Rendering Pro - Karam Baki Shows How to Make a Photo-Real Rendering

While studying architectural engineering at the University of Jordan (JU), Karam Baki also works as a freelancer, creating a lot of projects for the university and for various other clients.

This week, Baki will walk us through his process for developing his “Golden Mixed Use” project for the university. The project site is located in Amman, Jordan and uses the golden ratio (1.618) as a main generator of the design.

“Rendering in cloud was very helpful even in the very early phases of the project,” Baki states. “Usually we start a project with a mass, and here, we were able to render each mass transformation in the cloud very quickly and efficiently, within the site’s surrounding area. Without using the speed of the cloud rendering, the progress of the design process would’ve been very slow.”

So how does Baki achieve those impressive rendering results?  Here’s his step-by-step guide:
1. Always choose the correct sun setting. If you want to render a morning shot, make sure your sun is set at morning time.  Want to render at sunset—set your sun accordingly. These are the most important settings to use when rendering in the cloud—other option like “light scheme, background…..etc”, don’t have as much impact on cloud renderings.

2. Check your procedure.  For a typical cloud rendering, you should check all of the following items:

- Materials

- Sun Settings

- Realistic Visual Style Test

- Raytrace Test

- Cloud Test

- Cloud Final

- Exposure Adjust

Here’s how you ensure each item on the list is completed efficiently.

Materials

Materials in Revit are very powerful, though it takes some time to get a full understanding how they work.

Here’s a quick tree I’ve built to explain how materials are made up in Revit:

As the image shows, materials are one of the most important elements in a rendering.

Make sure that each and every material you use in your project has reflectivity. If it does not have reflectivity, you should enable it (in real life everything reflects, even painted walls, so you need this feature to give your materials a realistic look).

Additionally, always try to:

1. Always try to increase glossiness, bump maps, etc. but don’t overdo it—use a critical eye.
2. Organized your materials. For example, give each material a suffix , organize each asset you add with the same naming system.

Sun Settings

As mentioned before, sun settings are the most important settings for rendering in cloud.

Take note that sun settings are view-specific. Try to choose a time of day that will case the most attractive shadows on your building.

Tips :

-Make sure your location is correct

-Try using single day mode to toggle quickly between the shadow casting mode on your Building, and then chose the best still time.

Realistic Visual Style Test

This test is required to make sure that the scale of your material images is correct. Usually 75% of materials in Revit have incorrect scale.

To scale/style test:

1. Change the visual style to realistic to check the scale of the applied materials after you’ve placed your camera to take a shot and render it.
2. If you see that something is off, go and fix its assets image scale through the appearance of the material.

Quick Tip:

When positioning the camera, try to make the eye elevation from properties at 1.8 as a human eye view, not a monkey eye view from above.

When it’s done and all the scales of the material in the shot are correct, move on to the next step.         

Ray Trace Test

This test is excellent to check whether your sun settings are correct and your materials “colors, properties, scaling, etc” are ok.

1. To enable ray trace, change the visual style to ray trace.
2. Wait for it to render the temporary shot.
3. Now go for graphic display options, and from here you can change the sun settings if you don’t like what you had before, or you can change the photographic exposure as well.
4. When you are satisfied, change the visual style back to ray trace mode.
   
   Quick Tip: You can change the lighting scheme from the graphic display dialog, and use exterior/interior artificial lights to test the behavior of night shots.

Cloud Test and Final Rendering

Now that you have all your settings in order, it’s time to take the move!

1. Click on ‘render in cloud’ button from the view tab.
2. Choose the weakest settings in the pop-up window:

3. Always choose native exposure (if you have your sun settings right), since it looks at your sun settings and applies them to the cloud (you can choose advanced exposure if you didn’t set your sun settings, or were in a rush).

4. Start the test rendering.

5. Finally, go to the rendering gallery and login to your ‘My Renderings’ portal.

6. Select your rendering from the list and choose ‘re-render using new settings’:

7. Change the settings to final:
Morning Shots:
Quality: Final
Image size: Select the size you need
Exposure:  Native
Environment: Choose one that suits your rendering
Output Format: Png is recommended with alpha for post editing, otherwise, use JPEG

                       Night or Sunset Shots:
Quality: Final
Image size: Select the size you need
Exposure: Native
Environment: NONE
Output Format: Png is recommended with alpha for post editing, otherwise, use JPEG

Exposure Adjustments

After you’ve rendered, if the exposure is still not to your liking, you can tweak it until you’re satisfied.

1. Using the “Adjust Exposure” option, play with the sliders until you get the optimal lighting.

1. Hit ‘done’ and wait while it re-renders with the new exposure settings.
2. Download the image and you’re DONE !

Quick Tip:

Sometimes rendered night shots may display as a black screen. Simply adjust the exposure value to correct this behavior.

Final tips:

1. If your shot has a lot of details, you can skip using an environment. If your shot doesn’t have a lot of details, then using an environment can be a life-saver.
2. Never ignore exposure adjustments.
3. Keep your materials simple and not too-perfect (they’ll look more real that way).
4. Try to make your overall image as neat and clean as possible.
5. Using a good camera position is important and will hugely effect the final output.

And...the Results! The final exterior rendering of the Golden Mixed Use project.  Click the image for more photos and panoramas of the site.

 

Comments

[Aradhana]

Excellent blog, Karam. Great tips for our rendering users.

[Nour Mustafa]

Thanks Karam Baki , its very useful tips as always .. keep up the good work