Vray for SketchUp — Getting Started (How to Create Your First Photorealistic Rendering).

Are you ready to get started with V-Ray for SketchUp? You've seen what V-Ray can do, so you're probably eager to jump right in and create stunning photorealistic renderings. But wait! Before you do anything, here's a warning. There's an important step in the rendering process that most self-taught V-Ray users miss. It's a huge mistake that will send you down a difficult road, and you'll burn too many hours struggling to create renderings you're not even happy with. I'm Alex Oliver, Lead Instructor at SketchUp School, the place where professionals go when they're serious about learning SketchUp. And if you want to find out what this hidden step is, and learn the five things in this step that will set you up for success in V-Ray, keep watching. V-Ray for SketchUp is an amazing extension for adding realistic lighting and materials to your SketchUp models. It comes with a host of other powerful tools that make it great for creating both photorealistic and artistic renderings that bring your design ideas to life. In our classes, we've taught more than a thousand professionals how to use V-Ray for SketchUp. More often than not, students tell us that they've tried to teach themselves V-Ray for SketchUp before our class, that they decided to take our class because they weren't happy with the renderings they were getting out of V-Ray, and that they burned too much time trying to figure out what they were doing wrong. In their enthusiasm to get started with V-Ray, it turns out that the biggest mistake they made is that they completely skipped one important step. In fact, it might even be the most important step in the rendering process, and when we cover it in our course, students quickly realize why they had originally struggled. So what is this missing step? I'll give you a hint. You do it before you even touch a single button in V-Ray. That's right, it's not part of V-Ray at all, which is why I think everybody misses it. So what do you need to do before you get started with V-Ray? You need to make sure your model is render-ready. In the first part of our V-Ray course, we walk our students through our render-ready checklist. It's a five-part checklist covering the decisions you need to get right in SketchUp first to set yourself up for success in V-Ray later. And now to get you started off on the right foot, I'm going to share that checklist with you. Ready? Okay, let's jump right in. Number one, orient your model. V-Ray is responsible for shining light into your model, and out of the box, it will render realistic sunlight into your SketchUp scene. But if you open V-Ray and you find that the sunlight isn't shining in the direction you want, you've made a costly mistake. There are two things you should have already done in SketchUp first, and failing to do them before you get to V-Ray causes problems later. The first thing you need to do in SketchUp is to figure out where the sun is, because V-Ray looks to SketchUp to tell it where the sun is. By default, the green axis is pointing north, plus or minus a few degrees, which means that the sun would lie somewhere along the red axis, plus or minus a few degrees, depending on the date and time. So early in the process of building your SketchUp model, you can be sure to orient it based off the axes. The second thing you need to do is tell SketchUp where the sun is along the east-west or red axis. To do this, turn on your shadows and use the date and time sliders to get an idea of how the light will shine across your scene. If you need to be more accurate, you can geolocate your model to an exact place in the world, and you can use the Solar North extension to show you true north before orienting your SketchUp model. Okay, moving on to number two, optimize your file. When you create a final rendering in V-Ray, you click a button to render, and then wait anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours to see the final result. But chances are, everything won't be perfect the first time you click the render button. It's more likely that you'll be rendering frequently, testing each change to the materials, lighting, and render settings as you make them. And you can't afford to wait hours each time you render. Now there are settings in V-Ray to help you minimize the time each render takes, but the root of the problem starts with an unoptimized SketchUp model. That's because not only does each render take longer, but the changes you need to make in between each render take longer too. When you're going through the render, change, render, change cycle dozens of times, it adds up. So here are a few tips for organizing your model for faster render times and faster changes in between renders. First, if you've seen our getting started with SketchUp video, you already know to make everything a group or component. Now if you haven't watched it, I put a link to the video in the cards. Next, you'll want to organize those groups and components onto layers based on what you want to hide or show. For example, you may want to hide off-camera stuff that won't show up in the final image as an easy way to speed up your rendering times. Also, you can hide on-camera details early in the rendering process just to speed up your test renders and then only turn them on at the end when you're ready to dial in the final look. Lastly, you can use layers to hide and show different design options to help you preview how each will look in the context of your realistic rendering. Moving on, number three, organize your materials. Often as you model in SketchUp, you'll be adding colors and materials along the way. Then, you might be excited to jump into V-Ray where you can add reflections and other realistic properties to those materials. But here's the problem. This process of editing your materials in V-Ray can be really time-consuming if you don't plan ahead in SketchUp. Here's why. When you're done adding those materials in SketchUp, you end up with a long list of materials to work with in V-Ray. Some materials on the list aren't actually being used in the model and others have names that aren't very helpful, so you end up wasting a lot of time trying to find the right ones to edit in V-Ray. But if you're willing to invest some time into creating a few good habits now in SketchUp, your future self will be glad you did. Here are a few things to keep in mind when working with materials. First and foremost, name every color or material that you add to your model. It's much easier later in V-Ray to scroll through a list of specific names rather than generic ones. Also, naming your materials disciplines you to use the right materials on the right surfaces. For example, if you have a wall and a metal handle and you paint them with the same generic gray, you'll have trouble later editing them as separate materials in V-Ray. Instead, you should create two different grays and name them something like gray wall paint and chrome, enabling you to differentiate them more easily later in V-Ray. That said, there are also times where you'll want to use a single material in SketchUp. Let's take the chrome example. Maybe you have a few metal surfaces in your model, and they're made of different materials in the real world, but if they all look similar enough, you could use the same chrome material on all of them. That's a huge win when you get to V-Ray, since you'll only have to edit one chrome material to make everything shiny. Once you're done adding and naming your colors and materials in SketchUp, be sure to purge any unused materials. SketchUp remembers every one that you've tried, even if you've replaced it with another option. Purging will shrink your list down to only the materials being used, and it will give you less to scroll through later in V-Ray. While we're on materials, here are two bonus tips for you. First, if you import your own image to use as a material, pay attention to the resolution. Low resolution images might make your rendering look blurry, and high resolution images could slow down your render times. Ideally, use an image with a resolution that's close to what its resolution will be in the final rendering. And second, when you don't have the right material in SketchUp, use a color as your proxy. Later in V-Ray, you can swap that color for a render-ready material out of V-Ray's library. Alright, next up, number four, add realistic details. V-Ray renders faces, not edges. That means you have to give V-Ray faces in order to get certain kinds of details to show up in your rendering. For example, take these cabinets. If you rely on SketchUp's edges to show the details, V-Ray will render them flat. You need to get in there with tools like Move or Push-Pull to give the details some depth. Even when things are supposed to butt up against each other in the real world, it can be common to see a small gap, and it's these small details that can have a big impact on your rendering. And don't forget, SketchUp creates hard corners and edges, but in the real world, things tend to be beveled or rounded. So use the Follow Me tool or the Round Corner extension to add these subtle but realistic details. Alright, the last item on our render-ready checklist. Number five, mind your polygons. Perhaps the most important thing you can do in SketchUp, the one that will have the biggest impact on the quality and speed of your rendering in V-Ray, is to optimize your level of detail. By level of detail, I mean how many faces or polygons you have in your model. To learn how to optimize your level of detail, let's quickly review some fundamental concepts. As you may already know, everything in SketchUp is made of endpoints, edges, and faces, and these faces are known as polygons. So this box is made up of six polygons, whereas this sphere is made up of a mesh of 288 polygons. They're all stitched together to give it the appearance of a curved surface. But here's the thing, this sphere could also be made of 144 polygons, or it could be made up of 3,072 polygons. But which version is ideal? When it comes to rendering the sphere in V-Ray, there's a trade-off to make. Less polygons means faster rendering. However, it can also mean lower quality. For example, the lower polysphere looks faceted in this rendering. On the other end of the spectrum, more polygons gives you higher quality, but at the expense of longer render times. What's worse is that your SketchUp model also slows down when you have too many polygons in it, which can be a problem when you're trying to edit it. The goal then is to find the middle ground, a polygon count that gives you the quality you need without needlessly slowing down your rendering. So choosing the best level of detail for this sphere is easy, right? We should pick the one in the middle. It looks good enough and has a relatively low polygon count. Well, not necessarily. It depends on the distance between the camera and the sphere. So for this shot, the middle sphere is a good choice. But what if we zoom out? It's hard to tell the difference between the quality of the three, so now the lower polysphere is probably the best choice. And what if we zoom in really close? Now we're seeing clear differences in the quality, and the highest polysphere is the right choice. But you don't render spheres for a living, so let's apply this to what you need to do. First, as we saw with the sphere, make sure to manage your polygon count based on how visible the objects will be in your final render. For example, round corners of objects closer to the camera, and maybe skip the ones that are further away. And for any object that you need to use more than once, you need to make it a component before copying it around your model. Each copy you make will still increase your polygon count, but V-Ray can render component instances, or copies of the component, much faster than groups or non-group geometry. For components you get from sites like the 3D Warehouse, be sure to comparison shop. When you're searching for a particular thing, for all the best looking options, start by trying one with fewer polygons relative to the others. Now, when you followed all the rules for managing your level of detail, but you find you still need higher poly objects to get the quality you want, just know that V-Ray has a feature called proxies that can help. V-Ray proxies allow you to turn high poly SketchUp components into lower poly proxies. That keeps your SketchUp model light, and leads to faster render times, but V-Ray will still render the higher poly version into the final image. So you can have your cake and eat it too. Proxies are a slightly more advanced feature, and not something you jump into when you're just getting started with V-Ray. But it is helpful to know about them now, just in case you have trouble keeping your polygon count low. So that's it. Congratulations on making it through all five elements of our Render Ready Checklist. Did you learn something new in today's video? If you did, do me a quick favor and give this video a like. Also, I'd love to know which element from our Render Ready Checklist you'll be using first. Do you have a model that you need to orient? Or are the materials in your model in need of some organization? Let me know by leaving a comment below right now. Also, if you'd like to download a PDF of our Render Ready Checklist, I've added a link to it in the cards. I hope that watching this video will make the path that you take to learning V-Ray for SketchUp much easier. From here, it's definitely possible to learn everything on your own. But if you don't have the time to figure out what you need to know, and you can't afford to pick up any bad habits, then I recommend you check out our video course library. It's filled with $8,700 worth of SketchUp training exclusively for professionals, including our V-Ray for SketchUp course. Head over to our SketchUp School website and try it for free. One more thing, if you want to make sure YouTube notifies you the next time we publish a video, then make sure to subscribe to our channel right now. Just click on the subscribe button below this video. Until next time, happy sketching!