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[ntxdave]

Just to let anyone who looked at this tread know, I exchanged messages with Licensing and all is working fine now.

I just need to figure out how to render my model correctly now.

[pbacot]

What's wrong with the last picture you posted? You wanted a white background, so that looks OK at least.

For shinier metal, I believe you might look at a studio HDR environments. Maybe there's one that gives a white background when viewed from above but has some contrast that provides reflections on the upward facing surfaces. If you are seeking reflections from flat metal surfaces, the effect is helped when the edges are rounded or beveled. There is also a bevel setting you can make to the material in Twilight that is explained in tutorials here.

The post-processing in the render window allows you to adjust the exposure, color temperature. etc. If you are hoping to keep a white / near white background, there's not a lot you can do in post processing and not affect the whiteness, except adjusting the exposure might make it whiter. Bloom can give you a glow around some highlights in the picture. You have to play with it to see what affect it has. Any of the post-processing settings you try can be reset or turned off if you don't like the effect, before saving an image. There's post processing setting to overlay the Sketchup image on the render to have edges etc. That is explained in a tutorial on this site.

You can also look into using alpha mask rendering to use to remove the background to be pure white or transparent. I wouldn't know whether that's appropriate for this model, or it's something you want to work with. Requires post-processing with an application like GIMP or Photoshop. In case you haven't figured it out as yet, the .png itself will not make a transparent background from the rendering, though theoretically you can do that with GIMP or Photoshop.

Below is test with an HDRI. Is this like what you looking for or some other questions? You might start another thread with a more descriptive name to get some tips from the pros.

[ntxdave]

Yes, that is more like what I am looking for.

I did play around with various settings but do not believe I did as good a job as you did. I would like to know your settings and material. I know you are also a SU user so I have attached a PDF file that is a brief example of what I am working toward. have to past the image into the first page of a PDF file created in LayOut that is then shown to prospective customers of my sponsor. The document gets printed in an 11x18 format so I need the background of the equipment to be as white as possible so it does not show up in the printed version.

NTXDave Render Test.pdf

Sample LayOut Document

(947.7 KiB) Downloaded 334 times

I have looked at several videos on the Twilight site but I wish they would publish some documents that did a little better job of explaining some of the settings and how they should be used.

[pbacot]

With a different image. This uses a low resolution jpg. image for the environment plus sun. And adding some other objects helps to show that they add to the reflection. Some blue sky too so the reflection is not too white like the background. The trick is, in order to have pure white in the background straight out of the render, you need a small patch of white at the bottom of the background image (for the spherical sky), that will work at the angle you are using. Too much white background and you get too little reflection on the vertical faces.

[pbacot]

That looks great! I used Easy High+ for the last picture but Progressive exterior or interior would be best if your model will render fast enough for you. I just used the stainless steel template material on the rack. I'll attach the environment settings-nothing special, and the jpg background image FWIW. I left the post-pro mostly, just increased the exposure by .10 in the "simple" tonemap for the whiter background. You probably would rather omit the sun or the shadows.

So did you use a studio environment, an HDR etc. on yours?