Tutorials ModelCraft help Walkthroughs
Render a picture of the model
Make a picture that looks like daylight: sky, sun from your model's place and date, soft shadows, glass and metal looks, then save it as a PNG.
Written for ModelCraft 0.5. The same help is inside the app: press F1.
Render a picture… makes a picture of the view that looks like daylight rather than a drawing: a sky, the sun where your model's place and date put it, soft shadows, light from the whole sky that darkens corners and gaps, and colors that can look like glass, metal or gloss paint. The model is not changed.
Render the view
- Set up the view the way you want the picture: orbit, zoom, pick a scene, hide what should not show. The picture uses the view's own camera.
- Click Export in the File group, then Render a picture….
- Choose the Size and the Quality, then click Render.
The picture fills in as it renders and gets smoother with each pass. Stop (or EscEsc) ends it early and keeps the picture so far.
- Click Save PNG to download it.
Settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Size | The view's size, twice the view's size, Full HD, 4K or a square. Fixed sizes keep the view's camera and show more or less at the sides |
| Mode | Fast, or High quality (path traced) (below) with its Time limit |
| Quality | How many passes (or, in high quality, samples) are averaged: Draft 16, Good 64, Best 256. More passes give smoother shadows and edges and take longer |
| Sky | Clear sky, Overcast (soft light, faint shadows), Dusk (low, warm light) or White studio (a plain white background) |
| Sun | The sun comes from the date, time and place in Style › sun. Tick Use another date and time for this picture to try another time without changing the model's style |
| Brightness | Lighter or darker, in steps (stops) |
| Ground under the model | A ground that takes the shadows and fades into the horizon. Turn it off for a model that floats |
| Draw edges | Draws the model's edges thinly over the picture, for a drawn look |
When the sun is below the horizon at the chosen time it is night: the sky goes dark and the model's lamps light it. The dialog says so.
The settings are saved in the .modelcraft file, so the next picture of the same model starts where you left off.
Make colors look like glass or metal
Under Materials, every color on screen has a look: Matte, Satin, Glossy, Metal, Polished metal, Glass or Frosted glass. Unpainted faces are the faces with no color of their own.
To make windows glass, paint the window panes one color, then set that color to Glass. Glass lets the sky and what is behind it show through, tinted by its color, and reflects the sky.
High quality
Choose Mode › High quality (path traced) for a picture that follows light the way a camera sees it:
- light bounces between surfaces, so a room lit through a window, or by a lamp, is lit all round and colors bleed onto their neighbors;
- glass is real glass: light bends through it and it reflects the model;
- metal and polished surfaces reflect the rest of the model;
- light panels light as panels, with soft shadows.
It is much slower than Fast: each pass traces every pixel's light again. The picture starts grainy and clears as samples add up, so start small (The view's size, Draft) and choose a Time limit: when it runs out, the picture so far is kept. Stop keeps it too. The first pass waits while the browser prepares the path tracer, a few seconds on a graphics card, longer without one.
In this mode edges are not drawn, textures show their color and roughness but not their bumps, and a section cut is made on the model before the picture starts.
How long it takes
The picture is made on your own computer, by its graphics card; nothing is uploaded. How long it takes depends on that card. Time grows with the passes and the pixels: Best has 16 times the passes of Draft, and a 4K picture has about four times the pixels of Full HD. A computer without a graphics card still renders, more slowly.