10 Tips for a REALISTIC Interior Rendering

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm gonna show you some tips and tricks for interior rendering using Vray 3.4 for Sketchup. Let's get started. 1. Do your research Nothing is worse than spending hours and hours on doing a rendering and then realizing that it was a bad design. So the first thing that I usually do is to go find some inspirations to help me achieve a better concept. Here are some of the resources that I use to do my research. Houzz and Pinterest are the two sites that I use the most because they make it so easy to create your own collection or idea book. For example, to look for inspirations on Houzz, just go to the photos section and search for what you want. In this case, I'm looking for some inspirations for a home office design so I can just click here. This will search up all the home office photos and when I find one that I like, I can save that image to my idea book. Similarly, on Pinterest, you can search it and then pin it to the appropriate Pinterest board. 2. Use high quality components What often differs a good model from a bad model is the quality of 3D components. For Sketchup, there's no better place to find 3D models than the 3D Warehouse. You can download models from the website or use the 3D Warehouse tool to search it directly from Sketchup. If you take your time, you can find some amazing models on this site. Whether it be furniture, decorations, plants, or even 3D people. If you'd like to get access to these collections, follow this link to my profile and click on Collections. And if you cannot find what you want from the 3D Warehouse, you can always model your own object from inspirations like I did here in this previous video. 3. Be mindful of the scale When importing objects into your scene, be mindful of the scale because if the object is too big or too small, it can make the rendering look unrealistic. So just make sure you do tons of research to confirm that your objects are at the correct scale. You can either do this by simply doing a google search, or if you know the name of the product, like I know this lamp is made by IKEA, then I can just search it up and look for the actual dimensions. Then just go back to Sketchup and scale it to the appropriate size. It doesn't have to be exact either, but just make sure it's close enough to be realistic. 4. Use premium materials Sometimes the only difference between a boring rendering and an interesting one is the materials. In the past, I've always used any material that I can find, whether it be from Google or just some random website. But recently, I realized what a big difference it makes when using high quality materials. There are two main differences between high quality and low quality materials. The first one is resolution. The bigger the resolution, the better the material will look up close. That means that close up shots like this will look amazing. The other difference is that premium materials comes with different maps to make your materials look more realistic when rendered. I did a whole video on this, so if you have not checked it out yet, I will link it up right here. So where can you find these premium materials? Well, there's actually multiple websites out there, but one that I'm currently using is Polygon.com. They have a huge array of materials with a new collection coming out every month. It costs money of course, that's why it's called premium, but there are also free materials that you can download to try it out and see if it's worth it. I've been using Polygon for a while now, and trust me, it's definitely worth it. 5. Avoid wide angle shots It seems like a lot of people like to use wide angle shots to capture everything in their scene. It's understandable because they spend hours and hours on modeling the whole room so they want to show off everything. However, wide angle shots can often lead to a bad composition where viewers don't know what to focus on. If that's the case, consider using a tighter frame to compose your scene. For example, instead of using a landscape mode for this rendering, I've decided to use a 4 by 5 portrait mode to zoom in on a portion of the window. To do that, first open up the Asset Editor and go to the Settings tab. Now expand the Render Output and turn on Safe Frame. Then change the aspect ratio to 4 by 5 portrait mode. When you do this, make sure you pay attention to the field of view. If it's too wide, then it will get distorted and take away the realism. To fix that, go to Camera, Field of View, and you will see in the bottom right corner the current field of view. It's around 75 degree right now, which is super unrealistic. So I can easily change it by typing 4, 0, and then enter to change it to a more realistic field of view of 40 degrees. There you go, now adjust the camera until you get what you want. 6. Use camera settings Adding lights to the model is not the only way to brighten up the scene. You can also use camera settings. For example, you can see that I have multiple lights in this model, but when I start to render, it still looks pretty dark. Instead of adjusting existing lights, I'm going to use the camera settings to brighten up the image. First, expand the camera rollout and go to Exposure value. Adjusting this value will affect the camera sensitivity to a light, higher value results in a darker image, and lower value results in a brighter image. Alternatively, you can click here to go to Advanced settings, where you will see three parameters which are very similar to the settings of a real camera. The ISO or ISO measures the sensitivity of the image sensor. The shutter speed adjusts how fast the lens opens and closes, so a lower number means a slower shutter speed. The aperture determines the size of the lens opening, a smaller value means a larger aperture or opening. If that's too complicated for you, just remember this, a higher value here results in a brighter image, but a higher value here and here will darken the image. For example, this is the default setting of the camera. I'm going to keep the ISO number the same and only decrease the aperture and shutter speed for a brighter rendering. There we go, that's better. 7. Use Render Elements Before you render, I recommend adding some render elements to your final output. You can do that by first going to the settings tab, click on this arrow to open up the advanced options. Now expand the render elements rollout, click on this box and search for denoiser. A denoiser render element will help reduce noise in your rendering. You can control the strength and radius using these presets here. Keep in mind that if the denoiser is too strong, you might start to lose details in your rendering similar to this. Another element that I'm going to add is the material ID. This is a very useful image that serves as a selection tool which will help speed up your process in post production. Once you've added all your elements, start the render and when it's finished, you can view all the render elements with this drop down box here. And now since we have the Vray Fan Buffer window open, this takes me to number 8. 8. Use VFB Window to Edit For those of you who do not have Photoshop or other image editing software, you can use the VFB window to edit your image. Just click this button here to bring up the correction controls. There you will see a number of settings that you can use. I will start with the exposure settings and adjust the sliders to make the image a little brighter. Then I'm going to use the color balance to add more of a blue tint to the image to give it more personality. There you go, looks pretty sweet huh? If you want to save these settings as a preset for later use, you can save it by clicking this globals button and click save. Similarly, you can load this preset later using this button as well. 9. Use Depth of Field For a detailed shot of your scene, consider using Depth of Field. To do that, first open up the asset editor, and go to the settings tab. Now in the render output, I'm going to change my aspect ratio to a 16 by 9 widescreen. Since we are going to do a test render first, I'm going to reduce my resolution to 800 by 450 and set the quality to medium. Then I'll turn on the depth of field and click here to see more options. Now click on pick focal point and choose a spot in your scene that you want the camera to focus on. Then you can just adjust the blurriness using the defocus slider here. As you can see, the spot I picked is in focus while everything else is blurry. You can also test this with multiple angles in your scene. There we go, that's pretty good. Once you're happy with the result, you can increase the resolution, turn off the interactive mode, and produce a final render. Depth of field is not always necessary, but it can be an artistic shot that's a great addition to your sets of pictures. 10. Use Nik Collection in Photoshop If you use Photoshop for post production, consider using Nik Collection. I've mentioned this before in a previous video, but I'm going to mention it again because it's such an amazing plugin, plus it's free, so I'll leave the link in the description box below. Before I use the Nik Collection plugin, I'm going to do some small edits in Photoshop first. Let's open up our raw render in Photoshop. I'm going to use the denoiser channel as my base and I'll also import the material ID as well. Now I'm going to add a background image outside my window, so the first thing I'm going to do is make sure the material ID is selected. Then I'm going to use a magic wand tool to make a selection around this window. Now switch back to the base image, hold down Alt and left click here to mask away the window to make it transparent. Now we can import a background image and place it below our base layer. Then I'm going to make some quick adjustments to make the background a little more faded and not too prominent. After that's done, I'm going to select the top visible layer and press Ctrl Alt Shift E to flatten all these layers into a new image. Now we are ready to edit this using the Nik Collection. So just go to Filter, Nik Collection, and you can see that there's a lot of different plugins, but I'm going to use this Color FX Pro 4. On the left side, you will see a list of presets or effects that you can use to stylize your image. You can also use this slider to compare the before and after. I think I will use this Reflector FX preset. On the right side, I'm going to change the method to Soft Gold for a different look. Now press OK. There we go, pretty sweet huh? If the change is too much, you can always adjust it by decreasing the opacity of the layer. Also, you can add more than one effect, so I'm going to add this Classical Soft Focus preset and adjust the strength directly inside Nik Collection. Awesome. Now let's compare the final product with our original rendering. First, I'm going to hold down Alt and drag this original image to duplicate it and place it at the bottom of the layers. Then I can select all of the other layers and press Ctrl G to group them up. Now I can compare the before and after image by clicking on this eye here. There we go, that's a super fast way to edit photos in Photoshop using Nik Collection. And those are all the tips for a realistic interior rendering using Sketchup and Vray. If you're looking for a similar tutorial for 3ds Max, I would suggest you take a look at this course on Skillshare.com who is also the sponsor of today's video. Skillshare is a learning community with over 17,000 classes in design, photography, and more. The Premium Membership will get you unlimited access for less than $10 per month. As part of this sponsorship, Skillshare has set up a 2 month free trial for the first 100 people who sign up using this link so you can watch all of their courses completely for free. If that's something you're interested in, then go to this link here. I will also leave a link to a few courses that I'm currently taking. One of them is the Create Photorealistic Interior Renders with 3ds Max and Vray and the other one is Architectural Visualizations Fundamentals. Both of these courses will show you a step by step tutorial from modeling your scene to rendering and editing in post-production with Photoshop. And that's all for today guys, if you want to get this model to learn more about my process or simply want to support my channel, then follow this link here to download it. Thanks so much for 21,000 subscribers, leave a like if you enjoyed that video and comment below what I should do next. Stay inspired guys, and I'll see you next time.