Discover how to enhance your renderings with customizable lighting settings, sketchy line options, and adjustable contrast levels. Learn how to apply these settings across different views while maintaining the flexibility to alter them as per the project's requirements.
Key Insights
- The article discusses optimizing lighting settings before adjusting other values such as brightness. This involves adjusting values for sunlight, ambient light, and shadows to achieve the desired effect, and also turning on the 'show ambient shadows' option.
- 'Sketchy lines' is a noteworthy feature that provides a looser look to renderings, making it resemble a sketch. The impact of this setting can be manipulated with the 'extensions' and 'jitter' options.
- The article emphasizes the importance of naming and saving your custom settings as 'view templates', which can then be applied to different views. This enables consistent settings across views while preserving the potential for individual adjustments.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
Once we have the sunlight set, we can go in and we can we can start to mess with the values for the sun, ambient light and shadows. But before we do that, we want to go ahead and turn on the show ambient shadows option, because this is going to have an impact on the way the view looks as well. And so if I wanted to start brightening things like having the whites be brighter, I want to make sure I have all of my lighting settings set up first before I make that type of decision.
And so I typically like to dial back the shadows a little bit so that they're not so dominant. But if you're looking for a more contrast type looking view, then you can certainly bring both of those values up pretty high. And then you can get a higher contrast between your sun and your shadows.
If you want something more subtle, then you can bring both of those values down or find something in between, which tends to look pretty good as well. Moving on down, we have sketchy lines. And this is a cool setting because it'll allow you to give a looser look to your rendering.
If you're familiar with a program called SketchUp, this is a setting that I think really kind of was brought into the limelight by what was going on with SketchUp. And so if you use the enable sketchy lines, the extensions are kind of weak, so you have to really crank those. But if I turn those way up and hit apply, you can see we're starting to see some of the tails on here.
And then jitter is a pretty interesting setting. I don't really use this one too much, but I'll start with the very extreme so you can see what that looks like. And it gives you that really napkin quality sketch here.
Learn Revit
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
And then if I start taking it down a bit, you can see it starts to be closer to something you'd be comfortable presenting to a client. And so, you know, I bring it down a bit because it just starts to get a little too loose for my taste. But if you find a way to get this to look acceptable, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
So I'm going to go ahead and hit okay here. And then I'm going to turn off my scope box by category. So I'll hide and view by category the scope box there.
And I'm really only doing that just so I can get a good view of what my new rendering is going to look like, because I'm going to apply that same setting to this view here. So I'm going to double click back into this view. And then we're going to go ahead.
And if I go to the view tab, I can go to view templates here and I can say create template from current view. And I can call this one my presentation perspective or presentation 3D view or something along those lines. And the key is you want to name it something that you're definitely going to be familiar with, because if you just give it a random name, then you're never going to know what it is.
You're going to end up with a bunch of the same view template. We want to include all of these elements here. We'll hit okay.
And then I can go to this one, going to view templates again, and I can say apply template properties, current view, picking my presentation 3D view and hitting okay. And you can see I've now got it set up with another view. And the thing with the way we did the lighting here, and we kind of just winged it there, is that we don't necessarily want the same lighting settings on both of those views.
And so what I could do is I can now go in because I just applied the settings. I can go in and I can actually change the lighting. Instead of lighting from the top left, I could say change it to the top right, and that gives me a totally different look to the view.
And if I was looking at this and thinking, that doesn't look quite right, I can maybe increase the sun and then decrease the shadows a bit. These are all things that you can just look at and decide what you think is going to look best for your project, of course. And so I'll go ahead and hit okay.
And so now we've got our two pretty decent looking graphic renderings without really doing a ton of work to create a really nice presentation graphic for our title sheet here. So our next steps here, we're going to make sure we get the right revisions on all of our sheets, and then we're going to go ahead and print to PDF.
