KERKYTHEA TUTORIAL PART 3: NIGHT RENDERING

DOWNLOAD SKETCHUP FILE

DOWNLOAD KERKYTHEA SCENE

In Part 3 of the Kerkythea tutorials, I explain the process of creating night renderings. Instead of using Kerkythea lights, I go a different route and paint surfaces in Sketchup, then tell that material to emit light in Kerkythea. This method allows you create lights that work with the spaces of the design and avoids navigating around within Kerkythea. I have attached the SU and Kerkythea files so you can see the settings and practice.



NOTES:

The more lights you have, the longer the rendering will take. This rendering only uses a few, leaving some areas darker than they should be. This will allow me to show some post processing tricks in the next tutorial.

Make sure the color you use for the lights in Sketchup is not used anywhere else in the model to avoid lighting areas you don’t want to in Kerkythea.

Use multiple materials for different lights so that each can be adjusted differently in Kerkythea.

Use simple shapes for the lights. The more facets the object has, the more calculations the program will have to do, really increasing rendering times. For example, don’t use a sphere for a light.

GO TO KERKYTHEA TUTORIAL PART 4: POST PROCESSING

Comments

[baby]

Thanks for you share it!!!!!!!

[Blake]

Hi Alex,

I was just wondering what processor hardware you have, if you don’t mind me asking! :) I saw you selected 4 threads in the rendering options in KT, do you have a Quad Core processor? It went up to 8! :O As I understood it, this was where you selected how many processors you could engage. After 5 mins you get a pretty decent output. I use a duo core MB pro, render with metropolis light transport. I’m a noob by the way!

Thanks, Blake.

[ALEX HOGREFE]

@ Blake,
I have a Sony Vaio with an i7 quadcore processor. Your correct that that is were you select how many processor to use. However, the i7 has multi-threading, meaning each core has two threads. Therefore, i could use all 8 threads but this pretty much kills other programs I have running and sometimes crashes my computer haha. If you have a duo core, they also might have multi-threading capabilities which would mean you could tell Kerkythea to use 4 threads for renderings. Take care

[Fred]

Hi Alex,

I just stumbled upon your tutorials which are pretty interesting. I have barely scratched the surface of SU and Kerkythea so far, but there is one thing I wonder: in each of your tutorials, you modify the materials. Since each export from SU creates a new file, is there a way to migrate the modifications to the materials (like luminance, bump mapping, ...) from a file to the new file?

Regards,

Frederic