Adding Photographic Touches in Post-production - Photographic Rendering with V-Ray for SketchUp - page 325

Boosting the floor reflections
One thing that you will probably have noticed as you applied the HDR Highlight Com-
pression effect was the fact that not only were the highlights affected, but to some
extent, the entire image lost contrast and looked a little washed out, which of course
is not going to help our pursuit of photographic quality. Now, while we could tackle this
issue right now, this is generally a step that I prefer to leave until the end of the edit-
ing process, because it means we can apply a final correction effect to the additional
layers that we will be adding as we move forward here.
One thing we do want to take care of at this point in time, however, is the fact that our
floor reflections are looking a little dull for my tastes, not picking up any bright high-
lights from the exterior lighting as I would like and expect them to. What we need to
do then is to boost them a little by means of the extra reflection pass that we rendered
out of V-Ray.
All we theoretically need to do is apply a mask to our image that isolates the floor and
allows us to apply a reflection boost to just that area of our image. However, we now
run into the type of major problem that often crops up (sometimes on a number of oc-
casions) throughout the course of a working project.
You see, ideally, we should be able to use the Render ID pass that we created in V-
Ray as a mask, given that it assigns a unique color to every unique geometry element
in the scene. Indeed, if we double-click on that element in the Project panel and take
a look at it, you can see that we do have a unique color assigned to almost every
element in the scene—everything, that is, except our floor, which due to the way that
the model (quite deliberately, I must add) has been set up, has unfortunately been as-
signed the same ID color as the walls.
Now, we could spend some time experimenting with various ways of extracting a us-
able floor mask right here in After Effects, and certainly with a measure of trial and
error, we would be able to come up with something usable. That, however, could po-
tentially eat up a considerable amount of time, which again, in a commercial setting,
is not generally a viable workflow to follow.
Instead, we should be prepared to backtrack a little at this point in time, jump back
into V-Ray, and create a very quick but perfect floor mask for ourselves. To do that,
let's launch SketchUp and open up the DT_Interior_FloorMask_Start.skp file