Webinar 73: KeyShot Rendering - Start to Finish

all right since its we're just on the hour right now what I'm gonna do is actually just kick this off since we have a lot to fit into this webinar today what we're going to be doing is walking through the entire process start to finish of creating an image in key shot this does not necessarily include render time but again this is going to be focused on a high-level broad strokes view at how you can move through key shot to build a nice image it's definitely gonna be geared toward beginners or people who are newer to key shot however if you have been using it for a little while I do think you'll get a few tips and tricks out of it especially when you look at speed efficiency things like that so without further ado I will mention I'm will Gibbons I'm the global training specialist at Lux Eon and today I'm gonna be taking you through how to create an image start to finish all right so before we kick this off I am gonna mention that I am recording this it will become live on our YouTube channel in the near future and the computer I'm working on since that seems to be a common question actually today is an older MacBook Pro I one of the beautiful things about keyShot is you do not need a beast of a machine to get great results and while recording this and performing a webinar and rendering in keyShot today on a laptop should hopefully prove that true so if you guys have questions during this webinar feel free to type those in the chat box we have a couple of Luxy on employees on the line hopefully they can answer your questions as they come up anything that's relevant to what we're doing today will be held as a question that I can answer at the end of the webinar but we have a lot to get through like I said so I'm going to move fairly quickly and it might take a little bit so here we go the topics of our webinar today is going to be focused on again I said those broad strokes the major chunks these steps I take when I go to create an image again focused on trying to get as much done and as little time as possible it's easy to get caught up in those details so what we're going to do is go first with a block in where we kind of set up our scene and then we will take a look at lighting and then once we like the way our scene is lit we're going to work on materials and then we leave the details for the final adjustments stage so let's say all of a sudden we don't have as much time as we thought to actually finish or take our rendering to completion we at least have the broad-strokes taken care of that's why I like to break it down like this and then of course we will talk about basic render settings for the scene that I walk us through and then we will hopefully have time for some Q&A afterward so the first step for our block in here we're going to kind of look at three things first off we'll import our model and and then we'll use model sets to organize our scene if necessary I think because we're working on such a simple scene and we don't have a ton of time today we might not get into too much model set work but then we'll also be using primitives to create a setting so rather than just having your product floating in space it's sometimes nice to situate it or add context so we'll talk about how to do that in keyShot and then creating a couple of potential camera angles and then deciding on the one to proceed with so I'm going to go ahead and open key shot seven and then we have on our desktop the model that I'll be working with today is just a step file I'll drag it into the key shot real time window and our import settings look good nothing crazy here the only things I change is I turned off separate materials back part and I have import NURBS data just in case I want to play with the tessellation later I'll go ahead and hit import and here we go so our model is quite simple modeled in fusion 360 this is a power bank you use it to charge mobile devices things like that so pretty simple form and what I'm going to do is start by so it looks like I already have a 16 by 9 aspect ratio laid out so if I didn't for some reason if my view is like this when I started my real-time view what I would likely do as one of the first steps is go and set that aspect ratio to something I want to work with for me it's 16 by 9 because this is you know standard kind of a aspect ratio of digital screens and and stuff like that alright so then the next thing that we'll do is we're going to kind of situate our product again this looks like it's sitting on the ground that's okay but I'd like to go for something a little bit more interesting and I'll show you I actually found an image that I'm so sorry I'm not quite sure who this is from or where this came from online but I thought this had a cool aesthetic that was something we could aim for something similar I want to create the same image but just something that's a bit interesting and plays with a full range of values so value meaning the bright areas - dark areas so I think this looks kind of cool so we'll do something sort of like that it's always nice to have a reference so in order to do that we'll go ahead and I'm gonna go to edit add geometry and I'm gonna add a cube alright so we get a little cube in our scene I want to scale this up so I can turn on the scale handle and just drag click and drag on the yellow box to scale this up I can snap it to the ground and I'll hit the green check box next I want to put my product on top of it so grab the move tool lift it up and then I'll just click snap to lower object and then I'll move my product whoopsies wrong one let's do it again snap to lower object I'll grab the planar move handle and just bring this up toward the edge of my cube maybe rotate this a little bit so it's just not super perfect and we could go ahead and do that continue to do that we could add more if you look in our edit add geometry window we have quite a few options whether it's a ground plane or a backdrop a couple other shapes we can add just for interests for visual interest for now I'm going to keep things simple um also that has to do with the time constraints of our webinar we don't have a ton of time so the next thing I'm going to do is kind of consider a kind of a composition so how everything is framed up in our window so you'll notice as I get close we're getting a lot of convergence of the vertical lines of this cube that comes from having a fairly wide camera angle so or a camera lens so if I change this to a hundred for my perspective you'll notice this cube kind of flattens out and the verticals get closer to being parallel we are going to or I will I will usually adjust that fairly early on just because it allows me to kind of compose my scene get nice and close without getting far too much distortion on my object so as I kind of bring the camera in a little bit closer I'm thinking about what that final shot might look like I could do something kind of like this if I wanted to I don't want my product centered in the frame or anything like that but this would be kind of a cool close up for kind of a macro shot so I can go to my cameras and I can save off a camera at that position if I want to consider that for the future I can also hunt around for a few more angles so I can do something that you know shows off more of the profile of this kind of slim geometric product if I wash off this edge I can do something sort of like this I could save off another camera angle if I want one that's kind of more top-down say I'm going to show off like a texture a cool design on the top of this or maybe a branding or something a logo I can do something like this see mmm and sometimes just a matter of playing around to finding what your eye finds pleasing like I kind of like something sort of like this so I'll say this as the third potential option so I have these to play with I'm not married to any of them yet but we'll land on one eventually I think I kind of like this last one so if we move on over to our slideshow we created we consider creating a model set right now with just a simple single product and just a primitive in my scene I don't think it's necessary to add model sets but if I had maybe a couple different versions or I wanted two of these product in my scene and I want them to be kind of independent of one another I could add them to the model sets section so if this is something that is new to you we have other videos we can link up that show how to use model sets and then also going back here we use primitives create our setting and then couple camera angles so the next step is lighting what I want to do is explore a couple of off-the-shelf HDR eyes and see if one of them works for us and then if it doesn't or if we want to add some more drama we can add physical planes or lights for more directional or dramatic lighting and then finally I want to kind of between the two of those assess what we have and see which one I like the best and then proceed and then we'll move on in the next phase so let's do that if I go ahead and grab an environment I can go ahead and leave this at the default but you'll notice we lack contrast it's kind of boring but if I play around with a different environment like say this hallway one you'll see it gets kind of darker we have some shadows I can go into my environment settings and try rotating it the shortcut for this by the way is command or control + left click drag by knowing that shortcut you can always change your lighting without moving into this tab so I recommend you you memorize that one so I'm not liking this it doesn't have enough tres for my like for my preferences so if I try the bathroom scene you know you wouldn't normally think of shooting a product in the bathroom but check this out yeah so because this has a really bright window we've got a pretty strong directional lighting here so I can kind of get like a really bright side to the cube as well as the product which i think is really cool it's going to give us more of what we're after we could backlight it I'm thinking something almost like this and again we got to remember we still have a couple camera angles but I'm pretty sure we're gonna proceed with this last one I just have a good feeling about it so back in our environment so we've got this bathroom which could work we can play with the brightness if we wanted to we'll go ahead and just leave that at the default for now I want to do another thing I mentioned which was I'll consider physical lights there's definitely some benefits and there are some videos floating around online about those that we could probably link up but if I go ahead and add a plane to my scene I can use that as a physical light so what I'll do is I'll go to edit add geometry and we're gonna add a plane and we don't see it here on the screen I would need to move away and then I can grab it and drag it up so it's now visible above my cube so now I want to snap back to my camera angle so you see how my camera I didn't bother locking it because sometimes I want to change my camera view but if we just navigate off it and go back it's back to where it was so I kind of I kind of like that behavior that I can move my camera and then it doesn't automatically say if it's quite nice so now what about moving that light plane without constantly moving my camera angle well we can open the geometry view I'll go to window and open the geometry view and we should see it pop up on the left yeah so it's stacked on top of my library panel I scroll out though I can bring in to view my scene and now we're kind of this third-person looking the scene which is cool and we see our plane so let's get our plane I'm gonna move it I'm gonna just drag it over kind of give it a bit of a rotation and here's a cool thing what we can do is if we want to move this light but kind of keep it focused on our product I can change the pivot or the of this move tool so click pick I'll choose my product and I'll hit OK and now my move tools on the product itself and when I move it will see that the light kind of moves and rotates around my object which is super cool I'll leave it there for now I'll double click on the plane to turn it into a light material go for an area light my favorite I like how they give this nice kind of fall-off and I don't know just has a look that I think often works quite well with product shots it's too bright of course that's because I'm too close so I'm going to move my plane further away and it may be because my light itself is too bright so we'll have to check that out but now you can see as I move it I can move this around my scene and it stays focused on the product all right we'll leave it there for now also I'm gonna save this we don't like crashes and you never know when that's gonna happen so I'll go ahead and just save this to my desktop all right good okay so now I want to you know this a little bit bright if I go back to my environment something I want to show you if I take my HDR I and start dropping its brightness we can inject some drama into our scene and does two things one it keeps my scene from being blown out because now I don't have too much light in my scene and it makes those shadows nice and dark now if I take it down to nothing this does not look good we're going we're clipping we're getting too much black it's too dark so what I like to do is actually use both physical lights and HDR eyes and I tend to use my HDR eyes as fill light to keep the dark areas from getting too dark so we can just play with them and let them work together all right so let's take a look at our presentation so we checked out some HDR eyes or one in particular we stuck with and then we added a plane to see if we could get more directional lighting we got that I think I'm going to use the combination of both HDRI and physical light because I think they suit this shot pretty well so the next step is materials and this is where you can end up spending a lot of time so we want to kind of again focus on moving through this quickly so I'll start by applying basic materials and by basic I mean kind of straight out of the key shot library and then all spend time dialing in a couple textures and or you know labels and then we have this cool thing multi materials that is an awesome kind of last step that I use to try a few different color options or different finish variations and then we can count it just like we did a few different camera angles and then decided which one we liked afterward we can do the same thing with materials and then we can proceed with that that option so that's kind of like a nice way to use key shot through the development phase before you know exactly what you're going to end up with so I mean this looks pretty cool already but let's go ahead and get some materials on here so I switch over to my library tab and now I can go into materials and just search for what I want black plastic is my go-to it's kind of just a habit but I like to start off with very basic materials all the time and by working with something dark like black plastic it allows me to see all my textures and stuff quite well so I'll drag some of these on here it looks like we have another black part here I'm gonna drag that onto and we've got our cube which is just a diffuse material which I might leave as the diffuse we'll see but what I want to do is just change it from black or sorry this blue color to black you almost it's too dark avoid pure black I would say if I want it very dark I can go with a 10% maybe even 15 is better for now and then well mostly the thing looks kind of blue it's kind of because my light that plane that has the light material that's actually a blue color I don't want it to be blue so let's make it white for now okay and then we could have some color influenced from our HDRI if we did not want that if this had too much warm and then cool light so you see how we're getting cool blue on the front here and then warm yellow on the top here it's from these two light sources in here I can hit my HDRI editor tab choose that background image and then all I need to do is go to my saturation dial this back a little bit so I mean I could just desaturate the whole thing and that may be what I do for now there we go and then it looks like I need something on this button so I'll go back with the texture black plastic looking pretty good good enough for now what are these guys these are a rough plastic that's fine okay so if I go into my scene what I want to make sure is that these three things are not linked anything else I'm just gonna go ahead and isolate materials to selection okay very good so next I want to throw on some textures so right here we teased out this image of this Powerbank that I created a few weeks ago I'm gonna follow that pretty similarly I'm gonna go to my textures it looks like we have a bump on here already I'm gonna kill that for now we might come back to it but what I want to do is start off putting a texture in the diffuse channel and I do this to help me see what I'm working with if I go I'm gonna use a procedural texture which you get from this drop-down menu pardon me and I'm going to choose the mesh which is a really powerful texture that we can customize to create different kind of mesh patterns and I'm gonna stick with lines today I mean dots are cool but I've got these rounded edges and I know that projecting a round texture onto these kind of rounded edges could be problematic me so because this model is not prepped with UV mapping so I'm gonna go ahead and switch this to something like lines which will do just fine projecting all the way through that curved kind of edge and then I'm gonna take the color background color and background and turn one of them to be white so they are it's kind of high contrast now you can see it's projecting box mapped we don't want that I want to projecting as if it's just projecting all the way through this so I'll change it from mesh to normal Erb sorry excuse me I'll change it from box mapping type to planar and now it looks like it's projecting all the way through I'll Center it on the part and if I hit the move texture button we see our move tool let's turn on the translate handles turn off rotate I'll leave them on and then if I hit fit to Y or X or Z this will take our planar projection and project it along one of those three axes Y is what I want because it's going to project normal to the face and then if I want I'm gonna go ahead and actually just rotate this what maybe 45 degrees I think this a helps our composition and B is kind of interesting for kind of a linear product so go ahead and hit OK and then we can spend lots of time dialing in this texture really making you know spacing and everything the way we want it I don't quite have time for that now so I'm just gonna move on but before I do that there's something I want to look at because I'm gonna use this for the bump as well actually I'll show you what happens if we do that if I drag this on a bump we'll see it's pretty subtle if I go and take the bump height up to like say 3 it's gonna look pretty yucky does not look very good and the problem is if you look here we have this thing called fall-off it's set to zero and the fall-off controls how sharp this edge is and that's not so good as soon as I start dragging it to a larger number like say 0.5 you'll see it starts to be less less sharp and if I go to 1 it's really soft so the key here is is I'm gonna set this to a very low value point say 0.2 and that should give us a fairly kind of crispy bump edge and it's subtle here but we'll see it in a bit I just wanted to call that out because if this is the first time you've used this texture that this little fall-off guy can be key for making a bump texture with the mesh procedural to look decent the other thing or the other way I want to use this is to break up the shininess or the roughness on this material right now our material is rough if I take it down to glossy or shiny you can see a little bit better also I'm going to go back to the geometry view and tweak my light that plane just a little bit so I can get some kind of highlights on the top surface of this because if I don't do that adding a little bit of roughness variation may not come through or not read very well on this product so I'm gonna go ahead and do that and even I think put just a little bit more brightness into this light so I said it's about 1500 lumen all right so if we go back here and we look at our material graph and the reason I'm going to go into the material graph is because I want to use this texture on the roughness as well so let's scoot this window over pop open the material graph and now if I take this guy and I plug this mesh texture into the roughness go to go to the plus find roughness we can see now we're breaking up that surface between glossy and rough and here's a little trick if I click on the connector to the roughness I'm going to add a utility node going to color to number this is going to allow us to preview well I'm going to hit C while this is selected now I'm previewing this texture color info information now this Cullerton number is going to allow us to control the white and black values independently so it's too rough because pure white is equal to a roughness level of one and I don't want this to be that rough it's like it's it's too rough so if I bring this down it gets the white will get darker if I bring this down to about 0.1 we should be back to a roughness of kind of about 0.1 for the light areas and then if I left this black at zero this black will be pure glossy so if I get out of my preview with the C key we should hopefully see a difference there if I change my camera angle because I'm not seeing a huge difference there we might be able to see what's happening but it's definitely going to be dependent a little bit on your lighting so that's why this can be a little bit tricky let me go ahead and go back to that camera just reset it and then if I want to go back into the material graph get a preview on that color to number I'm gonna take the roughness up in the dark areas just a little bit as well maybe I'll bring this up a bit here too just to have some more contrast and for now we'll we'll leave this B now from this angle you can see that the roughness maybe I just had to go a little bit higher here now that roughness here is giving us a matte finish on the stripes which is pretty cool that's kind of what we're going for let's just pump it up for now and we'll back it down if we need to a little bit later there we go okay so let's get out of this material graph and continue editing next we want to add some labels I believe so if I go ahead and grab on my labels and I've three pngs that I can put as labels on this guy I'm gonna go ahead and start off with my power button so I'm just gonna drag it into Keisha and onto the part and I'll add it as a label and again I'm going to change my camera angle and if I go to move my label here let's see by default it looks like it's set to planar mapping mode and it's set to Center on model on the center on the part and go ahead and move texture let's fit it to either the X the Y or the Z and this looks pretty good although here's an interesting little insight because of the way I modeled this this part itself does not have its own local x y&z axes so what key shots doing is it's just projecting this along key shots global axis so in order to make this not distort the way it's projecting on to this button I'm changing my camera angle and allowing me to kind of rotate this to kind of match the angle that this surface was built at and I'm just gonna eyeball it for now if I really needed that to be precise I could go about doing it fixing my model so it had true good global axes I'll show you local axes and then at this point I'm a little bit rotated so let's go check out my labels angle and I can hopefully just take this and rotate this guy up to 90 there we go and let's scale this guy down alright and it's not quite behaving the way I want let's go ahead and check out what's going on with that here looks like that's the diffuse and what I think I will do is go ahead and just put this on opacity aha so what that is doing is taking that dark area and masking it out and the actual material you're seeing on this button is the properties here this plastic of the label itself so I'll go ahead and set this to be just a lighter color kind of like a mid-level oh I spoke too soon that's actually the I'm sorry that's the material on this button let's go to the labels label properties that's what I was looking for now let's grab this guy and drag it up so now we can have a button that's more of like a grey let's go for like a dark grey darker okay cool so we got this guy and then let's go ahead and maybe just apply one more label again we kinda have to consider how much time we have but if I take my USB here and drag this on to the face just apply it as a label let's go ahead and Center this on the part and just drag this guy way down and it's going to be similar to what I just did so I'm gonna make this guy something like do five millimeters and then I'll let's make it smaller go three four cool okay and then I'm going to bring this on over to opacity so now I've got that material I can go to its label properties I can go into here and set the set I think I had 30 for the color and similar thing going on as we have for a power button and if I go into my label texture I can I need to I can just move this on over a bit so that's right next to that port and very cool thing we can do is if we want we could just go ahead and duplicate this label and I can move one of them over so if I hit move I'll just move this on over here to be next to the other port and if I grab my labels I can just swap out my flash icon and boom it just inherits all the properties of the other label pretty cool so now we're rocking and rolling if we want to make this little fancier we can hold alt and drag this guy on over to the bump channel and it's hard to tell but if we get nice and close we can we can see that we're definitely getting a slight bump on the edge with a little highlight that could be pushed out a little bit further if we really wanted it to just by going down to the bump and setting the bump height to something like 2 because this is such a all graphic see now we're catching the highlights it looks pretty good so I'll go ahead and do it on the other one to click on bump and then set the bump height to 2 and I forgot to do that on this guy here so we'll double click on the button go to labels alt drag this over to bump and go down to the bump height and set this to 2 very good so we've got our labels we've got some textures last thing if you ask me is to just examine this material here if this needs a bit of a texture I could go into textures I want to use a roughness texture so once again I'll pop into the material graph and I'll change this material from diffuse to plastic because we want this to be a bit shiny and then what I want to do is get a texture and maybe I'll do like a bit of a let's go crazy let's go camouflage I know what you're thinking this seems weird let's go ahead and dial this back down to be tiny like 2 or no let's go away smaller 0.5 there we go I'm gonna do this I'm gonna take the black just make it not quite so black so we have less contrast here there we go okay and then what this is going to do is if I go into looks like my skill there we go so if I take this and plug this into the roughness alright so we have different kind of roughness values I can blend it a bit if I click mix colors and if I go to the spray and drag this guy way up it's gonna kind of make this more fuzzy go up pretty high and last but not least if that's too much contrast still we can get a color adjust in between these take our contrast down we could also bring our value down if we need to so it's not so rough because if we preview this we're seeing that we're getting here will kill the saturation so it's not confusing the lighter this color is going into roughness the rougher it's going to be the darker this texture is the smoother or shinier it's gonna be the glossy ER so if I bring my value down will reflect a little bit more light and we'll get more of a contrast in our gradient from the brightness here to the black the darker back there so I go down in value getting brighter so we can play with those and then lastly we can go to our plastic and take our specular value then we can drop this if that's just overall too bright for our scene if it's competing with the product that's on top and of course we still haven't even messed with this but we could go into our black and drop it yet to make it even darker so lots of fun stuff we can do with this okay we have to move on I get sucked into materials if we go back to our slideshow we can see that I might want to try some multi materials I'll just show you how that works real quick if I double-click on my shell and I go into multi materials I can say duplicate the material and link its textures this third one and then what I can do is I'll do that a couple times and then I'll just click on this and change the color I am super bright yellow so it's too much but I could drag that down if I needed to this also tells me that my light might be a little bit strong if I'm getting if it's blowing out at that dark of a color I could play with that if I had to I could also go into this other one I could try a different one like a pink or red or something or a blue so lots of fun stuff we can do with this here I kind of like that I think I'll stick with that for now go ahead and hit OK and then we can play with these you know if we want to examine different colors maybe instead of a yellow I can go with like a cool like a dark dark green or something like that sort of a minty green and then of course we need to see what's next so here we want to choose a direction and proceed now we do final adjustment so this is where we dial in our composition which means things like avoiding tangents where to the edges or the silhouettes or horizontal or vertical lines seem to come very close to being collinear that's very distracting to the eye we can also play up the rule of thirds or play have more kind of whitespace or or whatever we need to do we can also say maybe rotater product whatever we need to do to kind of make it more interesting then we want to fine-tune our camera settings this means things like add that the field maybe rotate a camera a little bit just make it look as nice as possible we tweaked the lighting dial in how bright our light is to make sure we have enough contrast or maybe our sharp shadows or soft shadows you can even add color to the lighting if we want to do that for some more interest and then finally the materials that we have we want to maybe go in and finalize any little settings to really controlling convey the surface quality of all those materials so I'm gonna move on into our scene and take a look at that I mentioned the light being a bit bright if I go back to my scene and my plane 1500 lumen let's knock this down to a thousand and all of a sudden my colors looking a lot better I'm still getting the bright white highlights without losing all the color and and blowing out this image so that right away tells me my light was indeed probably a little too bright based on its distance and size what about my cube got an idea these edges are pretty sharp I wonder if I can click on my cube but go to properties find my rounded edges if you just bring this up a little bit to see if I can't saw Fionn those edges let's do like two millimeters so that softens it too much I want to go down to say one there we go cool and in let's take a look at so I like how this is going to like pretty much pure darkness here I think the side of this cube could maybe get a little bit more light we'll see about that and then the shadow is pretty nice but if I wanted to adjust the size of the shadow just or the sharpness of the shadow in case anyone's curious I could go to my light move the part and I need to scale it either up or down but but here's the thing if I do it from here it's gonna bring this the light closer the object I want to reset I pivot and now I could grab the yellow square and or cube and drag it down so if I make it really small that shadow will sharpen right up which I know a lot of people struggle with it's pretty cool like that I'll soften it just a bit if it's too sharp it doesn't look very realistic I don't think but the larger your object the softer your shadow is going to be and then I'm gonna go ahead and move it again but I want to go ahead and pick that pivot so it's back on my object so now if I want I can go ahead and rotate or move it up and down and this will also have an effect on where that shadow goes how long it is all those good things if I had time I could set up another light to just throw some local lighting down here or I could modify the HDR I to do that which maybe I'll do rotate that light plane just a little bit to have a better direction of that shadow or if I'm really curious about getting that nice gradient in the lighting across the surface here I could go and play with that the other direction maybe it's not quite as overhead maybe it's higher overhead I can kind of rotate my light yeah so you just play with those settings to really just get it to look the way you like again time is really going to be the limiting factor here today if I want to play with composition I can go ahead and grab my power bank hit the move tool and just kind of move this guy around and here if I want to get it just a little bit closer I said tangents earlier by the way this would be a tangent see how the edge is coming right up to the edge of my frame that's very uncomfortable so you're either you want plenty of breathing space or you want to crop your image not somewhere in between so I'm going to choose to let this be chopped off a little bit that's fine and I kind of rotated my rotated my Powerbank so that these these stripes are not going super super perfectly like across my screen and then I think I'm moving forward toward the edge maybe just a bit and then we have say maybe a camera adjustment if we need to do that we can go in our camera and finally say like okay I still want that to be cropped a little bit better maybe I want to bring the camera in just a bit closer so I'm really drawing attention to this part of a product if this needs some roughness now I can go to this material add just a dash of roughness point zero five we'll say that definitely helps that surface not look quite so weird and then if these labels were too dark I could go back into the material here pop into the labels remember it's the label material that's driving our color so I can bring this up to say now 50 because remember before our light was really bright that was making them look whiter than it should have so I'll do the same thing with the other material or label go up to 50 mm sorry if I'm going a bit quick there's just a lot to go through today so go ahead and bump this up 50 very cool awesome and our lights showing us kind of that that bump that we're getting on those labels I think that's looking really nice last but not least we could get into this material just a teeny bit more pop open the material graph we have a stack of stuff this is because we made multi material if I click this button here it will align those and the one that's red is the one that we currently are editing so if I go to my color 2 number we'll see this these values are driving that roughness again I might want to go and just play with that a little bit more to see if I can take the black the shiny part make it glossy er just for the sake of contrast in the rendering and then I could take my roughness down or up looks like it's going to look better if I go even further in the rough direction and my bump is I think a little high so I'm gonna go to my texture double-click it find my bump set to 3 let's try 2 and there we don't have quite so much weirdness going on the edge here where it's getting a little bit stretched and skewed very good ok and then if I want because these are all a multi material and they're the textures are linked if I wanted to still assess any of these other colors I could and those changes I just made to the texture are staying true and there's our kind of all black version which kind of looks nice now so if I like this then I can proceed with this let's check our camera finally let's make sure we save because we moved those camera angles but before I do that I'm gonna add some depth of field click on this little guy everything goes blurry I'm gonna click set focal point and I want to click on where I want the part to be in most InFocus I think the face of the product is the most important so I'll click on it we can see in the real-time view the blue I'm sorry on the geometry view the blue plane is where it's in focus and then if I increase the f-stop everything the depth of field gets bigger because we're putting more space between these and now things start to come into focus and this looks pretty cool I'd say um I like the heavy depth of field look in this image so I think we're gonna proceed with this and we're getting a little bit of noise or white fireflies on here so I'll double click this material actually this is the next step let's let's go ahead and make sure our camera is indeed saved we'll lock it and actually before I lock it I'll close this one render alright and then now I'll lock it ok about 15 minutes left so I'm going to try to zip on through it we're almost done here cool so render settings let's talk about these we're gonna use our real-time region render to decide on how many samples to render at we want to adjust material samples if certain materials need a little bit more TLC meaning if they're looking to noisy or take too many fireflies we can work on that we can set our resolution for our final rendering and then our final rendering quality so getting back into here I think I'm done with my geometry view I'll close this out and then what I'll do is notice the fireflies here what I was going to do is double click on this and say hey I want to increase my material samples here's the interesting thing we can't because this is a basic plastic so let's make this a transparent plastic and I know this sounds very counterintuitive but transparent plastic has a sample setting under the roughness property that we want to adjust so I click the expand button and I'm going to create the samples here - something like 16 instead of 12 and that should help with that a little bit may not see it so much in the real-time view not immediately at least but it will work now interestingly enough we're starting to see through this be careful when you switch to a transparent plastic because specular transmission adopts the color white by default so I want to set this to black which means no light can move through that material go ahead and it save and now we're back to where we were with that material and its settings are higher so it's gonna render a little bit better that's a very vague way of saying that but it's it's or basic way of saying that but it's true and then I'm gonna do kind of the same thing here set this to black and set my rough no sorry sample settings to something about 16 and lastly this should be fine on this material if I go into my I'm gonna take my refractive index if I drop this down a little bit we should notice that this looks less shiny again I'm kind of like this this gradient to go back to a darker color so if we were to break the rule physics and play with this and start messing with this we could make it shinier or less shiny and kind of drive or direct the eye as we will or as we want one other thing I forgot I wanted some more light on the side of this cube so if I pop into my environment check this out in the HDRI editor I can add a pin actually you know what there's a better way of doing that I'm gonna add I'll trash that I'm gonna add a highlight hold ctrl or command and click on the cube side that I want to put the light on if I brighten that up go about 10:00 we have light on the side here so I'll do about 30 and the reason that this is how's it having to go so bright is because I turn my entire environment down and as far as the brightness goes I could have just turned say the background down instead of the overall environment so let's do that I'll go bring the environment up to one brightness and then the HDR I editor click on the background grab this brightness down I think at a point one three five or something is what I had it's an hour back to a where this light can be made this pin can be made a bit smaller and certainly not as bright and and I can again click to kind of reposition that if I need to still getting a bit noisy maybe with my depth of field it's not gonna look quite as good as I want so maybe I abandoned that idea that's alright let's go to our lighting tab I'm in basic still product is where it's at if you want to ensure that most your renderings are going to look pretty good product is the safest way to go that's a very blanket statement it's not not always the case but most people through rendering transparent materials or you want to get a few more ray bounces global illumination is something that makes stuff look pretty realistic again at the risk of oversimplifying things I suggest rendering in product mode this is going to set your real-time sampling to to behave this way for this scene I certainly don't need 14 ray bounces so I can drop this to like I'm about 5 that will certainly speed up this rendering you need a ray bounce every time light moves through a transparent surface so in this case I don't need very many just having a few helps the scene not get too many like black areas so to speak ok this is pretty good I'm happy with this let's go to our render settings at this point I tend to save I'll save one more time and then I'll check out my render settings here we've got to name our thing I'll call it power bank black or maybe I want to render all those multi materials I'll just leave it called power bank set my rendering format to PNG there's other reasons to use these other formats but for basic image today we're just gonna go PNG 1920 by 1080 is a standard resolution I render at so I'll leave it as is if I want to go in later and make some tweaks in Photoshop or something to the brightness or like the side like the cube or anything like that I could make this easier on myself and output like a normals pass or a clown pass if I wanted to so I can I can check those on these are freebies these don't make your rendering take any longer and then last but not least how are we gonna render max samples max time our custom control well I'm liking the way this looks I'll use max samples I really want these white things to clear up so I'm gonna get a region render I go to image click region and I'm gonna resize this box to focus on the problematic area of my rendering where I'm getting those white spots and hopefully with enough time those should go away and if they still don't maybe I need to dial in some of my render settings just a bit let's go ahead and take the refractive index of this down just a touch take our specular down just a touch and maybe take my roughness up a fair bit because those are still distracting me so that stuff should help make this a little bit less noisy and then as I let this sit if I hit the H key I get my heads-up display we see samples increase over time so samples this is gonna be the measure of like the clarity or the quality or the clean cleanliness of the final rendering so I let this sit for a second until I think it looks good to my eye visually here and when it looks good enough I look at the number of samples and then I decide to type that into my samples settings for my final rendering and that will ensure the whole image has this quality of resolution and if I'm left with any hotspots left there any fireflies I can take care of those in post it's not the end of the world I'm focused on speed I want to get in and out instead of tweaking lights and materials forever so at this point I have depth the field on I might sit somewhere around 500 samples it's on the high side but if I really want that smooth depth of field and just really want to be sure that things look nice um I'll go ahead and use that number so I'll type in 512 and then honestly that's it so I can let's delete this old job and let's go ahead and I can either add the current job so that I'm ready to go I can process this in the render queue or better yet I can go to add molten material and I can add all three of these multi materials if I select them all I can add them all and it shows three frames and it will actually render the same image three times one with each color pretty cool and then I just hit process cue and I'm done I can go get a coffee or take a break or go to lunch or something like that so really that's that's it that's the beginning to end sort of process and pop over to here that puts us right at Q&A it's a 1053 so demo took a while but I'm glad we made it through it hopefully questions were answered hopefully that's useful um I'm gonna leave this slide up and then I will let Rex or Josh or whoever is on the line feed me a few questions if that sounds good and based on time I'll try to either answer or demonstrate those in the key shot panel so if you guys gotta go thank you for attending and for those who are sticking around Q&A time okay well great job thank you for that we only had a few questions today one of those questions was from will and he just left he was asking about the material roughness of the particular senior you were working on but there are a couple other questions that could be worth answering here one by John Muir ish is can a label be turned into a light hmm good question sure so I assume the question having to do with a label being turned into a light let's say we want this to look like a kind of co-molded or two-part material and you want light to emit out of the power button or something to show it's charging or on yes the short answer is yes so if I double click on this material the way to do that is actually remembering that labels they're actually just a layered material one on top of the other so this if I turn off my opacity this is just a gray label applied or a gray plastic material that's on top of this button this little texture is what's actually keeping it to this area it's masking it out so it only shows up here if I want this to appear to be alight I could go to my materials and change this into something like any missive material and by doing that what this says is this is an emissive material it's color is this so if I want it to be like like a blue LED set this to blue and set the brightness just crank this up as high as I need to so if I want this to be like five it's gonna look almost so bright that it's like white if I bring this back down I can bring it into the color realm again and then as far as getting this to output light I know a lot of people often want some glow or some bloom here your options are to either check out the effects you can turn this on a little bit of bloom radius will kind of get this to glow a bit maybe it works in a scene like this because I have depth-of-field on already but if you're finding that this is giving you too much glow you can try to mess with it or bloom I will mention just around the corner key shot eight will have a super awesome extra slider here that allows us to keep the bloom or the glow to the brightest areas only and offers way better control then you can do with this currently but those are the options hopefully that answers the question well enough yeah totally and that slider is called bloom threshold for key shot a and yeah that's that's going to be a good one it's simple but very powerful yeah so just to recap that you can assign an emissive material to a label right but you cannot use any of the actual light source materials so yeah that definitely answers the question and then just one more that maybe you can touch on a bit a little bit unrelated Jason was asking about mapping wood textures but he said he has trouble with the the seams of wood textures and you mentioned with the mesh procedural that maybe you would have difficulty going around that radii there so maybe you can just quickly show how to use the triplane or mapping when mapping a traditional texture to have access to that blend seams parameter so you can yeah smooth out those those seams along the radii yeah that's good question so if I go ahead and just create a new plastic on top of here and I grab a traditional wood texture so again these materials in here the procedural ones they will have no problem mapping around round stuff like this the 3d procedural textures the traditional materials however can be a bit more challenging because they use 2d textures so if I go into my 2d texture grab this ash and I drag it onto here as a I will just go to diffuse and we see it will be set to box mode box mapping if I go and let's go ahead and throw in another environment really quickly just to make it easier to see we can see that the edge has a nasty seam kill depth of field here I have to unlock my camera to do that she's got a free camera and then if I throw this in a performance mode we really see it this edge or seam is pretty distracting so in our materials material graph we got all sorts of stuff going on I will simplify this by just killing the multi material going back inside and here we go so we have our ash our texture but here's what I'm going to do I'm going to bring one of these guys actually I won't do that yet I'm gonna delete this I'm gonna add a texture try planar and what this does is this allows me to load a presage traditional texture if I double click try planar if I go to projection I can drag this into that and what that will do is it a place it places it on just like we had but you'll notice the blend scene top is set to 1 if I turn that down to zero we get that seam they turn this up we start to blend that it becomes much less noticeable so if you push it your eye I mean you know it's not perfect but your eye can see past that the other thing is this is going the direction we maybe don't want it to so what I could do is figure out let's see I don't know if this is totally necessary but just to be sure I'm placing the same one in all three and then if I grab one of these angles and I start playing with it I should be able to rotate it looks like this one's not going to do anything hopefully this one will yeah so there's a top one so if I set that to zero that means the first one here was the X so I could take this and set this X to 90 and now this texture is aligned with the texture on top and they're blending and we're not going to get a seam so quite a bit you can do there I would say that's a super super sleeper feature I got a tongue twister but most people don't know about that and that can hopefully help out you the next time you need to get kind of a smooth blend of textures on a more complex curvy shape like this how's that dude Rex totally that was great and actually you made it a little more difficult than it needs to be so why don't you go ahead and and reapply the ash material from the library just go right up from from here yep okay you can go in and edit the the texture mapping type and change it to try planar the type drop-down so just above where it says texture map change that to try planar and then it it maintains or it should have maintained that the mapping of that ash node I wonder performance mode as anything no well in that case I can still prove that it behaves the same way yeah and then as long as you have a texture plugged into one of those paths it's going to read that same texture for the other two projections total email sent but you can't map them independently if you have a different grain for the side of a board or something like that but yeah super sleeper feature indeed cool so yeah just after 11:00 here today I think that was great you did mention that key shot eight feature the bloom threshold if that's interesting to anyone or if any of you on the webinar would like to check out key shot eight beta and see what else is new just send an email to beta at Luxy on comm and we can get you set up with a temp license so you can jump into keyShot eight and give it a shot for yourselves so yeah I think that's it for today go ahead and wrap it up thank you everyone for joining yeah awesome appreciate your help there Rex everybody thank you for attending hopefully this was helpful if you want to learn more about key shot check out youtube.com slash key shot 3d for more tips tutorials and webinars and hopefully we'll see you here again soon have a good day everybody

Channel: KeyShot

Views: 53,318

Keywords: keyshot, cg, 3d rendering, 3d animation, engineering, product design, marketing

Id: spmkOSKcTOI

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 05 2018