Architectural Visualization Meets Concept Design for Advanced 3ds Max and V-Ray Users

PAUL NICHOLLS: My name's Paul Nicholls. I'm from a UK-based company called Factory Fifteen. I've got about 10 years' experience as a 3D artist, and about four years experience as a company director.

We set up the company four years ago, straight after our master's in architecture. So I'm architecturally trained, like many people in the room. But again, like many people in the room, chose to kind of go into more visual methods of storytelling. I also got a little bit frustrated by the pace of the architectural industry, and preferred the kind of creativity and scope of design work within the visualization industry.

We're a little bit different to most companies in visualization, because we operate still as a design studio. And we kind of develop our own intellectual property, whether that be in TV, visual effects, or short films, or installations-- a range of different projects. But our kind of core business is still within architectural visualization and visual storytelling.

And you probably read a lot this from the handout, but this is just a brief kind of plot summary. This will be a technical workshop, highlighting an image that I made last year. So it's something that I've made, personally. So I'll be able to show you the ins and outs of it.

But essentially, I want this class to be about developing new ways to make images. It's going to be an image-specific presentation, through one of our projects we did last year. But I'll be showing a few clips in and out of the presentation, of other work, other examples relevant to the presentation.

But it's, essentially, finding new ways of creating images, and kind of getting away from the obsession towards photo realism. And understanding that there's lots of different methods of visualization, and photo-realistic methods are kind of one application applicable to and several different scenarios. But it's, by no means, the one approach that should be kind of just mass-applied to every kind of client, and every kind of project that you take on.

And that's something that we try and look at, very carefully, in the work that we do, the clients we choose to work with. And trying to treat every client, and every project, in a very unique way, rather than having a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to visualization. And for us, this is important, because it means that we're contributing to the project in a creative way, and we're not just a service for our clients. It goes slightly beyond that.

So I'll try to illustrate that in this project, and also a few other projects that we've done along the way. So the key learning objectives, just creating new ways of creating architectural images.

So just a brief bit about us, and we'll play our slightly-updated showreel. These things never are truly up-to-date. As soon as you've made it, there's another project that you've done that you want to add stuff to. But this will give you a kind of flavor of the variety of work that we do within the studio.

[INTRO MUSIC AND FX]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So why do we need to think about different kinds of visualization? Why isn't it just a one-size-fits-all? It would certainly be a lot less work having one approach to things. But I think, today, clients are expecting more. It's becoming kind of easier for people to create these things. There's younger competition, out there, being able to undercut a lot of companies. And I've been doing this for a long time.

The technical expertise, rightly so, has greatly reducing in creating these things. It used to be an extremely technical process that a lot of architects would be mystified by. But a lot of studios have in-house visualization artists now. And the mystique about this industry is kind of gone.

So we don't want things to go the way of photography, which is essentially having an extremely narrow top end, an extremely low bottom end, where you've still got the big studios charging whatever they want, and doing the same kind of work-- because they've got the client base, and the kind of guarantee of quality that they're known for producing. So you have a select few very famous photographers who will be still operating at the same level. But then, because of digital photography, you've now got millions and millions of still very good photographers.

But this kind of middle market has been completely squashed to the bottom, where everyone's operating. Everyone can become a photographer. Everyone can become a visualization artist. But there's very few that can make it's becoming at the top end within companies, or as individuals these days. It's much harder to stand out.

But on a positive note, there's more work out there. And also clients are engaging, and wanting to engage in, new technologies, and emerging medias, and this kind of thing. So it's an exciting time to work in this industry.

So what can we do? You can stay at this top end if you one of the top studios, and charge whatever you like. Or you can get more creative, more artistic. We can go back to, potentially, more impressionistic styles of visualization. It's only recently that we've had this obsession with photo-realism.

And actually, a lot of architects prefer a more stylistic root to visualization, we've found. It's mainly the developer-led side of things which are obsessed with the photo realistic approach. Because architects like a little bit of ambiguity about their design, especially the early stages of a project.

And so, again, picking when to choose different methods of visualization is important. And having a kind of repertoire of different approaches is also important, so you can expand the type of what you take on. So you're not limited to do it doing just the developer-led kind of projects. You can learn technique, and you can be open minded, with other methods of representation-- which is what, hopefully, you're all here to be.

So this is the kind of work that we're sort of known for. This is how we started our company-- the kind of very impressionistic future-driven narrative projects a lot of our short films were based on when we started. And these are just a couple of images of notable projects, along the way, that we've created-- some of which were for our own IP, some of which were commissioned for TV, or film. This was for the BFI-- British Film Institute.

This is another one that's in development at the moment, called 20k-- it's a kind of adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which is a TV show currently being developed by Sky TV. And we're doing a series of design work for them that started years ago, and it's only just actually came back recently. So we're using our skills as designers and architects to create these kind of fanciful worlds.

But then, more and more these days, we're getting commissioned to not just visualize a project, but to be part of how it's represented. We did a sequence of about 100 images for [INAUDIBLE] KN this year. And there was 10 projects, and 10 images per project. And this is just one of them.

And essentially, they came to us with a design. And they were very open-minded on how the design was represented. So we got to design a lot of the surroundings of these designs would be placed in, and non-relative to this their actual surroundings. Even the proposed built projects, they were quite been to us representing the concept.

So they would give us a kind of brief of the concept, and we would go away and think about how that could be represented. So this building is not at all in this kind of landscape, in reality. But it's we went with their concept of these different pavilions, with these different kind of functions happening within them. So we did lots of images like this. These are a couple.

And this was another one that we did. So again, we have a lot of creative freedom to explore the way that the project was represented-- the population, the foliage, the color scheme. All they gave us was the block model, and a brief for the essence of the concept for the building.

And this is the kind of what we're trying to push more of. It's difficult to find this kind of work, obviously, all the time. But it's definitely something, now, that we've got a bigger portfolio in it, that we can advertise to future clients as a kind of workflow that we prefer working with. And it certainly was very advantageous with the architects, in this case. This is another one.

And also, this kind of approach seems to be becoming more common. This was another one for Adjaye Associates in London, for a new spy museum. And they had essentially designed a shell in the very early stages of competition. And they came to us to design the interior-- with these kind of interactive walls, and pillars, and ceiling-- and come up with this kind of design strategy for the inside.

So we weren't just employed to visualize the architecture. Employed to actually design a lot of it as well. And with our speculative nature to our work, hopefully we're going to get more of this kind of thing.

But we also do the photo-realistic stuff as well. We try and be quite tasteful when we take these projects on, and represent buildings in the right way. And, of course, the there's always going to be at a market for this these projects. There's always going to be a need to know exactly what something is going to look like. But it's certainly not the go-to approach for every project. [INAUDIBLE]

And there's only many chairs, and photo-realistic interiors I can stand on these kind of blogs that we see these days. There's definitely more room for different methods of exploring these visualizations.

I'm much more excited by things like this. This is another project we did for Allies and Morrison, again in London, for a big Middle Eastern development. And the reason we represented it like this was clearly just because the design wasn't realized enough to be able to do it in a photo-realistic way. And the client was pushing for it to be photo-realistic, but you have to sometimes educate the client into different-- It's not just educating your staff, it's educating your clients to what they might want.

And this was a really good example, because it was actually a range of stills and an animation, which actually helped win the competition for them, which is one of the biggest Middle Eastern developments happening in the world right now, was this kind of big earth and city development. And the client really liked it, because it kind of got the essence of the projects across, in the animation, specifically, without being too bogged down by any kind of design details or materiality.

But this is the image we focus on focusing on today. This is an image I did last year. And this image was done in three days. So it was a very fast turnaround, with just me working on it.

And this is for a project of ours. We're trying to get a new film for the Christmas Carol commissioned. It's in the preproduction phase at the moment. And then we did a bit of artwork at the beginning to kind of help sell the pitch, and basically. And this was one of the main pieces we did.

So this is Scrooge, in the foreground, and Scrooge's house, set in a kind of stylistic period London. So the project had lots of different aspects to it, both creative and technical. It had to portray a certain mood.

And it's an image I've always been quite fond of since I created last year, just because of the way came together, and the design work that went into it. It was a really enjoyable process. And it also highlights quite a lot of different skills, which is why I thought it was quite good one to break down for this 90-minute presentation.

And obviously, like any project, this one's no different. It starts off with references. First of all, being the environment, the kind of periodic environment, of this London style. And it was something that we ended up buying lots of books for. It's difficult to find really good pictures of these on the net. So we bought a few books, specifically of this time in London, and gathered loads and loads of references to street scenes, and trying to get an idea for the mood that we were going for.

And right from the beginning, I wanted to create a collage to create that scene together. Initially it was going to be a completely Photoshop-based project. We were going to paint all the details, and paint the design in. So we started with the collage, just kind of cutting bits of these street scenes together.

We also gathered references for Scrooge's house. We wanted it to be quite part of the same world, but be aesthetically very different-- some materiality-- and would be the same, but the form, and the approach, would be very, very different. We wanted a slightly impossible nature to it, as well-- slightly fantastic nature-- to the house. Because we wanted the actual film to be set in a kind of hyper-real version of that periodic London aesthetic.

So these are some other kind of references. And the Despicable Me house is another one, which is quite funny. Because it's just this house sitting in the middle of this street, in a similar kind of style, but it kind of sticks out. Hall's moving castle was another great reference. And then just some other old steel works, that were created. And some of these old things were really inspiring for the kind of aesthetic. And also the kind of time, as well, in the Industrial Revolution that we were setting it in, made sense to go with that kind of forms.

And you also have to think of the characters, as well. And this is something we did on the project-- [INAUDIBLE] KN project. What the kind of people that are living in these places, and how does that influence the style of the project? The middle one is almost like a caricature of that Scrooge character, whereas on the left, and the right, is a much more realistic approach. So that can really influence the tone of the project, is who you imagine to living there, or populating the scene.

So the first thing we did was collage and paint. And this is where I'll kind of flip into Photoshop. And you can see, here, this is a rough layout of how we started mapping out the collage. And important thing, here, is understanding the perspective, and making the perspective work for all of the elements that you're putting in there-- especially, with what we end up doing later on, which is bringing this Max, and doing a kind of perspective-match camera projection on it as well.

So I'm going to flick into Photoshop, here, and show you some of how this was created.

So you can see here, this is more or less the final version. And one thing to note, here, is I'm not really a painter. I come from a kind of drawing, and model-making background before I went into 3D. But I'm not really not that great at painting compared to many concept artists out there. I don't think you necessarily need to, to do stuff like this. All I was doing with paint, here, was outlining, and highlighting, and defining areas, which I'll show you in a second. So I'll turn a lot of stuff off, here, and we'll go back to basics.

So I started with this image in the center. And this became my starting point and ruled perspective for everything else. You can see here, you've got the lines following out to the left, you've got this, in the distance here, this street fading out, which again, has clear perspective lines. And I wanted the Scrooge house to replace this main house in the center, here. So I had a clear idea form the beginning that this was going to be my hero collage element, which then everything else was going to be build upon.

So the first thing is defining the perspective lines, making sure the image works. And then every element that we add afterwards is following those perspectives lines. And because it's all in black and white, it was very easy to grade it all together, and correct all of the different elements to work with that perspective.

And some of this was a bit back and forth with what I'll show yous later on, with the projection. Because certain things kind of worked and certain things didn't, in terms of what I was trying to create with the projection, here. Doesn't look like it makes much sense well trying to do here. But actually, when my design for the Scrooge house is inputted, I needed to see more of the distance behind it. I didn't need that building in the foreground. So that something had to be put on top.

We actually made it quite difficult for ourselves, because we made the collage quite complex. And then we had to build all of this geometry to project onto, which then, when you got all this little detail, it can take a little bit of time. But we were quite loose with it. We were quite loose with every stage of the project, from the collage phase, to the paint phase, to everything else.

We got most of buildings mapped out, here. There's loads of gaps. So we just kind of found lots of different textures to come fill in the gaps with, and then added other collage elements on top. And there's a kind of mix between slightly color, slightly black and white elements, here.

So what we ended up doing is colorizing the image in quite a stylistic way. And that was quite simply done with a couple paint layers. And the first paint layer just kind of outlines and highlights certain aspects of the image to kind of give it more definition. Although, we were using quite high-res photographs, we wanted to pick out certain elements to stand out a lot more, especially with what we were going to do later. And again, this was a bit back and forth once we were kind of re-lighting things in Max.

And then this second layer is just a kind of overlay with color swatches, and essentially just painting over certain areas to kind of give it a slight tone. I wasn't too fussed about how realistic this was looking, at this phase, as you can kind of tell, because worked later on. And the final layer just fills in a few more gaps.

And then the grade is quite interesting, because, essentially, I wanted to re-light this image. The whole purpose of doing this workflow is creating a collage, or creating an image. And this goes for any kind of photograph. And we've used this technique quite a lot, which I'll show you a bit later. This one was using it in quite a dramatic way, where you're cutting lots of bits together.

But you can do it with just a single photograph. And you kind of project and re-light it in Max. And that was, essentially, the core aspect of the exercise.

So I knew I wanted to have this in a kind of slightly dimly-lit environment, where there was a lot of fog, and a lot of lights coming from lamp-posts, and from the interior. So the whole image had to be toned right down, the whites taken out, and essentially flattened to allow the re-light process to be a lot more successful. But again, this would have been done with a little bit trail and error, back and forward, within Max, in the re-lighting phase, to understand how low to take this in Photoshop. And a simple just hue saturation, there.

So we have our collage. We filled in the blanks. We did a colorize, and painted overlay, highlighting different areas. And then we've kind of graded it for re-light. And then, essentially, all we do now is bring that into Max as a background. And then match the FOV for the camera.

And this is a pretty simple process. And it's essentially just like matching the camera for any image. You kind of get the camera settings. And we use it quite a lot within just arch viz projects. But it's also used, obviously, a lot in visual effects, for camera tracking. It's a similar kind of thing, but for stills.

So there's a few things to note here when you set this up. The window that you want your projection to work in has to be the same aspect ratio as your image. And all this is kind of written within the PowerPoint, which will be packaged and you can download. So don't worry about taking any notes, or necessarily seeing exactly what I'm doing on screen. Because its all in the PowerPoint anyway.

But essentially, your aspect ratio for the window has to be the same. And then you have to enable safe frames. Once you've done that, you can load your image as a background, which most people should know is just alt+B and adding it in the background there.

And then, if you got to utilities, and perspective match, and then show vanishing lines, you will see there that you get a sequence of blue, green, and red lines, that kind of cross the image. And blue is vertical, x is z, and red is x.

And once you place it around your image, following the perspective lines of the architecture, here, then what it's doing is, essentially, it's repositioning the viewport, both in terms of the FOV, and in terms of the placement from the ground, or from the grid point. And once you've done that, you can essentially add a camera to your scene, which will be in roughly the correct FOV, and detail. So you can look at the camera settings, and you'll see that it's kind of given it the right FOV for this particular image.

There's no right or wrong, particularly with this image, because it's kind of a collage of lots of different elements. And as Jeff will know, I like to keep things quite complex in these technical demonstrations, rather than give simple examples. Because if you had just a photo this room, for example, it's very easy to follow the lines, and create that perspective match, whereas this was a little bit more tricky.

But if I go back to utilities, you can see I've just followed some of the basic lines from one of the images, mainly, to give consistency. Because, in this particular image, if I try to use some of the other lines, it might confuse the camera, just because it's a collage, essentially. So it might not be too accurate. So to keep it accurate, in this sense, all of the lines were based on one of the images used in that collage.

And essentially, once you've done that, you can model directly within the viewport. So you can see here, I modelled a box, here. And it fits perfectly with this building on the left-hand side of the image.

And you might be thinking kind of like, well, you know, what's the point of going through this kind of process? Because you could just do the collage, and then render the building separately, and Photoshop it all together. Right? Whereas, again, the kind of point of this process was to re-light the image.

The end result is very, very different to what this collage is. And doing that, purely in Photoshop, was beyond my skill set, personally. Again, because I'm not an illustrator, in the traditional sense, like a lot of concept artists are. I'm heavily reliant on 3D, and I design in 3D. And also, this workflow is very, very quick.

Because you can see here, now I've modelled this building. And it's very easy to go in and add detail to the building. Just edit polying the geometry, and then adding detail where the windows are, cutting out the windows, adding any kind of lips to where the end the sills are, the chimneys, and the whole scene, very, very quickly. And the whole of this scene was probably created in half a day, just by kind of modeling basic shapes. And then kind of cutting out the details and putting on simple layers.

And once you've got that-- once you've assembled your model-- you'll have something like this. So I'm going to single window here, now, with my safe frame on, inside the camera that was generated from the perspective match. And if I just go in perspective, and fly around a little bit here, you can see that we've added detail to the geometry, made sills, and cut out where the windows are-- which is quite important, because we wanted to add lights inside.

We've added a little bit of detail to the bridges, here. And again, cut out all the windows. And we've just added general detail for the floor, where the pavements are, and so on.

And the level of detail depends, really, what you want to do. I mean, we wanted to have quite a dramatic kind of environment-- fog in this scene. So the Z depth was really important. So all that kind of extra detail in the model made quite a big difference to the kind of re-light, and the way we were creating that kind of fog effect.

If I go back into the camera, and point out the moment that this camera is essentially the projection camera. And it's quite good to sometimes name it within your scene. Because this image isn't necessarily going to be the camera that you're rendering from. It's just the camera that's going to be used now to project onto the geometry. So it's quite a good trick to kind of lock your camera, so you can't accidentally move it.

So what else have we done to this geometry? If I click on any part the geometry, I see I've got a couple of modifies here, and just some general edit polys, to obviously model it. But then I've got subdivide. And I've got a camera map binding modifier, which is one of the world space modifiers. And within that, I've then selected my camera.

So again, this is all in the PDFs. You don't have to write any notes.

But at the moment, that's really not doing anything. If I activate subdivide, and the camera map modifier, it's not doing anything.

A little trick within subdivide is never display your subdivision, because it's just going to become a mess within the scene, if you kind of have this displayed everywhere. But it's needed for quite a good reason, which I'll show you in a second. But never display the subdivision.

So if I turn off the subdivide for now, leave the camera map modifier on. If I go to my material editor-- I just need to turn on my license server.

I've got a choke material, here, that's kind of applied to everything. Just underneath it, I've got a slightly different material. It doesn't really matter what material this is. It can be relay material, it can be basic material. But within the diffuse, I've got a camera map per pixel map, which then has a couple of functions here.

So you have camera. So again, you link it to the same camera-- the projection camera. And then, you have a texture, which in this case is our collage that we've made.

And this is a kind of smaller version of the collage just for this purpose. But obviously, the final collage would have been like the 10k texture map projected onto this geometry, here.

And what happens now, if I select all my geometry and apply this material, you can see it's kind of mapped it with the image. I forgot to turn on constant colors, here. Some of the geometry, because we haven't turned on the camera map per pixel, it hasn't worked. And you see what the subdivide is doing, here.

So if I select one of the geometry, and check this by subdivision, you might be able to see it, you might not. But essentially, if I turn off the subdivide, the detail of the way that that image is mapped is going to be significantly less. Just like this object here, you can see the image all kind of skewed, and kind of warped all over the geometry. But as soon as I turn on the subdivide modifier, it becomes much better.

I don't exactly know why, but it kind of relies on the subdivision of the actual geometry itself, to how detailed it maps the image onto it. So you have to have those two modifiers on-- subdivide and camera map binding.

An you can see here that, if I just go out of safe frame, and in perspective, all the geometry is now mapped with this kind of collage. And all the window are kind of left open. And you can see that all of the bridges have been mapped with the right texture. And obviously, the image is much higher resolution that. This is just the way it's displaying.

And this kind of technique is used loads. And we've used it for lots of different examples within visual effects, and film as well, which I'll show you clips of later, and try and explain where we've used it. But for this purpose, it was essentially just to project the collage onto the base geometry.

And this process would have taken about a day, to model the base geometry, and get the thing in there. The first day was spent on the references, and the collage. The second day was getting the scene ready.

So with that in mind, we've now created our base scene, so it's ready for our Scrooge model, and to put in the design of the building. Which is essentially the whole point of creating this image, in the first place.

And it's quite interesting, because I really do used Max as a design tool. You can see here within the kind of outline of building the base geometry, projecting the collage, and then adding the details, which I'll show you in a second.

But the actual Scrooge house design itself, I go now from a little sketch like that, to take straight in Max. I used to spend a lot more time drawing. I didn't ever do 3D stuff, until I started at the end of my uni course. But I'd always make models, and spend a long time drawing these things.

Whereas now, my mind works very differently. My mind down goes from a very simple sketch to just getting in 3D, and understanding the space, and building basic forms. And I really enjoy that kind of design process, within 3D Max.

And I used to kind of force it a bit, in terms of trying to design more like other people-- in 2D or with drawing very nice drawing. But I just kind of accept that this is the way I work now. And it works for me.

So I'll kind of start off with a very basic sketch of the whole thing, here. I had quite a clear idea from some of the references that I wanted it to be almost like an off-balance design, where it's like a stiletto heel, in some way. So this would be the kind of context buildings next to it. And the whole thing is kind of hinged on attaching to that from the bottom, here, and through this kind of central stairway, which would kind of act like the heel of the building, that accesses the different floors.

So this is, more or less, how I would start the project-- just kind of sketching out, and then referencing this into the collage scene, and then doing some kind of test-- test cameras, and test renders of it to try and get a feel for the scale. And again, this kind of top-heavy design I quite liked, to portray that kind of wacky nature, to both the story and the character living there.

So there's nothing special about any of this, how it's made, it's just sketch modeled. And that will get developed, very quickly, into something a lot more detailed, once I was happy with the design.

As you can see here, that this is the kind of final model. And there's a bit more detail added to certain sections. Like the kind of heel, especially, we added lots of detail to the kind of stairway, was the only bit where we went into a lot more detail with the model.

But essentially, it's all reasonably simple. There's no kind of super complex texturing. There's a bit displacement on the brick. But there's nothing too complex, apart from running things through CrazyBump. We use that quite a lot to generate normalmaps and specular maps for certain materials that haven't been developed in that way.

But again, all the textures we're kind of referencing the old brick work that was from London in that time. So it kind of fit within the scene. And materiality-wise, it didn't stick out from the rest of the scene. The only thing that we wanted to stick out was the overall form and the design, not necessarily all the materiality parts to it.

We also wanted it to be quite almost like a submarine, in its way, in terms of the windows. Again, the character influences the design. So the character is very closed, and hidden, very grumpy. And so, the biggest window is at the top, where the light gets let into his bedroom. All the other windows are like these little potholes, so no one can see into the house or to see the character himself. So that kind of influenced, quite heavily, this big blocky form, with these massive windows on top, which we thought was quite cool.

And then, in the final scene, which I'll open now, you'll see that we've added details like lampposts. We've added a few props within the scene. We've added lots of different lights within the windows, and around the model.

So you can see how, here, the whole scene acts together. We've got a few extra things in the scene, which would have been harder to do all in Photoshop-- adding all of this detail to the environment, and then re-lighting it all.

You can see here where we've cut the window. We've got little lights inside. We've also got a glass front on all of the windows. Which isn't, obviously, got the projected texture on it-- it's just normal glass. We get the reflection of the building, and the environment, in all of the windows-- which again, would have been very difficult to do purely in Photoshop.

We've got lots of lights kind of illuminating the actual design itself, within all of the different spaces. And there's nothing special about any of these lights, just being well-organized with all the naming of everything, so you've only got a few different assets to control within the light lister here. You've got the lights in the windows, you've got different Scrooge lights, you got the lamp post lights. Even though it's a quite quickly-generated project, it's being very organized with the workflow, so you can change things very quickly.

All the lights have got the same temperature, because we wanted this two-tone approach to the lighting-- all of the light's being very warm, and then the environment being very misty and cool.

You've still got our projection camera. We've also got a VRay camera. And that VRay camera can be in a slightly different position, as long as it works with the perspective. So you're not necessarily limited to rendering through the projection camera. You can tweak things slightly.

And the more you set up your projection-- you can even use multiple projections-- the more control you'll have on moving your camera later-- especially to do animations with this technique, because you can actually have quite a lot of control to move the camera through this environment if you do the projection right, or multiple, in certain ways.

So I'll got to my VRay camera here, turn on my safe frame. And then I've got a crop for the bottom, because again, my safe frame was a similar ratio to my image. And I also wasn't sure what we're going to do in Photoshop at this stage. I wanted to give enough room around to have a bit of play with both the foreground and the top.

The scene has been set up with a VRay environment fog, which we always linked to gizmos. So there's a big box in the scene, and it's linked to this object, box fog. And it's linked to just the one light, the dome light, that we've got in the scene.

If you have it just on default, use all lights, we've got quite a few hundred lights in this scene, acting as candles, and within the windows, and everything. And if we have that selected to use all lights, it's going to take a lot longer to render, because it's kind of calculating the fog emission, and the light refracting through that fog, for all of these different lights, which we didn't need. It's just for the overall depth to the scene that I was looking for in this particular project.

So there's nothing particularly fancy about the way this has been set up. It's just got a particular a fog distance which controls how close the fog is within that box gizmo that you've set. And it's got 16 sub [INAUDIBLE] and the step size is four. That's just the quality of the noise. Bit it's the overall fog distance, and the color, that's going to affect things. And if you leave it on color white, without scattering the GI, then it will take most of the color from the light information in the scene.

And yeah, all of the additional lights in the scene have just been set up with a basic multiplier that works with that light. We're rendering with in real world scale, with 2.2 gamma.

Again, the whole purpose of this presentation is to kind of get away from this kind of obsession with the settings. There's nothing special about the settings here. It's just rendering with your ratings map light cache. We tend to be render most of our stills with Reinhard color mapping, so we can control the burn value a little bit better.

Which is, again, quite different to the way we render animations. In animation we tend to pump everything through Nuke. So we render everything in linear, and we don't really mind if things burn out a little bit. Because it's much, much easier to control the burn in postproduction.

Whereas for stills the Photoshop workflow is not really true 32-bit. So it becomes a little bit more destructive when you're kind of trying edit out the burns in Photoshop. So we tend to try and render that in for the stills workflow.

But again, we have different workflows for all different methods of what we do. But most of the stills, particularly interior work, was all rendered through Reinhard. And you can see here, I'm even using a lot of just default settings. I'm not even going into advance for a lot of it.

This is on low settings, because I was going to do some rendering within the class, but I'm not sure this laptop's truly up for rendering the scene, unfortunately. But again, there's nothing special about the way this has been set up.

The actual dome itself is a CG skydome-- my favorite kind of HDRIs. They're not as necessarily camera-friendly as some of the other HDRIs out there, notably the Guthrie HRDIs. But the variety of texture, and light quality in them are much, much better than his ones. And there's a much bigger range of different kinds of light. So that's the CG skies.

But it means that the overall multipliers have to be tweaked a little bit. So this is just loaded through a standard VRay HDRI material. And the gamma's been brought down a little bit. Which is, again, really to be standard workflow, just to add a bit of contrast to the scene-- the scene like the base lighting. And then this is added to the texture channel in the VRay dome. It's a pretty basic workflow there.

Again, the kind of passes that you'll use within projects varies loads. This was, again, a lot of artistic license in this image. So there's only a few passes that I really wanted, and needed, to create the image. Self-illumination was important. Obviously the Z depth, the raw refraction, raw lighting, specular atmosphere. Obviously, if you're using any kind of fog, to be able to boost or play with that, or make selections from that raw lighting. Just the kind of the ones that I needed for this scene.

Within animation, especially if you're rebuilding the within composite, within Nuke, is what we use. Again, there's a very specific list of all the passes that you need. But for this, or for most stills, there's no rule to thumb with the ones that we use. There's just the ones here.

And if I open the frame buffer, here. We do use the lens effect settings quite a lot, actually, these days. And this is just to give the glint to all of the lighting, and it softens the render a little bit. And it's a free effect. It doesn't add any render time to the project.

But it does enable quite a nice effect, which you can limit only to a pass. So you can have it saved as a separate pass. Or you can have it burn that effects onto the image. In here, we burn it in, because I was quite happy with the effect.

But you have options here, for both the bloom and the glint to effect the image, and create a little render element, or just to create a render element only. So both these effects, glare and bloom, you have that kind of control. But for here, I burnt it in, because I was happy with it. And I didnt' really have a client, so it was kind of fine to do that.

So HDRIs. Additional lights. And then, you see here, this is the raw render from the project. And this is the original collage. So you can see, it's successively re-lit, the image, which would have been harder to do that effect in Photoshop without creating lots of different channels, and passes, and paint layers, and so on. Which, for me, worked really well. And the actual design of the building sat really nicely within the kind of tones that was created there. So for me, that was kind of a successful result from doing that.

We started using light meters quite a lot. Not many people seem to use these. But couple of years ago, we started using these more and more. And it's a really good way to kind of set the exposure of your camera, without endless test rendering.

And I'll show you a scene. It's very, very good for interiors. But we use it, more or less, on every project now that we set up for stills, or animation, as a general rule to get the exposure correct.

I mean, there's lots of different ways you can kind of do this, and test render. I've [INAUDIBLE] almost every method. I've done write-ups on VRay RT, and using really high-end graphics cards, and other methods through the kind of environment settings.

But this, for me, is kind of the most foolproof method that seems to work just straight away for generating the setting. And you got a scene like this where you kind of got a couple of windows on the inside. You've got an interior scene. It's a standard interior set up, here.

And this might take half an hour, up to an hour, test rendering to get the exposure just right on the camera. But these guys I've got in here are VRay light meters. And they work in quite a technical way, which the first to use them, it can be somewhat laborious. But the more times you do this, the better you will be at understanding how cameras work.

And that's the key thing, for me, is that you'll start to understand real world cameras a lot better, especially if you're not used to using them in real life. And once you get to know the settings, and the numbers, you won't need a lot of processes that follow.

So they're found just in Helpers, and then in VRay And you'll see the VRay light meter, there.

And you can see here, on the left, you've got an image which is rendered through a default camera. So that default [INAUDIBLE] I've got a VRay sun in the scene. I've got default camera. And I've just pressed render, basically. So everything's on default settings. And obviously, the image is a lot too dark. The exposure is not correct.

But by placing a couple of these light meters in the scene, and then generating within it, it calculates the light values within the scene. And then you can process that through this Lux to exposure value converter, which you can find online-- this link, here. Again, this will be in the package that I'll give you.

And then, through that, there's a table that you follow to then find the correct ISO for the fstop that you're using within the camera. So when we film in reality, even in interiors like this, and we'll try and keep the fstop on eight. When we're using reds, or [INAUDIBLE], more often than not, even on kind of dark scenes, we'll keep the fstop on eight to get the sharpest possible image.