Render settings and scene setup - Rhino Tutorial

- [Instructor] Rendering is a process that combines the objects in a Rhino file with simulated lights and simulated materials to produce digital images. Now, the rendering process can be just as sophisticated as the modeling process. It's definitely an art form all on its own. And if you want to, you can spend just as much time setting up renders as you do building your models, if not more. To help us get a feel for rendering in Rhino I've got the exercise file rendering-setup.3dm open. Here, we've got a few different objects that we worked with in previous videos and we'll use those as some test subjects for rendering. So we can find render commands in Rhino under the render menu. And here we can do things like activate a render preview or a full-on render. We can set up different kinds of lights, as well as adjust materials that are applied to our Rhino objects. We can set the current renderer and for now the built-in Rhino renderer is our only option. There are other more sophisticated rendering plugins out there that will do even more in depth rendering than what's built into Rhino. For now, though, we're just going to focus on the built-in renderer. Down here at the bottom we have render properties so let's go ahead and click to activate that. And we'll take a look at some of the most basic render settings. So we already talked about the current renderer, we're just going to use the Rhino renderer, that's all we have access to right now. We can decide which view we want to render. The default is the current viewport. Now, this is a little bit tricky sometimes because if you accidentally switch to a different viewport, you might end up rendering the top or the front and you didn't actually mean to do that. I'm going to set this to specific viewport and we'll work with the perspective viewport. That usually makes the most sense for me. And I'll just collapse that view. Let's take a look at resolution and quality. So this is basically telling Rhino how big of an image we want to render and at what quality level to render with. Right now, we're using the resolution of the viewport and if I want to change that, I can click either set a custom resolution or grab one of these standard resolutions. I think our viewport dimensions are going to work just fine. We could also set specific sizes in different units as well as a resolution setting. So this is really nice, we could render out really high quality, really high resolution images if we want to. For now, I'm just going to leave this on the default of screen resolution with the viewport dimensions. We also get an option for setting the quality of the render. So we could bump this up from draft quality to good quality, to final quality, and that's going to make the renders look better. It's also going to make the renders take a lot more time. Likewise, I could drop this back down to low quality and the render will come more quickly, but objects might seem a little bit more jagged, maybe look a little bit more pixelated, so I'll just leave this on draft quality for now. Let's take a look at the background options. So by default, when we use a render display mode at any of our viewports, we'll be seeing a solid white background with a ground plane and that's what gives us these shadows underneath our objects. So we can change the color of the background just by clicking. Let's see what it looks like with blue. Let's just switch that back to white for now. I could set a gradient. So you can see there we get a little bit of a gradient from darker gray to lighter gray. We could also use a 360 degree environment map. So this is basically wrapping an image 360 degrees around the background of our objects and we can choose different environment maps. So the default is going to be the studio environment map. If I want to load in other environment maps, I can click the triangle all the way to the right of that studio option and then click this plus icon and select import from environment library. And this gives us a bunch of built-in environment maps that we could use. Now let's just try this Toronto downtown. So I'll click open and you can see my background changes. We can toggle on and off the ground plane and go into some options for our ground plane. I'll just go ahead and click cancel here, we're not really going to get too much in depth into ground plane at this point. And we also have the option of using a custom environment for reflections. So this would let us load in an additional environment that would just calculate reflections. So that would let us load in a second environment map that would show reflections on the objects, but not the background. So I'll uncheck that for now and let's just leave this on solid color so we can kind of get a better sense of some of the other settings here. So that's our background. Our lighting, we have a couple default options. We can use a simulated sun. So we can go into sun settings here, we can turn that on, we can adjust all sorts of things like the position, the location, the date, the time of year, the location on the earth. So you can really get in depth with simulated sun lighting. I'm going to cancel out of that here. We're going to focus more on studio lighting in our rendering tutorials, but just know that that's there. Now by default, we'll have a skylight, which is a 360 degree environment light. We also have the option of using a custom environment for sky lighting. So that is using an image to act as a light source. And same interface here, we could add in additional environment maps if we wanted to use those to set the lighting. I'm just going to uncheck that for now. We'll keep the skylight on and later on we'll add in some specific simulated lights. I like to keep this ambient light color on black. I find that makes it a little bit easier to control my simulated lights and we'll set some of those up in other videos. Wireframe allows us to decide what parts of our geometry we want to show in the render. So for example, we could show curves, dimensions and texts, surface edges, and isocurves. Sometimes if we toggle those on and we have them in the scene, they'll show up in the render. In our case, I'm just going to leave these all off. And last but not least we have a dithering color adjustment. So this helps us deal with things that can happen when we go from a raw render into some of the common image file types like JPEG, PNG, things like that. Sometimes what can happen is we'll get banding in the color because of the way that those compression systems work, so. The dithering is kind of a workaround for that. Usually the simple noise works best and gamma does a similar thing. So that helps us to balance brightness between what's going on in the render and the image file types that we might be importing or exporting to render with. So I usually like to leave that on the default of 2.2 and have the use linear workflow checked. Okay, so we've gone through all our settings. I think things are looking pretty good. Let's go ahead and close out of here. And I can already see a rendered view because I've got my display mode in the perspective viewport set to rendered. So that's going to give me a pretty good idea of what's going to happen in my render. We can do a full-on render under the render menu just by clicking render. And you can see we're pretty much seeing what we see in that render preview in our perspective viewport. Now some of the cool things in Rhino 6 for Mac, when it comes down to rendering, is we can do some adjustments after the fact. So we can adjust the gamma, that helps us to adjust the brightness. We can set black and white points for example. Got to scroll down here a little bit. So this lets me set the darkest and the lightest point in my image. So you can see I'm basically changing the exposure after we've done the render. I can also add post effects, things like depth of field, things like annotation, isocurves, fog, as well as make other adjustments up here in the menu bar. One of the most important steps when we're doing rendering is to save out a file. So we could save this rendering as a file type. We could save as a BMP, a JPEG, PNG, TIFF, lots of common image file type formats. So important step to remember to save out your renders as you're doing it. So overall, I can see this render is looking fairly good. I'm going to zoom in just with my middle mouse scroll wheel. One thing I'm noticing here is some of these edges, so for example, this vessel shape here, and I can see the edge of the skull, this is just blending right into the background. It is almost inseparable from the background. As someone who is a photographer, that's just bugging the heck out of me. So I want to try to fix that. And of course we could look at a lot of those rendering settings we just went through. Maybe we could do a different background color. Maybe we could use some of those environment maps. Those are perfectly good options for solving that issue. What I'm going to do here is go into my layers, I actually have a piece of backdrop geometry that I built into the file. So if I zoom out here a little bit, this is basically just a profile curve that I've extruded into a surface, and this will behave almost like a real life photo backdrop. And I think that's going to help get us better separation from the background to our objects. And let's go ahead and just adjust our view here. Maybe I'll zoom in a little bit more. Let's try to do a render one more time. Okay, so I can see that really helps out a lot on the top edge of that skull. Not so much for the edge of that vessel here. So I need to do some more work to help separate my objects from the background. Again, there's no right way to do this, rendering is very much an art, so we'll work with lighting and we'll work with some materials in other videos and that'll help to alleviate those problems. One additional thing that can be really helpful when we're rendering is to go into our viewport properties and right now I have nothing selected. So in my properties inspector, I just have the settings for the viewport. So there's this safe frame tab. This view can help us to frame our image and make sure that we're not coming too close to the edge. So actually I'll want to zoom out a little bit here, so I'll just do a couple of adjustments. So I accidentally selected that backdrop, I'll just click off to de-select that. So now you can see when we're in a perspective viewport we'll see that safe frame and that helps us to set up our image.