From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

Render elements explained

From the course: SketchUp: Rendering with V-Ray Next

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Render elements explained

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- [Narrator] Oftentimes the projects that we are working on will use a pipeline that relies quite heavily on post production applications in order to bring together or composite a number of elements into a finished graphic or video sequence. In V-Ray for SketchUp it will be the render elements functionality that gives us the ability to output the pieces that can be used in just such a workflow. In this first video for the chapter then, we're going to spend a few minutes discussing just what render elements are. Before moving on to taking a look at how we go about using them in V-Ray Next for SketchUp. Simply put then, render elements give us the ability to quite literally split apart the various aspects of a rendered image or images. Breaking them down into their component parts, as it were. So imagine a painter for instance, being able to take apart a finished piece of work and separate out each of the elements that have made the painting what it is. So color choices, brush strokes and lighting for instance. Revisiting those with a view to editing and tweaking them, just that little bit more. Well, in a rendered image, this kind of control can be accomplished by gaining access to material properties such as diffuse color, reflections, refractions and so on. As well as to more general scene elements that are contributing to the look of the image. Such as direct and indirect lighting. We can even in V-Ray for SketchUp, generate data on the elements such as masks or mats, z or ZDepth and ambient occlusion passes as well as material and object ID passes that can help with the compositing phase. Once we have all of these components at our disposal, we can of course do pretty much anything that we want with them. Assuming we have had the foresight to render to floating point files that is. So we can composite them in a way that simply recreates the original render as it came out of V-Ray or we can also at the other end of the scale, use these elements to drastically alter pretty much every aspect of the shot that we've rendered. Imagine for instance that after rendering for quite a few hours or in some cases maybe even days, we realize that we really need to globally increase or decrease the strength of reflections in our scene, as well as perhaps alter the mood of the piece by changing the lighting. Well, with the right render elements to hand we can do all of that and much more. All without having to go back into our 3D package and perform more costly and time consuming offline rendering. This flexibility combined with the overall speed that the process brings is what makes compositing such a valuable part of the modern production pipeline.

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