IntroductionWelcome| 00:03 | Hi, I'm George Maestri, and welcome
to Rendering Using Cycles in Blender.
| | 00:08 | We are going to start off by showing you
how to enable the Cycles Renderer and some of
| | 00:15 | the basic Render Settings and then
we're going to create some Materials.
| | 00:19 | We're going to learn how to use a Shader
Node system to create Layered Shaders as well as
| | 00:24 | create realistic Class and Displacements.
| | 00:29 | Then we're going to do lighting in Cycles.
We're going to start with basic lights.
| | 00:34 | Then we're going to discuss Ambient Occlusion,
environmental lights, and how to use an object as a light source.
| | 00:42 | And finally, we're going to show you how to render
a scene from start to finish using Cycles in Blender.
| | 00:50 | Let's go ahead and get started with
Rendering Using Cycles in Blender.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | Now if you have access to the Exercise
Files used in this course, go ahead and
| | 00:07 | drag them to the desktop.
| | 00:09 | This is where I placed my Exercise Files.
| | 00:13 | And as we open this up, you'll see that
each Chapter has its own folder and
| | 00:17 | and within those folders are the Blender
files as well as any image files
| | 00:22 | needed for that chapter.
| | 00:25 | So go ahead and set up your Exercise
Files if you have them and let's go ahead
| | 00:29 | and get started with the course.
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1. Using Cycles in BlenderEnabling the Cycles renderer| 00:00 | Now by default Blender has its own
renderer called the Blender Render.
| | 00:06 | This is the one that if you've been
through the Essential Training will be the
| | 00:09 | one that you're most familiar with.
| | 00:11 | Now Blenders Cycles Renderer
is a whole new way of rendering.
| | 00:18 | So you can enable it by just clicking
here and adding in the Cycles Render.
| | 00:26 | Now once you do that you can
see how Render options change.
| | 00:30 | So in the Blender Render here, we have
our Blender Render options here, and as we
| | 00:36 | change it to the Cycles Render, you
can see how these parameters change.
| | 00:42 | Now one of the cool things about
the Cycles Renderer is that it is an
| | 00:47 | Interactive Renderer.
| | 00:49 | If I go here to the Render Method,
you can see how I've got a number of
| | 00:55 | different options here and these will change
depending upon the Renderer you have selected.
| | 01:01 | So if I go to my Standard Blender
Render, you can see I've got Wireframe,
| | 01:07 | Solid, and Texture.
| | 01:09 | If I go to the Cycles Render, you can
see I've got Wireframe, Solid, Texture,
| | 01:14 | plus Material and Rendered.
| | 01:18 | So if we go to Material, you can see how
the materials of the object show up, but
| | 01:24 | the really cool one is the Rendered Viewport.
| | 01:27 | So when I select that and turn it on, you can
actually interactively render your scene.
| | 01:35 | Now we can see that this is kind of
a glass bowl with some oranges in it.
| | 01:40 | As we move our scene it will start
to actually re-render, no matter what.
| | 01:46 | So as you change parameters it will go
ahead and go back to 0 and then start
| | 01:52 | re-rendering as quickly as possible.
| | 01:54 | Now this will reduce the amount of time that
you need to fine-tune and tweak your render.
| | 02:02 | So this can be a very fast
way to render your scene.
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| Controlling interactive rendering| 00:00 | Interactive rendering in Cycles
can require a lot of computing power;
| | 00:06 | it uses the graphics card as
well as the CPU in your system.
| | 00:12 | So, if you have a fast graphics card
and a fast CPU, you should be okay, but
| | 00:17 | you can change the amount of quality of
your render to get the most out of your system.
| | 00:22 | So, if we go over here to the Render tab,
we can scroll down to Sampling--it's a
| | 00:29 | rollou--and under Samples we have
Amount of Samples for Preview and the higher
| | 00:37 | the number, the higher
the quality of the Preview.
| | 00:41 | So let me go ahead and start Rendered
Shading in my Viewport and at the default,
| | 00:47 | which is 10, you can see
we get a lot of pixilation.
| | 00:51 | Now this may be just perfectly fine to
see how it's going to render, but if you
| | 00:57 | need more quality, you can up this value.
| | 01:01 | Now by bringing this
value up, you add render time.
| | 01:07 | But the nice thing about this is that as
you move the Viewport, it always starts
| | 01:11 | back to 0 and then it will just
gradually fill in, so if you just let it sit
| | 01:17 | there, it will go ahead and
start filling in the details.
| | 01:21 | Now if you don't need that, you can
certainly bring this number down or you
| | 01:26 | can bring it up, just depending upon
how much quality you want to see in your
| | 01:31 | Viewport.
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| Understanding render settings| 00:00 | Now the Cycles Renderer is a completely
different Renderer than the Blender Renderer.
| | 00:06 | So let's go through some of the basic
settings for Cycles. We find these in the Render tab.
| | 00:12 | Now under Render we have how you want
the Render displayed. You want to Display
| | 00:17 | in a New Window or in a Viewport.
| | 00:20 | Feature Set. This is actually pretty
important. Typically we leave this as
| | 00:24 | Supported, which is the Supported
Features, but Cycles is adding new features
| | 00:30 | all the time; it is a very dynamic Renderer.
| | 00:35 | If you want you can add in Experimental
Features, which will give you additional
| | 00:41 | features, which may or may not work.
| | 00:44 | If you want everything to work,
make sure that's on Supported.
| | 00:47 | Now in addition to this we have a
Dimensions tab here, which is basically how
| | 00:52 | big you want to render.
| | 00:54 | Do you want it to be 1080p?
Do you wanted to be 720p?
| | 00:59 | Aspect Ratio, Frame Rate, all that stuff,
is pretty much the same as it is with
| | 01:04 | the Blender Renderer.
| | 01:06 | Do we want to put a Stamp on this?
| | 01:08 | In another words, do we want to put a watermark?
| | 01:10 | Output. Where are we actually
outputting our images to? If we're going to do
| | 01:16 | animation rendering, what type of
file are we going to be rendering to?
| | 01:20 | So if we want to render to JPEG, you
need to select JPEG and the Quality.
| | 01:25 | Sampling--which we covered before and we
have Sampling for Preview--but I forgot
| | 01:30 | to mention that we also have a number of
Samples for the actual Final Render, so
| | 01:36 | again, the higher the number,
the higher-quality the render.
| | 01:40 | Now another really important one for
the Cycles Renderer is the Light Paths and
| | 01:45 | this controls the quality
of the lighting in the scene.
| | 01:49 | So we have Direct Light, which is
basically just using the Lights in the scene.
| | 01:55 | We have Limited Global Illumination,
which adds in bounce lighting or softer
| | 02:01 | lighting, and we have Full Global
Illumination, which is the closest to
| | 02:06 | realism that you can get.
| | 02:08 | And typically, I render with this,
but if you don't need these additional
| | 02:12 | features, if you want to render with
just the lights you have in the scene,
| | 02:15 | you have that option.
| | 02:16 | Now we also have a rollout here for Performance.
| | 02:22 | Again this is for rendering. We have a
number of Threads, which is basically how
| | 02:27 | much of your computer is it using to
render, so by Auto Detected, Auto detects
| | 02:32 | the number of Threads in your CPU
or CPU's, and assigns them or you can
| | 02:39 | actually reduce that by clicking over to Fixed
and this will free up resources for other things.
| | 02:45 | So if you want to model while you render,
you might want to not use all of your CPU.
| | 02:52 | And then also the Acceleration
Structure. Typically you keep it on Dynamic.
| | 02:57 | And then the number of Tiles. In other
words, how much of the scene is going
| | 03:01 | to render in one byte?
| | 03:04 | And then finally we have Render
Layers, which are pretty much the same as in
| | 03:09 | the Blender Renderer.
| | 03:10 | So now that we understand some of the
basics of rendering, we can go ahead and
| | 03:16 | move on to actually creating
Materials and starting to render.
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2. Creating Materials in CyclesUnderstanding basic Cycles materials| 00:00 | Let's go ahead and take a look at some
of the basic materials that we have in
| | 00:04 | the Cycles Renderer.
| | 00:06 | Now before we get started, I just want
to go ahead and get my screen set up, so
| | 00:10 | I'm going to go ahead and left-click
and drag in this Camera Perspective window
| | 00:14 | and close out that panel, so we
have a full view of our scene.
| | 00:20 | And then I'm going to go ahead and turn
this on to Rendered Mode and you can see
| | 00:25 | that Blender immediately starts
rendering this using the Cycles Renderer.
| | 00:29 | Now there's nothing in the scene,
because we don't have any Materials applied.
| | 00:33 | Now these other viewports--I have this
one set at a wireframe, which is fine--
| | 00:37 | and let's go ahead and set this one to
at least a Solid View, so we can at least
| | 00:42 | see things like color and that sort of thing.
| | 00:45 | I can go into my User Perspective
window and I can select one of the objects. In
| | 00:52 | this case I'm going to go
ahead and select the bowl.
| | 00:55 | Now let's go ahead and just change the
color of the bowl, but before we do that,
| | 01:00 | we actually have to add in a Material.
| | 01:02 | So I'm going to go ahead and expand
this window here and this is mostly because
| | 01:06 | I'm on a small screen. Hopefully
your screen will show this fully.
| | 01:09 | I'm going to go here to the Materials
tab; when I click on that, the Materials
| | 01:15 | for this object Bowl are pretty empty.
| | 01:18 | So we need to add in a Material, which
is exactly the same way that we always
| | 01:22 | do in Blender. We're just going to click on
New and it brings in the Default Material.
| | 01:27 | In this case it's called a Diffuse Material.
| | 01:30 | Now we have three separate rollouts
here. One is for the Surface Quality.
| | 01:35 | The second is for Displacement,
which is basically bump mapping,
| | 01:39 | displacement mapping, and then the
last one is for Settings, which is
| | 01:43 | basically just the Viewport color.
| | 01:46 | So the most important one here is
Surface, so we have a Surface type, we have a
| | 01:51 | Color for this material
and we also have Roughness.
| | 01:55 | So let's go ahead and start with the
default Material and add in some color.
| | 01:59 | I'm going to go ahead and just click on
this and I get my color picker, so I'm
| | 02:04 | going to go ahead and pick a bluish
color and you can see that as I start
| | 02:08 | dialing in this Color, you can see
it almost immediately down here in the
| | 02:11 | corner as I render, but we can also add in
some additional effects by adding in Roughness.
| | 02:19 | Now Roughness basically just
changes the type of Shader.
| | 02:23 | When Roughness is at 0, the
Shader behaves like a Lambert Shader.
| | 02:29 | When the Roughness goes up to 1, it
behaves like an Oren-Nayar Shader, which
| | 02:37 | is kind of a softer diffused Shader;
it's good for things like cloth and velvet
| | 02:41 | and that sort of thing.
| | 02:43 | And Lamberts are good as like the
basis for something like a Blend Shader or
| | 02:47 | something like that.
| | 02:48 | So you can certainly dial in your
Roughness and you can see how it changes
| | 02:52 | this Material here.
| | 02:54 | We can also change the type of Surface.
| | 02:58 | Now if you click on any one of these,
you'll see that you get a menu which has a
| | 03:03 | number of different things that you
can do, and we'll be going through these
| | 03:07 | throughout the course.
| | 03:08 | So let's go ahead and just focus on the
Surface menu and you can see we have a
| | 03:12 | number of different types of Surface.
| | 03:15 | By default we have the Diffuse Surface, but
we can also add in any number of other types.
| | 03:22 | So, for example, if I wanted this to be
a little bit shinier, we could add in
| | 03:26 | a Glossy Surface and you can see how this
becomes very reflective and almost mirror-like.
| | 03:32 | If we want we can also change that to
Glass, which is a very nice default Glass
| | 03:38 | Material and you can see how it has
some Transparency. We also have Translucent
| | 03:43 | as well as Transparent.
| | 03:46 | Now Transparent is really just a very
rough form of Transparency, which might
| | 03:52 | not be good for double-sided objects,
such as this bowl, but it might be good
| | 03:56 | for things like cloth or something like that.
| | 04:00 | Then we have some additional ones--
Velvet, it's kind of a very soft type of
| | 04:04 | shader--and then we also have another
one called Emission, which allows this
| | 04:09 | object to emit light, so you can turn
any object into a light, and in fact.
| | 04:15 | if we bring up the Strength of this,
you can see how this can actually become a
| | 04:19 | very powerful type of Light and then
we have a number of other ones, such as
| | 04:23 | Holdout, Mix Shader, Add Shader which
are a little more custom, and we'll get to
| | 04:27 | those. I'm going to go ahead
and switch this back to Diffuse.
| | 04:31 | So as you see adding Materials in Cycle
is pretty much the same as Materials in
| | 04:36 | the Standard Blender Renderer and
within our Materials we have a number of
| | 04:41 | different options that allow us to
change the Surface Type, Color, as well as
| | 04:46 | Roughness and a few other parameters.
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| Using the shader node system| 00:00 | As you start working with the Cycles
Renderer, you'll want to get used to working
| | 00:05 | with the Node Editor.
| | 00:07 | Now the Node Editor allows you to rewire
the way a Shader works and this is very
| | 00:14 | critical for the way that Cycles works.
| | 00:16 | So let me give you a quick brief
introduction to it and then we'll start using
| | 00:21 | it throughout the rest of the course.
| | 00:24 | So the easiest way to get into the
Node Editor is to select an object here.
| | 00:28 | In fact, let's go ahead and select
this bowl and let's make sure we have our
| | 00:32 | Rendering turned on here, so I'm going
to go ahead and turn on Rendered in my
| | 00:36 | Perspective Mode here, so
we can see what we have.
| | 00:39 | And I want to take a look at
the Nodes for this Material.
| | 00:44 | So what we can do is go into a Viewport.
In this case let's go into this Viewport
| | 00:49 | here and let's go ahead and change
this to a Node Editor and when I do that,
| | 00:55 | you'll see that the window changes
and I have what's called a Node Editor.
| | 01:00 | Now what this does is it basically
shows me how this Material is wired, so
| | 01:06 | I have a Diffuse Shader going into my
Materials, a very, very simple type of system.
| | 01:15 | So if I were to change this--let's go
ahead and change it, say, to a Glossy--
| | 01:20 | you'll see that this Glossy now is
showing up. So this just reflects the type of
| | 01:25 | Shader that we have plugged into our Material.
| | 01:29 | Now if I wanted to I
could add in additional things.
| | 01:33 | So, for example, I could change the
Color here. I can change it either here or
| | 01:40 | I can change it here.
| | 01:43 | Now if I start playing with this a
little bit--let's say I wanted to add
| | 01:47 | something a little more interesting to
this Color--I can click here and add in
| | 01:51 | any number of Nodes. So just for the
sake of argument, let's go ahead and add in
| | 01:56 | a Checker Texture. So when I add that
in, you'll see that this bowl becomes a
| | 02:03 | checker board pattern and in addition
to this, we have an additional Node here
| | 02:10 | that is plugged into our Glossy shader.
| | 02:14 | So as you can see, when I start adding
things in to my Materials, they show up
| | 02:21 | in the Node Editor.
| | 02:22 | Now the more powerful way of doing this
is to flip that on its head. Add things
| | 02:28 | into the Node Editor.
| | 02:30 | So I'm going to go ahead and select
this Checker Texture and delete it and as
| | 02:34 | you can see, it deletes
here in the Surface as well.
| | 02:37 | So if we want to, we can
add our Nodes in right here.
| | 02:41 | So if I wanted to I could go in Add and
we have a number of different types of
| | 02:46 | Nodes that we can add in.
| | 02:48 | So if I want to add in a Texture--
let's go ahead and add in that same
| | 02:52 | Checker Texture--so I'm going to go
ahead and add that in and you'll see that,
| | 02:56 | well, it shows up actually down here. I
have to kind of zoom out here. I'm just
| | 03:00 | rolling my mouse button and navigation
is just as simple as left-clicking and
| | 03:05 | dragging in this window.
| | 03:08 | So I'm going to go ahead and left-click
and drag this up and you'll see that I
| | 03:11 | have this Checker Texture and it's in
this Material, but it's not showing up
| | 03:17 | here; that's because it's not wired in.
| | 03:21 | So what I need to do is select the
Color Out of the Texture and plug it into
| | 03:26 | the Color In of the Shader and once I do that,
you can see it shows up here and it shows up here.
| | 03:34 | And now I can change my Color
and I can do whatever I want.
| | 03:39 | So this just one simple way of
connecting Nodes together and as we start
| | 03:44 | working through some of these
materials, we will be using this Node Editor more
| | 03:49 | and more.
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| Layering shaders using the Mix node| 00:00 | As you start adding Materials and
Surfaces in Blenders Cycles Renderer, you'll
| | 00:06 | notice that there are not a
lot of options to these Surfaces.
| | 00:10 | These are really a lot less
controllable than the Standard Blender Materials.
| | 00:17 | So, one of the ways to get around this
is to actually start combining materials
| | 00:22 | and stacking them up and layering them.
| | 00:25 | So, for example I have got this Bowl
here, in fact, let's go ahead and turn
| | 00:30 | all the Render here, I am going to
render it, and you see we have got a very
| | 00:34 | simple Diffuse Surface.
| | 00:36 | Now if we wanted to make this shiny in
some way, we would have to change the
| | 00:41 | type of Material, so, let's go ahead
and change this to say a Glossy Material.
| | 00:47 | As you can see we have got a
very highly reflective surface.
| | 00:51 | Under the Glossy Material we have a
number of options, you can change the type
| | 00:56 | of reflection, we have Beckman
which is standard, we also have a Sharp
| | 01:01 | reflection, which is very mirror
like, and then these two here can be
| | 01:06 | controlled, so GGX and Beckman have a
roughness, which blurs out the glossiness
| | 01:14 | of this, but again, it sometimes will not
create the type of the effect that you want.
| | 01:19 | Now one way to get around this is to combine
multiple surfaces to create a layered shader.
| | 01:27 | We can do that in the Node Editor.
| | 01:31 | I've got this Glossy here going into
my Material, if I want I could add in
| | 01:39 | another one, and let's go a head
and just add in a Diffuse Shader.
| | 01:42 | So, when I add this in, you can see
here it is, but I only have one input into
| | 01:49 | this surface, so if I disconnect this
here by left-clicking and dragging, you
| | 01:54 | see how there's nothing
craving the surface, so it's black.
| | 01:57 | So, if I put my Diffuse in there, you
can see, now it's diffused, in fact I
| | 02:02 | could change that color of my
Diffuse, but now it's not shiny.
| | 02:06 | So, if I just have one shader at a
time, I can either have Diffuse or
| | 02:12 | Glossy, but not both.
| | 02:14 | We can change this by adding
it was called a Mix Shader.
| | 02:18 | So, if we go Add>Shader>Mix Shader, you can
see I get a Mix Shader added to my window.
| | 02:29 | What I can do is I can connect the
output of the Shader into the Surface of the
| | 02:34 | Material out, plug the Glossy into the
top, and you see how this shows up here
| | 02:41 | too, and plug the Diffuse into the bottom.
| | 02:46 | So, now once I have that, you can
see how the character of the Surface
| | 02:49 | has already changed.
| | 02:50 | I have got a Glossy Shader here with this
color and a Diffuse Shader here with this color.
| | 02:57 | In fact, I could change my Glossy,
maybe make a little bit more towards red,
| | 03:01 | may it kind more of a violet type of color
and you see how that shows up in the Reflection.
| | 03:07 | Now we have this one parameter here
called Fac, and what that is this factor.
| | 03:13 | What it does is, as it gets lower,
it goes more towards the top shader.
| | 03:18 | So, in this case the Glossy at 0, it's
completely Glossy, at 1, it's completely
| | 03:26 | Diffuse, we have the same control right
here, so you don't have to jump into the
| | 03:32 | Node Editor if you don't want.
| | 03:33 | So, this allows you to layer
these Shaders and dial them in.
| | 03:40 | So, this actually can be very powerful,
because we are not limited to just
| | 03:44 | adding them to the Surface or the
Shader we can also do this for Color really
| | 03:50 | any sort of parameter we want.
| | 03:53 | If you don't want to use the Node Editor,
you can actually do this completely in
| | 03:57 | the Materials panel.
| | 03:59 | I am just going to go ahead and
disconnect everything here, select these in the
| | 04:03 | Node Editor and let's go a head and
just delete them, and let's go a head and
| | 04:06 | just start this up from scratch.
| | 04:08 | So under Surface, if we want we can
actually add our Mix Shader in here, watch
| | 04:14 | how this kind of builds
over here in the Node Editor.
| | 04:17 | And when we add in that Mix Shader
you'll see we have two options here for
| | 04:22 | the type of Shader, so I can add in my
Glossy here and I can add it in my Diffuse here.
| | 04:29 | So, you can actually do this entirely
from that Materials panel, but I find that
| | 04:36 | using the Node Editor is
actually a little bit more intuitive.
| | 04:40 | I like the graphical layout of this,
but it's really your choice as to what
| | 04:45 | workflow you select.
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| Adding textures to materials| 00:00 | One way to add additional
characteristics to a surface is to add Textures.
| | 00:06 | So, let's take a look at how to add
Textures within the Cycle's Renderer.
| | 00:11 | So, we have got a basic scene here
and I am going to go ahead and turn on
| | 00:15 | Rendered in the viewport. You can
see we have our table with our bowl.
| | 00:19 | And in fact let's go ahead and
start working on the table itself.
| | 00:23 | So, I am going to go ahead and
click on that and highlight it.
| | 00:27 | And you'll see that it
doesn't have a Material applied.
| | 00:31 | Let's go ahead and add in a New Material.
| | 00:34 | Now let's go ahead and rename it Table
and for the Surface type, well let's go
| | 00:40 | ahead and leave it at Diffuse right now.
| | 00:44 | In the Color channel here is
where I want to add some texture.
| | 00:48 | You can see we have little buttons
here are off to the right of each one of
| | 00:52 | these, and in the Color one, when I
select that, you'll see all the options I can
| | 00:57 | place into that slot.
| | 01:00 | So, we have what are called Converters,
we have actual colors so you can actually
| | 01:05 | do Brightness/Contrast, Hue
Saturation Value and that sort of stuff.
| | 01:09 | We have a Mix option here
very similar to the Mix Shader.
| | 01:12 | And then we have procedurals
such as Bricks, Checkers and so on.
| | 01:17 | And we also have an Image Texture, which
allows you to put an image file in there.
| | 01:22 | Let's go ahead and just bring in a
Basic Texture here. I am going to load up
| | 01:26 | the Checkered Texture here
and you can see how that renders.
| | 01:30 | Once we have done that, you can see we
have the color of the Checker, the Scale of
| | 01:35 | the Checker as well as a Roughness.
| | 01:37 | You can see here in the Node
Editor we have a Checker Node.
| | 01:41 | So, if I wanted to change the color I
can certainly change that color and you
| | 01:45 | can see it changing here. We can also
change this, maybe make it a darker color
| | 01:50 | here, whatever we want, and we can
also change the Scale, which is how much
| | 01:56 | Checker do we put on there? And also
the Roughness. So this Roughness actually
| | 02:01 | points back to the Diffuse.
| | 02:05 | Now if we wanted to, we could certainly
play with this a little bit more. We can
| | 02:09 | go into the Node Editor
or we can just play here.
| | 02:13 | You notice how each one of these
colors also has a little button here.
| | 02:19 | So, when I click on this, we can put anyone
of these types of Materials into this slot.
| | 02:26 | If I wanted to I could put in a Magic
Texture and when you put that in, you can
| | 02:30 | see how that changes this Checker Texture.
| | 02:35 | Here you can see I have this Magic
Texture plugged into this Checker Texture,
| | 02:38 | plugged into the Diffuse and you
can pretty much see it here too.
| | 02:43 | Color 1 is now Magic Texture and we
have our Depth and all of our controls for
| | 02:48 | that so I can change those if I wanted to.
| | 02:51 | So, as you can see this is one way of
adding in Texture to a Material is to play
| | 02:56 | with the Procedural Textures that are provided.
| | 03:00 | But I am going to go ahead and
back out of this and let's go ahead and
| | 03:03 | just add in a simple image file.
| | 03:07 | So I am going to go into my Node
Editor and select that and delete it.
| | 03:09 | Now another way of deleting these is to do
it from the Materials window. You don't
| | 03:14 | have to select and delete in the
Node Editor. You can just go here to this
| | 03:19 | Checker Texture here and just click
on this and select Remove. Same thing.
| | 03:24 | And now basically I've gone back to my
default, which is just a Color channel.
| | 03:31 | So if I select my Color channel
here, I can put in an Image Texture.
| | 03:37 | Another way of doing it is to go into
my Node Editor, Texture, Image Texture.
| | 03:43 | Same thing. And in this
case I have to wire that in.
| | 03:47 | Now when I bring in my Image Texture,
you'll see that it puts up this color and
| | 03:53 | that's because it
doesn't have the Filename yet.
| | 03:56 | So if I open this up and go into my
Exercise files, you will see I have a file
| | 04:03 | here called Granite.jpg and
let's go ahead and open that image.
| | 04:07 | And you can see now I have a granite table top.
| | 04:12 | By adding in Texture you can add in
either images or you can add in procedural
| | 04:18 | textures or both to create
complex colors for your Shaders.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating glossy surfaces| 00:00 | Let's take a look at how to create more
sophisticated surfaces and in this case
| | 00:04 | let's go ahead and create a Glossy Surface.
| | 00:07 | So, I have my Table and when I render
it here, you'll see that it renders kind
| | 00:12 | of flat. I am not getting much of a
reflection of this bowl in the scene.
| | 00:18 | So let's go ahead and add a Gloss or a Sheen to
this to make it look a little bit shinier.
| | 00:24 | In this Material here I have got this
Image Texture going into this Diffuse into
| | 00:31 | my Material Out here.
| | 00:32 | So you can see that here I have got a
Diffuse with an Image Texture, but I want to
| | 00:38 | add a little bit of shine.
| | 00:40 | So, I can add in a Glossy Shader and
mix it together with the Diffuse to
| | 00:45 | create my shiny table top.
| | 00:48 | So I am going to do this in the Node
Editor. I am going to go ahead and add in a
| | 00:53 | Shader and I am actually going to add
in my Mix Shader and I have to zoom out
| | 01:01 | here, because sometimes it comes in
underneath. Zoom in. Go ahead and just
| | 01:06 | rearrange these here.
| | 01:08 | So what I want do is basically put the
Diffuse into the Mix and into the Material Out.
| | 01:14 | Now let me show you a little trick
here. If you grab this and drag it over the
| | 01:18 | line--notice how that shows up as
orange--and let go, it will go ahead
00:01:23.10]
and automatically rewire it and that
can actually be very, very handy. A lot
| | 01:27 | quicker than rewiring that by hand.
| | 01:30 | Now I've got a Mix Shader with the
Diffuse going into it, but we also have our
| | 01:35 | second Shader, which is missing.
| | 01:38 | So let's go ahead and add in another
Shader and in this case we are going to
| | 01:41 | add in the Glossy Shader and I'm going
to go ahead and wire that into my Mix.
| | 01:49 | Now notice how as soon as I do that, this
table top gets a little bit of a highlight on it.
| | 01:56 | So let's go ahead and take that off.
You can see that when it's off, this is
| | 02:00 | pretty flat and then as soon as I plug
that in, I get a bit of a reflection here.
| | 02:08 | This Glossy has a number of
different ways to be reflective. One is with
| | 02:14 | Beckmann. In fact, let's go ahead and
turn our factor here up to one so you can
| | 02:20 | see exactly what's reflecting here.
| | 02:23 | This is what's reflecting off of this Shader.
| | 02:28 | I've got Reflections here. Then this
is a reflection of the bowl and this
| | 02:34 | white here is a reflection of the light, but
that's also coming from the Color Channel here.
| | 02:40 | So if I change this color, you can see
how it changes that highlight color and
| | 02:47 | then the Roughness again--
that's Roughness of the Shader.
| | 02:51 | Now this Roughness here is how much it
reflects, so when this is at absolute
| | 02:57 | zero, I get a perfect reflection. As I
start dialing it up--the Roughness--it
| | 03:06 | starts to get more
Diffuse and not so reflective.
| | 03:11 | Now we have a number of different ways
to reflect, so you remember here I've got a
| | 03:16 | Glossy Shader here with a Beckmann.
| | 03:19 | If we go to GGX--that's just another
way of reflecting--that you can see how
| | 03:24 | that changes in that again I
can add in Roughness if I want.
| | 03:28 | So this actually creates a much higher
highlight and then if we go to Sharp,
| | 03:35 | that creates an absolute mirror effect
and it's almost the same as if you just
| | 03:40 | dialed down the Roughness
completely on one of the other ones here.
| | 03:45 | So I am actually going to put this
back to Beckmann and actually I do want
| | 03:49 | to get a pretty sharp reflection,
so I am actually going to make my
| | 03:52 | Roughness fairly low.
| | 03:54 | So now that I have this and I have
the reflectivity the way that I want it, I
| | 04:01 | can go ahead and dial back my factor
here to add in the actual Table itself.
| | 04:08 | So now you can see how the actual
Granite is now reflecting this bowl and so I
| | 04:15 | have a much glossier surface.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding bumps and displacements| 00:00 | Now let's go ahead and take a look at how
to add Bumps and Displacements to a Material.
| | 00:06 | Now we are going to work on the
objects in this bowl which are oranges, but
| | 00:12 | right now if we render--and let's go
ahead and turn on Rendering here--you'll see
| | 00:17 | that, well, we don't have anything applied to them.
| | 00:20 | Let's go ahead and build a
Material for these that includes Bump and
| | 00:23 | Displacement Mapping.
| | 00:24 | Now the first thing I want to do is
just get the overall color of this surface.
| | 00:29 | So I am going to go ahead and select
one of these oranges and let's go over to
| | 00:34 | our Materials panel here
and add in a New Material.
| | 00:38 | By default it adds in a Diffuse.
| | 00:42 | And if we wanted we could just make this
orange and as you can see in the Render
| | 00:48 | it looks orange, but it doesn't look
like an orange, because it doesn't really
| | 00:52 | have the surface characteristic.
| | 00:54 | The surface of an orange is slightly
shiny and it has bumps on it as well.
| | 01:01 | So let's go ahead and start with the
shiny part of it and in order to do that we
| | 01:06 | need to add in some Gloss.
| | 01:08 | So I am going to do exactly what I did before
| | 01:11 | and I'm going to make a Glossy Shader
and mix that in with the Diffuse.
| | 01:15 | So I'm going to do this over
here in the Node Editor here.
| | 01:19 | So I'm going to go ahead and add a Shader
and I am going to add Glossy In and then
| | 01:24 | I am going to add one more
Shader and that's the Mix Shader.
| | 01:29 | You maybe have to zoom out in
order to see that and there it is.
| | 01:33 | So now I'm going to go ahead and plug
the Diffuse into the Mix Shader and
| | 01:40 | Glossy into the Mix Shader and notice
how they show up here on the right
| | 01:46 | in our Materials panel.
| | 01:47 | Now you can see here that I've got a
fairly Glossy orange here and also the
| | 01:54 | Gloss is kind of a white color and that's
because that's what this is. This is white.
| | 01:59 | So let's go ahead and change that to the
same color that we have in our Diffuse Shader.
| | 02:04 | So I'm just going to go ahead and click
this, pick my Color Shader, and hit the
| | 02:08 | eyedropper right here and
eyedrop that orange color.
| | 02:13 | And then I'm going to add a little bit of
Roughness to this Gloss and you can see
| | 02:17 | as I add it, it kind of spreads out that highlight.
| | 02:20 | And then I am going to go here into my
Mix Factor and I am going to mix it more
| | 02:25 | towards 0, which is going
to take out a lot of that gloss.
| | 02:30 | So it's going to be more Diffuse than Glossy.
| | 02:32 | So I'm going to put it right around .2 or so.
| | 02:35 | So now you have a surface that is slightly
glossy, but it's still very, very smooth.
| | 02:41 | So in this case that looks more like a
sphere or ball or something like that.
| | 02:47 | So let's go ahead and add in some bumps to
give it a little bit more life and make
| | 02:51 | it look a little bit more like an orange.
| | 02:53 | Now we can do that here in
the Displacements setting here.
| | 02:57 | So you see we have a Displacements setting here.
| | 02:59 | There's also one here on
the Material option here.
| | 03:03 | But I am going to work this from the
Materials panel and let's go ahead and just
| | 03:07 | select this and then we can select a
Texture to make the Material bumpy.
| | 03:13 | We have a number of things we can use.
| | 03:15 | We can obviously use an Image Texture,
but in this case I am going to use this
| | 03:19 | special one called Voronoi Texture
and let's go ahead and just select that.
| | 03:24 | And you can see here that it
gives it kind of this faceted look.
| | 03:29 | By default, the Voronoi Texture is kind of big and broad.
| | 03:34 | So let's take a look at what we have here.
| | 03:37 | So I have got my Diffuse and my Glossy
here going into my Mix Shader and that
| | 03:43 | goes into Surface and then my
Voronoi Texture goes into Displacement.
| | 03:48 | Now if we wanted to take a look at
what this actually looks like, this is
| | 03:51 | actually outputting a color and if we
wanted to, we could hook that color into,
| | 03:54 | say, the Diffuse channel and
you could see what it's creating.
| | 03:58 | So this is actually the output of this texture.
| | 04:03 | The output of this is kind of like this
cell-shaped texture and if we want to, we
| | 04:09 | could go down here to this and
it affect our scale of this.
| | 04:13 | And so we can use this to create a Bump Map.
| | 04:15 | So I'm going to go ahead and disconnect this.
| | 04:18 | So you can see now I've got this
texture and really the scale of this is
| | 04:25 | creating the bumps.
| | 04:27 | Now if you notice here, the bumps are kind of inverse,
| | 04:30 | so it's almost like it's creating pockets.
| | 04:32 | We want the bumps to go outward.
| | 04:34 | So what we should do is take this
scale and bring it below 0, bring it to
| | 04:39 | negative, which will go ahead and invert
the map and then make that a little bit
| | 04:44 | more in the way that we want.
| | 04:47 | Once we have the scale--which I have
right around -36 or 37, right around there--
| | 04:54 | I have got a very bumpy surface,
but it's not quite like an orange.
| | 04:59 | It's a little too bumpy.
| | 05:00 | So we need to kind of moderate this map.
| | 05:04 | So in this case we only have an option
here for intensity in this texture.
| | 05:11 | Now if we wanted to modify this, we need
to add in one more node to kind of pull that back.
| | 05:17 | If we take the Color Output here and we
put it back into the Diffuse, you can see
| | 05:22 | what I've got here.
| | 05:23 | I've got basically black and white.
| | 05:26 | So if I undo that, I can
actually put a Color Control on this.
| | 05:31 | So I'm going to go into Color and I am
going to add in a Bright/Contrast node.
| | 05:38 | So this will allow me to affect the
Brightness and Contrast of the output of this texture.
| | 05:45 | So I am just going to go and
drop this over this line here.
| | 05:49 | If we start bringing this contrast down--if
I bring it down to -1--it makes it smooth.
| | 05:57 | So somewhere slightly above
-1 is the sweet spot here.
| | 06:02 | I am getting right around -
.85, somewhere in that range.
| | 06:07 | I've basically pulled the Contrast
of that Texture down and that has
| | 06:12 | brought down the Bump Map.
| | 06:15 | So now that I have this, I can name of my
Material and apply it to my other objects.
| | 06:21 | So I can go up to the top here and
select my Material name and call it Orange.
| | 06:29 | And now I can apply this to my other objects.
| | 06:33 | So I'm going to go ahead and select
my second orange, pull down, find that
| | 06:38 | orange Material, select my next one.
Pull down. Select my orange Material.
| | 06:46 | Now we have these objects
looking a lot more like oranges.
| | 06:51 | Now remember a lot of the default
Textures that come with Cycles don't have
| | 06:56 | controls for the color.
| | 06:59 | You have to add in a secondary node
such as Bright/Contrast to actually affect
| | 07:05 | the color of these textures.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating realistic glass| 00:00 | Now let's take a look at how to
create realistic glass using Cycles.
| | 00:05 | This is actually fairly straightforward.
| | 00:07 | There is a Glass Surface that
will create a fairly realistic glass.
| | 00:13 | Let's go ahead and start by rendering our scene
| | 00:15 | here. I'm going to go ahead and
just turn on Render in this Viewport.
| | 00:20 | And you can see that we've got a
glossy table; we've got our oranges.
| | 00:24 | And now let's go ahead and work with the bowl.
| | 00:28 | So I'm going to go ahead and select my bowl.
| | 00:30 | And you'll see here that we have a
Material applied and that the Surface is Diffuse.
| | 00:38 | In order to create glass, we
have to apply the Glass Surface.
| | 00:42 | Pretty straightforward.
| | 00:44 | So all we have to do is select Glass
and you can see that there's glass.
| | 00:49 | But we've got a number of
parameters that we can affect.
| | 00:53 | The first one is the Color.
| | 00:56 | I want to actually see the glass
effect, so I'm going to go ahead and take
| | 00:59 | out most of the Color.
| | 01:01 | I'm going to click on this.
| | 01:02 | I'm going to go to my HSV parameters
and take down my Saturation and leave
| | 01:09 | my Intensity at .85.
| | 01:13 | So you can see here that I've got a
fairly realistic glass and you can see the
| | 01:18 | oranges through the glass.
| | 01:21 | And now we have a number of
other parameters besides Color.
| | 01:24 | We have Roughness and IOR, which
stands for Index of Refraction.
| | 01:31 | Roughness actually controls how rough
the surface of the Glass is; in other words,
| | 01:36 | it's the frosted glass effect.
| | 01:39 | At 0 the glass is fairly smooth and
glossy and if I bring this up to 1, you'd
| | 01:46 | see how this glass becomes a lot more opaque.
| | 01:50 | Now the reason I'm getting this little
speckle effect is because I've got my
| | 01:54 | Render Settings for my Viewport at 10,
which just doesn't give me enough to
| | 01:59 | actually go through and fully render this.
| | 02:01 | But I'm doing this for
sake of speed of rendering.
| | 02:04 | So if I bring this down to say maybe
.5 or somewhere in that range, you can
| | 02:09 | start to see through this.
| | 02:12 | We have a couple of different models for this.
| | 02:15 | Now this is basically the
same as our Glossy Material.
| | 02:18 | So a Sharp value here
basically gets rid of the Roughness.
| | 02:24 | GGX tends to amplify it so
let's see how that Roughness works.
| | 02:30 | So I tend to keep this on Beckmann,
which puts it right in the middle.
| | 02:35 | And in fact I'm going to go ahead and
turn this all the way down to 0 again.
| | 02:39 | So we can see this as clearly as
possible and make the bowl as clear as possible.
| | 02:45 | Because the next thing we're going to
work with is IOR (Index of Refraction).
| | 02:51 | Now this is basically the lens effect;
in other words how much the surface bends
| | 02:56 | light as the light flows through the surface.
| | 03:00 | So by default it's at 1.45.
| | 03:03 | Lower numbers have a lower Index of Refraction.
| | 03:08 | If I brought it down 1.1, notice how
the orange becomes more whole. In other
| | 03:14 | words it's bending the light less.
| | 03:17 | So when it's at 1, it
stops bending light completely.
| | 03:22 | This really isn't desirable because
it's not creating the glass effect and one
| | 03:27 | of the reasons we see glass the way
that we do is because it bends light.
| | 03:33 | So you really want this number above 1.
| | 03:36 | If I put it below 1, say at .7,
again, I'm going to get that effect.
| | 03:41 | This is really the difference between
bending the light inward and bending the
| | 03:46 | light outward. So at 1, it
doesn't bend light at all.
| | 03:50 | When it's below 1, it bends it one way and
when it's above 1, it bends it the other way.
| | 03:56 | For this bowl, values above
1 are really what we want.
| | 04:00 | So at 1.25, you can see we
get a pretty good glass effect.
| | 04:05 | As we get higher and higher, it's going
to start bending the lights so much that
| | 04:11 | the effect will become opaque.
| | 04:13 | So let's go ahead and just dial this up
to say about 2 or 2.4, in this case, and
| | 04:18 | you can see how it becomes
almost like a reflective surface.
| | 04:22 | So again typically between 1
and 2 are good values for this.
| | 04:29 | But you can play with this and create your
own effects that may suit your scene better.
| | 04:35 | If you want to, you can mix Glass with
other Materials to get other types of
| | 04:41 | effects. So just like we mix the
Glossy Material with the Diffuse, we can do
| | 04:46 | the same with Glass.
| | 04:48 | So I'm going to go ahead
and take my Glass Material.
| | 04:51 | I'm going to go ahead and add a
Node and let's maybe add a Diffuse Shader.
| | 04:55 | And then we can mix those two together.
| | 04:57 | So I'm going to add a Mix Shader and
drop that over that and drop this in here.
| | 05:06 | And you can see that when I do that
I'm getting kind of more of a reflective
| | 05:10 | thing and so as we dial this back
towards the glass--in other words make my
| | 05:15 | Factor lower--we're getting a
much more transparent effect.
| | 05:20 | And if you don't want that, you can
certainly delete that Mix Shader out of that
| | 05:24 | Node Editor and just wire it
back in the way that it was.
| | 05:29 | For this final glass, I'm going to go ahead
and just add in a little bit of blue color here.
| | 05:34 | I think that will complement the
oranges quite well. There we have it.
| | 05:39 | There is some of the ways that you
can create glass and other transparent
| | 05:43 | effects using Cycles.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Lighting Using CyclesExploring lighting types for Cycles| 00:00 | Once you understand Materials and
Surfaces, the next step in the rendering
| | 00:05 | process is to add light.
| | 00:08 | Previously we've actually had a light
in the scene but I've deleted all the
| | 00:13 | lights from the scene.
| | 00:15 | And let's go ahead and
just take a render of this.
| | 00:19 | We have a completely black scene. That's
because we have no light in the scene.
| | 00:25 | Blender has a number of default lights
that we can use and these are pretty much
| | 00:30 | the same that we would use for
the regular Blender Renderer.
| | 00:35 | And these are found under Lamps.
| | 00:37 | So each light is called a Lamp.
| | 00:39 | So I'm going to go ahead and select a Spot.
| | 00:44 | When I bring that in, it brings it in at
my 3D cursor here, which I had set up here.
| | 00:50 | We've got just a little
bit of light in the scene.
| | 00:53 | So if I go over to my Object panel here
for my light, you'll see that I've got a
| | 01:00 | number of parameters.
| | 01:01 | I have the Size of the light;
| | 01:03 | I have whether or not it casts a shadow.
| | 01:06 | And then I have a Surface Node, because
lights actually are just Surfaces, so if
| | 01:12 | I click on this, you can see I've got
all my other Shaders, and one of the
| | 01:17 | Shaders is called Emission and
that's the Shader that emits light.
| | 01:23 | We're going to use this a little bit
later to turn objects into light, but
| | 01:27 | just be aware that all of your
default lights actually have that as part of
| | 01:32 | the Materials panel.
| | 01:35 | Now we also have a Color panel here,
so we can pick a color for the light.
| | 01:40 | And we also have a Strength for the
light. And in this case our light, it
| | 01:44 | really isn't as strong as we need it,
so I can go ahead and just left-click on
| | 01:48 | that and turn up the light.
| | 01:50 | You can see here as I turn that light up,
we get a little bit more light in the scene.
| | 01:56 | And I can go ahead and reposition this
light if I want, and get my Spot light in
| | 02:02 | the scene the way that I want.
| | 02:04 | So I'm actually going to bring it a
little bit out here on the Camera side,
| | 02:08 | and I'm going to rotate that in, so that
way I can actually have that light centered.
| | 02:16 | There we go.
| | 02:18 | In fact, I'm going to go
ahead and turn this onto Local.
| | 02:23 | So that way I can push this light in and out.
| | 02:26 | So as I push this light closer,
notice how the intensity gets bigger.
| | 02:32 | In fact, I'm going to go ahead and
bring up my Strength a little bit more of my
| | 02:36 | light and you can see how I'm
really blowing out the scene there.
| | 02:40 | But as I pull the light back, the
light actually falls off, so these are very
| | 02:46 | much real world lights.
| | 02:47 | So if I were to pull this way back, you could
see how the light falls off with distance.
| | 02:53 | Unlike the regular Blender lights,
you cannot select whether or not these
| | 02:58 | lights have fall-off, so all of your basic
lights actually have inverse square fall-off.
| | 03:04 | So positioning of the light is important.
| | 03:07 | The closer the light is,
the brighter it will be.
| | 03:10 | And so this will affect your Strength value.
| | 03:14 | We also have additional parameters for
this light, because it is a Spot light,
| | 03:18 | we have our Spot light Shape and the
Blend, which is basically that soft edge.
| | 03:26 | Now we have a number of other types
of lights that are supported in Cycles.
| | 03:30 | So you can see here all of our Lamps
are Point, Sun, Spot, Hemi and Area.
| | 03:35 | And we can also change this
existing Lamp to one of those.
| | 03:40 | So let's just go through it here.
| | 03:42 | We have Point lights, which you should
be familiar with, which are basically
| | 03:46 | just the bare light bulb in the room.
| | 03:49 | And so these really just have the
Color and Strength parameter and the light
| | 03:54 | basically emits in all directions.
| | 03:58 | The next light is a Sun light.
| | 04:00 | Now this light is different than the other
lights, in that it doesn't have fall-off.
| | 04:07 | Point light will get brighter or
dimmer depending upon how far away you are.
| | 04:13 | The Sun does not, because the Sun is
basically at almost infinite distance, so
| | 04:19 | you will have to dial down your Strength quite
a bit if you're going to use the Sun parameter.
| | 04:25 | So I'm going to go ahead and bring my
Strength to say about 4, which would be a
| | 04:30 | pretty even illumination.
| | 04:31 | And you can see that as I bring this
back and forth, it really isn't affecting
| | 04:37 | the brightness like the other lights will.
| | 04:39 | So Sun is the one light that does not fall off.
| | 04:44 | Now we just played with Spot and we
also have one called Hemi, but technically
| | 04:48 | Hemi is not supported; it's
just interpreted as a Sun Lamp.
| | 04:56 | For the regular Blender Renderer, Hemi
is basically just a unidirectional Spot
| | 05:01 | light that comes from a
very parallel beam of light.
| | 05:06 | This is basically the same as the Sun.
| | 05:09 | The last light is the Area light, and
again, that is a light that has fall-off.
| | 05:16 | So I am going to have to bring
up the Strength of this light.
| | 05:20 | This light is an Area light which
means it emits from a Rectangular Area.
| | 05:27 | So I can increase the size of this
and you can see here this dotted line
| | 05:32 | indicates the size of that light.
| | 05:35 | And we also have two different types of lights.
| | 05:38 | We have a Rectangular light.
| | 05:41 | We can change Size in X and Y. And we
have a Square light and typically I
| | 05:47 | keep this on Square.
| | 05:49 | And again, we just have Color and Strength.
| | 05:51 | So those are the types of lights that
we have available in Blender and you can
| | 05:56 | see how each one has its own uses.
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| Controlling shadows in Cycles| 00:00 | Now when you start using lights you'll
also want to be able to control the shadows
| | 00:06 | that those lights create.
| | 00:08 | It's actually a pretty simple process.
| | 00:11 | The size of the light will
determine the quality of the shadow.
| | 00:17 | So here I have a Spot light,
which I've put into the scene.
| | 00:21 | You can see I have a very, very
sharp shadow underneath this bowl.
| | 00:27 | Now here we have an option to Cast the Shadow.
| | 00:31 | If I want I can turn off the
Shadow or I can turn it on.
| | 00:36 | The Size of the light will determine the shadow.
| | 00:40 | Now remember, this is a
Surface that emits light.
| | 00:44 | When the Surface is 0 Size that means it's a
Point light, and the shadow will be very sharp.
| | 00:53 | As I increase the Size of the light--
| | 00:55 | let's go ahead and increase this to
about 5--you can see how the shadow starts
| | 01:00 | to get a little bit softer along the edge.
| | 01:04 | And as I bring this up bigger and bigger,
you can see how this really starts to
| | 01:09 | affect the way that that shadow works.
| | 01:14 | So let's see how this
works on other types of lights.
| | 01:17 | So let's go ahead to the Point light here.
| | 01:20 | And again, very similar as it
gets to 0, you get a sharper shadow.
| | 01:26 | Now the Sun, in and of
of itself, can have a size.
| | 01:30 | So as I bring up the Size of the
shadow, you can see how it fades out
| | 01:35 | almost immediately.
| | 01:37 | When it's at 0, it's sharp, but by the
time it gets to 1, it's almost completely
| | 01:46 | evaporated that shadow.
| | 01:48 | So remember, the Sun has no fall-off,
so as that Size increases, it magnifies
| | 01:56 | the softness of that shadow.
| | 01:59 | The last light I want to take a look at
is the Area light, and again, I'm going
| | 02:03 | to turn up my Strength a little bit here.
| | 02:06 | The size of the light will affect the
quality of the shadow and you can actually
| | 02:11 | see that in this Area light.
| | 02:14 | So in some ways the Area light and the
Point light are almost the same, except
| | 02:20 | for the fact that the Area light does
have a little bit more of a direction.
| | 02:26 | So those are some of the basic
lights and how to control the shadows.
| | 02:31 | Now just remember, you can turn
shadows on and off per light, and the Size of
| | 02:36 | the light generally affects the
size and the softness of the shadow.
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| Using ambient occlusion| 00:00 | Now in the real world there is
additional lighting that comes from light
| | 00:05 | bouncing off of objects.
| | 00:07 | Now typically this is called
ambient or bounce lighting.
| | 00:11 | In Cycles we use what's called
Ambient Occlusion to simulate this effect.
| | 00:18 | So let's take a look at
our scene as we have it now.
| | 00:21 | I've got this simple scene here and
when I turn on Rendering, you'll see I've
| | 00:26 | got my oranges in my bowl.
| | 00:29 | Now I have one light, which is a Point
light, in the scene so you can see how
| | 00:34 | it creates the shadow.
| | 00:36 | Now if we want, we can add additional
bounce lighting using Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:41 | So I can do that by going over here to
the World panel and if we scroll down,
| | 00:47 | you'll see we have a rollout
here called Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:52 | So watch happens to the
render when I turn this on.
| | 00:55 | Instantly the Render gets a little bit brighter.
| | 00:59 | So let me turn that off
again. see how it gets darker?
| | 01:02 | And when it's on, it gets brighter.
| | 01:05 | And that's because the light
is bouncing around the scene.
| | 01:09 | So now the light from the Point light
is illuminating the scene, but the light
| | 01:14 | bouncing back from the table and from
the oranges and all that stuff is also
| | 01:19 | adding additional
secondary lighting to the scene.
| | 01:23 | So with Ambient Occlusion
we have two options here.
| | 01:27 | We have a Factor, which is how
much is this affecting the scene.
| | 01:31 | If I turn this down, you can see it gets darker.
| | 01:34 | A Factor of 0 is basically the same as
turning it off. And if I bring it all the
| | 01:39 | way up to 1, you can really
have a lot of bounce lighting.
| | 01:43 | Now typically by default
that is right around .5.
| | 01:48 | And then we also have a Distance value,
which is basically how far does the light bounce?
| | 01:54 | So if you have a bigger scene, you may
want to make this distance bigger or if
| | 02:00 | you have a tighter more intimate
scene, you may want to make it smaller.
| | 02:05 | So as this is getting bigger,
you can see how it changes.
| | 02:10 | When it goes negative, you can see how
things start to glow a little bit more.
| | 02:15 | Look at how the Ambient
Occlusion works with the glass here.
| | 02:20 | And because this is a tight scene,
getting this much above 5 or 6 actually
| | 02:26 | doesn't have too much of an effect, so
really the Distance value will have an
| | 02:30 | effect on the bigger scene.
| | 02:33 | As you can see Ambient Occlusion is
just another way to add additional bounce
| | 02:38 | lighting and add one more layer of
softness and realism to your scenes.
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| Creating environmental light| 00:00 | Another way to add light into your
scene is to use environmental lighting.
| | 00:05 | In other words, light from the environment.
| | 00:08 | Now this can either be a solid color,
or an environment image, such as an
| | 00:13 | HDRI or an image file.
| | 00:16 | So let's take a look at our scene.
| | 00:18 | Turn on the Render here.
| | 00:20 | I'm going to render it.
| | 00:21 | Let's make sure we're in the World tab,
and turn off Ambient Occlusion, because
| | 00:27 | I want to show you the exact
effect of an environmental light.
| | 00:32 | Now we can add that in by
adding a surface to the World.
| | 00:38 | Now a lot of these are standard Surfaces.
| | 00:40 | But the one we want to add
here is called Background.
| | 00:45 | So, when we add that in, it brings in
just some standard stuff that we normally
| | 00:50 | see in a Shader such as Color and Strength.
| | 00:55 | If I wanted to, I could
change the color of my environment.
| | 00:59 | And you can see how this affects
the way that the scene renders.
| | 01:04 | So the color kind of adds
an overall tint to the scene.
| | 01:09 | And then we have a Strength value
here where we turn that up or down.
| | 01:16 | You can see how it not only turns up
and down the light, it also turns up and
| | 01:20 | down the background environment color.
| | 01:23 | Let's say I brought it up to 2.
| | 01:26 | You can see this will over
-saturate fairly quickly.
| | 01:29 | So you really want to
keep this between 0 and 1.
| | 01:34 | Another way to affect this is to simply
bring down the value of the light, which
| | 01:40 | is almost exactly the same
as taking down the Strength.
| | 01:43 | Another way to do this is to add
something other than a solid color.
| | 01:50 | We can add bitmaps into our
environment, not only to create light, but also to
| | 01:56 | create a background image.
| | 01:59 | So we can do this by
adding a texture into our Color.
| | 02:03 | So I'm going to click here and we
have a number of different Textures.
| | 02:06 | Now, typically, you want to have
an Image or an Environment Texture.
| | 02:11 | You can also have a Sky
Texture, which is a procedural sky.
| | 02:16 | In this case, I'm going to use
what's called an Environment Texture.
| | 02:20 | Now this is a little bit different
than an Image Texture, in that it will
| | 02:23 | wrap around the scene.
| | 02:26 | By default, it puts in this very loud color.
| | 02:29 | But we can certainly
open up an image file here.
| | 02:33 | And I have one here in my
Chapter 3 folder called Panorama.jpg.
| | 02:40 | This is a JPEG file.
| | 02:42 | If you want, you can load in an HDRI
file, which will have a much higher dynamic
| | 02:46 | range and will work a lot
better as a light source.
| | 02:51 | But I've got this image here, which is
basically just some mountains, and they're
| | 02:57 | actually creating a
light source in the scene.
| | 03:02 | If I want, I can again bring the
Strength up or down and you can see how this
| | 03:08 | affects the light in the scene here.
| | 03:11 | So if I brought it up to, say, maybe 0.5
or something like that, you can see how
| | 03:16 | this actually creates light.
| | 03:19 | And if you look really closely, you'll see
that this is reflecting on the glass as well.
| | 03:26 | Those are some basic ways to add
environmental lighting into a Cycles render.
| | 03:32 | Now remember, you can add in either a
solid Color or a Texture just as long as
| | 03:38 | you add a Background Surface to the World.
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| Using objects as a light source| 00:00 | Now the last type of lighting I
want to show you is lighting from
| | 00:04 | objects themselves.
| | 00:05 | So you can actually turn objects into
lights by using the Emission Shader.
| | 00:12 | Now I have a couple of objects in this scene.
| | 00:14 | I have a Sphere, and a tube, or a Cylinder.
| | 00:19 | Let's go ahead and start by rendering the scene.
| | 00:22 | So I'm going to go ahead and turn on Rendered.
| | 00:25 | You can see that actually I've got some
light in this scene and that's because
| | 00:29 | I have Ambient Occlusion turned on.
| | 00:33 | So let's go over to our World panel here,
and let's find Ambient Occlusion and
| | 00:38 | let's go ahead and turn that off.
| | 00:40 | One of the things we can learn here is
that Ambient Occlusion can be a light
| | 00:44 | source in and of itself.
| | 00:46 | So now that I've turned that off, I've
turned off all the light in the scene.
| | 00:51 | So I'm going to go ahead
and select my Sphere here.
| | 00:54 | Let's go over to the
Materials panel for that Sphere.
| | 01:00 | Let's add-in a new Material.
| | 01:03 | By default, as we've seen
before, it creates a Diffuse.
| | 01:08 | But we can change this to
a Surface that emits light.
| | 01:13 | And that's called Emission.
| | 01:15 | So I find the Shader that says Emission.
| | 01:18 | And when I turn that on, you can see
how instantly I get light in the scene.
| | 01:23 | So, the Sphere illuminates and
it casts light into the scene.
| | 01:30 | This Emission has two parameters:
| | 01:32 | Color and Strength.
| | 01:33 | So basically, the Color determines
the color of the light and the Strength
| | 01:39 | determines how bright that light is.
| | 01:42 | So when I turn up the Strength,
you can see how the light comes up.
| | 01:47 | Now, if I want, I can move the light away.
| | 01:51 | And just like with any other light,
it will be affected by distance.
| | 01:57 | So the closer this is, the
brighter it will light up the scene.
| | 02:03 | Now I'm going to go ahead and
bring this number down to, say, about 2.5.
| | 02:08 | So when I add in Color again--let's go
ahead and add in some Color--and if you
| | 02:13 | notice that when the Strength is up,
the Color still goes in the scene, but the
| | 02:19 | light source itself doesn't reflect the Color.
| | 02:23 | So when this is greater than 1, you're going
to get less and less of that Color in the light.
| | 02:30 | So if I bring that up, you can see
how it gets closer and closer to white.
| | 02:35 | And that's because the Strength is
above whatever Color I put into that light.
| | 02:40 | So let me show you
another way of creating light.
| | 02:44 | This was just a simple Sphere and the Sphere
actually is almost the same as a Point light.
| | 02:51 | And if you took a Point light and
actually increased the size so that it was the
| | 02:56 | size of the Sphere, you would get
almost the identical type of light that you
| | 03:00 | will get with this object-based lighting.
| | 03:03 | So let's use a different-shaped object here.
| | 03:06 | So I'm going to select my Sphere
and let's go ahead and delete it.
| | 03:10 | And when I delete it, it deletes out
the light that this Sphere created.
| | 03:14 | I'm going to rotate around here. My
Camera's here, so this is kind of more of an
| | 03:19 | even representation of what
I'm seeing in this Viewport.
| | 03:22 | Let's go ahead and select the Cylinder,
and go into the Materials panel and
| | 03:27 | add in a new Material.
| | 03:30 | And again, in Surface, we're going
to go ahead and select Emission.
| | 03:34 | So I'm going to go ahead and bring
this down, so you can see it in the view.
| | 03:41 | And as you can see, when we start having
lights that have more unique shapes, we
| | 03:46 | can actually have a more unique
type of lighting in the scene.
| | 03:51 | So as I turn up the Strength of this
light--let's go ahead and bring this up
| | 03:56 | to about 4 or 5 here--
| | 03:57 | you can see how this is actually
more of a tube light; it's actually more
| | 04:02 | representative of something, say,
like an overhead fluorescent light or
| | 04:07 | something like that.
| | 04:09 | This light, again, will vary
depending up on distance to the object.
| | 04:16 | So the closer it is, the
more it will light it up.
| | 04:19 | Now one of the things you may notice
is that when you have an object such as
| | 04:25 | this as a light source, you may
not want to see it in the scene.
| | 04:30 | Obviously, this looks very unnatural.
| | 04:34 | So one of the things you could do is
you can certainly bring it up and out of
| | 04:38 | the scene so that we don't see it.
| | 04:40 | But sometimes you may need that light
a little bit closer to the object to get
| | 04:44 | the exact effect that you want.
| | 04:47 | So when this happens, we need to find
a way to turn off that light, but still
| | 04:51 | have that object illuminate the scene.
| | 04:55 | And we can do that by going into
our Object Properties panel here.
| | 05:00 | So if I click on this little cube that
says Object, we can actually scroll down
| | 05:05 | to our Render Settings here.
| | 05:06 | And this is actually under Ray
Visibility, which is the very last rollout.
| | 05:11 | So when I bring that up, is this object
visible to any number of different things?
| | 05:18 | So, is it visible to the Camera?
| | 05:21 | Well if I turn this off,
it will stop rendering.
| | 05:25 | So the Camera will not see this object.
| | 05:27 | But, it can still transmit
light and create shadows.
| | 05:32 | But, by clicking this off to
the camera, it will not render.
| | 05:38 | So that's just a nice little trick to
get very unique type of lighting in the
| | 05:43 | scene without actually showing it in the Camera.
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|
|
4. Rendering an Interior Scene in CyclesConfiguring the scene| 00:00 | In this final chapter we're going to
take a look at workflow, how to actually
| | 00:05 | light and render a scene.
| | 00:08 | Now we have a basic interior
scene, which we will be lighting.
| | 00:13 | Now I have some Ambient Occlusion
already set up, so we can just take a
| | 00:17 | quick look at the scene.
| | 00:19 | So I am going to go down here in this
bottom Viewport here and just turn it to
| | 00:22 | Rendered and this will go ahead
and start rendering that Viewport.
| | 00:27 | And you can see we've got a basic dining
room scene with that table and the bowl
| | 00:32 | of fruit that we were working with
before, along with some other furniture, a
| | 00:37 | window, and a whole environment.
| | 00:40 | Let's go ahead through our Render
Settings and make sure that they are exactly
| | 00:43 | the way that we want.
| | 00:45 | So in order to set the scene, we want
to make sure we click on the Render
| | 00:49 | Settings tab and let's go through some of this.
| | 00:52 | First thing we need to do is make sure
that we have the dimensions of the final
| | 00:57 | image that we want. By default it's set
to HD 1080p, but for the sake of faster
| | 01:03 | rendering, actually, I'm going to turn this
down to 720p, so that's going to be 1280x720.
| | 01:11 | Now which directory do you want
to output your final animation to?
| | 01:16 | And I will let you decide that.
| | 01:18 | Sampling. Initially, let's go ahead and
leave the sampling at 10 for Preview, but
| | 01:24 | for Rendered, maybe we should turn this
up to say about 200, which will give us a
| | 01:29 | much higher quality rendering.
| | 01:32 | Now we may change that depending
upon how our final render goes.
| | 01:37 | And then for Light Paths, we should set
up a proper illumination model for our
| | 01:43 | scene and, in this case, I'm going to
select Full Global Illumination, which will
| | 01:48 | go ahead and set all of this
transparency and balances to the proper amounts.
| | 01:54 | Now finally we have stuff for
performance. I'm going leave that it the default,
| | 01:58 | which is Auto-detect (how many Threads I have
of my CPU, the size of Tile, and all that stuff).
| | 02:04 | And we are not going to be
working with Layers in this at all.
| | 02:07 | So there's our settings.
| | 02:09 | Now once we have that set up, it's time
to start adding the Cameras and lights
| | 02:14 | to your scene.
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| Creating the camera| 00:00 | Now that we have our basic rendering
parameters set up, it's time to add the Camera.
| | 00:05 | Now typically we add the Camera at
the beginning of the rendering process
| | 00:10 | because a lot times you
are rendering to the Camera.
| | 00:13 | So you may need to position things off
to the side or behind the Camera and you
| | 00:18 | need to know where the Camera is
in order to light the scene properly.
| | 00:23 | The scene currently does not have a
Camera in it and we can easily add a Camera
| | 00:28 | in by going Add>Camera.
| | 00:32 | And once we do, we have a Camera in the scene.
| | 00:36 | Now probably the easiest way to position
your Camera is to first get a Viewport
| | 00:42 | that's reasonably aligned to
where you want your Camera to be.
| | 00:47 | So actually I'm going to use this Viewport
here. I'm actually just turn it to
| | 00:51 | solid so we can manipulate it fairly quickly.
| | 00:55 | And just position this Viewport right
around where I want the view of the Camera.
| | 01:00 | We are going to fine to the Camera, but
let's just get the rough positioning here.
| | 01:04 | And now once we have this Camera set, we
need to set this Camera as the default.
| | 01:10 | So I'm going to go over here to this
Scene tab. And under Camera, I'm going to set
| | 01:14 | my Camera, which is the only one
currently in the scene, as my default Camera.
| | 01:19 | Now once I have that set that as the
default camera, I can go in to View>Align
| | 01:26 | View>Align Active Camera to View.
| | 01:30 | Once I do that, watch how the Camera
jumps over and now this is exactly what
| | 01:35 | my Camera is seeing.
| | 01:38 | This is close, but it's not exactly
what I want, so I'm actually going to go
| | 01:42 | over to my Camera panel here,
because I do have the Camera selected.
| | 01:48 | And now I can start
manipulating the Camera parameters.
| | 01:52 | Now the first thing I want to do is position
the Camera; it's not exactly where I want it.
| | 01:58 | So I'm going to make sure I'm in Local
Translation Mode and I'm going to just go
| | 02:03 | ahead and grab that Z axis
and pull the Camera back.
| | 02:08 | But if you notice here,
I'm getting some clipping.
| | 02:11 | You can see this big black splotch
there and that's really just the Clipping
| | 02:16 | plane on the Camera.
| | 02:18 | Now if we go over to our Camera
parameters here, you'll see that my Clipping
| | 02:22 | plane right now is at a hundred. So
I'm just going to make it a thousand and
| | 02:26 | that will give us plenty of clip on our Camera.
| | 02:30 | So now that I have that I can
actually start positioning this Camera
| | 02:34 | exactly where I want.
| | 02:36 | Now as I pull this Camera back, you're
seeing how I'm kind a getting the edge of
| | 02:41 | the floor in the scene and really
the scene itself is a little too small.
| | 02:46 | So I'm actually going to push the
Camera in and let's go ahead and open up the
| | 02:50 | lens or make the lens little bit wider.
| | 02:53 | So right now we're at a 35mm lens, so
I'm going to go head and dial that down.
| | 02:59 | The next standard size lens is usually
a 28, so let's go ahead and change that
| | 03:03 | to a 28 mm lens and see what happens.
| | 03:07 | Looks like I might be able to
get the whole scene in there. I'm going
| | 03:11 | to go ahead and start rotating my Camera just
to get a little bit better perspective there.
| | 03:17 | So right about there and
then maybe drop the Camera down.
| | 03:21 | And again I'm paying close attention to
the bottom corner of this just to make
| | 03:27 | sure that I'm not getting to edge of
that floor in the scene. In fact I'm
| | 03:30 | going to push the Camera in just a
little bit and maybe rotate it and just
| | 03:35 | subtly adjusting it.
| | 03:37 | Now that I have this set, I
can start lighting my scene.
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| Setting up an environment| 00:00 | Now let's go ahead and start adding a
little bit of light, but also adding in an
| | 00:05 | Environment into the scene.
| | 00:07 | Now if I were to render this using the
Ambient Occlusion we have set up, you'll
| | 00:13 | see that what we have
behind the window is nothing.
| | 00:17 | I need to have something behind that window.
| | 00:21 | Now I can do this in one of two ways.
I could actually make just a flat
| | 00:25 | plane almost like a picture frame and
put that behind the window to simulate
| | 00:30 | what's beyond the window.
| | 00:32 | Another way to do this is to create
an Environment because you can also use
| | 00:37 | that as a light source.
| | 00:40 | So first thing I'm going to do is go
over to my World tab here and let's go
| | 00:45 | ahead and add a Surface to our World
which will create the environmental
| | 00:50 | lighting that we need.
| | 00:52 | So I'm going to go into
this and create a Background.
| | 00:56 | As soon as I create a Background, you
can see that the white color of that
| | 01:00 | Background is adding light to the scene.
| | 01:03 | In fact at this point I can turn off
Ambient Occlusion right now just so we can
| | 01:08 | see what the light itself is doing;
in other words what the Environment is
| | 01:13 | doing to the scene.
| | 01:15 | But I don't want to a white background
behind this window and so I'm just going
| | 01:20 | to go ahead and add in some basic clouds.
I am going to create an Environment
| | 01:25 | Texture and you can see how
that turns to that hot pink color.
| | 01:30 | And we're just going to go ahead
and replace that with a actual file.
| | 01:34 | So I'm going to go ahead and open up
a file and in your Chap04 folder you
| | 01:38 | should have a file called Clouds.
| | 01:41 | Now I'm going to go ahead and open that up.
| | 01:43 | So as you can see this creates
kind of a blue cast to the scene.
| | 01:48 | But this is really just our first pass
at adding light to scene. We're going to
| | 01:52 | add a lot more light to the scene, so
hopefully this will diminish the amount of
| | 01:56 | blue in the scene when we start
adding more lights in the next few movies.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding primary lights| 00:00 | At this point we have just some basic
environmental lighting in our scene.
| | 00:06 | Let's go ahead and take a look at what we have.
| | 00:08 | We basically just have a sky with
clouds and that's casting kind of a blue tint
| | 00:14 | over the whole scene.
| | 00:16 | What we really need to start off with is
the primary light source in this scene.
| | 00:21 | Now this environmental light source is
kind of more of an ambient light, but we
| | 00:25 | really need a direct light source.
| | 00:28 | In this case it's going to be the
sun streaming through this window.
| | 00:33 | Now typically you would think, well, I
should just add a Sun Lamp to the scene,
| | 00:39 | but that's not as controllable
as some other types of lights.
| | 00:42 | So in this case, I'm
actually going to add a Spot Light.
| | 00:47 | So let's go ahead and Add>
Lamp; I'm going to add a Spot.
| | 00:53 | So that comes in here.
| | 00:56 | Now let's go ahead and turn this over
to Material Mode here so that way we can
| | 01:00 | actually see how the light is
being projected into the scene.
| | 01:05 | And let's go ahead and select our light here.
| | 01:08 | So I'm going to go ahead over to my Spot,
and you can see we have the Color and
| | 01:12 | the Strength of the light as
well as the Spot Light Shape.
| | 01:16 | Now the first thing I'm going to do,
is go head and do Show Cone, which is
| | 01:20 | actually going to show the cone of the light.
| | 01:24 | Go ahead and start positioning this light
so that it's shining through the window.
| | 01:29 | So I'm basically just
moving and rotating this light.
| | 01:33 | Now I really can't see exactly how
that cone is falling on the scene.
| | 01:39 | So the easiest way to see that is to
just scale up the light, so I'm hitting the
| | 01:45 | Scale Tool and I'm just going to go
ahead and scale up the entire light.
| | 01:50 | It doesn't affect anything other than
how this displays in the scene. It's not
| | 01:55 | making the light brighter or dimmer by
scaling it; it's simply just making it
| | 01:59 | bigger in the Viewport.
| | 02:02 | Now once I have that, I can
start positioning this light.
| | 02:06 | So I'm actually going to go ahead and
pull this light back quite a bit. I really
| | 02:11 | want to get enough light so that it
fills the window without spilling over.
| | 02:16 | So really I'm looking here at how
this is falling on this wall here.
| | 02:23 | Now once I have that I can
start turning up the light.
| | 02:26 | So I've got my light here, I think
it's pointed in the right direction.
| | 02:30 | Now I'm going to look here in my Render
Viewport as I turn up the Strength of that light.
| | 02:37 | So I'm going to turn it up quite a bit
here and it's starting to cast kind of a
| | 02:42 | shadow on the scene.
| | 02:44 | But I really actually need that light
to come down a little bit more, because
| | 02:49 | I'm really not getting the
type of shadows that I want.
| | 02:52 | Let me turn this up a little bit more here.
I'm actually bringing this light up quite a bit.
| | 02:57 | You can see I'm right now at about 100,
000 in terms of Strength, and you can see how
| | 03:03 | that's creating this nice shadow effect.
| | 03:07 | But I feel like this light is a little
bit too low, so I'm going to go ahead and
| | 03:11 | move it up just a hair and angle it down.
| | 03:15 | Again, I'm just doing a rotation here,
so that I get better illumination.
| | 03:21 | So in other words, it's
coming down a little bit more.
| | 03:24 | So it's starting to look pretty good.
| | 03:26 | Now I'm getting a pretty intense shadow
here on this wall, and maybe what I need
| | 03:31 | to do is bring this light over just even
a little bit more and just move it over
| | 03:39 | this way. Again, turning up my
Strength to get a pretty nice shadow and
| | 03:45 | illumination in the scene.
| | 03:48 | Now once you start playing with this,
you'll see how this actually has replaced
| | 03:53 | a lot of that
environmental lighting in the scene.
| | 03:56 | So as we start adding light, that
environmental light will become less and less
| | 04:01 | important as the total
overall lighting in the scene.
| | 04:06 | So this is a good starting place for this.
| | 04:09 | We may come back and tweak this light,
but I think it's time to start adding
| | 04:14 | additional lights into the scene.
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| Adding secondary lights| 00:00 | Once you get your Primary Light in
the scene, it's time to start adding
| | 00:04 | Secondary Lights to
illuminate other parts of the scene.
| | 00:09 | Now, in this case, I want to
add in the overhead lighting here.
| | 00:14 | So if I take a look at this here,
you'll see I've got a couple of holes here
| | 00:20 | in the ceiling for lighting that's supposed to
illuminate this wall and the art on the wall.
| | 00:27 | So, we can do that by
adding in some additional lights.
| | 00:30 | Now, because these are overhead
spotlights, we're going to add a Spot.
| | 00:36 | In fact, we're going to add three
Spotlights and connect them together so that
| | 00:41 | they all share the same parameters.
| | 00:43 | First thing I want to do is go ahead
and position my 3D cursor as close to the
| | 00:48 | center of the first one of these.
| | 00:51 | So, right about there, and then
I'm going to go Add>Lamp>Spot.
| | 00:56 | That brings in a Spot.
| | 00:58 | But, it brings it in fairly low.
| | 01:00 | So, I'm actually going to go ahead
and move it up in my side Viewport here.
| | 01:04 | So that seems about right.
| | 01:07 | So now that I have this first light in
the scene, I can start to duplicate it.
| | 01:14 | Now, I can duplicate it either as a
separate light, or as a connected or
| | 01:20 | linked object here.
| | 01:21 | So, we can go Object>Duplicate Linked,
and then that brings up that second light.
| | 01:28 | You can see this is my linked light.
| | 01:30 | Now, I'm going to right-click just to
snap it there, and then grab my Move icon,
| | 01:35 | and again, center that in that second hole.
| | 01:40 | Let's do this one more time;
| | 01:42 | Object>Duplicate Link.
| | 01:45 | I'm going to right-click.
| | 01:47 | And that keeps it aligned along the y-
axis and then I'm just going to go ahead
| | 01:53 | and move it along the x-axis here.
| | 01:56 | And so now I've got three lights that are linked.
| | 02:01 | So when I affect the luminosity of one
light or the strength of one light, it
| | 02:06 | will go ahead and affect the
strength of all three lights.
| | 02:11 | I'm going to go ahead and select my
first light, and let's go ahead and start
| | 02:15 | manipulating these and
getting these positioned properly.
| | 02:18 | So I'm going to turn on Rendered
View so I can see what's happening.
| | 02:23 | Obviously, not much is happening because
these lights are not as strong as they need to bel
| | 02:28 | So with this first Light, I'm going to
go ahead and just turn these lights up,
| | 02:31 | and you can see how already
they illuminate the scene here.
| | 02:35 | You can see how it's
starting to put light on the floor.
| | 02:40 | But we really want the
light on the wall and on the art.
| | 02:43 | So I'm going to go ahead and just
Shift+Select all of the lights and we're
| | 02:49 | going to go ahead and just
rotate them here towards the wall.
| | 02:55 | And you can see right here that we're actually
getting a nice pool of light on the wall.
| | 03:01 | These lights are actually set up with a
fairly narrow beam. In other words, they
| | 03:05 | are at 45 degrees but with a very small Blend.
| | 03:09 | So actually I am going to turn up the
Blend on these to give it a much softer
| | 03:13 | edge, which will help a lot.
| | 03:16 | And then I'm also going to actually
increase the size of the Shape and
| | 03:22 | basically make it a wider Spot.
| | 03:25 | That will go ahead and
illuminate that wall a little bit better.
| | 03:29 | I can see I'm getting a little bit of
light here on this stone piece here.
| | 03:35 | And so what I can do is just select
the light that's closer to this, which
| | 03:39 | would be this third spotlight here, and just
rotate that, so that it's not hitting that wall.
| | 03:48 | And I can probably do that the same with
this light here, maybe just kind of rotate
| | 03:52 | that in just a little bit so it's a
little bit more focused on the art.
| | 03:57 | Now once I have that, then I can start
playing a little bit more with the Strength.
| | 04:02 | Now if I bring up the Strength,
you can see it pretty intensely.
| | 04:05 | In fact, you can see the lights here.
| | 04:08 | But actually I'm going to
bring this down just a bit.
| | 04:11 | In this case, here, I've got
them probably in the 3,000s or so.
| | 04:16 | It will give just enough light to
make that art pop just a little bit.
| | 04:20 | As you can see, once you get your main
light in, you can start adding secondary
| | 04:25 | lights to illuminate other parts of the scene.
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| Creating a soft box| 00:00 | Now let's go ahead and add some
additional light into our scene.
| | 00:05 | Let's do a quick render here and we've
got a primary light coming through the
| | 00:10 | window and creating this
nice shadow on the floor.
| | 00:14 | Now we have some secondary lights
illuminating the far wall with the art on it.
| | 00:19 | But we can still add some additional
light and in this case I'm going to add a
| | 00:23 | Soft Box to kind of get a
more general wash of light.
| | 00:28 | And we can do that by using an Area Light.
| | 00:31 | I'm going to go ahead and click over here
somewhere to the side of the table here.
| | 00:37 | And I'm going to add a Lamp and
I'm going to add an Area Lamp.
| | 00:43 | Now when I add that in,
you can see it comes in here.
| | 00:48 | And I really want to go ahead and
rotate it. This little line here indicates the
| | 00:53 | direction that that lamp is pointing.
| | 00:56 | So I am basically just moving and
rotating this light into the scene here.
| | 01:03 | So you can see where it is
in this Wireframe view here.
| | 01:07 | If you're a photographer, a lot time
you use soft light as your fill light.
| | 01:12 | So you'd have a primary spot on your
subject and then a soft box off to the
| | 01:17 | side just to give a nice wash of light.
| | 01:21 | And this is what we're doing here.
| | 01:23 | And you can see how this is creating
more of a general wash of light even
| | 01:27 | in this scene here.
| | 01:29 | And we can also add in a little bit more
Strength and also we want this to be a very soft light.
| | 01:37 | So I'm going to go ahead and increase
the Size somewhere around 20 or 30. In
| | 01:42 | fact I'm just going to type in the
number 30 and make it a fairly big light.
| | 01:47 | And you can see how this is starting to add
a much bigger wash of light into the scene.
| | 01:54 | And so this kind of just gives a general
illumination into the scene and kind of
| | 02:00 | ties everything together.
| | 02:02 | Now we can certainly play with this
a little bit. We can certainly change
| | 02:06 | the angle and we can also change
the Size. The bigger the Size, the
| | 02:10 | softer the Shadow and the higher
the Strength, obviously the more the
| | 02:15 | light affects the scene.
| | 02:17 | I'm going to bring this down just a
little bit because in the next lesson we are
| | 02:22 | going to add in some additional light.
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| Configuring ambient light| 00:00 | So at this point we're pretty close to
being done with our lighting of our scene.
| | 00:07 | We've got four basic light sources.
Now let's just go back over these.
| | 00:11 | We've got an environmental lighting.
| | 00:13 | We also have a Spot Light,
which is simulating the sun.
| | 00:18 | We have some lights that are projecting
on the wall and then a Soft Box to
| | 00:23 | give a good overall general lighting.
| | 00:26 | Now in order to finalize this, one of the
things we can do is add in our Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:32 | So I can go over to my World tab
here and under Ambient Occlusion, we can
| | 00:37 | just click that on.
| | 00:39 | And you can see how this
scene immediately lights up.
| | 00:42 | We really don't want it to be that
bright, so we can certainly change
| | 00:47 | some parameters around.
| | 00:48 | Now we've got two parameters; one is
the Factor, which is how much of the scene
| | 00:53 | is ambient lighting.
| | 00:54 | And the other one is for the length of the
rays. In other words, how long before it bounces.
| | 01:01 | So if we bring this number up, it will
reduce the amount of light in the scene.
| | 01:08 | And we can also change this
Factor a little bit to bring that down.
| | 01:13 | So I'm going to bring my Rays up to
about 100 and my Factor down about .15 or so
| | 01:20 | is a good additional bit of lighting
just to kind of smooth out the scene.
| | 01:27 | Now as you start adding in stuff like
ambient lighting and all this other
| | 01:31 | lighting, you're going to start to get a
little bit more detail in your Viewport Render.
| | 01:38 | We can certainly change this here by
going into our Render Settings and coming
| | 01:42 | down to our Sampling.
| | 01:46 | I've had my Preview set at 10, but if
you want you can bring it up a little bit--
| | 01:51 | maybe let's say 25--and that will give you a
little bit more realistic render in your Viewport.
| | 01:58 | Of course that's going to
take a little bit more time.
| | 02:01 | Be careful with this number; you can
adjust it up or down depending upon how fast
| | 02:06 | your system is and how complex your scene is.
| | 02:10 | So now that we have all of this set,
we can start doing our final rendering
| | 02:14 | which we'll do next.
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| Final rendering| 00:00 | At this point we have our
scene pretty much ready to render.
| | 00:04 | So let's go ahead and take a look what we have.
| | 00:08 | And as you can see we've got
a pretty good lighting model.
| | 00:10 | So we can actually start doing our final render.
| | 00:15 | Before we do our final render, one of
the things we want to do is make sure we
| | 00:18 | check our dimensions, which we set
up at the beginning of this process.
| | 00:22 | And let's also scroll
down and check the Sampling.
| | 00:27 | Now right now for our Render Sample we
have this set at 200, which should give a
| | 00:32 | good render, not perfect but pretty good.
| | 00:36 | And then also we are set up for full
Global Illumination which should give us
| | 00:41 | the best lighting model as well.
| | 00:43 | Down here we have Performance.
| | 00:46 | At this point I have this set for Auto-
detect which will use all 12 of the Threads
| | 00:51 | that I have on this particular computer.
| | 00:54 | If we want we can change it to Fixed and
just dial in the number of Threads we want.
| | 00:59 | This will allow you some extra
processing capacity to do other tasks while you
| | 01:05 | render in the background.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to keep this on Auto-detect.
| | 01:09 | So once you have all of that, you can
start rendering by either doing Render
| | 01:14 | Image or hitting the hotkey, which will be F12.
| | 01:18 | And once we do that we can start rendering.
| | 01:23 | And now we have our final render.
| | 01:26 | With a quality of 200, you can see that
there is still some speckly highlights
| | 01:32 | in here which means that we really
do need to up our quality before we do
| | 01:37 | another final render.
| | 01:39 | So here under Samples, we really
need to bring this up much above 200.
| | 01:46 | Now for this particular scene, I find
a value above 1000 is probably a good
| | 01:52 | value to start with.
| | 01:55 | Now this will increase your render time
and depending upon your system this may
| | 01:59 | take a little while to render.
| | 02:01 | But remember that in order to get high-quality
renders you do need to render a little bit more.
| | 02:07 | As you can see the process of lighting
and rendering a scene really is just a
| | 02:12 | method of building up from your main
light sources to your secondary light
| | 02:17 | sources and then doing the final render.
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ConclusionNext steps| 00:01 | That's it for Rendering Using Cycles in Blender.
| | 00:04 | Now I hope you enjoyed this course, and
this has really just been a brief introduction
| | 00:09 | to the Renderer, but hopefully we've
covered all the major features so you can actually
| | 00:14 | use this Renderer for your own projects.
| | 00:18 | As with anything in 3D,
practice is really important.
| | 00:23 | For lynda.com, this is George Maestri,
and hope to see you next time.
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