Keyshot for Beginners

Chapter 1 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot provides an introduction to the course and it's contents. Your host is introduced along with all the different topics that will be addressed in the course. Including the extra items.

Chapter 2 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, addresses what Keyshot is, why you should use it, and it gives a general explanation of what ray tracing is using a simple but straightforward animation.

In Chapter 3 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, we jump into Keyshot to have a look at the complete default User Interface. I will be taking you through the default workspace, going through each interface menu and window, and quickly explaining you what you can find in all of those different menus and windows.

In Chapter 4 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I address some important aspects with regards to creating Keyshot primitive models, preparation of your models before importing them and things to be aware of when actually importing your models.

It is especially important to be aware of these preparatory aspects, as they will assure that you can effectively start-up and progress with your projects.

In Chapter 5 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot we will be starting with the actual drone project. In this chapter specifically, I’ll be addressing the first tab from the project window. Which is the Scene tab. In the Scene tab you can find all the information about all your objects in your scene, and you can do all the organizing of your project in this tab.

So, I will be importing the drone model that we will work on for the rest of the course, and I will show you how to properly position the model and how you could organize the scene.

In Chapter 6 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will be addressing the topic of materials in Keyshot. I Will show you:

1. The different methods to apply materials to a model.

2. How you can change the material properties.

3. I will show you the complete materialization of the drone model, and all the different little workflow techniques you can use to do that in Keyshot.

4. Give you a quick glance of the potential and power of the Keyshot Cloud library.

In Chapter 7 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will address textures in Keyshot. In the last chapter we completely materialized our model. Now the next step is to apply textures to those materials that require it. Applying textures will greatly enrich the materials, and therefore our final render in the end.

So, I am going to show you how you can:

1. Apply textures.

2. Properly size and position them.

3. Make a complete material from scratch, using a texture set that you can download from the internet.

In Chapter 8 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will address another powerful and useful tool that we have in Keyshot. And that is adding labels to materials. What labels basically are, is the stacking of one material on top of another material. In that way we can for example make decals like logo’s, and put this on top of an existing material. In this chapter I will demonstrate to you exactly how you can do that in Keyshot.

In Chapter 9 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I am going to demonstrate how you can set up your camera. I am going to show you how you can:

1. Create a new camera

2. How you can position it

3. How you can set its focal length

4. How you can add Depth Of Field (DOF)

In Chapter 10 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will be talking about the environment. The environment basically consists out of your lighting dome and your ground plane. I will show you how you can:

1. Change you lighting environments using the presets in the library.

2. How you can change the environments general settings.

3. How to change the specific background settings.

4. How you can create pins to customize you lighting environment towards your liking.

In Chapter 11 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will be talking about the different render presets we have in Keyshot and the individual render settings that we can change.

In Chapter 12 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will be showing all the features in the images tab of the project window. In this tab we can change our viewport resolution, but we can also change all kinds of post processing elements for our image. So we can give the image our own personal little image style. These are elements like color adjustments, vignette or chromatic aberration. But also, very powerful tools like denoising. I will show you the basic image style option as well as the photographic image style option that Keyshot provides.

To render our image is the penultimate aspect for each project in Keyshot. It is the final thing we are working towards. How we can set all the output settings and options for our render, and how we can perform the render in Keyshot, is what I will be showing you in this chapter of the beginner’s course for Keyshot.

In extra 1 for the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will demonstrate how you can create a water puddle effect in Keyshot.

In extra 2 for the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will demonstrate how you can fake water droplets on your model.

In extra 3 for the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will demonstrate how you can create your own custom Ambient Occlusion (AO) pass in Keyshot. This method will provide you a lot more flexibility in creating an AO pass than choosing the standard render pass option in Keyshot’s render window.

In extra 4 for the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will demonstrate how you can create your own custom mask renders in Keyshot. Keyshot does provide the option to generate a clown pass to select different objects in the render in post-production, based on color selection. But a dedicated custom black and white mask provides more accuracy, and is easily applied as a mask channel in Photoshop or any other post processing software.

Now that we have created our renders, we can go and jump into Photoshop to edit our renders to make them look larger than life. This post processing part is a real make or break aspect of creating a great visualization. So, in this chapter, chapter 14 of the beginner’s course for Keyshot, I will show you the complete editing process that I normally use for my edits. I will be showing you some neat tips and tricks to make your render look absolutely amazing.