11/12/13 V-Ray for SketchUp Rendering an Interior Scene

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Rendering an exterior scene Home Tutorials

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Note: The scene for this tutorial is provided by Bui Tuan Hung

Part I: Adjusting the GI settings

Part II: Rendering with materials
Part III: Rendering the final image
Part IV: Post-processing the image

Part I: Adjusting the GI settings

Step 1. First render

1.1. Open the scene (which can be found here).

1.2. Check the Override material option in the Global switches rollout. This will give you an idea of how your
lights will work without the final materials.
1.3. Set the Image sampler type to Fixed Rate.
1.4. Go to the Output tab and set the resolution to 400 x 325.
1.5. In the Irradiance map rollout set the Min Rate to -5 and the Max Rate to -3.
1.6. In the Light Cache rollout set the subdivs to 500. We will change this to 1000 for the final render.
1.7. Render the scene:

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Notice that the render looks bright considering that we are using light gray color as the override material. Also
the position of the sun it is not the one that we are looking for. First, we are going to change the position of the
sun. Then we are going to change the shadow settings and tweak the exposure using the Physical camera.

Step 2. Tweaking the Physical Sun and the Physical Camera

2.1. Click on Window, located in the Sketchup menu. Then select Shadows
2.2. Open the Shadows settings (Windows>Shadows) use the Sketchup menu to set the time to 12:15am and
the Date to 1/25.
2.3. Other effect that we want to have is blurry shadows on the sun light. To achieve that effect we have to go
to the Environment rollout and click on the "M" near GI(Skylight) and change the "size" to 20.
2.4. In the V-Ray options under Camera increase the Shutter Speed to 250.
2.5. Click Render and compare this to your original render:

The result is quite noisy, but it does give a good idea of what the scene lighting is like. Notice that the
exposure is better right now, but we still having some very bright areas in the render. The final material color
will be brighter than the override material color and those bright areas could be a problem when we switch to
the final material render.

Step 3: Tweaking the Color Mapping

3.1. By default V-Ray for Sketchup is using Linear as the color mapping. Therefore, we are getting very bright
areas. In the Color mapping rollout change the color mapping type to "Reinhard".
3.2. Render

You can see that the result is very close to the previous render with linear color mapping. The Reinhard color
mapping is a blend between linear and exponential. If the burn value is 1.0, the result is linear color mapping,
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while if the Burn value is set to 0.0, the result is exponential style mapping

3.3. The idea is to have an exponential style mapping. So, we have to reduce the Burn value to 0.8
3.4. Render

The result is much better. We still have the same amount of light in the scene, but we don't have the very bright
area produced by the physical sun.

At this point, the illumination is very good. The only issue here is the overall quality of the render.

Step 4. Better Antialiasing and less noise.

In the first steps we change the quality of the render to be able to have a fast preview, while we are working
with the illumination. Our goal now is to improve the setting to achieve better antialiasing, better GI and less
noise in my render.

4.1. In the Image Sampler rollout, change the type to Adaptive DMC.
4.2. Set the Min Subdivs to 2 and the Max Subdivs to 6.
4.3. In the DMC Sampler rollout set the Noise Threshold to 0.008.
4.4. The sun shadow has a lot of noise. To avoid that, we have to increase the subdivs of the sun light. In the
Environment rollout, click on the "M" near GI(Skylight) and increase the subdivs to 32.
4.5. Render the scene.

Rendering takes more time now as V-Ray needs to calculate a more precise Antialiasing solution.

Step 5: Better GI Solution and Ambient Occlusion

The Antialiasing looks Ok now, but we still have a low GI quality. For this reason we have some missing and
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blurry shadows. We also want to use an Ambien Occlusion effect to add more definition in the render.

5.1. In the Irradiance Map rollout, set the Min Rate to -4 and the Max Rate to -1.
5.2. Change the Color Threshold to 0.3.
5.3. Render

We do have better shadows definition, but We would like to improve the shadows on the corners and crevices

5.4. Go to the Indirect illumination rollout and enable the Ambien Occlusion option.
5.5. increase the Subdivs to 32
5.5. Render.

Notice that the GI solution is very good and we have nice edges, corners and crevices definition.

This completes the first part of the tutorial. In the next part, we'll add the scene materials.

Part II: Rendering with materials

Step 1. Rendering with materials

1.1. Turn the Override material option in the Global switches rollout off.
1.2. Render.

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The render looks pretty good with all of the material applied. It is time for the final render. We will render the
image in a final resolution in the next part.

Part III: Rendering the final image

We now have to render the final image.

Step 1. Adjusting V-Ray for larger resolution

1.1. Set the resolution to 1600 x 1300.

1.2. In the System rollout, set the render region division size to 48 x 48.

We will need to adjust the irradiance map parameters: since we increased the resolution twice, we can
decrease the irradiance map Min and Max rate by 2.

1.3. Set the irradiance map Min Rate to -6.

1.4. Set irradiance map Max Rate to -3.
1.5. In the Light Cache rollout, set the Subdivs to 1000.

Step 2. Rendering the final image.

2.1. In the Output rollout enable "Save render output" to automatically save the rendered image. Pick the image
file extension and assign a name and a path. For increased precision, you can choose a 16-bit image format
(for example, a 16-bit .png).
2.2. Press the Render button.

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The final scene for this rendering can be found here.

Part IV: Post-processing the image

The image looks ok, but in most cases you will want do some color correction in an image processing program.

For example, here is the same image some level, color balance and curves correction. To add a more
photographic feel to your image, you can apply some radial darkening of the corners and some chromatic
aberration, for example like this:

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