Clay rendering is one of nine rendering techniques available in Chief Architect.
It's an abstract rendering technique that also supports real-time ray tracing.
The real-time ray tracing uses the computer's video card and requires a higher
end version with a graphical processor unit, or GPU.
These GPU's with hardware accelerated video cards for real-time ray tracing
from NVIDIA or AMD are currently available on the Windows platform.
Let's take a look at the steps to create clay renders for an exterior and
interior scene. Beginning with an interior scene,
I'll use the full camera tool and click and drag to create the view.
The default rendering technique is currently set to the standard view.
To change the rendering,
choose the rendering technique tool in the top menu system,
and then click the clay rendering technique.
To improve the quality of the rendering,
I'm going to cover four of the five key steps and settings.
Materials are important for rendering and are addressed in separate videos.
Let's start with the camera settings.
In my upper toolbar is the edit active view tool.
In making changes to the camera settings,
one of the things that I like to do for shadows is to turn on ray casted
shadows. It's going to give you a little crisper view. Reflections,
not as necessary without mirrors.
And then the next thing that I'm going to do is turn up the automatic
lights. There are a lot of lights in this scene.
And you can come in here and override the default eight lights by typing in a
value. Or, since this is a very large sample plan,
I'm going to use a light set. Light sets are covered in a separate video,
but you can create groupings of lights.
I've done that in this case to create a grouping of lights for the kitchen
and wine room. Next, I typically like to have a backdrop.
I'm going to choose the backdrop from the backdrop panel and then browse out to
the library.
Then I'm going to choose one that I already have collected in my backdrops folder.
And then I'm going to go ahead and close the edits for these camera settings.
You may not notice much of a change or improvement in quality.
Part of that is the sun is very bright.
When we created the view,
I did a click and drag toward the cook range,
and you'll notice that I had the sun following the camera.
Let me go in and make some modifications to the sun.
In the upper menu system, let's click on the adjust lights,
and then I'm going to come over and adjust the sunlight.
For the clay rendering on an interior scene,
I typically will use a very small number in the range of 500
for the intensity of the sun.
If I want to flip the sun shadow around and have that come through the windows,
you can either uncheck sun follows camera and adjust the tilt angle,
or you can use a sun angle with the correct latitude,
longitude, as well as the time of year.
You can see by changing the direction angle that the sun has flipped around,
and now you see the shadow. With a lower intensity on the sun,
you now see the lighting effects in the scene.
The next aspect of improving the rendering is to look at the technique options.
Let me go ahead and open up the technique options.
This is at the bottom of the techniques. Let's begin with the camera exposure.
For this interior scene, I want to increase the exposure.
And I found for this particular scene,
0.8 will significantly brighten it.
You can change the color of the rendering. Currently, it is using a white color.
If you click on the color,
you can choose a specific solid color to use for the scene.
You can also choose to use the material color,
which is going to use the materials from the scene.
Or you can use the layer color,
and I'm going to come back and explain that here in a minute,
I'm going to switch this back to a solid white color,
and then just reset the scene.
I'm also going to come back and talk about the material properties you can
adjust. Lighting: If any of your lighting has different colors,
if you've used a yellow or a white,
you can override those light colors and then choose a specific color that you
want to use in here.
The clay rendering does support using ray tracing.
Ray tracing does require a hardware accelerated video card.
If you want to use this,
I'll show you in a minute in your preferences where you can find that.
I like to use the ray tracing for the clay scenes.
I'm going to go ahead and turn it on.
And then for the daytime backdrop intensity,
you might notice it's pretty dark out the window and probably out the front door
behind this dialog. I'm going to increase that to a 1,000.
And then down toward the bottom of the dialog,
I'm going to enable line drawing on top.
And you can see that the image is slowly improving.
Line drawing does add quite a bit of time to generate the rendering,
but you can see the effects of having the line drawing.
You can choose the color and then you can choose a number of settings from the
thickness, extend, squiggle,
that have been derived from the water color rendering technique that you may
have used in the past.
Let me close the dialog and let's take a look at the scene.
I mentioned you can use layers to create the colors.
My layer set is currently using a 3D camera view I
created without landscaping. All the landscaping elements are turned off.
If you want to create a layer set specifically and use
colors and colorize the cabinets,
let me show you how you might do that. In the tools menu,
I'm going to come down to layer sets and layer set management.
I'm then going to make a copy of the layer set we're using,
which is the 3D camera, no landscape. So let's make a copy of that.
And then I'm going to give it a name of clay 2 since I've already created one of
these. At this point, the program opens up,
it's made an exact copy of the layer set we were using,
and you can see that the colors for all of the different layers are all black.
First thing I'm going to do is select all. Then,
I'm going to change the color for all of these layers down here to white.
Once I have all of the layers set to white,
I'm then going to pick on a couple of specific layers.
Let me grab the wall cabinets.
And I'm going to come in here and change the color for the wall cabinets
to one of my favorite blue colors.
So this is the only thing in this layer set that will be using a color.
At this point,
I'm going to come up and I'm going to change my layer set to the new layer set
we just created.
You shouldn't notice any real changes because it's an exact copy of the other
layer set. What I can do now is go back into my technique options.
And now I'm going to choose underneath the color to use the layer color.
Now remember all of the layer colors are white with the exception of the
wall cabinets. You can see them turn blue in the background,
and I've done that same approach in building an additional layer set that has
a very neutral light color for the wood and some of the furniture
and some of the stainless steel.
And if I switch my layer set to this other view,
3D camera clay,
you'll see the scene refresh using those colors with a very
subtle approach to that view.
And since the technique option is using the layer color,
you'll see a slight shading on some of the furniture, some of the floor,
my doors and windows have a very light gray on them.
So using this technique allows you to colorize and focus on the
scene and maybe point out some of the things you want the client to see.
Now let's talk about if your video card supports the real-time ray tracing.
Up underneath my preferences, let's come down.
There is a specific video card status.
You can see hardware ray tracing is supported using this
specific NVIDIA video card.
Let me zoom in on the backsplash area of the scene,
and let's talk about a few more settings that we have.
Let me go back over into the technique options,
and I'll slide this dialog over to the other side so we can see what we're
talking about.
The first thing underneath the material is ignore the material metalness.
Notice that the blender over in the corner probably has a
shiny stainless steel setting on there.
If I say ignore material metalness,
and as the scene begins to refresh,
you can see that it now takes away that property.
The next one is ignore material bump or normal map.
And you'll see on the backsplash,
there is a bump map on here that is giving a
nice texture in here. If we remove that and say ignore,
it's a little less subtle, but there is a small difference.
If you have an ambient occlusion map,
which gives a little bit of light in the texture, that will turn it off.
I have some of that on the hardwood flooring.
And then if there is roughness,
maybe some of the hardwood has a very rough feeling,
you can override that as well. So a few settings in here that,
in addition to your normal material properties,
you can use to further dial in your clay rendering technique.
Let's go ahead and zoom out and take a look at the scene.
Each of the settings we made gradually improve the scene.
Your scenes may require different changes.
Let me summarize the changes that were made in the scene.
In the camera settings, I turned on the ray casted shadows,
I turned on all the lights for both the kitchen and the wine room off to the
left, ambient occlusion was set low at eight.
I did add a backdrop image.
I did change the sun to 500. In the technique options,
the camera exposure was set to 0.8,
I turned on ray tracing and then the backdrop intensity was set to a
1,000. For the coloring, you can use a solid color.
I did create a layer set and then colorized certain layers
to create the scene with just a little accent of color.
And then finally, I did turn on the line drawing.
Let me repeat similar steps for an exterior clay rendering.
Using the camera tool, I'm going to create a perspective full overview.
And then I'm going to rotate around to the back and then zoom in using the wheel
on my mouse. To change the rendering technique to clay,
I'm going to come over and choose the clay rendering technique.
You can see the intensity of the sun is washing out the view.
Let's begin by changing the sun information. In the menu system,
let's come into camera view lighting tools,
and then over to edit the sunlight.
I'll adjust the intensity of the sun down to 2,000. Also,
if you want to create a sun angle with specific coordinates and time of day,
you can do that as well. With the sun turned down,
let's go in and edit the camera settings.
Up in the edit active view, most of these settings look pretty good.
I am going to turn on the ray casted shadows. For my exterior views,
I do like to set the ambient occlusion at zero.
To edit the technique options, let's come down, open up the dialog,
and I'm going to make a change to the camera exposure -
slightly increase that to 0.4.
I'm going to change the color to use the layer color.
Then we'll switch it to the layer set once we close this dialog. Then,
I'm going to go ahead and turn on use ray tracing.
My backdrop daytime intensity is set to 20.
That's a good number for an exterior.
And then I am going to turn on line drawing to overlay over the top.
Once I have these changes in place,
I'm going to change the layer set that has the colorization for the
different layers. And then one final change.
I'm going to set the opacity for the windows and doors.
In the technique options, you'll find that up toward the top of the dialog.
And then you can see the results using the layer set with different
colors turned on to create this style of a view.
Let's recap the settings made to the scene. In the camera settings,
ray casted shadows were turned on, the sun was set to 2,000,
I did not have a backdrop. In the technique options,
the camera exposure 0.4, ray tracing was on,
the intensity of the backdrop was at 20,
and for the color,
I turned on the layer set with colors for a few of the layers,
and then line drawing was turned on.
That wraps up this session on clay rendering and real-time ray tracing.
Be sure to see the program's built in help to learn about each of the settings.
Thanks for watching the video!