7 Beginner Mistakes Interior Rendering

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations that I'm going to show you some common mistakes that beginners make when using Vray and Sketchup. Let's get started. Mistake 1. Textures at the wrong scale When applying materials to your objects, it's important to apply the texture at the right scale. The textures being too small or too big can make your render look unrealistic. Here you can see that the flooring texture is too small. To know the typical dimension of a specific material, you can search for it online like so. Or you can reference real-life material around you. To fix it, just go to the Sketchup Material Editor and use the Sample tool to pick the material. Now we can go to the Edit tab and increase the dimensions of that material here. Let's zoom out and measure the width of the wood plank using the Tape Measure tool again. It's around 7 inches now, so that's more realistic. In this case, this scene was modeled after a real project and in the original photo, the planks of the wood flooring seem to be pretty wide, so I will make it a little bigger. There we go, that looks good. Mistake 2. Models are too perfect Perfection is not always a good thing. In the real world, it's rare to see an object perfectly clean or a room perfectly organized. However, in computer graphics, we get the straight lines and clean objects by default, so when your render is too perfect, people will definitely know that it's a 3D model. That is why it's a good idea to add some round corners to the edges of your objects and when decorating a scene, give the objects a little twist and turn and move it slightly so that they're not perfectly aligned. For example, I usually like to rotate and flip similar components such as these chairs here. Sometimes I like to go even further, like adding some hardware to these drawers just so I can pull them out and make it look even more interesting. As you can see, this method will give the scene more personality, making it more realistic. For a more detailed tutorial on these topics, I recommend this video on 3 tips to increase photorealism. Mistake 3. Bad Composition Even when you have a good model, but if you don't set up the camera correctly, then your render can still look bad. So here are a couple of tips to improve your composition. One is to adjust the field of view so that it's not too wide or too narrow. If the field of view is too wide, then it will look distorted. To adjust the field of view, press Z for the zoom tool and you will see in the bottom right corner the current field of view. It's around 75 degree right now, so I can change it by typing 5, 0, then enter to change it to a more realistic field of view of 50 degrees. Now I can left click and drag down to zoom out a bit, and make sure you save the view after you make changes. Here is the comparison between the two views, you can see the second one looks a lot more realistic. Another tip is to use 2 point perspective so that the camera is not tilted. Sometimes I see people tilt the camera slightly up or down like so. When you do this, the vertical lines will become slanted which is not great for the composition. So to make it look better, go to Camera and select 2 point perspective. This will fix the slanted verticals and make your composition look a lot better. However, sometimes it's okay to have slanted vertical lines. For example, if you're doing a view from the top like this, then I actually recommend you to NOT use 2 point perspective. Note that you can try different aspect ratios too. For example, here I have a scene with a landscape aspect ratio at 35 degree field of view. But I can change the aspect ratio to portrait by first going to the various settings. Under Render Output, I will turn on the safe frame so you can see the rendered region. Then I can click here and change the aspect ratio to portrait. When you do this, the view will look a little distorted even though it might not look like the field of view has changed. But if you re-select the zoom tool, it will show the true field of view. Now I can readjust it, and I can change the image width and height if I need. Mistake 4. Bad Lighting A good model with good materials can still look bad if it has bad lighting. For nighttime renders, it's important that you use the correct light assets for different light fixtures. For example, I often use the spotlights for reset lights. The rectangle or plane lights are good for lights with rectangular shapes such as surface mount lights or these under cabinet lights here. The sphere lights are good for pendants and lamps. Mesh lights are useful for lights that have irregular shapes such as the light bulb itself or this LED lighting behind my logo here. As you can see, it is hard to set up good lighting, so knowing how to use each light asset is very important. For daytime renders, it's important that you know how to use the sunlight and dome lights correctly. Here are a few tricks to drastically improve lighting of this scene. First, I usually set the color mode to Override. This will override the color of the sunlight with this color here, which is white. In this scene, I don't like the sharp shadows too much, so I will increase the size multiplier to 100. I've also added a dome light, but I've turned off all of these settings except the effect reflections. This will give me a nice background while I can still use my sunlight as the main light source. Since the background is kinda blue, I will adjust the color to be light blue to match it. Finally, I'm going to adjust the exposure using the camera settings here or here to make the scene brighter. There we go, that looks better. But you can see that this area is still a little washed out, so let's go to number 5. Mistake number 5, Highlight Burn. Here you can see the lighting looks a little dark in these areas, but this area here is a little too bright. To improve the lighting, I can open up the control corrections, then click here to show the exposure settings and turn it on. Now I can increase the exposure using the slider or manually type in a value here. As you can see, the scene is brighter now, but the highlight burn area just gets worse. If I click here on the force color clamping button, it will show me the areas that are too bright. Now I can fix this by decreasing the highlight burn until I can't see the clamped colors anymore. There we go, it's not so burnt anymore. However, this can make the image lose some contrast, so you can increase it here. Let's look at the before and after. We can now turn off the color clamping too. As you can see, with some quick adjustments, it looks a whole lot better. For more tips on lighting, I recommend this video on 10 tips on realistic lighting. Mistake number 6, Unrealistic Entourage In one of my previous videos, I mentioned that using high quality components will drastically improve your render. However, another common mistake beginners make is using 3D people in their render. Even though these are high quality and can be called realistic, but they're still not realistic enough. So if you take a really good model and insert 3D people into it, this is an automatic giveaway that it's a render instead of a real photo. It's because 3D people look better from far away but they're not very realistic up close. Personally, I still don't like to add people in my render, sometimes it's just better without them. Mistake number 7, Too Much Noise Sometimes the model is very high quality, but if your render has too much noise, then it will look like a low quality render. This is why it's important to use the Denoiser to improve the quality of your render. To enable the Denoiser, go to Settings and turn on the Denoiser. Here you can see two options, the default Vray Denoiser and the NVIDIA AI Denoiser, which is only available if you have an NVIDIA graphics card. If it's a smaller model, and I'm doing a test render using interactive mode, then I will use the NVIDIA AI Denoiser because it is faster. But if I'm doing a production render, then I will use the Vray Denoiser because even though it is slower, it is still more accurate. You can also open the right flyer panel to see more settings under the Denoiser rollout. However, I usually keep the default settings because it's good enough for me. After you've rendered the image, you can find the denoised image here. As you can see, with the Denoiser, the render looks a lot better. And there we go, those are some tips and tricks on how to fix beginner mistakes when rendering with Vray and Sketchup. 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