How to use RENDER ELEMENTS CHANNELS

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you how to use V-Ray Render Elements in Photoshop to make your rendering look more realistic. Let's get started. So this is an image that I rendered from the model that I did in the last video, check that out if you haven't yet. Whenever an image is done rendering, you can find all of its V-Ray Render Elements in this drop down box here. So what are Render Elements? V-Ray Render Elements, also known as Render Channels or Render Passes are a way to separate different parts of a rendering such as Diffuse, Material ID, Reflection, etc. These are very powerful images that you can use to composite your rendering in post-production softwares like Photoshop. To get Render Elements, you would have to add them in before you start the render. In V-Ray 3.6 for Sketchup, you can find them in the Settings tab, click this arrow to see more options, and expand the Render Elements rollout and add whichever elements you want. In this case, I added the denoiser to reduce the noise, the Diffuse Channel, the Extra Text Channel with a Dirt Texture to serve as an Ambient Occlusion Pass. I went over this in another video, so check that out for more details. Next is Material ID, Raw Light, Raw Shadow, Reflections, Refractions, and finally Z-Depth. There we go. Now after you render, you will see all the render elements in this drop down box here. Of course you don't have to render all of these, I'm just doing it as an example. Also keep in mind that the more render elements you add, the longer it will take to render. Before I save them, I'm going to make some adjustments and add some effects. If I click here on the Force Color Clamping button, it will show me the areas that are too bright. To fix this, I can open up the Correction Controls and turn on Exposure. Click here to show its settings, and turn down Highlight Burn until I can't see the clamp colors anymore. There we go. Now to add some effects, I'm going to click here to open up the Lens Effect Settings. Here you can add different types of effects, and in this case, I want to add a glare effect. So I'm going to check this box, and make some adjustments here. Once that's done, I can save all the render elements with this button here. Now that is done, I'm going to find the RBG channel which is the one without any extra name at the end, and open it up in Photoshop. If you look closely, our rendering has quite a bit of noise. This is when the Denoiser comes in handy. I'm going to import the Denoiser and compare the two. As you can see, the Denoiser did a great job of reducing the noise in our rendering. But let's say I want to reduce the noise even more, I can go to Filter -> Noise -> Reduce Noise Now I can set the strength here. But keep in mind that if it's too strong, then you start to lose details. If so, then just go back and reduce the strength to a more appropriate setting. I think that's pretty good. Since the Denoiser is our base render now, I can turn it off or delete the RGB channel. Next, I'm going to adjust the Base Render. Just click on the layer, and go to Filter -> Camera Raw Filter Here I'm going to increase the exposure to brighten up the image. Then I can pump up the contrast a little, and also brighten up the shadows. There we go, it's already looking good. Next, I will bring in the effects channel to add the glare. You can see that it's darker than our base render. So I'm going to hold down Alt and left click, then drag the Camera Raw Filter to copy the adjustments from the base image to the effects channel. You can see that the glare is affecting everything in our render, but let's say I don't want that. Then I can just go down here, hold down Alt and left click the layer mask to mask out everything. Now I can paint white on the parts where I want the effects to show, which is where the lights are. There we go. So for the background of this picture, I'm going to add an ocean. Then just like the base render, I'm going to apply a Camera Raw Filter to adjust the image. I just want the shadows of this image a little brighter, so I can increase the shadows like so. I really like the mountain right here, but not so much the water. So I can press W for the Magic Wand tool and use it to select parts of this image that I don't want. I can change it to the Quick Selection tool as well. Once I'm happy with my selection, I'll go down and Alt left click the layer mask to mask that part out. Now I can import another background image of the ocean with the water that's a little more blue. And I'll place it below the background, then resize it, and reposition it however I see fit. To clean up the image, I can select the layer mask and use the brush tool to paint white on the part that I want to be more visible and paint black on the parts that I want to be less visible. With some quick work, you can make it look pretty good. Although, the water is too blue and it's a little distracting, so I'm going to use Camera Raw Filter to adjust it a little bit like so. There we go, that's better. For the next part, I will bring in the extra text render element, which is also an ambient occlusion pass in this case. Now I can put it on top and set the blend mode to multiply and reduce the opacity to 20%. There we go, now it gives the render a little more depth. As you can see, the floor looks a little too bright, and it seems to have lost some details of the wood flooring. So I'm going to bring in the diffuse render element and set it to soft light. You can see that the floor looks better, but the other parts of the render looks terrible. So we only want this render channel to affect this part of the image. We can do that by manually make a selection with the Lasso tool and then mask it out using Layer Mask. But there's a better way to do it, so I'm going to delete the Layer Mask and show you the other method. First, we need to import the Material ID channel. This is a very useful image that you can use as a selection tool to make it easier to select surfaces with the same material in your rendering. Let's say I want to select the wood material on these shelves, then I can go to the Material ID, select it with the Magic Wand tool, hold Shift to add, and hold Alt to subtract selections. Also, you can turn off Contiguous to select all the same color at once. In this case, I'm not interested in selecting the shelves, but rather the wood floor. So I can go to the Material ID layer, and select it, then turn that off. Go to my Diffuse layer, and click this button here to mask out the rest of the image. As you can see, with the mask, now the Diffuse channel only affects the wood floor. For the next part, let's import the Raw Light render element. Then I'll set the Blend Mode as Soft Light, and drop the Opacity down to 20%. Next, I'll bring in the Raw Shadow render element, then I'll set this as Soft Light as well, and bring the Opacity down to 25%. As you can see, these two images are good for adjusting the lighting and shadows of your render to give it a bit more contrast. Now I want to add a reflection of the ocean water on the refrigerator to make it look more realistic. So to do that, first I'm going to hold down Alt and left click, then drag the Ocean Background layer to duplicate it and bring it to the top. Then I'll set it as Linear Burn. Next, I'm going to use the Material ID and select only the material of the refrigerator. Now I can turn the Material ID layer off and select the Ocean layer, then click here to create a mask based on our selection. As you can see, it's starting to give us that reflection that we want, but it's a little too much. We can decrease the Opacity, but the reflection still looks darker than it was. So I'm going to import the reflection render element and set the blend mode as Screen. Next, I'll hold down Alt and left click, then drag the layer mask from the Ocean Background to our reflection channel. There we go, that's already looking better. If the reflection is too bright, then you can turn down the Opacity like so. Now that looks good, but if you look closely, the reflection of the ocean is actually on top of the doorframe as well, and that's not right. So we can select the mask on our ocean image and use the brush tool to paint black wherever the doorframe is. That way, the reflection of the ocean is only visible wherever the glass is. Now I can group these two layers and compare the before and after. The effect is very subtle, but it looks more realistic now. Next, we will add the Refraction channel and set the blend mode as Screen, then turn down the opacity to 50%. As you can see, the Refraction channel is really good for adjusting the glass material in your rendering. Next, I'm going to import the ZDepth render element to create a depth of field effect in my rendering. First, I'm going to turn this layer off and select the top visible layer. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E to merge all of the visible layers into a new one. Then I'm going to add a layer mask by clicking here. To make this file more organized, I'll select all the layers below this and press Ctrl-G to group them up, then I'll turn them off for now. Now I can turn on the ZDepth channel, select that layer, and press Ctrl-A to select the whole image, then press Ctrl-C to copy. I'll turn the ZDepth channel off and Alt-Left click on this layer mask and press Ctrl-V to paste it there. Now I can click here to go back to the main image. As you can see, it's looking a little odd, but just hold on for a second. With the layer selected, we can go up to Filter, Blur, Lens Blur. For the source of our depth map, click the drop down box and select Layer Mask. Now you can just click on the part of the image that you want the camera to focus on. There we go, pretty cool huh? But if you notice the window, there seems to be some kind of error happening around this area. So let's cancel this and go back a few steps. I'll turn this off for now and turn on the ZDepth. As you can see, this area of my ZDepth is transparent, that's why it created those errors. So what I'm going to do now is go down and click here, then go up here to create a solid color layer. I'll set that as black and I'll place it under my ZDepth layer. Then I will select both of these layers, right click and merge the layers. There we go, now I can press Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C to copy this. Then turn this layer off and turn the other layer back on. Alt left click here to go to the layer mask, and press Ctrl-V to paste the image here. Now we can select the main image, go to Filter, Blur, Lens Blur, and bam, you can see that there are no errors at the glass area anymore. Now we can press OK, but it still looks a little weird. All we need to do is just shift and left click the layer mask to turn it off. There we go, now we can turn on the group and compare the before and after. For the last part, I'll just add some glare to the image, then stylize with Nik Collection. Next, I'll make some adjustments with Camera Raw Filter, and I'll use the curves on here as well. And there we go, our image is finished. And that's how you can use render elements to composite your rendering in Photoshop. If you want this file along with my model, remember to sign up on my Patreon before the end of March to get it at a cheaper price. After that, it will be on Gumroad for $10. I also like to thank my members on Patreon, you guys are amazing. And that is all for today guys, leave a like if you enjoyed the video, comment below if you have any questions, stay inspired guys, and I'll see you next time.