Physically based rendering is one of the nine rendering techniques available in
Chief Architect. It's the program's most photorealistic rendering technique.
And, it supports real-time ray tracing.
The real-time ray tracing in the physically based rendering uses the computer's
video card and does require a higher end version with a graphical
processor unit, or GPU.
These GPU hardware accelerated video cards for real-time ray tracing from
NVIDIA or AMD are currently available on the Windows platform.
In this session,
I'll go through the steps and provide tips for rendering an interior,
exterior, and overhead or dollhouse view.
Let's begin with an interior scene. Using the full camera tool,
I will click and drag to create the view.
The default rendering technique is currently set to our standard render
view. To change to the physically based rendering technique,
or PBR, choose the rendering technique tool,
and then, over on the left side,
choose the PBR render technique. To improve the quality of the rendering,
I'm going to cover four of the five key steps in settings.
Materials are very important for rendering and are addressed in a separate
video. Let's start with the camera settings.
In editing the camera settings,
you can do this by coming up into the top menu and using the
edit active view.
And I'm just going to kind of walk down this dialog and give you the settings
that I'm going to put in place for this scene.
Some scenes may be different and require different changes.
You can make all the changes that we're about to make in your defaults,
save that in your template plan, and then you will have those going forward.
The first thing is, is you can change the camera name,
you can choose the rendering technique.
We already have this set to be physically based, color,
watermark, shadows. For shadows,
you can improve the quality of the shadows by turning on ray
casted sun shadows. For reflections,
typically I reserve that with scenes that have mirrors in them,
such as a bathroom. I'm going to turn that off.
They're a little bit more expensive,
and I want to make sure that I'm as efficient as possible.
The next setting that I typically will be making is for ambient occlusion.
You can see the default setting currently is 80%.
I'm going to change that down to eight.
If you want to learn more about any of these settings,
please see the help down here in the dialog. That will open up the help,
and you can learn specifically about each one of these settings.
The next aspect to improve the scene is lighting.
You can see in the scene currently it's very washed out,
and the program is using a default number of lights of eight.
In between the rope lighting and the pendants and the can lighting,
there are a lot more lights available that can be turned on.
If you have a simple plan, you could come in here and enter in a value,
and just bump that up. Since this is a full sample plan,
I'm going to actually build a light set that already has those lights turned
on. You can learn more about light sets in a separate video.
I'm going to turn on a light set.
I already have one configured that is just for the kitchen and the wine room.
The information behind that, again,
is turning on all the lights for those two rooms; it's called a light set.
That completes the settings for the lighting and the camera settings.
Given that the sun is very bright,
you may not see much of a change after making that adjustment to the
lights, as well as the camera settings.
Let me go in and adjust the sunlight at this point.
In my upper menu,
I'm going to come up to the adjust camera view lights,
and then over to the left-hand side for the adjust
sunlight. What I have found for an interior view,
I want to turn the sun down significantly.
Currently it's set to be very bright at 75,000.
For an interior scene, I like to turn that down.
I'm going to set my sun to be 500.
And you're going to notice that sun follows angle.
Since I drew the camera toward the cook range,
the sun is coming through the windows behind me.
And that's using the sun follows camera. I'm going to change that.
One easy way to change it is to uncheck it.
And then I'm going to change the direction or angle,
and I'll just put in 112, press the tab key,
you'll see the sun then flip around and come through the front.
It's very light because I haven't adjusted some of the other settings that we'll
make here in a minute.
I will point you to the other option if you want to be very specific
and use a sun angle,
you can enable this and make the adjustment settings in your sun angle.
The same type of information is available if you want to use that.
I'm going to switch this back and use the generic sun at that angle.
The next thing I'm going to do is insert a backdrop into the scene.
I'm going to come over, open up my library.
I have a few backdrops already saved. I'm going to grab one of them.
Let's pan over a little bit,
and then I'm just going to click inside the window to place the backdrop.
You might notice when I place that backdrop,
a lot of the color from the backdrop flooded into the scene.
That means I need to make additional adjustments to dial in this rendering.
Let's go ahead and close the library browser.
And the next thing I want to do is make adjustments to the scene for the
technique options. You can find the technique options, again,
I'm going to go up into my upper menu and come over at the
bottom, and choose the technique option settings.
And I'm just going to walk from top to bottom through this dialog.
The camera exposure is going to be how bright you want it.
The default in this case is using an exposure of 0.35.
I'm going to turn that down just slightly to make the adjustment.
This next setting is use ray tracing.
This does require a higher end video card that supports
hardware acceleration that I mentioned earlier.
I'll show you where to determine if your computer supports it. In my case,
you can see that I can turn this on, so my computer does support it.
And I'll show you that in a minute in the preferences.
The next setting for the daytime backdrop intensity,
I'm going to turn that down quite a bit.
We have a lot of light coming in with the default setting of 7,000.
I'm going to change that to 1,000, press the tab key,
and you'll be able to see the scene resolve itself and improve.
It depends on the speed of your video card.
I'm using a little lower end laptop for this session.
So it may take a little longer if you're using a faster video card than what I
have here on my laptop.
The nighttime backdrop intensity is okay since I'm not using a nighttime
scene. And then for color adjustment, hue, saturation,
and brightness, a lot of this depends on your scene.
I'm going to improve or increase the saturation,
and I'm going to type in a value of 25.
And then also I'm going to brighten the scene slightly, again, 25.
Each one of these changes, again,
you can use the help to better understand each one of these settings.
Something that's new that we implemented beginning in Chief Architect X13,
is to enable line drawing on top.
This will be more expensive with the rendering and take more time to
produce it, but it will give you a slightly different view with added line drawing,
just like in the watercolor view if you've used that much.
There's settings for each one of the lines that you can adjust
with these values. I'm going to turn off the line drawing,
and then let's go ahead close the dialog altogether and take a look at the
scene. You're going to notice that it gradually improves. Again,
it's doing different passes and depending on the speed of your video
card will depend on how fast your scene resolves itself.
If you're wondering if your computer supports real-time ray tracing,
you can find that underneath your preferences,
come down to the preference setting,
and then down to the panel for video card status.
And you'll see that my video card does support hardware ray
tracing, and you can also see the name of my video card up here.
This is a very basic video card.
There are much faster ones that will make your rendering much faster.
This interior scene with a few adjustments now renders to this quality in
under 30 seconds.
Let me share a brief slide to recap those settings that we just made. In the
camera settings, I made sure that ray casted shadows were on,
that I'm using enough lights for the scene,
and then I adjusted the ambient occlusion to eight.
I toned the sun down and set it to 500 and then
inserted a backdrop image. In the technique options,
the camera exposure I set at 0.3.
I turned on the ray tracing setting.
Then for the backdrop intensity, it's set to 1,000. The color settings;
hue zero, saturation 25,
and brightness also at 25. So you can use these settings.
If it works for your scene, you can actually set that as a default,
save it into your template plan, and then you have it going forward.
I will caution you some scenes will require different settings.
Let's move on and take a look at the overhead or dollhouse view
for the next segment. Similar steps to what we did to create the interior scene,
I'm going to come up into my menu and I'm going to select the camera view tools.
Then over on the left-hand side,
I'm going to select the perspective floor overview camera.
This will open up in the standard render view,
and I'm just going to kind of scroll in on my mouse and situate the camera the
best that I can. And then we'll go through the different settings again.
Let's begin with the camera settings.
Up into the menu for edit active view,
and then I'm going to come down and make a few changes.
Typically for an overhead view,
I don't like to have the shadows turned on.
Reflections might be a good idea.
We have some mirrors over in the bathroom that can be seen.
I'll go ahead and turn those on.
And then for ambient occlusion for these views,
I typically leave it off completely. Lighting information
not as important, because we're going to let the sun light the majority of this scene.
So I'm going to go ahead and leave the lights with an automatic setting of
eight. Next, I'm going to make the adjustments to the sun;
we'll come up under the camera view lighting tools,
over to the sun information. Typically with this scene,
I like to have it quite bright.
It's using a mid-morning setting of 75,000 lux,
and that works just fine for me.
I typically don't have a backdrop setting, so I am going to avoid that step.
And then the last component is to edit the
technique options. To get to the technique options,
we'll come over and then make the setting adjustments.
You'll find that down in the very bottom. Currently,
I'm using the standard render technique.
I'm simply going to come up and choose the physically based render
technique. And then I'll just walk from the top to the bottom of the dialog.
I'm going to set the camera exposure at 0.6,
then for the daytime backdrop intensity,
notice it's pretty gray out here. So I'm going to crank this up to a 100,000.
Once I press the Tab key, you'll see that gray disappear.
And then for the hue, saturation, and brightness, again,
this is the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
I'm going to set my saturation between 25 and 35.
And then I'm going to also crank up the brightness to set that at 25.
There's also line drawing on top.
I'm going to avoid that step and then close the dialog.
So with a few adjustments into the camera, the technique options,
we've been able to dial in a very quick rendering within
seconds of the perspective floor overview or dollhouse
camera view using all of these settings.
Let me share a brief slide to recap the settings used for the overhead or
dollhouse view that were used in the previous set of steps.
The final step let's take a look at is an exterior view.
To create the exterior view, again,
I'm going to use my camera view tools and then specifically,
the perspective full overview camera.
And I'll come over and kind of situate the angle for the view that I want to
create. Let's begin with the view settings.
Let's go in and edit the active view.
The first thing I want to do is turn on the shadows that are ray
casted. No need for reflections in this view.
Ambient occlusion is set to zero.
I'm also going to leave the lights at automatic set to eight.
Next, let's go up and make adjustments to the sun settings.
For the sun information, I'm going to use an existing sun angle.
I've got it set up to be 10:00 AM on July 4th. Typically,
I have a few of these depending on the time of day.
You can edit the sun information,
and you can see that the lighting data that I'm going to use for the physically
based render will be 2,000.
And then the final thing is to set up the rendering technique.
Let's switch it over to the physically based rendering.
And then once I've switched it,
I'm going to come down to the technique options.
We'll just begin at the top. I'm going to set the exposure at 0.4,
make sure that ray tracing is turned on.
For the daytime backdrop intensity,
I'm going to set that back down to a thousand.
Down in the hue area, I'm going to set this at minus five.
And then for the saturation and brightness at 30.
You can see the settings are adjusted.
You can still rotate and move around in this view.
And then the scene will resolve.
Let me share with you the settings that we just made to create
this render. You can see that for the exterior settings,
I've got the ray casted shadows on, the sun at 2,000.
And then the technique options; camera exposure 0.4, ray tracing on,
the backdrop intensity at a 1,000, and then you see my color settings.
Let me rotate around to the back of the scene,
and let's talk about creating a nighttime scene render
using this view. To create a nighttime scene,
let's go through the different settings beginning with the camera settings.
I'm going to turn the shadows off for the nighttime view.
No need for reflections. And then for the lighting,
I do want to have most of the lights on. This will be expensive,
but I want to create a nighttime scene.
I've created a light set for all the lights on;
I've just named it the nighttime view.
You can alternatively just use the automatic and turn up the number of lights,
whether it's a hundred, maybe even a 1,000 in a large plan like this.
So I'm going to turn on the lights and then let's also assign a backdrop.
I noticed I didn't do that for the exterior daytime view.
You can do the exact same process. Let's go in and select the backdrop.
I'm just going to use a very subtle background; blue to white.
And then the next thing I want to do is edit the technique options.
We'll come over, open up the technique option settings.
I'm going to take the camera exposure down to 0.7,
and then for the nighttime backdrop intensity,
I'm going to set that to be 0.5.
I'll also set the daytime as well as long as I'm in here.
And then for the hue, saturation, brightness,
probably just come in here and make a couple of adjustments to those settings.
I'll show you the slide when I'm finished with the exact settings that we've set up.
And then the final thing I'm going to do is simply toggle the sun
off. So let's come up into the sun information,
let's toggle that to be nighttime,
and then you can see the effects of the lights coming on with the nighttime
scene. Here are the settings that we had made,
and I'll just kind of pause here for a second so you can see these exterior,
nighttime settings.
It's pretty close to the daytime with a few minor adjustments in particular with
the camera exposure. And note,
that I did turn the setting from daytime to nighttime there at the very end.
That wraps up this session on physically based rendering and real-time ray trace rendering.