From the course: Revit: Rendering

New realistic shading

From the course: Revit: Rendering

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New realistic shading

- [Instructor] In the previous chapter where we generated walkthroughs, we focused on a hidden line walkthrough, but I mentioned that you could output to any of our visual styles. Now the one visual style that we haven't looked at yet is realistic shading. Realistic shading is an incredibly powerful and useful visual style that makes your viewport look almost indistinguishable from a rendering. So it's going to use all of the materials and the lighting directly in the viewport in kind of a live display. Now, what I have here on screen is an animation that I exported from the walkthrough using the realistic visual styles. And I was going for a nighttime effect here, so I configured the settings to try and make it look like nighttime. This one is sort of pseudo successful and gives me more of a kind of a dusk sort of feel, even though I had set the sun to 10:00 PM. So that didn't work out so well, it looks more like sunset than it does 10:00 PM. And particularly when you go back to the beginning here and you see the glowing orb of the sun kind of floating there on the horizon. So I tried again with a few different settings and in this one I just simply turned the sun off and now you can see the artificial lights are a little more prominent and it definitely has more of a nighttime feel to it. So what I'd like to do in this video is working in this viewport, looking down the Portico here, I'd like to show you the realistic visual style and talk about the settings that I use to get that sort of nighttime effect in those two videos there. All right, so let's get started with the realistic shading. So we'll choose the visual styles pop-up and select realistic. And this will display all of your materials directly in the viewport. Not bad, we can see the qualities of all of our materials directly here in the view. We've even got the trees being rendered there in the background. Okay, let's go into graphic display options next, and look at what else we can configure. So we'll start here at the top with this show edges option. If you look carefully at all the geometry, you'll notice that there's these black edges around all of the various forms and you can toggle that off if you like. So when I do that and click apply, when all those black edges go away, now I think the materials look a little bit more realistic because in real life you wouldn't have those black lines outlining everything, so this looks a little closer to what you would get in a rendering. All right, so let's keep going here. The next thing that we normally do is talk about shadows, right? If you're going to keep this a daytime rendering, you can go ahead and turn on your cast shadows, and immediately that will change the quality of the view. And I think it's almost imperative that you have the shadows turned on if want the quality of the materials to look believable. Without it, something just seems off, right? These of course are tied to your lighting scheme. So once again, we need to look at our lighting scheme and you can see that I'm currently set to just the over the shoulder lighting, which won't do. We want something more realistic, so we'll go to the still solar study and you can pick any of the presets. Like let's try our early morning sun and you can see it looks a little warmer there, it kind of has that sunrise kind of effect to it. You go to late morning and some of that orangy glow will go away and the sun will move of course become a little higher in the sky. Here's the rear afternoon, which throws the front of the building into shadow. So not as interesting for this part of the building. Now here's my night scheme that I tried at 10:00 PM. And while it does darken the Portico, it's not anywhere as dark as it would be at 10:00 PM and more strikingly off in the background it's still looks like daytime. So one thing that's important to understand about how lighting works in Revit is the sun is the light source, but it's not tied to the sky, but in real life it kind of is, right? So you'll need to deal with the sky separately from the light source, separately from the sun. And that's why I ultimately decided that using sunlight for the rendering was not going to get me there. The other thing was, it doesn't appear that the sun actually goes below the horizon in Revit. It seems to kind of just hang there on the horizon, no matter what time you said it to if it's after sundown. So for those two reasons, what I'm actually going to do is I'm really not concerned with what my sun setting says, because I actually am going to change the scheme from exterior sun only to exterior artificial only. Now, if you want to try the one in between sun and artificial, you can certainly do that, and these lights should turn on here. But if we change it to artificial only and click apply, this is where those lights really now start to be noticeable. This is one of the things that's really powerful about this realistic shading is that it does have the capability of using your artificial lighting. Already, it's starting to give me that mood that I was looking for walking down the Portico here with the artificial lighting turned on. Let's try the ambient shadows and see if maybe that kind of dirties things up a little bit for us, and maybe adds that little extra bit of texture. A little bit, maybe not quite as much as I was hoping for, but it's not too bad. Okay so, all that remains then is making it look like night because right now what it looks like is just kind of almost like an eerie sort of dusk, right? And that is an interesting effect that you might be going for, but what we want to do here is turn on a background. So that's really the key because what's controlling what you see off in the distance is the background settings. Right now it's set to none. So we're just getting this white emptiness. Well, we've got two options here. We could use sky. Let's see what that looks like. That's a blue sky, not really what I was going for. It's interesting, but it's not really what I was going for in this rendering. So I'm going to switch to gradient instead. Now here's the default. Again, that's more of like a daytime scheme there, but because the gradient has these buttons here, you're able to customize all three of these colors and that's really the key. So what we're going to do is click on the sky color and we're going to change that to very dark blue. Now you can kind of drag here in the color picker and you know, use this slider here, but I've actually got some numbers that I used in that walkthrough that I showed you. And I'm just going to dial these in to save a little bit of time here. But you're welcome to experiment with any colors that you'd like. So that's a really almost black bluish gray that I've chosen there. For the horizon, it's going to be really sort of a dark gray. Okay, so I'm just going to kind of drag that down to about there, okay. And then for the ground color, I'm trying to match the greenish tone of the ground, so it's sort of this sort of green brown kind of color right here, but once again I have some numbers that I can type in here. So this will get me closer to the values that I'm looking for. All right, let's click apply and see what that looks like. The ground color isn't quite right, maybe I need to darken that a little bit more. So let's do that. And there that's a little better, you can keep tweaking that, but do you see the sky color there is starting to do what I'm looking for. It's kind of this dark sky. Now you could probably get away with making that even darker and it'll start to you know darken that up as it tapers or this one as well, right? And as you kind of darken both of those values, it'll start to darken the overall sky cause it's going to blend those two colors together and it starts to feel more like a nighttime sky. So that's really the key to making this realistic view look like it's a nighttime rendering is making sure that you're using that gradient background with sky colors that evoke nighttime and then turning on your artificial lights. Now there's plenty more that you could do here in this window and I encourage you to experiment further, but the realistic shading is a fantastic tool to give you near photo realistic quality rendering directly in your viewport. And more importantly, you can use this little fly button right here, and you can actually start to interact with this thing directly in the viewport. And you can use your W, A, S and D keys to kind of move through the space. So I can move forward with W, A and D will step side to side, and S will back up. Play around with it, get comfortable with this realistic display and whether you're setting it to a nighttime like I'm doing here or setting it to daytime and turning on your shadows, I think both are really effective and compelling presentations.

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