- [Instructor] In the previous movie, we started setting up
our options for the quicksilver hardware renderer.
I've got the rendering from the last movie
in the rendered frame window.
I'll clone that rendered frame window
and just minimize that, so we can compare
to a later version.
In the render setup dialogue
in the quicksilver renderer tab
we now come to the visual style and appearance options.
First thing is the visual style pull down
and it's set to realistic by default.
And that's what we want.
We don't want any stylized non-photoreal rendering.
Textures are enabled by default, we want to leave that on.
Transparency is also enabled by default.
But transparency is problematic in quicksilver
because it does not support ray tracing.
I actually don't have any transparency in this scene.
There actually is a window glazing object here,
but I've hidden it.
Since we have no transparent objects visible
the state of this transparency check box is not relevant.
Below that we have lighting and shadows.
Illuminate width is defaulted to scene lights
and that's what we want of course
we don't want to render default lighting.
Highlights is also enabled.
And again, we want that,
we don't want to render all matte finishes everywhere.
We see shadows, the check box's on, so shadows are enabled.
There's also a shadow quality pull down list you can choose.
The default of 1.0 is going to be fine in this case
but if you find that your shadows look grain
you can go in there and increase that level.
Ambient occlusion is built into nitrous and quicksilver.
Remember that AO gives contact shadows
or darkness in crevices
nitrous and quicksilver use the video hardware to calculate
what's called screen space ambient occlusion.
It's a very basic solution.
It's not nearly as sophisticated as software rendering AO
which is based on actual distances between objects
in the scene rather than pixel space.
But if you combine ambient occlusion
with some environmental or ambient lighting
you can get a rough approximation of global illumination.
I'll enable that, and let's change up the options down here.
We'll increase the radius up to a of value of 10
and also knock down the intensity.
I'll set that to value of 0.5
so that'll be a more subtle effect.
Below ambient occlusion, we'll see indirect illumination.
And that sounds pretty cool
but we can't use it for animation.
If we enable this, quicksilver will automatically
place some point lights around the scene
to give the impression
of global illumination or bounce light.
And higher render iterations up at the top here,
will result in more lights in the indirect illumination.
But unfortunately, the positions of those lights
will be randomized on each frame
and that'll result in flickering in an animation.
So we can't use this for animations
only for still images.
Going down a bit further, we come to reflections
and this unfortunately
is the most problematic part of quicksilver.
The reflection switch up here, should actually be labeled
reflections from environment.
If we were rendering a single model
against an HDRI environment background
this option would be great, but in almost all other cases
it's going to cause problems
and it's actually way more trouble than it's worth.
And it's especially a problem for interiors.
The reflections from the background environment panorama
will travel through any occluding geometry
such as walls and ceilings
and we will get some massive hotspots
in places we'd never expect.
And that's what we're seeing in our rendering
from the previous movie, that's what all of this stuff is.
It's reflections from the environment that are traveling
through the walls of floor and the ceiling
and of course, that does not look good at all
it's completely unrealistic.
So we actually can't use this reflection switch
in most cases.
Now, if reflections is on, then we also have the option
to generate cubic environment maps for individual objects
and that's what these other switches are over here.
These options aren't really labeled very well
but they enabled dynamic scene reflections.
We can choose to enable reflections on particular objects
by name, by material ID or by object ID number.
But keep in mind quicksilver does not support ray tracing.
These are all automatic cubic reflection maps.
The object becomes a camera
and takes six pictures of its surroundings
then those pictures are projected
back onto the object as reflection maps.
Automatic reflection maps have many limitations
and can cause problems, especially in areas
where the objects are too close to one another.
That will cause reflections to completely fail.
But even if these automatic reflection maps
give you good results in your particular scene
for some strange reason, we do not have the ability
to disable reflections from environment
while enabling the dynamic reflection maps.
Since those reflections from the environment
are so uncontrollable, we can't have those on.
Practically speaking, we can't use
the dynamic reflection mapping
unless there is no environment.
If we're using an environment to generate
lighting and shadows, as we are in this scene
really our only option is to turn off
all of these reflections, meaning that we will not get
any mirror reflections anywhere in the scene.
That's unfortunate, but the good news is that quicksilver
does respect the roughness parameter
of the physical material.
Even though mirror reflections are disabled globally
the specular highlights on most surfaces
will render fairly realistically.
In this scene I've taken that into account.
I've created these large area lights outside my model
and those are there in order to generate reflections.
I've also created these other area lights
in this cubic formation around the model
and those are there to create the illusion
of global illumination, of light bouncing off
of various surfaces.
Now that's an ancient technique by the way
it's used in order to approximate
the effects of global illumination
it's sometimes called fakeocity in reference
to a now obsolete global illumination algorithm
called radiacidity.
Finally, at the very bottom of the render dialogue
we have the bloom section, and that is super helpful
if you've got lights or very bright surfaces
that are visible with the frame.
Bloom will add some glow to the hotspots in the rendering
emulating the effect of a real lens
such as a camera or an eye.
Let's enable bloom, and we've got a radius value of 10.
Let's leave that as it is.
We've got a strength of 0.2, that's a good value as well
but let's increase the threshold.
Bring that up to a value of 2.5.
A higher threshold value will require brighter pixels
in order to trigger the bloom effect.
With these settings we'll get a subtle bloom
only in the very brightest parts of the image.
Okay, we can test this out by rendering the current frame
just click on the big render button
and again, that will take a few moments
to compile and then start rendering.
Once it's done, we can compare it to the rendering
from the previous movie.
I've got that minimized down here,
and we can see there's a drastic improvement.
Turning off the reflections from the environment
made a big difference.
And we've also added this bloom effect up here,
which has helped to improve the realism
the believability of the shot.
Okay, that's how to set up quicksilver
for a draft quality or a standard definition rendering.