Lights, Camera, Render! Take Your Fusion 360 Rendering to the Next Level.

SIMON LEIGH: So welcome to the session, Lights, Camera, Render! And thanks for joining me. This session is really pitched at people who have used Fusion 360 before and have maybe done some modeling or some more advanced modeling in Fusion, and maybe even looked to the render workspace and applied some materials and done a quick render. But really, they have not explored the render workspace beyond that. So let's look at what we're going cover in this session. We're going to look at basic rendering. So we'll look at some of the kind of fundamental concepts that are in the workspace.

Then, we're going to look a little bit about local versus cloud rendering, and what that means you are rendering. And then we're going to go through setting up a scene. We're going to look at some of the building materials and how we can modify these. And then we're going to look at some custom materials and how we create those. And then finally, we'll look at some extra tips for making your renderings look more realistic. So, first up is a basic render. So we'll just into Fusion here. We'll jump up here and open our file.

And here, you'll see we have a game controller, so a simplified game controller. So a quick look around, and that's what you'd expect, front and back casing, various buttons. You see that those as separate components there. So that's our game controller. We'll just jump into the render workspace, and that's what we end up with. So it's essentially a partially-rendered view. So there's no ray tracing that's been done. It's not been cloud rendered. This is just going to give you a feel of what it's like when it's rendered.

OK. So if we jump up to the top here and I look at some of the tools available to us, we've got Appearances, Scene Settings, Decal, Texture Map Controls In-canvas Render, In-canvas Render Settings, Capture Image, and Render. And we'll cover what all of these are as we go through the session. So first up, for our basic render, we'll do what most people have probably done before and just drop some appearances on some of the components. So we'll take this glossy red plastic and add it to one of the buttons, and we'll take that glossy green plastic and add it to that button there.

And this is probably kind of people's first interaction with the render workspaces to do this and drop-- drop on a few appearances to see the effect. We can hit this button at the top for In-canvas Render, and it'll start doing the ray tracing to give us our render. And you see we've got a much more well-defined image here. And you'll see along the bottom-- so you will see the quality creep along this bar at the bottom. So it's telling you how much time has elapsed, what iteration is it for the ray tracing, and what quality we've got for our rendered image.

And you'll see it's going to head towards Excellent. It'll stop at Excellent, but you can move it along to-- see the triangle at the bottom here? You can drag it on to Final, and that will make it skip forward through to the Final-- so potentially, it improves the quality. So we are going to stop at Excellent, but you can then tell it to do a Final quality render. So we'll just leave that to chug along at the bottom there. We'll skip forward in time here. But you'll see we're at Excellent quality down at the bottom.

I'm going to shoot it up here in Capture Image, then export our image as a PNG file to our computer or to our project, whatever you prefer to say. That's probably what most people have done in the rendering environment. It's that kind of first drop a few appearances on, then hit In-canvas Render. You'll notice that each time you move your object or you move your part, it will start re-tracing again. But you can go up to the top and choose In-canvas Render Settings and choose to lock the view.

Then, no matter how much you try and move component, it won't allow me to orbit round our component or assembly. And it will still trying to still try and carry on rendering. So as I said, that's what most people have done in the render workspaces is in-canvas render as a starting point. So this the in-canvas render as a local render. We'll just cover a little bit about the difference between a local and cloud render.

When we're talking about local versus cloud rendering, we're really talking about using your local, computational resources, where often in that computational task to the cloud. So in the same way that you would do simulations with cloud credits, you can do that then with rendering. And there are various pros and cons. Firstly, for me, I like to use local rendering as a kind of roughing stage really to make sure everything's OK. I'll make sure everything looks OK before I then send it off to cloud rendering. So it's that kind of local internal check before I then commit to the cloud for this.

So if we jump back into Fusion here, you'll see we're still doing our in-camera render. But we go along to this Render option on the far right hand side of our menu bar. This will then give us the option to do a cloud render. So you can see that we've got all the different presets here, so Web, Mobile, Print, Video, and Custom. So we can set up the resolution of the size of images you want to render. You see with Custom we can fully control everything. We'll just choose this one here. We'll choose Final quality, and it will tell us the amount of cloud credits we need to solve this render.

If you're happy, then you can just go on-- go ahead and click Render there. This will send this away to be rendered in the cloud, and your results will appear at the bottom here. We'll do a cloud render at the end of our session. So you'll see kind of what the results look like. So that's how you would do that, and just close out there. Perfect. So that was really covering some of the basic concepts using the rendering workspace. Now, we're going to look at how we set up a scene, so how we control things like the environment, how we control the lighting, how we really kind of-- to use a phrase, set that scene for our render, before we then go on to some of the more advanced stuff of playing around with custom materials, et cetera.

So jumping back into Fusion. No doubt, I'm going to seeing this quite a lot. We'll go in to Scene Settings, and we'll just look at some options in the Scene Settings box. So first up, we've got the Brightness. You can use this slider to drag it along to change the brightness of our rendered image. You can also type numbers in the box. We just set that on back to the 1,000. We can also change the position of our light source. So we click there and we can use this slider here to change the position or a light source.

And you'll see that then changes how the shadow is cast within our scene. You can play around with that. I just changed the position as well. So we click on that to reset that. We can choose our background. So we can choose our solid color. So we can click there, and we can change that to a different color. Maybe we'll choose black. There you go. And choose any color you like, and you can input RGB values, et cetera. So we'll just change that back to our gray. That's a little bit too dark, maybe we'll get it a little bit lighter. Oh, perfect. There we go.

So the next box down we've got Ground. So we can choose to turn our ground plane on and off. So if we turn it off, you'll see we'll lose our shadow. So isn't she-- we've got this plane sitting behind our assembly. We can choose to turn reflections on. You'll see we get this cool reflection underneath our-- our game controller there. So you can toggle that around and play around with those settings. We can also change the roughness of our ground plane. And you'll see our reflection sharpens up or opens up depending on how much we slide that long.

Again, we've got a nice, clear reflection. We'll increase our roughness up, and you'll see we lose some definition in our reflection, because we've got this more matte finish to our notional ground plane. So we'll leave our ground plane switched on. Next box down, we can change our camera. So we can change it to orthographic and change it to perspective. We can also change with depth of field. And we'll cover that a little bit later on in the session. So I won't use that one just yet.

We can also apply different environments to different lighting. So you can choose some different lighting options, which you-- go back here and choose Environment instead. And you'll see we can drop different lighting environments on there. And it will change the lighting environment of our-- our games controller. And just drag them and drop them onto the environment here. We don't need to be accurate. You just drag them on. There's no particular place you have to drag them to. It's even got a Warm Light option there.

So I think for our purposes today, we'll go with-- go with the sharp highlights. Let's go back and drop down to a solid color. I think that's probably what we need for our session today. We'll move around the lighting position a little bit, just to make sure we cast a nice shadow from our game controller. And you'll see the effect of this as we go a little bit later into the session. So now, we know how to set up a scene in Fusion. Now, we can look at how we use some of the built in materials to start applying appearances, change the color of the plastic to maybe apply some textures to our plastics.

We're predictably back into Fusion. So if we go to our Appearances option at the top, or we can press A on the keyboard, you'll get up our appearances, and you'll see the ones in this design. We'll just move those over there. And if we don't click on our red, glossy plastic, we get these additional options come up. It's not necessarily an easy options box to find if you don't know it's there. So we're looking at our red plastic. We can change the roughness of our plastic.

And we can also have an increase or reduce reflectance. Now, we want to try and get a more matte appearance. So we've dropped the-- dropped the reflectance and increased the roughness. If we hit In-canvas Render, you'll see the difference that's made in comparison to our green, glossy plastic. So we've lost some of those reflections on that upper edge. We just made it a little bit more matte in appearance. Sometimes, you-- this can help to kind of boost the realism. So sometimes, the standard setting for your gloss plastics can be a bit artificial.

So just drop the reflectance down and boost the roughness a bit to make it look a bit more realistic. And you can see we just wait for that in-canvas render to resolve. You can see the difference there. We can stop our in-canvas render. And we can go back and change these settings. So we'll drop our roughness right down, bump our reflection-- reflectance right up. About there should do. Hit Done. Hit our In-canvas Render again. There you go. You'll see the difference. We've got those-- they're kind of edge reflections from our light source back now on our red button.

So just those small tweaks to the materials could make a massive difference in how realistic your render can look. So say sometimes, the glossy materials can look a bit too artificial. So sometimes, you may have to dial back that reflectance to make it look a bit more realistic. But you have to play around with it. Spend a little bit of time playing around with that and see what works for you see what works for the thing you're trying to render. Let's let that head towards Excellent. But I actually think for my game controller today I'm going to not choose red and green.

I'm actually going to choose glossy black appearance, or glossy black plastic. I'm going to drop that on all four of these buttons. So that one and that one. Perfect. Let's go up here, and we'll go ahead and change it a little bit. So I could change the color, make it a little bit grayer. Yep. That feels about right. I'm also going to bump up the roughness and drop reflectance little bit to give it a more matte appearance. That looks quite nice. Let's hit In-canvas Render. There we go. That's started to look a little bit more realistic now. Yep. It looks really nice.

We've just been a lot bit towards excellent there. All right. So what we do next? Let's take this matte plastic and drop this on those two buttons in the middle. And we'll do the same with this directional pad as well. Let's take it from there instead. Perfect. That's starting to look nice there. Maybe we change this and make it a little bit darker. Let me drop that in. That feels about right. Perfect so we'll just hit In-canvas Render to check and see what it looks like. That's starting to look really nice.

Remember, In-canvas Render doesn't you any claim credit. So it's good to just do that every once in a while just to check what your end is going to look like. I think that's starting to look real nice. So next up, really, I want to start looking at our casing. So we've got our directional pad. Let's start looking at the casing. And see if we can start adding some texture to our render. So we've got these nice, flat appearances for our directional pad and our buttons on the right-hand side of the controller. Let's see if we start doing something with the casing.

So let's go to our appearances. We've got obviously our matte plastics. We can drop that on. It looks OK, but it's a bit flat. It doesn't really give us that kind of feeling of texture. So I'm going to drop down here to Paint, and I'm actually going to choose a powder coat paint. If you click that button on the right-hand side, it just downloads that appearance. Let me drop that onto the top and bottom casing. And if we just close our Appearance box, if we zoom in, you'll see we got this texture appearing on our-- our casing now.

So it's more akin to what a proper manufactured product would look like. If we hit In-canvas Render, you'll see we're starting to get this software feel to our render now. So it's a little more realistic appearance by just adding this subtle texture to our casing. So because this has an appearance with actually some texture to it, in the same way with other materials, we can look in the Appearances and double click on them to change some of their properties. So as you saw with the red and green plastic, we changed their roughness. We can do the same with these materials.

So we'll just turn off In-canvas Render. We'll just go and look at our appearances. We'll double click on our powder coat, and we can change a scale of our roughness. We can change the scale of our texture, sorry. I think about there feels about right. We can change how rough it is. Click on Advanced here, and we can get some more advanced options. You can see the roughness that our texture is based on and also our relief map or bump map.

So if we go down and click on this option here, you'll see the PNG image that's been used to create this relief pattern in our material. Choose Cancel and close out. And hit In-canvas Render, and now we've finalized-- we're now happy with our texture and our relief pattern. We'll just let that resolve up to Excellent again. We'll just skip forward bit to speed this up. Perfect. So all right, let's jump back into the design workspace.

And you'll see kind of how those changes that are made in the render workspace are reflected in our design workspace. So we've got this slightly less aesthetically pleasing image of our game controller here. So that's how far we've come so far. We looked at materials. We looked at playing around with the properties materials. We're now going to take a look at making our own custom materials. So we're in the design workspace. We're going to go up here to Modify, click that, and choose Manage Materials.

We get this Manage Materials box up. Let's stretch it out to the right-hand side. Go to this option at the bottom and choose create new material. I'm going to choose New Generic Material for this one. So there's a few things we can set up. And you'll see these settings look not dissimilar to the ones we saw using the built-in materials when we started changing the properties. We'll just call our new material controller plastic. Choose the color. You can choose any color you like obviously.

I'm just going to choose a very, very light gray. So it's not dissimilar from the one we were using with the built-in material really. Let's just run you through the process of how-- how to create your own custom material. We'll choose it to be a non-metallic. You can change your reflectivity and transparency. But we're going to create our own bump map. And this is something we saw in the inbuilt materials. So you can click on the right-hand side here and use some of the inbuilt textures.

So we click there, and you'll see we can use a gradient, or noise, or speckle, or tiles, waves, wood. We can create a material using any of them one of those basis textures. But I'm just going to use a stock image which I've imported. And I'll choose the amount that essentially sticks out or goes into the surface. And you'll see the effect of that when we apply it to our game controller in a minute. So we'll close out. We've created our new material. So let's jump back into our render workspace.

Let's set that up and go to our Appearances again. Rather than choose one of the ones in the Fusion 360 Appearances tab, we're going to go to our favorites. And I'll controller plastic should be there. Drop that on our top and bottom case. You'll see that our scale is probably slightly off there, so we need to change that. As we did with the inbuilt materials, we can change your scale. And drop it back to about there I think. We go to Bump, and we change the amount it sticks out or goes into the surface if that makes sense, or embosses or debosses into the surface.

We'll just zoom in and you'll see the effect of me dragging this bar here, just the extremes there. So I think we'll set it about there. That gives a nice kind of texture feel. We'll apply that. We'll just close the option there. Again, that's not dissimilar from the inbuilt powder coat texture. But remember this bump map could be anything. So you could choose any texture you want to form the basis of this custom material. So let's set this up. All right. Now we're going to head on to look at some additional tips for realism.

It's not an exhaustive list. This is really just some of the things or little tweaks that I do to my render to try and make them a little bit more realistic when I'm setting them up. For this final section, we're going to cover some additional tips for realism. These are really just some of the techniques and tips that I use to try and make my renders more realistic. Unsurprisingly, we're back to Fusion. I'm guessing everyone is saying this in their demonstrations, hopefully.

So first up, what we we're going to do is apply decal or decal, however you want to pronounce it. So we'll just orient our model there. And we'll go to the option at the top here. We'll choose our first PNG image. Let's actually choose the select and start first. So that's our image. We're going to choose the facial we want to apply it to, which is this face of the controller. Let's just get the top image there. I'm going to choose where we want to put it. So we'll scale, and then we can place it about there I think. That feels about right. We can also flip it around in different orientations and change the opacity as well.

So it's how much your background material actually shows through your PNG. We just confirm there. We're going to apply another one. You can apply that to the top face of our controller. So again at the top, let's choose the Autodesk logo, choose to Insert, and click there. OK. And we'll just look at the top view. Spin that round. Choose a scale, and about there. That feels about right, I think. And you know what, let's draw that back a little bit. With this frozen tree, you can play with just applying decals to try and create some different effects as well.

I won't cover these in this session, but it's worth having to play around with how you can layer them up, and how you can use them to create interesting effects like glowing screens, all that kind of stuff. So next up, we're going to create some different regions of appearance on our front or top of our game controller. So if we actually jump back into our design workspace-- I'll just line that up again. Sorry, I'm a bit of a stickler with getting the right view. We'll go back into our design workspace. You'll see that I've actually used sketches to split up the face.

So we've got these different regions with different faces on the front of our controller. You won't to see them in the render environment, but they are there. So we applied different appearances to those. You see that at the top you've got these options. So you're applying appearance to a body or component or to an individual face. And we're just going to apply it to this face here. And close that. You'll see the effect that that has had. So we just applied to that one region. We created this nice contrast on our surface. It's almost like mimicking things like over molded parts. So we're going to choose another material or appearance now.

I'm going to apply that to these two regions here. So you see these two regions around the buttons have this texture from our games controller plastic that we created. We want these actually to be smooth, so we're just going to take one of our matte plastics. Again, choose our faces option and just apply those-- to those regions. The color is slightly off. Let's change the color slightly. I'll draw it back to make it a slightly lighter gray. So much for our custom material. That's perfect. Lovely. So we'll click Close.

Zoom in now, and you'll see we've got this nice contrast between the textured plastic of the main case, this gray, matte plastic circular region, and then these lighter gray regions around the buttons. Lovely. So this next one is a trick I use all the time to try and essentially force some-- force some realism into my renders. So I'll go back and we'll just choose plastic. Let's choose matte, black plastic, I think.

So when you create things like these, game controllers and stuff, you will have regions of clearance where the buttons stick through the case. But what I try and do is apply an appearance around these buttons. So I'm going to just zoom in. I'm just going to apply it to this face in here. So let's try and force the eye to see this clearance. So let's make it look more realistic. So in reality, these kind of consumer products would have these clearances to allow buttons to go through the cases.

We're just going to try and force it a little bit to make it look a little bit more realistic. So drop it on that face there. I'm going to do the same around that button. So we're essentially creating these regions of dark and light on the surface of our object. We're going to do it around our black buttons as well just to essentially make it look like there's a bigger gap there than there is. Just try and force that notion of a clearance and realism. So drop that one in there. Let's zoom in a little bit just so we can see it.

And we're applying this just to the face, remember, not to the whole object. We'll zoom in again, and there we go. Perfect. I just noticed that we've forgot our cable. So we need to apply the appearance to our cable. We'll just give that one of our slightly darker gray materials as well, matte gray plastic there. Lovely. So the one thing we didn't cover in our scene settings look earlier was this Depth of Field option. So if we go down here and turn it on. We'll get a warning that we've disabled it, and it will be visible when ray tracing is engaged.

So we'll click our point of focus in our image. And we'll just control or type in the amount of blur we want, and you'll see what effects. There's quite a fairly dramatic effect this has when we choose to turn on our ray tracing. So we'll line up our image there. We'll hit In-canvas Render. And you'll see straightaway we've got this region of focus around our four buttons here. And everything behind that image is very slightly blurred and out of focus. And this is a massive tip for getting your renders to look more realistic.

It's the same kind of thing you would see in things like product photography. So you can see back that it's nicely blurred out. So it's given this tremendous sense of depth in our image and this tremendous kind of sense of realism. We can go back to our Scene Settings and change them amount of blur, as well we'll change our point of focus. And just-- it's worth playing around with that just to see the different effects you can get in your renders. We'll let that just quickly head towards Excellent quality as well, just to clear up a little bit.

So see that's a massive difference from where we were right at the start of this session, where we had kind of just one color plastic, really, really shiny red and green plastics for our buttons. We've completely kind of changed the game of where we are-- where we are with our rendering. I'm pretty please Blur settings. I'll skip over that quite quickly, so I don't have to watch that in real time. All right. I think I'm quite happy with those, that Blur and that Depth of Field setting though. I'm not necessarily happy with this texture of our custom material though, our controller plastic.

So I'm going to go and tweak that. So let's find it up here, controller plastic. Now, let's move that off to the side. Nope, that's the wrong one. There's controller plastic. Perfect. That looks good. Change the scale ever so slightly just to make it look a little bit more textured. Let's hit In-canvas Render again. Yeah, that feels slightly better. Perfect. All right. On to the next tip for realism. When you see-- if you take note of our split in our case around here, you'll see that it's not particularly pronounced. Though it's the right-hand side, it's almost washed out when we're doing our In-canvas Render.

So I'm actually going to do is, again, like we did with our clearance around our buttons, I'm just going to force some dark and light areas into this split. And I'm going to apply it to the face. So I'm going to apply our-- plastic matte gray there. I'm going to apply-- and I'm going to apply it to that one actually. Let's get back to our Appearances. Let's choose Faces. I'm going to put our controller plastic back in there. I'm actually going to put a black on this underside of this lip around here.

I'll have to zoom in just to be able to grab that. There we go. So I just applied that just to try and force some areas of light and dark under there to make this kind of split in the case pop a little bit more in our render. So let's line that up again to the same kind of orientation we've been using throughout the session. So it's about there. And let's hit In-canvas Render. And you'll see right away the differences we've made. So if you remember just a second ago, we had our split in our case.

So it's actually washed out on the right-hand side and not particularly visible on the left-hand side the image. Now, we've really kind of forced-- forced it to create this darkness on the left-hand side the image, which makes it look as though-- you can see where the light is casting the shadow on that side anyway. We've essentially forced a shadow onto that side as well, and just made it pop slightly more on the right-hand side the image.

So doing things like that like, like we did with the buttons and doing like with the case here, just by applying those different materials in slightly different ways, can really kind of make certain features in your render pop out slightly more than they would if they were just rendered normally. So I think on the whole, I'm happy with that result really. That's kind of looking how I want it to. So I'm just going to actually export an image of that. Let's save that out. I'm actually going to then send this for cloud rendering.

So let's choose a print setting. Let's just choose one of the presets. It's saying 8 credits. And I'm just going to send that off for rendering. I'm going to save the document. And it will tell me that cloud rendering has started. So you can navigate away. You don't need to watch that much cloud rendering. So some time has passed. We're going to check back in on our cloud render to see if it's finished. We'll press down here on Rendering Gallery. And there we go. Our cloud render has completed. So let's click on that. It gives us a preview. And it looks great.

We can-- there are some options here we can play around with. So we can actually post-process the image. So we can change our exposure values, some of the color correction. I can zoom in and just check what our image looks like. That looks good. We also have the option to download its PNG, JPEG, TIFF. Of course, we can choose to have a transparent background on the image we download. You can also render as a turntable. So this is where your object actually spins around in the render. We're not going to do that for this session, but you can do that if you want to.

So that's what our cloud render looks like. And we'll just jump back into design. And that's basically the end of a session. So you see how far we've come from our very plain, white controller to start with our bare, very basic application of some different color plastics to where we've now got our nice rendered controller with the different textures. All the different realism that comes from that kind of split in the casing, where we forced that black in to create that contrast between the buttons and the case as well. It's a very different render to what we started off our session with. So hopefully that was useful for you. Thanks for tuning in to the session.