 Hi everyone, thanks everyone for coming, thanks for those of you who are waiting for the wardrobe for coming. My name is Lech and I am the guy who created the Chocoford.com website where we try to help people doing the architectural visualization and let's say design in general to have it easier to do with Blender. So what you can see right now is my course coming out in December 2018 which I want to apologize for almost one year delay in preparation of this course. Yeah, it took me much more time than I thought it's going to take but I think I'm pretty proud of how it came out and in case you would like to ask us any questions about the course or about the Chocoford or if you're one of our clients maybe you can approach me or my team. If you want to hate us for anything just please do it for like focus on them and if you want to thank us just come to me. And yeah, so what I would like to share today since it's a little bit more open environment I was thinking about sharing three tips. I could give anyone when it comes to architectural visualization. So how to maybe not necessarily make better renderings but how to optimize your work a little bit more or I would I can also say these are the three principles I'm always kind of using in my works when we are working with the clients and customers. So let me just share a few more things that we've done so all of the works you can see right now they were created in Blender and Cycles. What can I say? I mean I think it's possible to create a high quality work in totally free and open source software which wasn't a case some time ago. I think it was already possible many years ago but it wasn't like you don't always have the opportunity to show what Blender is capable of but what we are trying to do, what we are striving to do for the past few years is to convince our clients, convince our business partners that we don't have to stick to the commercial 3D apps and we can use Blender for at least for doing the architectural interior stuff what we are focusing on mostly right now but we also want to move to the exteriors. Hopefully next year I'll be able to share more on that but now let's just jump into those three tips I would like to share. So I have prepared this simple scene and my presentation will be a live work so in case anything crashes like last year or something doesn't work we'll try to do the damage control. So I have created this very simple scene and one of the things I would say that's the most important thing when you work on the architectural visualization are the glass materials especially the glass materials that you put into the window openings. In every almost every interior scene you're gonna have an exterior light source and in most cases as we can see you have a glass in the window openings. So I have prepared this simple world setup here but let's just ignore it for a moment I will get back to what's happening here. As it works the default way this set of works is just what you would have when plugging in a regular HDR map and yeah let me just go on and do it as I would do normally so in order to create a glass panel I would simply start with a cube just scale it like that so it has some physical thickness then just adjust it to the opening sometimes I'm just pressing CTRL A to apply the scale to the object and we begin with creating the glass material. So if you're new to Blender and you're watching some tutorials the tips you will probably get is setting up the transmission to one color to 100% white reducing the roughness here and just hitting the render button and here's your glass but what you've probably noticed we've lost the shadows that were caused by the HDR map. If I hide the glass panels the shadows are visible again so that's very confusing to a lot of people because well I've created a glass material where are my shadows why isn't it working out of the box as the principle BSDF shader should work. Well in 3D graphics I would say glass is actually one of the most tricky materials to recreate correctly because it really depends the approach you should have to the glass it really depends on how you're gonna use it what kind of object you're trying to recreate so with window openings I would call it and some of the rendering engines have this type of shader I would call this material a thin glass and a thin glass material doesn't necessarily represent the IOR settings that you have here because what happens quite often in Blender maybe I will actually show it so let's say you set up your background view in the 3D viewport then you add a glass panel you set up the IOR settings as someone on the forum recommended you to do for the glass but then when you render it you can see the view behind the window distorts or shifts or moves around and this is what the IOR setting does but when you compare the results to the real-life windows this effect is barely noticeable so yeah how should we approach the glass so a little bit more advanced users will tell you well man you just have to add the shader glass reconnect it of course reduce the roughness let's leave the IOR as 1.3 and you need to do this trick with a mixed shader transparency and now it's the most advanced part which is the light path node so you should connect it as a shadow ray input here and voila you have your glass material but I wouldn't call it incorrect solution because it does the job done but from my experience that there is much more optimized and better working solution which can cut your render times even by 40% and this is something I'm sharing in the course which I just want to show you here so this is the scene we are working on in the course and what you see right now is a default result with a glass shader created the way I just showed you in the node setup and this is how it looks like the way I'm doing it it's not a black magic or anything I will just show you in a second but in my opinion the left hand result is much better because it gives you this more natural brightness and when I was preparing the course as you can read down below here the original render time for this frame was 27 minutes 30 seconds and with the glass optimization it was cut down to 16 minutes 30 seconds so it's almost a 40% improvement and I would say yeah if I was to give a one tip on how to what should I do to make my interior or architectural visualization workflow better in blender I would single-handedly say do apply this one trick because it will save you a lot of time in all of the projects so as I said this setup is not incorrect it does the job but what not everyone is aware of here within the object settings in cycles we have the visibility settings and here we also have quite similar things as in the light path node the difference is if we disable them here they work on the object level of the glass panel and not on the shader level that means if we let's say disable this object to all those light or ray visibility settings cycles will treat it as it's hidden so it's basically works as I press H here in the viewport but just for the diffuse transmission and let's say shadow passes so the difference we have is not that big and with HDR usually you just get 15 to 20 percent better render times but with more complex setup as we have here in my course where we have the like the normal environment emission in the background plus the area lamps plus the sun lamp that which causes those shadows here on the left the render times can be improved even up to 40 percent so I would say that's the first and most important tip I would give anyone actually for a thin glass shader like the one we use here in the window this is something I'm not saying is necessary but instead of using the glass BSDF and the light path I'm personally in some projects going even further and using the normal glossy BSDF with reduced roughness let's say point zero one and I just try to recreate the Fresnel effect by the way if you're beginner to this kind of stuff I'm sorry but this year I wanted to show a little bit more advanced things so yeah if you have any questions we'll have time to answer them and you can also approach us and ask whatever you want like what's my who's my favorite Formula One driver and what's my video game and so on so yeah actually it should work I don't know why it's so reflective right now we go back so the opening we see here is the second window just just to show you what's happening we have two openings but I will now try to totally reduce those reflections like this right thanks exactly so now with this curve I'm able I don't know if you're able to see it on the beamer but let's say here within this area we are getting this pretty realistic light highlight reflection within the window which wasn't even visible in the default principle BSDF shader and with just with just this one knob we are able to increase the reflections in the glass because again if you look at those let's call them thin thin glass elements in reality you only see the reflections the glass has you don't see any glass distortion as in the glass of water so and since these are the like usually quite big areas of your rendering letting the light into the interior scene I would say that's a yeah pretty important thing to keep an eye on again I'm not saying this is the way you should do the thin glass shader this is the way I quite often do it because even if I increase the reflections this high with those settings disabled here this doesn't affect the illumination in my scene at all so of course it's not physically correct but sometimes you're just looking for this one particular look let's say you're trying to recreate from a photo and for some reason it looks like this in the photo and yeah with just the traditional kind of let's call it physical approach you won't be able to achieve that so yeah let me just leave this shader as it is right now and I'm gonna move to the second tip which is this beginner's only note set up for the world what it actually does and I know it looks complex but it's it's not and to make it a little bit more approachable to make it a bit more approachable we want to release a free add-in that will just pack all of those lines into a very neat solution where you can just play around with the sliders but let me show you a rendering output this is a default rendering output from the scene I am just showing you so we have an HDR map which is correctly done as it costs this nice sharp light and sharp shadows but I don't know about you what I don't like about the HDR illumination is that it usually in Blender generates those very dark diffuse illumination within the interior so you can try to fight with it fix it with the color the color management settings here but what I also found interesting you can actually adjust the HDR map within the Blender itself so here I'm trying to this is this is the result showing you how it would look like with when I double the HDR map strength the emission strength but this is how it looks like when I if I could double the diffuse illumination only within the scene so that's the difference I'm not increasing the strength of the HDR map at all I'm just increasing the strength of the diffuse bounces this is how it looks like if I could desaturate the diffuse bounces so we are getting rid of this bluish tint which is obviously not when we look behind the window right we don't see that much of the blue color as we see in the diffuse bounces here so it would be cool if we could desaturate them so this is what's happening in this image here I'm increasing the diffuse bounces even more so with the same exact render time with the same exact HDR image we are able to have this picture instead of this one so it's what this setup does and I just want to show you how it's done I mean I'm gonna recreate some of those settings here but let me just demonstrate how it works in real life so the render times I hope from what I tested we are gonna go with the 30% resolution so it's gonna be around one minute yeah let's just render the default view we have right now so we have a point of reference and if you want to ask any questions in the meantime feel free to do it if not we are gonna sit here in dead air and wait and not to keep you hanging the third tip already I will point say what I'm gonna show it's it will be how I'm extracting some of the render passes from blender and then combining them later in Photoshop the things that I'm showing you right now this is also part of the course actually the HDR setup is a part of the advanced chapter of the course but yeah just letting you know this is something I just want to share totally for free as well so this is a default input we have right here and as I mentioned I mean maybe let's look at it for a moment I will tell you my approach if I'm working on a project like this so looking at that image I can already tell I would like to have much more brightness within the scene itself not just in the center area I can try doing this just by increasing the gamma settings here in the color management so let's set it to 2.2 as some people say it's a standard for this kind of setup and let's maybe try playing around with contrast so it doesn't look bad but one thing I've noticed when illuminating scenes with HDR maps is in the highlight areas here for example we are getting you can see the tone difference right and normally when you look outside probably from the physical point of view or physical approach the values the brightness we have represented here is totally related to the sky brightness but from my experience when you do renderings it looks much better when the highlights are a little bit brighter and a little bit more desaturated than we have here because you can see this area has this bluish tint as well so how we can fix that well in my setup we are able to play around with the glossy value and glossy saturation so let's decrease the saturation by 50% and let's increase the glossy value by 2 so you can already see within this area those highlight or let's call it the old school way the specular reflections they look much better as in the previous example perhaps they are too bright so let's set them up to those values and let's re-render this image again so we have a clear comparison of what changed or to save you from dead air we can stare at this set up once more actually I can add a few two cents as you can see I have two image inputs and what I'm testing out here because it's still in a test phase is having a separate HDR input for the sky and a separate input for the reflections a background and so on because and I'll be honest some people keep this as a golden rule that you should always illuminate the scene illuminate the scenes with the sky only because the ground the grass and all those elements don't cast any light so they shouldn't contribute to the scene I already did at least 10 HDR setup tests with this separated and with just this input and the differences are sometimes very minor so I'm still not sure if I'm doing something incorrectly here or if it really doesn't matter that much but getting back here now when we compare those two results let me just see if it's visible yeah it is visible so I don't know about you but I like the second one more and I'm just gonna stick to it but honestly I think it really looks better usually when you look around if we took a picture of something the actual picture which captures physical light would probably have this bluish tint as well but the way we perceive things with our eyes simplify a lot of things so I think this this version looks a little bit more natural but let's keep going let's say I would like to increase this nice caustic effect that happens here so I can also do that within this setup by increasing the transmission value so let's launch a live preview again let's focus on this area and let's increase those values by four for example so you can now see we get this nice brightness here it also cover it takes some of the color tint with itself and we can also desaturate it here so to save us a little bit more time on rendering I'm gonna apply all of the other fixes so yeah the most important one I was talking about is the diffuse brightness so if we move up here we have the diffuser value which is separated from the entire setup let's increase it by three and you can now see the scene becomes brighter without changing any of the other settings so if we if we did that just by increasing the general strength of the HDR input it will affect everything with the same level so the reflections the light beam here on the ground would also increase then we would have to play around with those settings and the final output would be more or less the same that's why we need to be able to separate those properties of an image from each other and fine-tune them independently so yeah let's keep the diffuse as three let's desaturate the diffuse bounces so you can now see they got a little bit they lost a little bit of this bluish tint and what I also think is really missing in blender right now maybe in the within the color management maybe within the compositor I'm not arguing on which level is something that we have in almost every camera which is a color balance so it will be nice to influence a general temperature of the image because we can we can capture a picture on a sunny day but with a different color balance the final output will be very cold and totally not related to the actual lighting conditions I don't say it's a good thing to capture it in with an incorrect white balance but it would be good to be able to adjust it so within just a few clicks I'm able to change the general temperature or general look and feel of the image so let's set it up to something neutral like 5,500 and let's do the third rendering so we can compare this starting result with the end result so I think before it finishes we can already start noticing the difference right that we've lost this bluish tint I don't know if someone likes it I'm not criticizing but usually you would like to in architectural visualizations you would like to keep the colors more neutral and balanced so yeah just using the one and the same HDR map I think we are getting much more natural results much cleaner results here we could also play around with the background image a little bit in this setup but yeah I'm not gonna show you that but let me just focus on how it's actually done a little a little bit more and as I mentioned at the very beginning it really is it's not a rocket science so I will just copy this base HDR map and the background emission and come back to our view here so right now again we have this very default setup here and for example I would like to influence the background view of this of this rendering so to do that I'm gonna need a mix shader another background shader which is plugged in which which has my HDR image plugged in here and I'm calm I can just add the hue saturation node here then I'm combining these two and using the light path node to define what's gonna be influenced by this setup I have here so if I set it up to the camera ray by the way now I'm gonna just see this is the camera ray is it or not sometimes you need to hide those glass elements and because the yeah okay that was a camera I just hide the glass panel because sometimes you have to use the transmission ray since the light has to go through the transmissive element first but anyway right now with this very simple setup I'm able to totally desaturate the background increase its strength and change the hue so step by step just with the light path node that I have here that I also have here in the center of the setup I'm able to extract each one of the rendering properties and edit them independently and I would say if you want to have more natural illumination in your scene this is something you have to do you don't have to create this enormous enormous setup that I've did as I mentioned we want to pack it into a nice add-on so you can just play around with the sliders but sometimes if something doesn't work in your rendering and you would you're wondering how to fix that yeah you can just do it using this simple setup here so for example if I just change the input to the diffuse ray now you can see all those walls got much brighter because this setup that I have here now only influences the light that bounces around the scene so it's also interesting you can change the hue of that you can actually do many crazy things with it so yeah I would say that's the second to the glass tip I would give anyone who'd like to quickly improve their architectural visualization looks the third tip that saves probably the most time is the post-production post-processing so I'm gonna create a new blender file for that go to the compositor and that's also I think I I would say it's worth knowing that when you render an image in blender you're you you don't have to lose it once you close blender if you save it if you save it way I think I need to do any kind of rendering here if you save it as the open XR multi-layer file format or maybe not necessarily multi-layer if you're not saving the render passes but when we go here and at least choose the open XR file format this will save all of your rendering outputs to the file so you can then load them back into blender again if you want to keep on working with them let's say the next day or something if you want to include the render passes that can be selected here so again I'm not gonna dig into all of that right now but if you want to save any of those and keep on working with them in blender later just choose the open XR multi-layer file format here and everything will be saved to the file so you want to lose your rendering progress or anything so I'm gonna show you right now just another tip how I'm using some of the render render passes render pass outputs to edit or to improve the final look of my rendering I'm just gonna add an image and open my XR file and by the way I'm I'm not the biggest fan of the blender compositor so forgive me for not using any node wranglers or the add-ons I'm just always trying to extract what I need from it and keep on moving with the post-production in external applications like Photoshop or GIMP I'm gonna show it how I'm doing it in Photoshop so yeah as you can see what I have here right now is the raw output of rendered scene that I had which I can now come back to and edit and the render passes I would say are at least for me are the most important ones are the shadow pass which looks like this ambient occlusion pass which looks like that and the glossy direct and indirect passes I've included the other passes just to show you how many you can you can have so but I would say I'm all 90% of the time and I'm sticking to those four that I've just mentioned the other passes they that I also include are the cryptomet passes which allow me to separate individual elements I would like to save so let's say we are gonna focus on the shadow pass and it's very useful for increasing or improving the shadows in the final rendering except you need to get rid of those block black areas so in order to do that we have to use the cryptomet node and we can just plug in either the material inputs or the object inputs I think actually the material would work better for us so let's do it and you don't necessarily have to plug all those in I'm just doing it because I'm I don't know I'm weird so anyway right now once we set this all up we're able to generate this selection input mask and with those two buttons here we are able to add things to our selection so let me duplicate the viewer node just to preview the shadow pass once again so I can clearly see I need to get rid of this area and this area and some of the other usually these are just the glass areas so I'm gonna start clicking I'm gonna click this add button here and start adding each one of them to my selection and right now when I choose the matte output here and plugging in to the viewer node I can see my selection mask so I can now switch between these two just to see what else am I missing so it's definitely the oven area here and the lamps I'm gonna reconnect the pick input again here click the add button and start adding those missing objects and if I press the V all the V key I can zoom in with alt and middle mouse button I can pan this backdrop view so step-by-step I'm adding those items and now I can see that my mask is probably complete so right now I need to combine this shadow pass with the mask I've created and the way I'm doing it and this is this is where I'm getting lost every single time so forgive me it's not alpha over it's combine actually I don't have to do it this way I can actually just plug in the met input to the alpha here so you can see we still need to invert it and to do this I'm gonna use just the color invert node which if I plug it in here it adds the transparency to my shadow pass so I can just double check if there are no black areas within it there aren't the way I'm saving those passes I usually do it manually if I hand hand pick the areas or hand mask out the areas of a render pass then I'm saving it manually you can also save all of the render passes automatically to the files if you have if you want to but yeah I'm usually doing it manually so here within the rendering view I just switch to the viewer node and right now I'm able to save it as a separate file so I just choose save as I usually go with just the PNG 16 bit format with alpha channel and since I already did that to save you time with the other render passes I'm just gonna show you how they look like so this is the ambient occlusion pass with the same areas mask out this is the glossy direct pass with the glass panels only masked out this this is the glossy indirect pass which I'm using to increase the reflections of some of the elements and and yeah and this is the shadow pass that I just showed you and this is the raw rendering so let's now see how far we can push the raw rendering using those four render passes and by the way what I'm gonna do in Photoshop right now can be also done in blender but in my opinion it's a really painful way through so I just from the practical approach I just prefer to do it quicker in Photoshop so yeah I'm gonna just start with the shadow pass I will drag and drop it resturize the layer and the mixed mode I'm using for ambient occlusion and shadow passes is the soft light so once I do this let me switch to the so it's a bit more visible so just by the by default you can already see the difference we are getting some of the elements become more visible let's say this kitchen sink or faucet here sorry and I'm very rarely using those render passes at 100% opacity so usually I just go down to 50 40% not to overdo the effects and I'm just leaving them like that then I keep on adding the other elements and in the end I'm fine tuning everything all together so with the ambient occlusion pass I can already tell it's a little bit too dark but let me switch to the soft light anyway yeah and if with 100% opacity it darkens my image to this level I will just use the curves I'm pressing CTRL M shortcut and I'm just gonna make this render pass a little bit brighter so with this applied again I'm decreasing the opacity by 40 by 60 50% and I'm just hiding and hiding the layers just to see if it works or not the thing is very subjective so I wouldn't say there is any like fixed rule which percentages of opacity should you use or not it really it's really very subjective with the reflection passes like the glossy direct pass that I've just imported I'm using the screen blending method so once I add it you can also see we are getting those nice reflections here in the highlights and this pass is limited to those highlight areas only I would say from all the passes I think this one is the most important one because for some reason the 3d applications I think they don't represent the highlight areas as we see them in real life so if it's possible to boost them I'm always trying to do that and the final pass is the glossy indirect pass again I'm gonna use the screen blend mode for that here I'm gonna go much lower with the opacity so we don't add that many reflections to those glass surfaces and again as with the ambient occlusion I'm also able to play around with the brightness of this render pass so if I think this let's say area is cut out or it it brings too many reflections I can just simply adjust it with just a few clicks so after packing those all those render passes into one group when I enable and disable all of them we can see they influence our rendering quite a lot maybe we have a little bit too many highlights but yeah in order to have this effect from a raw rendering directly I think we would need to spend extra a few hours readjusting things setting up the materials re-rendering etc and with with just those few clicks and by extracting the render passes from the raw rendering we are able to do it much we are able to do it much quickly and not mentioning the the freedom of adjustments we have right now so again I'm gonna go back to the beginning of my presentation so these are the three tips I would give to anyone who would like to quickly let's say jump to a higher level with their architectural stuff so the first thing would be those glass settings that I mentioned that can cut your render times by 40-20% and make your scenes much more believable second tip will be adjusting the HDR map so spending a few more minutes sorry I closed the scene sorry spending a few more minutes with trying to adjust the the individual properties of the HDR illumination and the third tip would be saving the render passes individual render passes from your rendering and trying to combine them of course this doesn't have to be done to to every single rendering that you're producing right if you're doing some previews for your client and so on you can just go on with even with the jpeg file file outputs to save time and to save disk space if that's your problem but if you're creating a finalized image if you have to deliver the highest quality I would say this is the way to go at least with the post-production so saving the files as the open xr file format to be able to come back to them later in blender to readjust the highlights the tones the way you want to and to be able to extract all those render passes so let me just actually finalize this picture I'm going to open my second Photoshop file which is also included in the course and I'm just gonna drag and drop the color correction layers and by the way how to set these two up you can actually check on our youtube channel because I'm also trying to be active on youtube my previous video make your blender renders look better this is where I show how you can just do how you can do the color grading and post processing in Photoshop without any render passes so in the end you should be able to create those two pretty easy color adjustment layers actually it's just these are actually just the curves that increase the contrast of an image a little bit and the color balance that shift the tones a little bit more to the green spectrum I don't yeah I think it's not even visible on the screen so let's just open the image and one more time compare the end result with with the raw rendering so I think at least I think the the end result is much better and we did this without any extra rendering or 3d adjusting effort but what's really great about blender we are maybe this is just a side note because oftentimes people say blender is not ready for professional work in my opinion if you're able to extract all this raw information from a rendering and keep on working with that later and adjust it to me that's a one of the things that define a totally professionally ready application so if you're ever wondering should you switch to blender or should you use blender for architectural stuff or professional work in general not only architectural things my answer is yes because I'm doing this since 2012 and for the past five years I would say 99.5 percent percent of the projects that we did as a company was blender only projects and these were architectural related jobs so don't give up you probably might have a question what happens if a client sends me the 3ds max files or cinema for d files and I work with blender you just ask them for obj's this is what we do or for the alembic file format because it also saves quite a lot of scene properties so you don't have to rework things yourself and yeah and you just keep going and don't give up and you're going to be able to do it with blender so thank you for listening I really hope it was informative to a certain level and if you have any questions feel free to ask if you want to talk to us again I'm together with my team so we'll be glad to answer any questions that you'd have thank you