Vray for Rhino Tutorial _ exterior lighting with HDRI

hello and welcome to my VA 3 for rhino 6 tutorial on exterior lighting with HDR eyes in this tutorial we're going to cover how to set up a Sun set up an HDR I make sure that they the Sun ACR HDR I are working together and fully suits you get a nice beautiful more atmospheric lighting for your exterior scene and [Music] yeah so let's just get right into it first thing I'll say this tutorial is intended for v-ray 3 for Rhino 6 so some of these settings we're going to tweak may be different in other versions so keep that in mind the other thing I'll say is that this is building on our my previous tutorial that is dealing with the v-ray global settings so if you haven't seen that tutorial go ahead and run through that to make sure your v-ray settings are up to speed to match what we'll be demonstrating in this tutorial so let's get right in we have our sea scene here of this this little house that we'll be working with is just a way to demonstrate some of the properties so the first thing I want to do is go ahead and get my son sorted out and figure it out which way it's coming from and how it's affecting the model so if you go over here to the right to your properties tab you see this little son icon if you don't see it you can just hit the settings and come down and make sure that the son is checked once in here you can see your son positions and options here for most of my renderings I like to just have it run by nagging control there are options to pick the exact location and time of day based on where your project is located I like to keep things a little bit more simple and just do a manual control mostly because I can just have much more control over it when it comes to setting up my scene lighting I tend to err on the side of making it so get the shadows where I want them and get the product to look the best not necessarily concerned with exactly the perfect you know solar angle that the specific site has I just want to make my image my from my particular view look the best so the best way to start to figure that out is if we double-click on our viewport drop down over here and we look at our project it planned that plan would actually match our sub plan here so we can see right now the default is that my son is coming in from the south which is you know the bottom of my plan new here I'm looking here at my main perspective this is the view I'm gonna be rendering overall so what I haven't be like this typically what I'd like to do is have my son coming from one of the two vanishing points waiting so coming off of the far left are the far right and since this seat in particular is so left focus most of the filling on the Left I'm going to want this son coming in on the left so if we look at that and plan it's really coming in from the southeast corner right here so to make sure that's what we have I can just click it and drag my son over here so coming in at a pretty shallow aigo angle off the south and my height is a little high I'm actually gonna bring this a little bit lower down here so sort of a getting to the late afternoon dusk timeframe but coming in off the south here and that should lock that in right there so if we go to back to my main perspective and really quick just to see their sort of starting point renderer I will just hit play and again this is this file is already loaded with the global settings that we set up in the previous tutorial so go ahead and do that a few habits all of that stuff is ready to go I have my quality settings that low my image width is fairly fairly small just to keep this moving fast one thing I am going to do is come to my material override so this is a great tool for dealing setting up your exterior lighting because in general we're not totally concerned with what our materials are at this moment we're just concerned with making sure our light quality so we can basically just do this in a grayscale and this will lower the rendering time so you can don't have to spend a lot of time getting this these settings just right you can just override that and so what's gonna happen is it's gonna override it to this color so I can go in here and just that and usually just a nice light gray is something to override all my materials will keep things moving fast let me go into my materials real quick there is one material that I don't want to override and that's gonna be my glass and we'll see why once we get the HDRI but if you go into whatever you're working in go to your class file and if you don't have one made that would be the time to to build one and again you can see the tutorial on creating materials with more help with that but for this tutorial the classes already in here I'm gonna go over to my right options and forces can be overridden I am going to uncheck that so now this particular material cannot be overridden therefore it will render my glasses light gray it'll render my classes class all these other things like my wood siding says it says it can be overridden so that will be turned into gray some of those concrete's will also just be ready just like grey and not as the concrete material itself so let's go ahead and hit play and well first go to my view just for consistency so everything is set to the main perspective and let's hit render and let's see where our starting point is and so unsurprisingly things are a little washed out at firsts which is fine part of this is because the settings that I have loaded are designed for the final product of this tutorial meaning that they're designed for a blending of the Rhino Sun with an HDR eye so the starting point of that if you sort of reverse through that logic is it starts off extremely washed out which is totally fine but I wanted to just give you a quick view of where we're coming from now that that's finish we could see again everything's washed out but we could at least tell is that the shadows are coming the right way so my son is coming the right way and as we sort of work through some settings will this will become more and more clear so let's minimize that let's jump right back into those settings and see what we can do to start getting this a little bit better the first thing I am going to do look at its come to my lights tap here and so you can see the writing on documents on this is the default right now Sun has already built into this the intensity is set to one the size multiplier says to one there's a lot of other settings here they get into some very you know nuanced things but because we're gonna be adding an HDR I it's gonna kind of cover all that I can just play with two things here the first thing is the intensity multiplier what I want to do is actually bring this way way way down because we're gonna be lighting with an HDR I not just the Sun so I'm gonna drop this all the way down to point zero three again as point zero three not point three and the size multiplier this is gonna affect the sort of fuzziness of the shadows I'm gonna drop this down to five right now but we'll come back and we'll play with it to show exactly what the difference is so really really reduce the Sun and this instance here so let's minimize this and we'll do a quick render to see what how much that has helped all right so as you can see here we're getting a much more even lighting you can see the wet directions or our shadow is moving that our light is coming from the angle that we like and we're sort of getting a very flat light meaning that everything's coming in its got a little bit of yellowish tone to it that's probably starts to be because of the low setting we are in the sky starts to get that warmer feel but the good this isn't super atmospheric it's very sort of flat and simple if we zoom in a little bit here we can see our shadows get a little bit more fuzzy as they move away from the source of them that's again this shadow bias that we toying with and just to show you a quick example what I'm gonna do here is turn on my render window here and I'm just gonna draw a little box here so now when I do a render test it'll only render within that box and not the entire thing over because I want to just demonstrate what's happening with my shadows so I'll minimize that I'll go to my settings and so if we change this back down to zero for example and go back to my render window and hit render we can see the difference here is that nice crisp line the really hard shadow and if I go back and bring this way up to maybe like nine or so well at render and you can see it becomes much much more fuzzy so again this is that trying to get that that perfect shadow that starts to get a little fuzzier to its away from the source of the shadows but I found this a good spot to generally keep this is usually about five or six so I'm gonna just bring this back down to five and leave it there so now that we have our Sun more or less set up where we want what we want to do is incorporate the HDR I to the equation because right now we just have a black background we're not giving our glass anything to reflect we're not getting a more atmospheric quality that a sky would actually give this is sort of generic strong single single directional light source so when we're adding an HDR I the best way to do that is to use the dome light tool and your v-ray lights if you don't see the v-ray light options you can always just pull up the toolbar so if you go to show toolbar and again i just right-clicked in anywhere in the toolbars for this little dialog box to come up you know to show toolbar go all the way down all your v-ray tools should be here if you want if you're not seeing these the same way my screen is but what I'm looking for is this building light so I'm just gonna click on this here you can see it's asking me for a location it doesn't matter where I put this at all it's gonna work the same way it just needs a location in the file so I'll just click anywhere you can see immediately it pulls me to a dialog box to choose the dome light texture which is your HDR I so I'm going to go to the file where I have kept that and I have a HDRI that I found available free online if you do a little bit of digging a lot of various websites give you free HD RS to do some things like this and do some experimenting and testing so certainly you know do a quick google search and you'll find at least one or two free HDR eyes to use as your own way to test this now that that is locked in there we'll do a look real quick render to see what's gonna happen but before I do that actually let's go back to our top view to it let's look at that light so this is now this arrow right here this represents my my new HDR dome light and so what this is telling me from a bigger conceptual idea is that I now have a dome light that's encompassing the entire project and that dome light is an HDR eye that is stretched to be the new dome so the default at rhino is simply just a white dome that has an even lighting on your scene we've replaced that with a HDR I and for those you who don't know what a CRI is or why keep referring to this type of file it's essentially a JPEG of a sky panorama except for that it has some lighting qualities embedded within the file meaning that it has a Sun and a bright spot and when I rotate this dome which unfortunately you can't quite see until we render it that will in fact change the way the light quality comes in and so it's important to know that there this changes based on that how you rotate it and it changes based on where this arrow is pointing so this arrow is pointing to the Sun in my HDR so to demonstrate what that means I am going to take this arrow and rotate it so that it's facing perfectly south and then I'm gonna come in to my perspective and I'm not even gonna worry about my image here I'm just gonna come off here just look off into the distance basically just looking south in my virtual Rhino world the house is completely out of you and I'm just going to hit render to show you what this is what's really happening here oops you can see I only rendered this tiny little box because I left my box on there I'll just click that again to turn that off and hit render and now over in there the entire scene so the difference here now you can see is that we no longer have just the generic black background we actually have a whole stretch sky scenes goes full 360 so it had this this particular HDRI that I'm using there's a little bit more at a dusk setting but you can see it has some beautiful clouds and it has a hotspot we'll say so this is where the Sun is in this image and if I were to turn and look north now so I'm looking away from the Sun we can see the other side of that image and here you can actually see the seam where that image is wrapped 360 around my object or around my my environment and that's the see where it comes together because when they whoever made this free HDR I didn't quite make that clean enough which is fine because we don't actually ever see this we're just using it for its lighting qualities so here is gonna be the darker side of this image and if you remember from before South is gonna be the bright side and so what's gonna happen is that that is going to light up my scene the same way it would light up a building in reality meaning that the Sun itself will be brighter because of the Sun in the image so if I go to my plan view and if I remember back when I looked at my son I set it up so that my son was coming in from like a south southeast and coming in about that height which is about more the Sun setting in my my HDR I so if I take my HDR I dome which is to again just represented by this little arrow here just to keep keep track of where the Sun is in that HDR I what I want to do is actually just rotate this little arrow to match my Sun angle so it's a little bit of backwards right so the Sun is coming from south east to the center point here at that height and then my hgri is pointing back to the Sun so if the sun's coming south east to my object this is pointing to the south east to the Sun so now these are working the same way if I were to do this backwards it would be brighter on the shadow side of the building and you'd have conflicting light sources in which your eye would quickly catches something is not quite right so now that this is pointing the right direction I've now have a a rhino Sun and an HDR eye that are coming from the same direction so now let's see what that looks like I'll go back to my saved view so everything keeps rendering consistence and let's just hit render and see what the difference you so we can see there's a very very different overall look and feel to this rendering so I'll just cover a few things that are happening here one we're seeing the HDRI that's that's affecting our image in the background keep in mind this will save if I were to go here and save this as a PNG this will it'll actually save that image of the sky in the background with it if you don't want that to save all you need to do is go into your lighting settings so again back to the asset editor and you can see under my lighting settings this beer a dumb light has appeared here all you need to do is click on this options tab and click invisible this will make it so that that does not save with it it's usually not much of an issue because if you are to go back to that that image if you've followed the previous tutorial settings and you are also rendering out a material ID which it looks like I need to update a few settings on that actually the reason this material ID isn't showing anything is because I have my material override so it's not false overwriting my material IDs so that's something we'll need to fix as well but typically if you have a material ID it'll allow you to just select the sky and Photoshop with a magic wand and just delete it itself so there's a number of ways to make sure this doesn't save or if you'd like it to save that is certain the easiest option so that's what's happening in the background but let's more importantly look at how it's affecting the model if you remember before just the typical Rhino Sun that was coming in was sort of a harsh flat yellow light this has a lot more nuance in it so not only are we seeing the nuance and the color variations in this landscape and the materials is hitting in different planes we also have now given the glass something to reflect so the heated glass and we'll get into this a little bit more with the material tutorial but the key with class is really giving it's the glass needs to reflect something to look like it's reflective as well as be somewhat transparent and and look into that at a different tutorial so now that the class is something to be transparent and that would apply to any sort of reflective material so right now I have the material override so we're not even getting the full benefit of what this API will do we can only just see how it's affecting certain things but for example if this steel up here was created a material that feels like a that has a nice subtle blurred reflection like this like a steel beam might that would also have some nice nuances and variations in the color along the length of it because it's gonna pull in some of that light from the sky so we can see this is making this is a significant improvement to the overall lighting source or to your exterior lighting and from here to sort of edit this and tweak and play with some settings really what you're gonna want to do is going to be playing with where the Sun is so again if we wanted to try the Sun coming from the Northeast I would just pull this over here and then I would just take this my a CRI and make sure that's matching it and I would rotate it so it's coming in to the same way and then they'll always feel synced up and you can always adjust these settings to get to the lighting that your desired if we go back to our lighting settings here the v-ray dome the intensity is fine and just leave that at one for most of HDR eyes if if it's a little bit too bright or too dark you can just tweak that number just a little bit but again the Sun wants to be down here very very small at point zero three and the reason the last thing we'll just kind of discuss is some of the high level conceptual reasons we have both and we're trying to sync them and the reason for that is because the HDR eye itself is not going to provide a shadow so it will give you the nice soul glow it's gonna be brighter it's gonna brighter towards the side that's closest to the Sun within right and it'll give you all these nice subtle lighting effects but it won't give us the shadows so if we look at this image and we think about why this image is great it's because we're getting some very nice color variations but we're also we have some really nice shadows that are coming off of the building as well that are starting to get a little bit fuzzy as they move out and we see the shadow coming out of here so you really want both of those you want the hard shadows from the real Sun and you want the subtle atmospheric effects from the HDRI so the best way to do is to sync them both up and lower the Sun setting so it's not overpowered by the tcri and let the hgri handle the light and the Sun handle the shadows and together you get a nice clean output so that'll do it for setting up the exterior lighting

Channel: Source Render

Views: 26,449

Keywords: HDRI, Vray, Vray 3, Vray for Rhino, Rhino 6, dome light, exterior lighting, rendering, setting up the sun, setting up a dome light, rendering with an HDRI, HDRI as a dome light, vray lights, vray dome light, sun, rhino sun

Id: 6WacAGgWLBg

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 27 2018