you're eager to create awesome renderings like this in v-ray for sketchup but wait don't make the mistake i see so many self-taught v-ray users make hey guys alex here from sketchup school the place where professionals go when they're serious about learning sketchup time and time again i hear about frustrating roadblocks that trip people up in v-ray and nine times out of ten their struggles can be traced back to one crucial step they skip a couple of years ago we shared this crucial step in our getting started with b-ray video which now has over half a million views and now we're back with an update of that original video with some pointers about how things have changed in the latest version of v-ray plus a new bonus tip for you so what's this missing step i'll give you a hint you do it before you even think about touching a single button in v-ray that's right it's not part of b-ray at all which is why i think everybody misses it so what do you need to do before you get started with v-ray to set yourself up for success with your renderings you need to make sure your sketchup model is render ready to do that i've created an easy to follow five-part checklist the same one we start off our v-ray for sketchup course with and now i'm going to share it with you now before i get too far along i need to quickly mention that this video isn't for beginner sketchup users or people completely unaware of how rendering works in sketchup you should at least be familiar with the concepts we cover in our getting started with sketchup video which goes over some of the fundamental skills you need to know as well as our how to render in sketchup video which outlines how the entire rendering process works don't worry i've also written up some notes that will make it easy for you to review everything we're about to cover and you can find a link to those in the cards okay back to our list starting with number one orient your model v-ray is responsible for shining light into your model and out of the box it will render realistic sunlight into your sketchup scene but if you open v-ray and find that the sunlight isn't shining in the direction you want you've made a costly mistake there are two things that you should have already done in sketchup first and failing to do them before you get to vra causes problems later now i should note if you're using vray 5 there is a new feature that allows you to adjust the position of the sun after the fact in v-ray but even for v-ray 5 users i recommend following these steps and i'll talk about why in a second so what do i mean by orient your model that means aligning your model correctly in the north-south direction so the angle of the sun and shadows in sketchup is accurate because v-ray will automatically look to sketchup to tell it where the sun is to do that all you need to know is that by default the green axis in sketchup is pointing north plus or minus a few degrees depending on the location of your project which means that the sun is positioned along the red axis plus or minus a few degrees depending on the date so the first thing you should do early in the process of building your sketchup model is correctly orient your model based off the axes and the second thing you need to do is tell sketchup where the sun is along the east west or red axis to do this turn on your shadows and use the date and time sliders to get an idea of how the light will shine across your scene even though you can edit the sun's angle in v-ray 5 i still always recommend orienting your model correctly in sketchup first because it's a helpful reference to have while you're building out your model seeing how the sun and shade will move across your design at different times of the year and throughout the day now if you need to be even more accurate in terms of the angle of the sun you can use the add location feature to geolocate your model to an exact place in the world and you can use the solar north extension to show you true north before orienting your sketchup model alright your model is oriented and you've got a nice angle for the sunshine and shadows set up for your rendering the next item on our render ready checklist is number two organize your file when you create a final rendering in v-ray you click a button to render and then wait anywhere from a couple of minutes to several hours to see the final result there are settings in v-ray to help you minimize the time each render takes but when it comes to excessively long render times the root of the problem starts with an unorganized sketchup model for faster render times and faster changes between renders here are a few tips for organizing your model before you get to v-ray as i mentioned earlier you should be familiar with everything we covered in our getting started with sketchup video so you already know to make everything a group or component as you build your model in order to make your model render ready you'll want to assign those groups and components to tags based on what you'll want to hide or show in your final rendering for example hiding off camera elements that won't show up in the final image is an easy way to speed up your rendering times but another tip that can really help speed things up as you're working on your rendering is having tags set up so you can hide some on-camera details early in the rendering process to speed up your test renders then when you're dialing in the final look you can turn those elements back on this can help save a ton of time as you iterate through changes in v-ray lastly you can also use tags to hide and show different design options to help you preview how each will look in the context of your realistic rendering alright once your file is organized you're ready to move on to number three master your materials often as you model in sketchup you'll be adding colors and materials along the way then you might be excited to jump into v-ray to make those materials more realistic looking but working with your materials in v-ray can be really time-consuming if you don't plan ahead in sketchup here's why all the materials you add and test out along the way in sketchup end up creating a long and often confusing list to work with later in v-ray some materials on this list aren't actually being used in the model and many have names that aren't very helpful you can end up wasting a lot of time trying to find and change the materials you need to edit so if you invest some time into creating a few good habits in sketchup up front your future self will definitely thank you great scott i came back to warn you you gotta fix your materials i i just told them thank you here are a few things to keep in mind when working with materials first and foremost name every color or material that you add to your model it's much easier to edit all of your materials later in v-ray when you're scrolling through a list of specific names rather than generic ones also naming your materials disciplines you to use the right materials on the right surfaces for example if you have white walls and white cabinets and you paint both with the same generic white in sketchup you'll have trouble later if you want the cabinets to be glossy and the walls to be flat since you won't be able to edit them as separate materials in v-ray instead you should create two different whites and name them something like white wall paint and white cabinet finish enabling you to differentiate them later in v-ray that said there are also times where you'll want to use a single material in sketchup perhaps you have a few different metal surfaces in your model and while they're made of different materials in the real world maybe they all look similar enough that you could just use the same chrome material on all of them that's a huge win when you get to v-ray since you'll only have to edit the single chrome material to make everything shiny once you're done adding and naming your colors and materials in sketchup make sure you purge any unused materials sketchup remembers every one that you've tried even if you've replaced it with some of the other options purging will shrink your list down to only the materials that are being used and it will give you less to scroll through later in v-ray beyond staying organized i've also got three bonus material tips for you first if you import your own image and use it as a material pay attention to the resolution of the image low resolution materials may look blurry in your final rendering and high resolution materials can really slow down your render times ideally use an image with a resolution that's close to what its resolution will be in the final rendering second when you don't have the right material in sketchup use a color as your proxy later in v-ray you can easily swap that color for a render-ready material out of v-ray's library and third if you paint a material on the wrong side of a sketchup face it may not render correctly in your styles panel under faces set them to display monochrome that way you can see if any blue faces are facing out for any that are right click on them and pick the option for reverse face then switch back to shaded with textures mode and make sure your material is added to the white face that is now properly facing out alright now that you've mastered your materials the next item on our render ready checklist is number four add important details in real life the world is full of beveled edges reliefs and other design details to get a realistic rendering out of v-ray your sketchup model needs to have the same attention to detail here are three specific things to look out for first v-ray renders faces not edges so if you take this cabinet for example you can't just use edges for the door front style you need to get in there with the move or push pull tools to add some depth second even when things touch in the real world there are often small little gaps adding these across your scene can have a big impact on your rendering later and third sketchup creates hard edges and corners but in the real world things tend to be beveled or rounded use the follow me tool or the frito corner extension to add these subtle but realistic details now speaking of adding details that leads us to the next item on the checklist number five mind your polygons perhaps the most important thing you can do in sketchup the one that will have the biggest impact on the quality and speed of your renderings and b-ray later is to mind your polygons so what does that mean that means optimizing the level of detail in your model by being mindful of the number of polygons you're working with to do that let's quickly review some fundamental concepts as you may already know everything in sketchup is made up of endpoints edges and faces and those spaces make polygons so this simple cube is made up of just six polygons whereas this sphere is actually made up of a mesh of 288 polygons all stitched together to give the appearance of a curved surface but here's the thing the same sphere could also be made with 144 polygons or it could be made with 3072 polygons so which version is ideal when it comes to rendering the sphere with v-ray there's a trade-off to make less polygons means faster render times however it can also mean lower quality for example the lower poly sphere looks faceted in this rendering on the other end of the spectrum more polygons gives you higher quality but at the expense of longer render times what's worse is your sketchup model also slows down when you have too many polygons in it which can be a problem when you're trying to edit it the goal then is to find the middle ground a polygon count that gives you the quality you want without needlessly slowing down your rendering so choosing the best level of detail for this sphere is easy right we should pick the one in the middle it looks good enough and has a relatively low polygon count well not necessarily it depends on the distance between the sphere and the camera so for this shot the middle sphere is a good choice but what if we zoom out it's hard to tell a difference in the quality between the three so now the lowest polysphere is a better choice and what if we zoom in really close now we're seeing clear differences in the quality and the highest polysphere is the right choice but you don't render spheres for a living so let's apply this to what you need to do first as we saw with the sphere make sure you manage your polygon count based on how visible the objects will be in the final render for example round corners for objects that are closer to the camera and maybe skip the ones that are further away and for any object that you will use more than once make it a component before copying it around your model each copy will still increase your polygon count but v-ray can render component instances or copies of that component much faster than groups or non-group geometry and for components you get from sites like the 3d warehouse be sure to comparison shop when you're searching for a particular thing for all the best looking options start by trying the one with fewer polygons relative to the others now when you followed all the rules for managing your level of detail but you find you still need to include higher polygon objects to get the quality you want just know that there's a feature in v-ray called proxies that can help that's when you turn high polygon sketchup components into lower polygon versions or proxies that keep your sketchup model light while shortening your rendering times all while allowing v-ray to still render the higher polygon version into the final image so you can have your cake and eat it too [Music] okay we've made it through the main points in our checklist but as i mentioned earlier i've got a bonus tip for you since we published the previous version of this video we've come up with one more way to help you take your v-ray renderings to the next level by being mindful of one more thing in sketchup before you get to v-ray use high-quality models if you've done everything we've outlined so far then your model will be set up for success when you get to rendering in v-ray however one thing that can hamper the realism of your final rendering is making the mistake of using lower quality 3d models for the objects you need to add to your scene by low quality i mean objects that haven't been modeled with a realistic attention to detail or objects that have low resolution unrealistic or inaccurately applied materials so how do you avoid that first if you're using the latest version of v-ray 5 then you'll have access to cosmos a curated 3d library of high quality render ready models of things like furniture trees cars people and more to use them just click on the cosmos icon on your v-ray toolbar browse to find the object you want click to download then click again to import it will be attached to your move tool cursor click to set it down then hit the escape key when you don't want to place any more instances of the model by default the object will display without much detail keeping your polygon count low and the materials won't show up but when you render you'll see the full level of detail with realistic materials now if you're using an older version of v-ray or looking for something that you can't find in the cosmos library another option is to look in sketchup's 3d warehouse but if you're searching through the millions of models available to you on there know that many of them are low quality and trying to find good ones can be overwhelming but i've got a few tricks that can help you filter down to the good stuff one thing you can do is when you find a model that looks like it's pretty good click through to the model details page from there look to see if that model is found in any other collections if so click on a promising looking one to see the models in there now you're looking at a curated version of the 3d warehouse other designers like you have taken the time to find gems so you don't have to to find more curated collections from other sketchup users you can do the same thing again clicking through to a model's details page and clicking through to another new collection and along the way be sure to save models or collections to your own collections so that you can find them later and if you find some really good looking stuff click on the author's name to see everything else they've created and their saved collections jackpot [Music] just know that when you use a model from the 3d warehouse its materials will rarely be set up to render realistically in v-ray so you'll have to spend a little time configuring those settings next you should know that the 3d warehouse isn't the only place to find high quality sketchup files there are dozens of other websites that offer 3d models you can use in sketchup too many to list here but i'll add links to some of my favorites in the notes and lastly know that you're not limited to using only sketchup files that's right it's possible to import other 3d file formats while there are a number of ways to do that which we don't have time to cover extensively right now one easy solution that i recommend is an extension called transmuter which makes for quick and pretty seamless importing of other 3d file formats for using in your v-ray for sketchup renderings and once you realize you're not limited to only sketchup files that greatly expands your options for finding the best quality models to add to your scene don't worry i've added links to some of these other popular 3d model websites in the notes as well now there's just one thing to remember that goes along with this bonus tip and it goes back to one of our previous tips don't forget to mind your polygons because if you're not careful all these high quality models could slow things down in your model and your renderings so be sure to pay attention to polygon counts in the 3d warehouse opting for models with lower polygon counts if you're choosing between two nice looking options or take advantage of extensions like transmuter or skimp which can be used to reduce the complexity of the model without losing visible quality and that's it you made it through all the steps to make sure your model is render ready are you ready to learn more about how to take your v-ray renderings to the next level from here it's definitely possible to learn everything on your own but if you can't afford to waste any time or pick up bad habits i recommend checking out our video course library it's filled with 8 700 worth of sketchup courses exclusively for professionals including our comprehensive v-ray course head over to the sketchup school website and try our courses for free and if you're not ready to try our courses yet be sure to at least check out this playlist it's filled with a bunch of helpful tutorials tricks and tips to help you streamline your v-ray workflow and achieve great rendering results until next time happy sketching great scott i came back to warn you wait let me do that again