Interior Scene with Twilight Render

By Frederic Yves Moro

My name is Frédéric Yves Moro. I am a French interior designer/contractor. I design for all types of clients, and I enjoy creating 3D models, scenes and then developing them into reality. I have been using Google SketchUp for 3 years now and Twilight Render for a year. I do all my post processing with Neat Image and ACDSee Pro. This brief tutorial will take you through my process of creating this interior render. Model is available for download here.

Step 1.  Scene setup

Firstly I setup my scene – walls, ceiling, furniture, decorative objects and materials, all in SketchUp. As I don’t have the time to model all furniture myself, I have a really huge 3ds model library (about 600GB). I usually download 3d models from www.archive3d.net in 3ds, and imported them into SketchUp.

Model Setup

Step 2. View and shadows

Inside SketchUp, I setup the camera position, to get the view I want, and the shadow position. The shadow position is really important to give life to your scene. Twilight Render will render the scene with the sun position setup in SketchUp.

Camera View and Shadows

Step 3. Material editor

Twilight Render is very intuitive and easy to understand. I think it is definitely one of the easiest interfaces around, if you compare it with all the render engines.

a) I always render with the progressive render preset, like easy 9 or 10+. If you want to get high reflection on your materials, you need to increase the Shininess from 15000 to 85000.

The floor tiles material is ceramic and the Shininess is set at 85000.

Settings

b) For the leather material I always use plastic satin template.

The chair’s material is Plastic Shiny, Shininess set at 15000

Settings

Step 4. Light editor

It is very important to always set the Shadow parameter at 4 or 5, as I feel it speeds up the render time and your shadows at the final render, will look more realistic.

In this particular scene I have used a HDRI image as lighting, and the Background/sky type. I select Sky Probe and choose my HDRI.

Light Editor

Step 5. Render

As I stated previously, I always use the easy preset, 9 and also 10 if I need some caustic reflection.

I set the size of my render image to 1400px wide and I select “Fit to view proportion”

Preset and Render Size

I also change the camera Exposure Level and Gamma Adjustment if needed, here set at 1.500.

Camera Exposure

Finally I click render…

Step 6. Post processing

After leaving it over night to cook, I have my first render. I have to say that I have an old computer; you could probably have the same result with a better computer in 2 hours I think. Next I save my image, and now I am ready for a very short post process.

For my work, I find I really do not need Photoshop. Also for me I feel too much Photoshop post processing can kill the render image.

Render Without Post Processing

Step 7. Post processing part 2

I always filter the grain of my image with ‘Neat Image’. It’s free and very useful image editing software (www.neatimage.com). I click on the Noise filter setting and after preview, I don’t touch the settings, as they seem good enough to me.

Post Processing

Next I click on Output Image + Preview + Save output image.

Post Processing

Step 8. Final image editing

To edit my image I always use ACDSee Pro, cheap and very powerful (www.acdsee.com).

Click right on the image and process with ACDSee, my post processing only consists of increasing the contrast level, the exposure and the very cool temperature slider. It can really change the mood of the image.

Image Editing

And that’s it, you can see the result.

Final Image

A small reminder of all the software used in this tutorial:

• SketchUp
• Twilight Render
• Neat Image
• ACDSee Pro

For a modest amount of outlay for software, I can make good, acceptable 3D renders. Check out my site for more examples of my work  Frederic Yves Moro.

Cheers and thanks for reading my little tutorial.

Frédéric