Perspective Rendering

Perspective Rendering

The ODS Studio free modules comes with the ability to do Radiance perspective rendering from one or multiple cameras.  This tutorial covers the setup of a simple scene with multiple cameras for Radiance rendering of daylight levels.  The final .blend file is available for download at the bottom of this page.

Assuming that you have already modeled a simple L-shaped building in Blender the following steps are required to do the Radiance calculations of daylight levels.  Ensure that you have enabled the ODS Studio Radiance module which will automatically also start the ODS Studio Core and SunPath modules.

  1. For each surface that you would like to apply a different material (either colour or type) select the faces in edit-mode and press 'p' to separate them into a new object
  2. Enter the materials properties menu and for each surface add a new material by selecting the "+" button next to the material name editor.  Set the color of the material by setting the diffuse color of the material.
  3. In the ODS Studio Material Properties panel select the material type (Glass, Opaque, etc.) and set other pertinent properties as required (visible light transmittance, roughness or spectacular)
  4. Add cameras as required by going to "Add -> Camera" and then "View->Cameras->Set Active Object as Camera" then use Shift-F to fly the camera to the location as required. 
    • Note: At this point you can set the camera lens angle by going to the Camera Properties menu and in the "Lens" panel select "Degrees" and set the angular-degrees of the camera, for internal and architectural renders it is good to set this to quite a wide-angle such as 90 or even up to 120 degrees.
  5. Expand the panel menu on the right-hand-side of the 3D viewport, expand the "SunPath" menu and press the "Draw" button.  Uncheck the "SunPath" checkbox and then with your mouse cursor in the 3D viewport press the right arrow key until the time displayed in the lower-right of the 3D viewport is equal to 10:00.
  6. In the Scene Properties menu set the latitude, longitude and timezone of your project.  In the Radiance menu also set the number of indirect bounces and the quality of the render which is "medium" by default.  In this tutorial we will set the sky type to "Intermediate Sky with Sun"
  7. Ensure that you press 'a' to select everything in the visible scene.  Then press the "Write Case File" button followed by the "Render Frame" button.  Between pressing the buttons ensure that you check the ODS Studio command terminal window to check output messages and ensure that there are no errors.
  8. As the renders are complete you will see them appear in the sub-directory "rad/images/" relative to where your .blend file is saved.
  9. Post-processing the images to create falsecolor images, threshold maps and contours are shown in a later tutorial. 
Icon Perspective Render Tutorial ODSv1.1 (3.8 MB)