutorials webpage link below here I have a scene in Rhino 5 and it's set up to use the default Rhino lighting using NHGRI for the illumination now since I want to judge the lighting independent of materials I'm going to override all the materials in my scene so open the asset editor here and in the settings tab turn on material override to temporarily assign a simple gray material on everything in the scene which gives you a faster render feedback on the illumination itself now launch an interactive render click and hold the render icon and choose render with v-ray interactive the VfB opens as the house render resolves with that default Rhino lighting now we're going to add V Ray's Sun and sky in the Rhino UI click on the options gear icon here and select Sun to access the Sun options and then enable the Sun the VfB updates lighting up our little house next we'll add the sky to the equation and take out the existing HDRI in the asset editor expand the environment section and right-click on the map icon for background and choose clear to get rid of that existing hgri environment now click on the map icon and select the sky texture instead and now it looks like the end of the world it's so bright this is because the camera in the scene is exposed currently for the HDR lighting that we had before click to expand the camera section and set the exposure value or evey to a higher value to let less light into the camera I'm going to settle on 12 and a half and that gives me a good exposure now experiment with the time of day and time of year a little bit to see how the Sun makes our little house look you can get a pretty wide range of looks just by changing how the Sun lights the house now let's move on to the sun's settings in the asset editor click the lighting tab and here is the some that we have in the scene by default in Rhino click the arrow to expand the settings for the light let's first experiment we'd be size multiplier in the VfB click on the render region icon and define this area of the image this keeps any updates to the render only to this part of the image for faster response using my mouse wheel in the VfB I'll zoom in to this part of the image to focus on these sharp shadows now in the Sun set the size multiplier to 10 and the shadows in the VfB soften quite a bit disable region render and see how the soft shadows work for the whole scene set the size multiplier back to the default of 1 and we'll move on to changing the color of the Sun itself click on the filter color swatch and try out some different colors i'll settle on using a very slight pale blue for this scene and there we are the illumination in the scene is pretty good to go so stop the interactive render with the stop' icon in the VfB in the asset editor in the settings tab disable the material override change to the geometry tab for a little treat we have created grass for the scene using v-ray fur so click on grass entry and expand the distribution section in the settings set the per area value to 0.005 which populates the ground area with a little bit of grass and then go ahead and close the settings in the Rhino UI click on the layers tab and turn on BG plate and you'll see it show up in the scene this is just a geometry plane with a texture applied to it for a simple background to fill out the scene in asset editor select the settings tab and in the render output section set the resolution to 1280 by 720 and then turn off interactive and progressive and start a production render with the render with v-ray icon once the render is finished click on the show corrections control icon in the lower left of the VfB and you can begin to make adjustments with the panel on the right that shows up I'll start with adding more contrast using the curve control and then move on to hue/saturation to boost the color a little bit to add some vibrancy and then finally on to color balance to adjust the mid-tones to add a little bit of warmth now click on the open lens effects settings icon to open its panel on the left of the VfB turn on the bloom effect and give it a weight of about 15 a size of about 77 and a shape of about 4 to give the image more of a photographic feel and there you have it you can go ahead and save this image at this point because we're about to move on to using a another lighting workflow where we'll be using an HDR image using a v-ray dome light to light this exterior scene so in the VfB turn off the bloom effect and all the corrections that we added and then go ahead and close the window in layers go ahead and turn off the BG plate and then in the geometry tab select the grass and in the settings distribution section set per area to zero to get rid of that grass which is certainly a lot easier than mowing it turn to the settings tab and turn on material override so we can again just judge the illumination of the scene and then set the resolution down to 960 by 540 for even faster render feedback start an interactive render and we can see that we still have the Sun and sky system in the scene in the asset editor environment section disable the background to disable that sky which turns the I black in our VfB and then in the light section of the asset editor disable the Rhino document son click over to the v-ray lights tab in the v-ray toolbar and click on the dome light click in your scene to place the dome light and a file dialog pops up select the HDR file shown here which is found in the downloaded assets for this tutorial now the image is pretty dark it's not as bright as the sky texture that we had before so we can increase the intensity of the dome light in the asset editor like so turning it up to 2 but when you're using an HDR image especially a properly assembled and calibrated HDR I it's not the preferred workflow to simply boost the dome light like this so I'll set the intensity back down to 1 in this case go to the Settings tab and in the camera section set the evey to a lower value to let more light in I think around 11.5 works quite well in the scene select the dome light and then rotate it to reorient the HDR image using the interactive render in the VfB to gauge how you set its orientation for the best look when you're satisfied stop the interactive render now on to a production render in the layers tab turn on BG plate and in the asset editor geometry tab set the grass distribution per area back to 0.005 in the settings turn off material override and set the resolution back to 1280 by 720 turn off interactive and progressive and then start a production render now when the render finishes click show corrections control and enable hue saturation color balance and curve to apply the color Corrections that we had set from before you can adjust the color a little bit more to suit your taste I'm doing here a bit with a new curved shape and then I'll display the lens effects and turn on the bloom effect and there you go all you need now is to move in all your furniture and your home thank you for joining us on this exterior lighting quick start video for v-ray for rhino where we use the Sun and sky system as well as an HDR eye with a dome light

Channel: ChaosTV

Views: 165,334

Keywords: V-Ray, VRay, Chaos Group, Rhino, archviz, architecture, design, designer, lighting, shading, software, cg, 3d, tutorial, how to

Id: EkK5FhEwcAU

Length: 9min 25sec (565 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2017