It’s All About Tricks…

because quick simple renders are often just enough…

A Quick and Simple Render Technique Tutorial by ‘Mr Wip’

While trying to evolve in the cruel world of virtual rendering, you may have seen many tutorials, all presenting super advanced master techniques, but you can’t  stop feeling that their starting point is always a bit above your current skills, and their goal far away from your current needs.

So, here is a small and quick way to get an efficient result with a minimal effort. The goal is to create a clean white model with some color overlay to express a project potential.

The main part of the tutorial is based on the model ‘casino y torre’ from the 3D warehouse (made by Indigo group), which presents interesting spaces that match well with the needs of the explanation.

We will be using SketchUp, Vray, and Photoshop.

The Vray presets are from the website wip-archi.com Link (It is in French,can translate with Google translator).

The basic idea is to combine different method to get quickly a good result without having to spend too much time on each step, by adjusting everything precisely.

So, after choosing a good point of view that presents well the project, it’s necessary to create first two main pictures, by using the Vray presets:

1 – White -  Sun : All textures are overwriten, the light comes essentially from the sun, creating nice shadowing.

2 – White – Sky : All textures are overwriten,the light comes only from a sky dome,creating a smooth
uniform render,with a good level of detail.

The combination of both styles is necessary to get a convincing result because if the sun gives a good overall effect and nice shadows, it does kill the small details in full lit area, which are preserved in the sky-only render. By using Photoshop it’s then easy to blend them by adjusting the transparency level of the overlaying picture (the order doesn’t matter…) as shown below.

To emphasis the ‘clay model’ effect, it is necessary to add a simple ‘black and white’ adjustment layer(or’ desaturate’), because the sun render always presents a small coloration. A ‘level’ layer is also useful to complete the picture adjustment, allowing a quick reinforcement of the overall contrast.

… It’s really important to see what can be done by the renderer and what can be done in the image editor, in order to keep the process as quick and flexible as possible…

When the first step is done, go back to SketchUp, and export a simple white image, which only shows sketchup lines  (To get a satisfying precision it is often necessary to create a bigger output than the Vray render, and then reduce the size in the image editor ).

In Photoshop, paste the SketchUp lines as a new layer, at the top of the existing stack. Then changing the blending mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Multiply’ creates the desired effect.

It is interesting to understand that this method is also really efficient to create clear plans or facades from any 3D model. The combination of sun and sky emphasises the nature of every space.

Using the same method the image below shows raw SketchUp > full render

When you have built your complete Photoshop file, you can easily enhance your presentation.  As shown in the image below for example, let’s show the facades and ground elements that will be affected by the project.  Using the ‘Skp lines’ layer, it’s possible to select precisely certain areas, and then apply a color filling, on another layer.

This method that allows a quick color filling in that case can also be used to add effect on a particular part of a render. It’s really efficient to get nice water or glass effect, without having to lose time adjusting complex shader parameters, and it reduces a lot the rendering time.

Before applying a local effect > after

And finally your finished image…

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial….Mr Wip