Working with Materials in Enscape and SketchUp - Webinar

okay so hi everybody um i think we'll uh start off with the preamble now and get things going so uh hi thanks for joining i hope everybody is safe and well my name's adam fairclough and i'm the customer success manager here at elm tech and we are the exclusive um distribution partner for sketchup in the uk so my job is to help sketchup users get the most out of sketchup and its extensions of course enscape is one of those so that is the topic of today's uh today's webinar which is to help you work with materials within enscape so before we kick off i suppose i'll just let you all know you're all on mute at the moment um just so i can hear myself thinking i've got a lot to get through um if you've got questions feel free to type them in the questions section at the side i've got colleagues who are online as well and they may be able to answer them for you for me um if not we're going to have a q a session at the end of the main presentation which i reckon will be 45 minutes to an hour if uh if all goes well so all the normal rules of the real life um real life the the webinar world apply to this so please excuse um any doorbells ringing any cats attacking me crawling on my keyboard um any of these things that can happen most likely something crashing and so it's there also just for reference the video will be recorded and we will have this on our youtube channel so if you do need to dash off at a at a later time don't worry you can pick up and watch the rest of it later so let's uh head on through and let's get started so i mean if you're not familiar with with enscape enscape is a real-time renderer and if you're not familiar to real-time renderers that means that we can make changes to our geometry to our lighting to our materials and we can see those changes happen instantaneously in real time and it's really great for producing see very high quality still images but also particularly good at doing video and vr and panoramas and all these other good things too so this is how today's um agenda looks agenda is a very office word i suppose um but hey we've gotta pretend we're we're working prop haven't we so it's gonna start off with a simple keyword workflow with an enscape so this is a good place to start if you've not really ventured into the world of materials in enscape we're going to move on to a manual material parameter section where we look at how we can take control of those in a little bit more detail and then we go off and have a look at pbr material maps and the power of kind of height maps and roughness maps and how we can really add another layer of realism to our models so keyword workflow we'll head into a model in just a second um essentially enscape will look for keywords within the material name within sketchup so if it sees any of these words in here it's going to start applying some parameters to the material so let's um just head into my actual sketchup model there we go it's all ready to go let's get that set up i'm just going to close my windows so i can see what i'm looking at perfect i'm going to shuffle get comfortable and we'll start to have a look so here we are so just you may want to make the window full screen as we're watching today as there is obviously multiple things going on so i can work all at the same time so let's just have a look at a few things generally uh i'm just going to be using the eyedropper tool which is just over here and i'm going to have a look at this material here i just need to close microsoft teams down because it's probably flipping over you right now there we go let's have a look at this here so um over here we've got some glass materials basically along the top we're going to see the materials in their default form and then the bottom we're going to see them with them with the um parameters applied so i'm going to start with glass this is a bit of an easy one because most of the sketchup materials themselves have glass in the title so these have already started off being glass but we can see how we can make some really basic changes directly within sketchup itself so if i just hit my edit material button here we can do some really basic stuff like increasing the opacity of the glass let's just zoom in a bit further for you there and we can see actually what is sort of defined as glass within the rendering we can see that we've got a very sharp clear reflection obviously the material is transparent we've got a little bit of bending of light reflect i can't talk refraction at the edge here and this is creating this kind of double wall effect as well so this is roughly how enscape renders glass and in fact the endscape will actually pick up opacity on any material and define its glass so if you've got anything that has opacity applied enscape will assume it is glass so just be aware if you've got any neck curtains or anything that you've applied opacity to because they will start to show up in glass and landscape but we can see we can turn off the glass actually so let's move along to another another keyword which isn't predefined uh we've got mirror and chrome so mirror and chrome both do the same thing if i grab that material sorry i've got such a big cursor for your benefit that i keep missing it um and if i simply type mirror into the keyword into the material name we can see how enscape will now apply a couple of rendering parameters to that material in this case it's made it metal and it's made it very highly reflective no roughness at all mirror and chrome are two keywords that you can use anywhere in the name of the material and that will behave in the same way so we can see we can have a really big change very very quickly if we move along to another material metal that's sorry i'm just going to lost my uh ability to do anything uh-oh it's all going wrong guys sorry there we are let's have a look at metal metal just here if we use the keyword metal anywhere in this material it's going to apply another set of rendering parameters so metal steel copper aluminium these parameters are all going to do the same thing and what we can see is enscape has applied a metal parameter to make it have the reflect well the reflective parameters of metal but also we've got a slightly more diffuse reflection compared to the mirror there the keywords there steel copper aluminium there's probably some other hidden ones as well just bear in mind this only changes the changes it to a metal it won't if you choose copper it won't change the color of that we can change the base color of our material and that will have an impact on how our metal actually looks within enscape so primarily controlling these within within sketchup itself we'll move along to the next keyword and i've just got an example here of something with some texture that's a wood texture there and there are two variations on this we've got polished and acryl and then clear coat and car paint which are similar things so what this will do if i uh use the keyword polished here this is going to apply a lacquer or a kind of varnish like finish this this is a little bit different to some of the other ones as we actually have a secondary clear coat that sits on top of our color or on top of our material and this can be really beneficial if you're wanting to create that create that varnish effect um if we turn off the texture and we apply some other colors we can maybe see how we might be able to use that for an enamel paint or something like that so the clear coat and car paint variations do something a little bit differently these are primarily set up for producing car paint and this will produce a metallic paint effect i was trying to think of things um in an interior situation there might be that kind of paint and i was uh a bit stumped all i could think of was maybe like an espresso machine or a kitchenaid or something but again useful useful tags to know about just undo those send that back to wood let's move across to our i have to keep doing this sorry it's not canceling my moves if we move across to ceramic and we thought we'll do all of these three together we'll look at ceramic marble and plastic if we apply um the ceramic key tag or keyword sorry to the material here we can see that we've now got a reflective surface there's slightly more diffuse and this is something we can use on lots of materials i wouldn't get too hung up on the fact it's called ceramic and because there are many other things that you you'll be using which are um equally as reflective i'm going to have to bring back my large tool set because it's really irking me this right i'm presuming you can see everything okay because i'm getting a little bit of delay in certain things my computers haven't do it really hard to be able to render and uh do some recording and some other things all at the same time let's have a look at marble key tag and this here um we'll apply another parameter and this is one that you can use lots you can see that this is a slightly more diffuse reflection yet again if i change the time of day and change the lighting a little bit i'll be able to see it a little bit better we've still got a smoother surface but slightly rougher than the ceramic material there let's have a look at plastic plastic is again slightly more rough again but we can see that there we see that there's a difference between the original material before we applied it and after then we'll just move on to the last kind of core tag and this is the fabric tag this is going to be a very very subtle one actually as it is a very rough rough material so the default material isn't particularly uh shiny to begin with so sorry it's fabric so we can use the keyboard fabric or cloth for this we'll talk more about this later on and how we can can use it um again probably can't really see a difference between the two there but um by default everything that comes into enscape is very very rough um which means that a lot of things almost have the appearance of of fabric and this is part of the reason why we can probably do a lot better and just by doing some pretty straightforward things with with these tag parameters so you can see here that the the balls at the top there don't really look like anything in particular they're kind of unreal i guess they're levitating which doesn't help with that but um we can see how these materials that do have some kind of shine generally will start to look as if they they belong in our world so let's apply these two um actually to an interior that we have here so i've got a tree in the way that's randomly appeared um let's head down to this and just have a look at some of these tags on something a little bit more interior focused and let's grab this one here so you can just see how we can really quickly use these i'm going to make this elephant here ceramic see it's now reflecting things from around us we can do the same with the elephant or we can maybe make him uh metal uh what else have we got we've got again some other metal objects in the background we can see we've used a gold material straight from sketchup let's just pop metal onto that one as well now i've got a gold metal this one here we'll do the same for that as well i suppose it could almost be terracotta so maybe we could we could leave that as it is or we could try i'll try plastic something like that so we can see that we're just changing the materials very quickly i'll use marble for a spell marble not morable we use marble for the marble there and we'll just use a couple of other tags we've not talked about so first off let's just have a look at the top surface of this mobile phone here so i'm just going to grab the color or the texture that's on there which is just a phone screen texture here's a tag called emissive which is i can never spell this one m and two s's emissive and that will produce a small glow on the screen if i make it a little bit darker you can see it's starting to glow a little bit there just a little one we can do to add a little bit of extra extra realism so let's have a look at these plants here um so the plants there's a couple of unique tags for these here let's grab this leaf there we are and so we can see that we've obviously got a backlit image here and there's light shining towards us and if we go around to the other side of this leaf we can see that it is illuminated on this side we've got light and we've got shadow but on the other side nothing at all um there is a tag that can help us with that it's designed for leaves and we can use the tag foliage or vegetation or leaf and i've got a feeling this won't work because i've broken my model by changing things let me just turn this on manually and we'll come to this the foliage tag here basically means that through the model or through this single face that light can now pass so it makes quite a big difference to to that plant there adds something a little bit more realistic we can actually use that same tag on other things which we'll talk about later so that's foliage let's just show you a couple of other hidden ones we've got just some scene here we can use the word grass or long grass or short grass and enscape will render some animated grass that blows in the wind if we grab the water here and i name that one water we can generate a an animated water surface too and i suppose i probably should have shown you something that's quite similar to uh grass and that is in fact carpet so if we grab the carpet or the rug that's there and this is actually a texture of a rug rather than just a solid color and if i use the keyword on this example short carpet and there's long carpet as well it will actually render some carpet fibers they're quite thick and they eat into the floor a bit but we can kind of see the type of effect that it has there so that is a really basic run through of simple keywords and how we can make some very quick changes to our model and we're going to head over into another model in just a second so that's just another emissive tag there so there we go that's that's the simple simple keywords any questions you have about that again pop them into the questions down there and we'll come to them afterwards and we're going to go into part two which is looking at the manually so i'm just going to load up a file and whilst that is loading which i'm not sure if it is no let's go and have a look at some slides okay so yes this is uh to paraphrase uh somebody who i read about online who is a graphics engineer who's designed a lot of the algorithms that are used for 3d rendering both um in archviz in video games in movies um he's he sort of has a mantra of everything is shiny and this is kind of a bit of a good example of this we're going to be going into this model shortly but we can see this is an enscape model essentially if we've just pressed the the play button in sketchup and gone straight into enscape we can see roughly how this model would look as i mentioned before enscape treats everything by default as having a very rough diffuse surface which is in this in this example is given as ok results the clever stuff that enscape does in terms of rendering light bouncing around the video around the image and around the world has done what it needs to do but there's something off about this is something that maybe doesn't look look quite right and just as an example i took every material in the model and i made it a half as rough i made it similar roughness to to plastic actually or the plastic example that i showed you in in the early thing as i said don't get too hung up on the names just we're just thinking about whether something's rough or smooth and we can see here that now light is able to bounce off the floor in particular we've got reflections of other parts of our environment of our space shadows where there weren't shadows before because light can bounce off and interact with other parts of the model shiny bits on the ceiling and this is i'd imagine and hopefully you agree probably looks a little bit closer to reality than our first example which looked comparatively flat and i'd encourage you to have a look around the world have a look at the world around you and you know look where can you see reflections where can you see light bouncing um i started doing it for the last few weeks actually as i've been thinking more about it for this webinar and and now i'm just keep doing weird double takes on on my kitchen tiles and stuff so we're going to have a look at the material parameters shortly primarily what we were adjusting um just now was whether something has a very clear smooth surface or whether something has a very microfasted rough surface and essentially the reason that we see a reflection is because light rays hit the surface of an object and then bounce off in a very predictable way and we get a very crisp clear reflection and if the surface itself has micro abrasions on it which everything does to some extent then light actually hits and it scatters and we start to have a more diffused reflection so at the very very extreme end of things we've got still got light bouncing off but it's just scattering in every direction so we no longer see uh easily see a reflection there's still light bouncing off it just not towards our eyes always um and there are some just examples here of kind of where some real-life materials might fit in on this scale i think most of this will be fairly self-explanatory in that we know that a very reflective surface is going to be very smooth and something like a plaster surface is going to be um on the rough end of the scale but it's quite unusual for something to be 100 rough and we're going to show this as some examples just now so i'm hoping this has all loaded up yes brilliant so we're in the same model so it's a little bit grainier than it normally would be just because the computer is working hard um but we're going to have a look at some material parameter adjustments i'm just going to hop over to an object that we have set up here so this is just an abstract object that we can use to demo um manual material changes now i'm just going to hit this up here the enscape materials button which is if you've not got the toolbar you just right click and turn on enscape i can't my brain doesn't work for alphabets there we go enscape it's just there and we're going to get a window just like this so we're going to be having a look at these just now but basically we've got all of the materials that exist within our current model so we can we can search for something by name if you're well organized and have name things or we can just do what we've been doing previously and using the eyedropper tool and just targeting a particular color so at the moment we're just at the default enscape 90 roughness now we've got a scale here this is what we're going to be looking at reflect the reflection section let's turn that one off as well we've got i'm going to make that a little bit darker also so we can do some stuff like changing the color of the material here that is synced up with sketchup so if i click off it'll change that too and we have a scale of zero to a hundred percent in in roughness just give you some examples there the glass and mirror materials that we looked at were around about zero percent or zero percent the uh ceramic material that we looked at is around about ten percent we can see this again changing here the marble material is somewhere around about 30 percent so we can start to see that changing there the plastic material that i applied both to that image and to the plastic ball on the keyword section it's around about here and we can see it starting to fade away and then our fabric that we had as an option is around about 80 and we can now see that it's starting to become um almost duller in color because the light is hitting it and scattering away in every direction we've got some other optical things happening with this so we can control quite a lot about our image simply by using this roughness slider and what we would say is that generally things are going to be in maybe that first or 75 percent of roughness most most objects will be and we'll go through and use some examples of things throughout the model in just a second the other one that we will be changing quite frequently is the metallic slider and this has two choices to choose from really it has a whole whole scale but basically something is metallic or it is uh sorry it is metallic or it is not and it's pretty much just just two types of materials that exist in the world there are some exceptions to this if we have time in the questions and somebody wants to see some exceptions and we can do that we won't talk about that just now so let's go and go back to model and just look at maybe some strategies for making large changes so i think as we saw from that first example there are certain things within the model that we we could possibly focus on i think the most obvious ones are going to be any large surfaces that exist within your model so let's take a look at the floor that's the most obvious one floors ceilings walls are going to be the ones that we look at straight away you can see i've just tagged the floor there and this has actually got a texture applied to it because it's got a texture applied to it i've also got an option now to go to fade out that image to to a plain color so if i wanted to fade it out to a white color i can kind of mix the texture image with with the color if i wish but we'll leave it just as a texture at the moment 90 percent roughness is quite unlikely for a floor that would be um very very very very fine and that's probably not typical of a high wear highway floor and if we head over right to super shiny let's come down so we can see a little bit easier we can see we've got this really cool shiny floor it looks really great it's it's basically a black mirror at this point and again probably not going to exist but we can see as we come back just a little bit we can start to look at a ceramic floor we're able to start seeing seeing reflections change and we're just going to essentially eyeball this as to somewhere that we feel is appropriate for the material that we're using so we can see this is a kind of stony material and i think the examples we gave you for ceramic and marble should give us an idea that we might want this somewhere between sort of 10 and 20 depending on how shiny we want it to be so i'm going to just drop it we'll go for maybe 21 something like that so we can see we've made quite a big impact to our model already and it'll just settle down if i let it go still and it'll just carry on calculating the beams of light as i'm moving and let's have a look at some other components within the model so we could look at these chairs for example which we could see actually sitting in front of that reflective floor now if we have a look at these we can see let's have a look at the yellow one we can see they're very very diffuse and if you've seen those type of chairs you'll know that they're either enamel painted or i guess sometimes they are bare metal with an enamel paint so we could use that clear coat option or we could simply make these more reflective and you can see as i've approached even like well even at sort of 65 we can start to see these starting to sit within our model looking more realistic as actually starting to catch the light on the topic and we're actually getting reflections now let's have a look at the red one which looks really um really uh matte by comparison if we increase the roughness down to zero we can see we've got some reflections now we could even look at using that clear coat option that we talked about so we can use keywords for it or we can actually select it manually i'm going to select it manually and we have the same kinds of options is it a metallic it's not in this case is it non-metallic so i'm going to set it to zero and then i can choose the level of roughness that i want to apply to that material so we can see straight away those those materials probably would match but let's do that because it's annoying me there we go we can see how those already are starting to fit in with our model starting to look um a little bit more real so that is roughly those materials let's head over to a little scene over here and let's just tackle a few other ones so again everything here currently is a uh the default ninety percent roughness so if we have a look at uh we've already had a look at just basically changing materials i'm going to apply a bit more gloss to to this vars maybe a little bit less we'll do around about there let's have a look at the other side we've got a black material and let's let's make this one a metallic surface and let's do it somewhere somewhere around there so we we've got a mixture of materials now we can have a look at this white pot here and let's have a look at the transparency option so we've got an option to manually control the glass and that is triggered um if it's not already triggered by hitting transparency and there are a few parameters here so first of all let's have a look at the roughness it's set to having a very rough external surface which isn't typical for the glass and let's just come backwards there's also a little bug there involved in that so i'm going to make it a shiny glass here and we can also adjust our opacity the same as we did in that initial keyword section so i'm going to make that a little bit more transparent and let it just settle down we can see it's exhibiting the properties of glass we've got an option here for tint color so we could maybe make it a kind of medicine jar kind of 70s smokey color there and we have another parameter here for refractive index so let me just show you that one i think we talked about how it's bending the lightest thing as as we look through it we can reduce the option it's set on 1.5 which is broadly where most glass materials will be and if you finding that that doesn't look quite right for you because it does create a sort of double wall effect sometimes you could decrease that just to make it look what's appropriate for you so we'll go with that one there we also have another option there for frosted glass if we tick that one what this one will do is actually this is attached now to the roughness if i increase the roughness not too far it will actually start to blur as we look through it so we can make some again some very quick changes to a setup that have a lot of control over how how things look so again talking about quick wins i think we're sitting on this table this table here is actually a wooden texture um we could do a couple of things to it we could increase or decrease the roughness make it shinier and that kind of looks like it has been very highly polished now but we could also look at that clear coat option as well for this because again this might have a very thick layer of a varnish or a french polish or something so we've still got the same kind of options that we have for for clear coat we're able to adjust the roughness of the material that sits underneath the lacquer and we can see that again we with those additional reflections now we're starting to get something that looks perhaps a little bit more like it would do in real life so let's look at some other bits going on we've got a metal material on the macbook here let's uh move across to it sorry it's going jerky again let's grab the metal now we can see actually this model has come from 3d warehouse and it's actually textured with um a a kind of noisy a noisy texture there don't if you can see that this texture here now we could leave that there or we could just remove it i'm going to remove it and at the moment we are on a metal metal surface again we could see a metal which is going to behave like a mirror in this case a grey mirror i mean we could have it as a red mirror if we wanted but let's keep it on that kind of gray color and then we can increase the roughness to give it that kind of that frosted frosted metal type finish that a premium laptop will have worth noting as we're changing these we can change the lighting in all the natural lighting if you've got sun coming in so you can do this by holding shift and clicking the right mouse button and dragging it and it will change the time of day it depends a little bit on what you're planning on doing with your model whether you are um aiming to just produce static shots in which case you may have already set your your sun position and your lighting up or if you are um planning on using video or vr and you may be planning on changing the lighting conditions a little bit more uh it's worth just flicking between night and day because it would just give us a bit of an indication as to how those materials look in in different lighting conditions um occasionally it's possible to create something that looks okay in the daytime but maybe looks a little bit weird in in in the night time and i think this looks okay at the moment so let's make it a little bit lighter and let's look at a couple of other parameters so we're going to click uh on the laptop screen as an example of something else we can do so we talked about the emissive tag very briefly that we can use we can use the self-illumination option and this will actually cause any material whether it's a texture or a plain color to glow and we now have an extra option here i've just had a warning telling me my audio is cut out oh i just had a warning telling you telling me my audio's cut out i'm hoping you can hear me again hopefully that's all okay if i could have a sign from one of my team members that would be great i'll carry on i'm assuming that it's all good um where was i sorry having a look at the the computer screen here um we've got another option that's appeared when we tick that self illumination box and that is to control the luminance and this is the intensity of the light that's being emitted um just for reference a computer screen is around about two to three hundred candelas per square meter which is what that is there so i'm gonna apply that to that screen i'm going to get my lights back on again and there's some other you know useful ways that we can use that self illumination parameter screens and we'll come to some others in just a sec another nice thing you can actually do an enscape and again this depends on whether it's uh whether you're planning or doing videos or vr outputs but you can actually load a video and use that as a texture so if i find i've got one there i've got a little video clip of my fame famous my favorite film there and again this still works with the self-illumination so you can see it see it glowing see it moving as we move around our model so that's just a nice little thing we can do but let's look at some other quick wins some little tips we can use to improve our model so i've got these decorative light bulbs up here uh in this particular model i've not got any lights actually placed in the model and even if i did i probably wouldn't be placing any lights for these um for these light bulbs because they're i'd say primarily um decorative in the scheme of things now i have been organized enough and i've actually got a material called filament which is applied to those and you probably just about see it it's a yellow material it's there if it was green see it there okay so i'm going to use self-illumination on on that one and we can see that those are now glowing they're probably a little bit intense in brightness and i'm going to bring those back a little bit generally when i'm using the self illumination option i will go as low as i can while still getting the effect that i want so i'd say around about there other kind of references actual if you're actually creating an actual light bulb like a full fully bright led one or something those are somewhere between 5 000 and 10 000 uh candelas per square meter i've actually done this up here on the spotlights there's no actual spotlights placed but the light source is where where i will be placing the the lights often look better if they've actually got some kind of glow particularly if you've got recessed lights it looks weird if you've got your up lighters and your down lights and other things but there's no actual place that light seems to be coming from so i've just applied that to the surface of those so it kind of looks okay that self-illumination option can be used in a few other places i'll give you an example here if you're doing kitchens or interiors another nice place you can do it is have a look at the model depends where it's come from or how it's been modeled but quite often from 3d warehouse people have used little photo textures and things for things like buttons and if i apply the self-illumination to those i'm going to turn it right down we can now see that if i happen to be using a darker lighting setup they now glow that's nice so yeah lots of lots of places i can do these endlessly light boxes another good kind of place they can be used so those menus up there i could do that turn that down again it's too bright we can see we can make some fairly big changes quite quickly just by going around changing the reflectivity of different materials making them emit light making them transparent and having full control over that so just to head over to how we're doing for time i think we're okay just to head over here let's have a look at a couple of other parameters um i think we talked about the foliage and the vegetation parameter that we can use for tags we can use that in other situations so i will actually use this on this curtain here so we've also got the light shining through but um depends on whether your curtains are blackout curtain but perhaps you yeah you're going for something a little bit finer uh or you've got some bright sunlight behind that you do kind of want to have an influence on it i'm going to use the foliage tag on that on that curtain and that just now allows light and shadows to interact with it and or transfer to the other side of the material and this will work for both direct sunlight or artificial artificial lights as well so if you've got an artificial light placed which i have which you can't see um that will also cast a shadow um so if you haven't guessed who it is just sitting there i know i'm about a month behind but it's burning so we've got a couple of other ones we've already seen these working but let's just show the manual parameters for them we've got the the water here and we showed how we could turn turn that on if we look at the water option you've got a few options to change the into a bloody murder bath or a beautiful turquoise tropical sea we've got options to be able to override the settings of the wind that exists within our world so by default it will it will blow along we can make it windier so water moves faster in the case of maybe an interior maybe you don't want to really want it to move at all and so we can just really slow it down change the direction of the wind you can change the size of our waves oh it's going slow in different ways the scale of them and then again really nice on core sticks intensity so if you're not familiar with caustics that is i'm gonna have to make them bigger to make them show up those are the little reflections that you get at the bottom of a pool and that allows you to turn those up or on make those more obvious less obvious so i think that is the majority of the different options that we have within enscape for changing parameters manually and just double check there i think as you said i would be tackling if i ever look at look at a model tackle those big surfaces tackle the floor look at these floor these wood bits here the ceilings anything that you know in the model that is shiny so that fridge for example i think i've already done it and anything that you know is shiny is a really good place to start and start working backwards from that so let's have a look at part three which is uh working with pbr materials so here we go so i'm just going to put these on screen we'll send you some stuff out by email afterwards which will talk about where we can get some of these links but these are these are some resources online for being able to go and get physically based materials if you're not familiar with physically based materials hopefully you will be a little bit more familiar with them afterwards but these ones particularly these top ones are some really nice places to go away and find them and typically find them online i'll show you an example of how they look and the example i'm looking at is these subway tiles here an example of the files that might be within that and then we're going to talk about what those are and what they might be named differently and how we use them of course most importantly so um in enscape you've we've seen the material editor there are three types of maps that we can load in there are some other ones but they're probably outside of the scope of this talk today but these are the ones that are going to have the biggest biggest impact for you these are called albedo height and reflections so inside of the file that we might download from our website so this is one from ccotextures.com this is uh how it looks you can come on here and search for them and we've got a few options between having jpeg versions of the files or png version of the files in different resolutions you download one of those and inside that file are a few different images so we have in this example this one had something called ambientoclusion.jpg if we see ambient occlusion or sometimes it's abbreviated to ao we don't need this enscape doesn't support this one so ignore it we'll have another one called color we'll have another one called displacement another one called normal uh another one called roughness and there are some variations on this but let's have a look at um those maps one by one so albedo that is the main texture or color of your object this might be what you would look at and say right that's a sketchup texture i'm going to apply it to a wall or whatever and you can and you can see there we've got the color of the tile and the color of the grout in the tile as well of course different colored grout to the dial this depending on which source you get it from this might be called an albedo map it might be called a color map it might be called a base color or it might be called a diffuse color or some variation of those so if you see any of those names or something abbreviated then this is what we were looking at it's usually fairly it's usually fairly obvious that that's the one that you want for albedo as it looks like the thing that you're actually getting so let's have a look at the next one and this is a normal map so i'm just gonna have a sip of water okay so we're looking at the height section of uh the enscape pbr maps and this is gonna be doing some real heavy lifting um for our model um this is a height map called a normal map actually and this is really easily found because it's always this purpley blue color it's fairly easy to look at and be able to read because it kind of looks like embossed images almost has a slight 3d property so we can kind of see now that my tiles are going to have some extra information in them that will make them look closer to a subway tile with these with these bevels on them and this is an illusion of depth um these this information contained within here is going to instruct enscape to basically show light as if it's hitting these edges in different ways even though there's not actually any geometry there so it's a trick of the eye and i was trying to think of a number for this but i think um to just give you an idea these work really well for very small um small texture details so anything under two millimeters in in height i suppose that could be something really tiny that could be the if it was a human's face it could be the pores in their skin it could be um if it's on a wood it could be the wood grain as a texture it could be a very shallow tile maybe the difference just between um the edge of the tile and the grout line so this is suitable for very very small fine details we'll have a look at the difference when we actually load this one in it gives us three options there's three different types of maps so sometimes you have to load in and choose the most appropriate map which for this case would be the normal map sometimes it will get it right it will pick it other times it won't the other kind of map that we can use for height is called a displacement map and this is um very very useful in other situations uh this maybe doesn't look as easy to read but if you want to know what it is it's always black and white black is information that's kind of going inward so downwards if we're talking about height and white represents uh something that's leaping out of the texture and using a combination of grayscale colors we can create actual real looking 3d geometry this is really good for creating very deep deep detail it's a little bit more computationally expensive so we only use this in situations where it is really needed occasionally you'll see something called the bump map um this is also another black and white one generally when people talk about bump maps they are actually talking about something that's got old-fashioned and this is an older version of a normal map so we generally don't need to use the bump map section uh bump map option um but it is useful to know that sometimes they label it the bump map and it's actually the displacement map so sometimes you just have to give it a try and see if it works for you the final map that we'll look at in a moment is a roughness map and a roughness map what this does is this changes the roughness on a more local level so we've been changing roughness across a whole texture making everything shiny or everything reflect or everything rough and this allows us to define which parts of a texture are shiny or rough so in this case the tile is black and that represents a low roughness value so shiny and the white represents a high roughness value so the grout is not reflective and then we've got these little gray bits on here which are some just surface variations so this might be um just some smudges or some dirt or something else that that is just interacting with the light in a different way and this can again just add some extra realism into our image i know often creating cg renders you might not necessarily want to think about there being dirt or smudges in your perfect world but those real-life things exist everywhere uh even in a brand new you know brand new show home there is some natural grunge hidden away and these all contribute towards making things look more real and we'll see how this looks in just a second so some tips for material maps if you've got the choice png or tf files will generally produce better results particularly for our normal map and our height map other things to know higher resolution maps or using more maps you'll need a more powerful machine to do it so things in enscape are starting to slow down it may be that you've just got a lot of these um in your model and in order to kind of combat that and just be sensible and optimize your model in a sensible way if you've got the choice to download different resolutions of files which i think i did in this example here i would generally start with the lower resolution ones two the 1k the 2k start with those see how you go if those look good in your model brilliant if you're finding those ones look a little bit blurry or whatever then those are the times when we can go and get the higher resolution versions of them uh right so i've lost my uh i've got two material okay so let's uh have a look at these in actually working in enscape now all right let's go um upstairs for this first of all let's have a look at something uh something obvious that let's look at the floor so in order to apply these i'm just going to go into my materials editor and i've actually already got a texture here but what i'm going to do i'm going to go away and find the albedo texture so i can either delete the one that's there and click plus or click on the name itself and that would give me the option so i'm going to look at that subway tile which is here we see these folders and i'm going to load in this one in this example it's labeled as color i'm gonna load that one in and we can see down here we've now got tiles they're actually a little bit smaller than i would like them to be so i'm gonna come over into enscape you can you could do this actually in sketchup you can change your parameters here or we can do it in enscape and i'm going to hit explicit texture transformation and i'm just going to change these numbers to one and one in this example which you'll just scale them up to make them a little bit easier for you guys to see so here we are we can see we've now got you know something that's meant to represent tiles if they were shiny we can see them there let's load in next our roughness map to give you an example of what that does so if we pay attention to here loading the roughness map as we move around hopefully you can see this that the those grout lines are no longer reflecting light so even off in the distance there we've already got a little bit of extra depth or realism just just from making the grout itself not be able to reflect light back sometimes that alone can be really powerful and make a huge difference to to the model in this case here we've still got something that looks like it's very flat so let's load in a height map so i'm going to load in the normal map to begin with and what you can see now is we have started to get an effect of some height now it's selected normal map for this one which is good so i'm going to just make sure it's there and then we've got an option here for intensity and that's going to increase the or amplify the effect of this of this normal map and we can see yet we've got a kind of bevel there off in the distance that looks alright actually we can see it there but maybe if we were in a scene where we were very close to something you might realize that there is some there is a kind of level of fakery happening here and you can see as we've amplified it as well you can see there are some kind of surface imperfections in it as well and this is again a desirable thing because it this exists in in real life those tiles probably aren't that perfect but we have amplified the i guess the any imperfections that exist within the file as well so you can see that there let's have a look at how this would look at how this would look with the displacement map so i'm just going to swap it out for displacement which as we said it's a different kind of bump map oh it's loaded in as a bump map to begin with which is which is wrong but you can see how it kind of worked let's turn it down to almost zero to get full effect and let's change it to the displacement map and then we can see as we increase the displacement we can see that we're starting to get the perception of real height so there we go we can see actually if i exaggerate it quite a lot we can see the the different type of effect that the displacement map can provide now i think by the time i get that to kind of real um realistic looking tile level i don't think i look a million miles off that original normal map that i had so i'm going to go back to using that for this example because it will perform better and i've broken it oh yeah because it needs to be changed to normal map there we go so i'm going to go with that one there so that's an example of um just how you can load in just three textures and it can make a really big difference let's head over to a wall and look at another type of thing that we see a lot and that is uh i guess like a kind of plaster wall can't think what i'm doing brain work please there we go let's just grab the wall material there i haven't got a material on that wall well there we go that's my uh preparation failing let's just apply anything for now something i haven't used just to use that one i'm just going to make that make that white there we go right sorry about that so let's have a look at this wall here and let's look at how we can use um use a height map to add some texture to what we might think as being otherwise quite a plain flat surface all of everything we see has some kind of texture on it which is why the roughness and the roughness slide itself isn't enough to create coarser substances so if you think about a painted wall whether it's been painted with a roller or a brush you've still got you know you've still got a surface that you can feel with your fingernail you can get close you can see the if i've painted it you can see the bits of hair that fall off the roller you can see the brush marks you see all those things um so let's load in um in this example we'll show you with a colored wall let's say we've got salmon pink wall for example i can load in a color map so i think i've got another one for plaster i've got saved somewhere gray plaster let's have a look at that um so this is this this is called grey plaster and this is probably a good example because it's maybe not what we want for the wall first of all we can see that it's tiled a lot that texture it's like a photo texture of of plaster um and the tiling is quite obvious so i'm gonna make it larger to try and make that um tiling less obvious if i will go for two on that one okay so we've now got a photo texture so i'm just going to change that light to get it out of the way so you've now got a photo texture of tile and this probably isn't what you want and i don't really want this filthy and gross looking wall in my lovely coffee shop um but what we can do is we can use the other components of this material i got from online so i'm going to grab my height map and this here is we'll just use the normal map again for this one so we'll load that one because we're just talking about very fine details that is probably all we need just so we can see it i'm going to turn it all the way up to 100 i'm going to grab my roughness map which i also happen to have and i'm going to put that on anyway now in this example we can't really see a great deal going on but let's show you as light changes and as light falls across this at different angles we get close enough have i got the right file i feel like i've done something wrong [Music] let's turn off now there we go we can see it more easily there we go so i've actually got so using this option here image fade i've actually faded out the um the photo texture that's kind of come with this file because i don't really want it you'd fade it all the way out or you could leave a little bit of it behind just to add some some variation we can see now that we've got a surface that is a little bit a little bit pitted and depending on how the light catches it it's actually able to cast shadows on itself so i'm gonna swap this for a different one because this actually isn't this isn't obvious enough to see on a on a stream uh i do have another one use white plaster i'm sure that's the one i'm looking for and kind of see it going on up here so we've actually got some texture that's been provided by by the height map and if it is severe enough it will actually be able to cast shadows onto itself into those little into those little divots and if we find it that we don't really want them to be quite so obvious we can just decrease the intensity of that um so let's just go to about there that's again very fine fine detail probably this distance here is not particularly perceptible but this all adds real uh what's the word i'm looking for this adds to the way that the light bounces around the model so in certain lighting conditions we will see this we will see that this is now a a rougher surface it should hopefully look a lot better than if we'd have just left that blank let's show some other creative uses for height maps um so let's just come over here what are we on four o'clock so i'm just going to do a couple of couple more examples these are really as i said these are really powerful if i've actually loaded up the right file which i'm worried i haven't done now we can see in my model here actually these pebbles here these are actually produced from a pbr map that i've downloaded from one of the sites have provided you with and these have created some actual real real looking pebbles that can actually receive light and cast shadows and behave in a natural way so otherwise that would be a that would be a flat a flat texture and let's go back to that sorry just get it all up in sync again yeah just to show you that that is actually a flat texture so we can have a really big impact on on certain types of material i'll show you another really good example here of the floor speed up now um this is a material that i got from one of these websites paving stones zero four six and let's look at how we can apply this and the kind of effect that we can have so let's grab paving stones which is definitely got in the right place we've got this one it's got color it's called nope uh we're going to do we'll do let's pass some light on it first of all so let's see the roughness map working so the roughness map's going to define whether it's you know shiny or not you of course can opt out of using the roughness map if you want if you find that sometimes the material can look too shiny or too rough just depending on how the person who has authored the material has made it look um in which case you can delete it and then use those manual controls and usually that's okay if you've got a height map we can see here now that just just controlling that the cement or mortar is non-reflective and the stones are reflective we can see that that in itself has added a good amount of realism if we use height map we use the normal map to begin with and we can see it hasn't selected normal maps i'm going to turn on the normal map we can see if i again increase the intensity of it to exaggerate it for you we can see that the combination of that optical illusion of the height and the reflection map has now created a quite natural looking stone with natural variation natural variation in the texture itself but then my model because light is bouncing around it from different places it's creating a natural variation over quite a large area which is really beneficial to creating something natural looking um but if we wanted to go real big with our detail which i probably would do in in some cobbles i can load the displacement map again and you can see there that we've just got a greater deal of control over the depth of those tiles or those cobbles so i would probably opt to use this one on this and this looks really good so that's yeah a few examples of um of pbr maps so you can again use those creatively this is uh this is actually one this looks like real geometry this is a terracotta stone wall but in fact it's actually was a flat surface with a displacement map there's lots of really awesome things you can get that can really help you to either communicate something that you want to communicate that uh so in this case here maybe i want to try and go for something a little bit more opulent on this wall let's turn this on uh and escape wherever you go hello uh let's try loading in another kind of showstopper style uh map let's do metal metal tiles metal tiles base color we've now got these kind of honeycomb tiles which are tiny let me make those bigger four and four let's do that let's tell enscape that it's made of metal okay we've now got a kind of quite rough metal let's make them shiny let's load in roughness map which is called roughness we can now see that some of it's reflecting light some of it isn't and then let's add our height map to this so i've got a really good height map or displacement map they've called a height map so sometimes you just have to try it and see if it works set it to a displacement map a little bit exaggerated but we can see how we've now really really quickly changed a really large surface um and then scapes calculating all the reflections really accurately and this is going to have an impact across the whole model so i think that is probably about time um i'm at an hour already or just over an hour um so hopefully that's given you an idea of some of the things that you can achieve with um with those maps you've gone and found online or just with keywords or with those um manual parameter changes so i think that is me there let's see if we've got any questions my colleague lauren who's our marketing manager here at elm tech is also with me so maybe she could uh have a look at some questions and let me know what we've got hey adam hey everyone um fantastic webinar thank you we have a couple um i think kyle and i have managed to get through most of them while he was presenting um there is one here that i'd like to go back to i think it needs a little bit more demonstration um and she's asking she's asking um where do you add where the light source comes from um i believe was that sort of halfway point of your presentation yeah yeah okay we have explained that it is kind of a simple case of dropping the light source just to drag and drop and you can change the light direction intensity but um maybe you could show that a bit you could show it clearly yeah so i suppose it just depends a little bit on uh on what the question is but we'll just cover both both parts of that so uh yeah so you'll see in in sketchup view at the moment um if you're familiar with lighting in in enscape you drop in a light source in a in a very particular way that's just a bit of a tricky one to arrange let me rotate it one sec we create this little light light cone sorry got too many things open now um so we have our actual our actual physical light source that we can position within within sketchup that'll do get the idea and that and that is represented by in this example this little this little cone and let's open that again and if we and that is that is illuminating the wall in that example there so i didn't actually have any of those objects placed in the model um all i was getting at was that um it basically looks a little bit weird if you've got a spotlight and you've got loads of ceiling lights and you've got light bulbs and things in your model and uh you haven't got a visible place that it's coming from so if i look at this one here and then my brain is starting to slow down i've got this bar over my sketchup okay so what i did in in this example here um is this model uh of a light which we'll go i'll go right into um i've just found a surface within within the front of that spotlight and using my enscape tools select the material that sits on the front which might have been a glass material to begin with but um i've made that a self illuminating surface so you can see there that i've turned them all off now we've got a spotlight shining on my arm tech sign but we've got no lights that are on so you know it looks a bit weird and that's because there's different types of light source that exists within a rendering engine here so all i've done there was used used the um self-illumination option just to give all of those spotlights which are look like they've been made right so they've been made as components they're all behaving at the same time just to create a a point from which that light is is being emitted so the actual lighting things of using the light objects is not a materials thing so i've not covered that today but this is just just about making sure we we can see the light coming from something as it will look a little bit weird otherwise so i'm hoping that that little demo there answers that question lynn if it doesn't feel free to send me an email and tell me again and i'll try again with any other ones um i don't think there are actually we managed to uh fire through them while you're presenting um [Music] yeah we've uh we haven't got any more we'll maybe give it two more minutes um if anyone thinks of anything um or they're also totally welcome to email us sure i'm just flicking through so james has asked what spec of computer am i using so i've got um an hp laptop with a an nvidia rtx quadro 4000 i think it is which has eight gigabytes of video memory 30 32 gigs of system memory uh what else have we got there so yeah i think just questions about the materials so yeah endscape doesn't have any built-in materials that's why we've gone off to those other websites and light sources yeah some other ones at the bottom here um this is from londina i londina um asking is the water in the pool just a layer over the water material or is it a solid form inside the pool yeah so it does make sense and it is actually the former so it is a layer that's sitting on top of the pool technically um if i go into it you can see there i'm not there's no water here and if i look out it's single-sided so there's nothing there but enscape is very clever and it has um tried to work out where the bottom of my pool is so the core sticks have been cast onto the bottom of it and there is also a depth component when viewed from above so the deeper the water the darker it will become so technically yeah it's just on the top but in reality it will look like it has depth got it cool um not a question but uh richard says that was excellent thank you richard um one question here we've got from can adam please repeat the graphic spec of your laptop please so it's that for enscape and i think any kind of 3d rendering um sorry just watching another video i think the kind of one of the main components you need to look at if you're doing any kind of 3d rendering nowadays particularly if it's a real-time renderer like enscape is the graphics card and i've got i think it's a quadro 4000 that i have inside my laptop which is um an nvidia ray tracing capable workstation card generally if you're looking at laptops if you've got something that's got an nvidia card in particular an nvidia rtx card usually the rest of the specs on that computer that surround that are kind of capable for running uh good quality real-time visualizations or games if you if you want to do that too um so there's a few questions one more yeah just read it out and i think it might be related to that as well um just also to let you know guys um feel free to drop us an email um leave questions regarding the breakfast parts as well we can help out on that too um question from graham uh i think it looks a lot smoother and less grainy around the edges in the youtube videos i've seen compared to how it looks here why is that right the reason that i think this is happening is you probably see it's just beavering away and calculating as as i stop um my computer i'm having to render i'm having to record some things in the background my audio processing is actually using my graphics card so basically my laptop's working much harder than it normally would do and i think he's right it does look grainy that normally does for me when i'm actually working on things so i think it's just that my computer is under a really heavy load right now um so yeah i think that's all it is computer needs to pay rise it does yeah it hasn't and it hasn't crashed which is good it crashed it crashed during rehearsals so it's not crashed you are correct like me it will look uh smoother if you're not running a webinar at the same time and what what you may have seen as well um is that enscape has it does something called rest mode so when i actually so when i'm moving it's recalculating everything in real time but when i actually stop it sits down and it just calculates the space that i'm looking at so that might be what you're also seeing is it just as i'm moving the quality is reduced but yeah but there's still it still applies my computer's probably working too hard so i think i think that's pretty much it i think in terms of other bits of questions there yes there is a there is a free trial for enscape um and also for those who don't um already have a subscription enscape we'll be sending out a uh a link to be able to get some some discount for for enscape as well so yeah i think that's all all i needed to do thanks so much for everybody who stuck around to the end it's really appreciated and yeah we'll email you with some bits and pieces some cheat sheets and some other info that kind of supports this webinar and as i've said feel free to to drop me an email ask me any questions that you have thank you very much and we'll see you next time

Channel: SketchUp UK

Views: 48,412

Keywords: Sketchup, Enscape, Archviz, interior design, architecture, rendering, ray tracing

Id: TDngTIEcULU

Length: 73min 8sec (4388 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021