Chief Architect offers nine different rendering techniques you can use to
generate your 3D views.
Let's begin by creating a 3D view with the perspective full
overview camera.
The default rendering technique is currently set to a standard view.
To change the technique,
choose the rendering technique tool in the upper toolbar.
Then, on the left side of my screen,
you will see the nine different techniques.
I'll enlarge the tool palette and turn on the list view so you can easily see
the names. To change the rendering,
you can click on the different techniques.
At the bottom of the list is the technique options tool,
where you can define the settings for each rendering style.
For the vector render technique, there's a few settings you can change.
One is the shadow intensity.
You can slide that along and adjust it as you need to.
There is an opaque glass option where you can toggle that on and off.
The render view can be changed in the render technique options by clicking on
the style, and the render will update.
I'll slide that down so we can kind of take a look at the changes with the
standard technique. In the standard technique,
you'll find the opaque glass setting.
There are ambient light settings for the interior, daytime, and nighttime.
And, line drawing has been added where you can place this over the top.
Much like the watercolor view,
each one of the line drawing elements can be changed, as well as the color.
Again, I'll slide the dialog down and you can take a look at these settings using the
standard render technique.
I'll discuss the physically based and clay render styles later.
The glass house gives you a translucent view.
There's a few settings you can change. This is more of a wireframe setting.
If you want to turn on some of the framing elements,
you can see right through the design.
There is the color option where you can change the color.
You just tap on the color;
you can make any adjustment that you want to the glass house.
And then there's also the amount of transparency where you can slide this to be
very transparent, or the other way where it's less transparent.
The line thickness. And then if you've made changes,
there is a reset to defaults that will restore your settings for that view.
The technical illustration view is quite similar to the vector view.
You'll see patterns on your materials and then a few settings
in here for the opaque glass, a warm color,
and a cold color. Each one of these can be changed.
And then you can mix the blend between the two. The line thickness,
and then the shadow intensity can also be set up.
For the watercolor technique,
there are a number of settings you can use for the watercolor.
If I slide this up, again,
you have glass opacity where you can toggle this on and off.
Some of these settings you may notice are not as dynamic as others.
In some cases, when you toggle,
you may need to use the update view to see the actual changes.
Underneath effects, there are several settings for smooth amount,
paint contrast, turbulence, pigment, and edge strength.
Each one of these elements are described in further detail in our help system.
As I open this up,
you can see all of the effect information has been defined
and how it works,
as well as the rest of the components down in the dialog.
Line drawing can be added over the top of the rendering. With line drawing,
you can change the color, the thickness, extend,
amplitude. And remember,
you need to click update view in the watercolor render technique.
Let's go ahead and pull the dialog down and take a look at the rendering with
watercolor, with the line drawing on top.
For the line drawing technique, there's glass opacity,
and then the same effects for the line drawing that we just looked at for
watercolor. The bottom of the list is duotone.
Duotone, again, has glass opacity that you can turn on.
There is a light and dark color,
as well as the mix that you can use for desaturation, tone,
and then line drawing that we've been talking about with several of these
techniques to create the different style.
I'll slide this down so we can take a peak at the duotone rendering technique.
For the physically based render style and the clay render style,
a number of changes have to be dialed in for those specific views.
Let's begin with a physically based render,
which also supports real-time ray tracing,
provided your computer's video card meets the minimum specification
for the graphical processor unit, or GPU.
With the physically based rendering,
a few of the settings that I typically might change are the camera exposure,
maybe increase that slightly.
Then on the daytime backdrop intensity,
I will adjust that based on the backdrop I'm using.
There are settings for the color adjustment: hue, saturation, brightness,
as well as line drawing on top.
And typically you want at least a minimum thickness of two.
Let me toggle the line drawing off,
and then I'll go ahead and pull the dialog down so you can see the
physically based rendering.
This is using the real-time ray tracing option which you can still see in my
dialog down here.
And this is happening within seconds to create this style of render view. Again,
I would refer you to a separate video to watch to show you how to dial in all
the settings for your physically based rendering. For the clay rendering,
let's slide the dialog back up.
I'll briefly cover clay rendering and let you know,
there is a separate video dedicated to the details of clay rendering.
The camera exposure
often times I'm going to be changing that for an exterior view to be slightly
brighter. And you can see in the background down here, the view is very bright.
I'm also going to turn the sun down as we finish making a few of these
technique render option changes. You can use a solid color;
right now it's using white.
You can use a layer color and change things based on a layer,
or you can use the material color that will use the materials.
It might look a lot like the standard render in some cases.
There are settings down here for the materials to ignore certain properties:
metalness, bump maps, AO maps,
override material roughness if you've set those for things.
Change your lighting to all be consistent.
Sometimes you may have changed your lighting.
Interior lights may have a yellow hue to them.
You can turn on ray tracing for this view, as well as turn on line drawing.
So let me make a few of these changes that I typically do with using ray
tracing; turning on line drawing on top,
and then I'm also going to use a specific layer
set, and I'll change that when we're finished here
to use layer colors to control how the clay view will look.
Now once I've made these changes,
I'll change the layer set to use one that has colors.
Let me switch this over and choose the layer set that I've built.
You'll see in my drop-down here,
I have a layer set for 3D camera clay that was custom built.
For both the physically based render and clay techniques,
adjusting the sun will typically greatly improve the render.
If I make a quick adjustment using the camera view lighting
tools, and then come over and adjust the sunlight,
toning the sun down from a 100,000 to something like 2,000
should improve the view.
Render technique settings can be made in your defaults.
You'll find this setting under 3D view defaults, and then rendering techniques.
If you have preferred settings,
make the changes in your defaults and then save them in your template plan for
all of your 3D views going forward.
That wraps up this session on rendering techniques.
Please see our built-in help file as well as our additional videos to learn more.
Thanks for watching the video!