IntroductionWelcome| 00:03 | Hi, I'm Donovan Keith, and welcome to
Production Rendering Techniques in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:09 | In this course, we'll look at many of the
more advanced features of CINEMA 4D's renderer,
| | 00:13 | with a goal of better simulating real-world
photography in a time efficient manner.
| | 00:18 | I'll start by showing you how to add realistic shallow depth of
field to your renders using the physical render engine,
| | 00:24 | then show you how to use blurry reflections
in your materials to create a logo treatment.
| | 00:28 | We'll see how to light our scenes using only
photographs with the help of HDRI and global illumination.
| | 00:34 | We'll even go over how to use fast rendering cheats
to create similar effects when you're under a deadline.
| | 00:40 | We'll be covering all these features,
plus plenty of other tools and techniques.
| | 00:43 | Now let's get started with
Production Rendering Techniques in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:48 |
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you are a Premium Member of the lynda.com library, you
have access to the exercise files used throughout this course.
| | 00:07 | The files are located in folders numbered by chapter and
video with a brief descriptor of the main subject.
| | 00:13 | These names may not match the video titles
exactly, but they will use the same keywords.
| | 00:18 | Inside of each folder will
be a CINEMA 4D project file.
| | 00:21 | You may also see an example subfolder, this
contains uncompressed versions of the example
| | 00:26 | images and animations that
you see in a particular video.
| | 00:29 | The CINEMA 4D project files
represent the starting point for each video.
| | 00:33 | Open them up if you'd like
to follow along in real time.
| | 00:36 | Your render times will likely
vary from what you see on screen.
| | 00:39 | One: because we are probably using differently
configured computers, and two: because especially
| | 00:43 | long renders have been time
compressed in the finished training movies.
| | 00:47 | If you don't have access to the exercise files, you can
follow along with your own assets. Let's get started.
| | 00:56 |
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| What you need to know about this course| 00:00 | What you need to know about this course.
| | 00:02 | Production Rendering Techniques in CINEMA 4D
is an intermediate to advanced level course
| | 00:07 | covering the rendering and
lighting tools in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:11 | If you feel a little bit fuzzy on the lighting
and rendering aspects of CINEMA 4D,
| | 00:15 | you might review Rob Garrott's
CINEMA 4D Essentials 5: Rendering and Compositing,
| | 00:20 | as well as CINEMA 4D Essentials 4:
Materials, Texturing, and Lights.
| | 00:26 | This course is being recorded in CINEMA 4D R14 studio,
and it is possible that you're using
| | 00:31 | a different version of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:33 | If you're using CINEMA 4D Prime, you won't
have access to many of the tools and techniques
| | 00:38 | that we're discussing in this series.
| | 00:40 | If you'd still like to follow along, I recommend
downloading the CINEMA 4D Studio demo from MAXON's website.
| | 00:45 | Please note that you will be limited in terms
of output resolution and your ability to save
| | 00:50 | your finished work, but
it's a great way to learn.
| | 00:52 | We'll be spending a lot of time focusing on
Global Illumination and the Physical Renderer,
| | 00:57 | which is accessible from CINEMA 4D
Broadcast, Visualize, and Studio.
| | 01:02 | As a final note, if you're using CINEMA 4D R13,
you're in luck because the Physical Renderer
| | 01:06 | was added to the software in R13, and many
of these tools will still be available to you.
| | 01:12 | If you're using a version earlier than that, like say R12,
some of the Global Illumination tools will be similar,
| | 01:18 | but the way that they function will be a little bit
different, and best practices have changed version to version.
| | 01:23 | That's enough technical gobbledygook.
Let's get started.
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1. Physical RendererModifying depth of field| 00:00 | The beauty of shallow Depth of Field is
what set off the digital SLR video revolution.
| | 00:05 | Shallow Depth of Field is what used to
separate film from video and these days it's still
| | 00:09 | part of what separates just
too perfect CG from photorealism.
| | 00:14 | CINEMA 4D's physical render engine allows us to
accurately simulate the optics of a real-world camera.
| | 00:21 | It's what allows us to get realistic Depth of Field,
Motion Blur, or even strange effects like Chromatic Aberration.
| | 00:27 | Here is a simple scene with some compact
fluorescent light bulbs at different depths on a grid.
| | 00:32 | If we render the scene, we see
that it is perfectly crisp and clear.
| | 00:35 | Now, if we go into our Edit Render
Settings, we can add some Depth of Field.
| | 00:42 | To do that, change your Renderer from the
Standard Renderer to the Physical Renderer.
| | 00:46 | Once you've done that, activate
Depth of Field and render again.
| | 00:51 | Notice that there is now blurring in our foreground
and our background and the center most CFL is in focus.
| | 00:56 | And there are a couple of
small points for you to remember.
| | 00:59 | In order for the Physical Renderer to do
this Depth Of Field blur, you need to make sure
| | 01:04 | that you have a Camera object in your scene.
| | 01:06 | The Editor Camera alone will
not do what you need it to do.
| | 01:09 | And that's because the camera
settings here impact the amount of blur.
| | 01:14 | If you click on your Camera and go to the
Physical settings here, you'll see an F-Stop number.
| | 01:19 | This allows you to adjust the aperture or opening size of
your lens and f/8.0 is a pretty middle of the road aperture.
| | 01:27 | If we choose f/1.0, we'll get a very
extreme blur, because we've got a wide-open lens.
| | 01:32 | Now, you'll probably notice that the
render that we're getting here is pretty grainy.
| | 01:37 | In future videos we will go over how to
address this in-depth, but for now just know that
| | 01:42 | you can go into your Render Settings, to the
Physical tab and adjust the Sampling Quality
| | 01:46 | from Low to High, in
order to get a better result.
| | 01:48 | I'm going to leave it at Low
to keep our render times low.
| | 01:52 | To adjust the point of focus in your scene,
you want to select your Camera, go to the
| | 01:57 | Object tab, and you'll
see a Focus Distance option.
| | 02:01 | If you click on the picker right here, it
should allow you to click on an object in
| | 02:05 | your scene and set a Focus Distance.
| | 02:07 | Now if you're finding that this isn't picking
up your object in quite the way that you want,
| | 02:10 | you can go into your four-way view and
take a look at the plane that is extending out
| | 02:15 | from the front of your camera.
| | 02:16 | By adjusting this Focus Distance, you can adjust
the point at which objects are perfectly in focus.
| | 02:21 | I'm going to go ahead and render again, and we
should see that this front CFL is in better focus now.
| | 02:27 | And you see that the edges
are in fact perfectly crisp.
| | 02:30 | But notice that the blur starts again very quickly even
within the CFL, and that's because of our aperture here.
| | 02:36 | So, if we go into the Physical settings of
our lens, we can stop down to a higher F-Stop
| | 02:42 | number like say f/22.0, which should
give us a fairly crisp looking image.
| | 02:47 | The reason that we're still seeing a fair amount of
blur is because we're shooting small objects close up.
| | 02:52 | Let's take a look at another scene.
| | 02:53 | This is an exterior scaled
to be roughly downtown size.
| | 02:58 | If we render this, we see that within f/2.0 lens,
we're getting a very minimal amount of blur.
| | 03:04 | And that's because the scale of your objects is critically
important when you're using the Physical Renderer.
| | 03:10 | You always need to model your objects to scale
and place them as you would in the real world.
| | 03:15 | Looking at my buildings, I see that
they're each about 20,000 centimeters tall.
| | 03:20 | Let's see what happens if we scale our scene.
Go to Edit > Scale Project.
| | 03:24 | I'm going to type in 20,000 cm for the Current
Scale and my Target Scale is going to be a 1 cm.
| | 03:32 | This is going to compress
everything in my scene to be much smaller.
| | 03:36 | And now if I render my scene again, we'll
see that it's woefully out of focus as a result
| | 03:41 | of this shift in scale.
Almost none of my scene is now in focus.
| | 03:46 | Shallow Depth of Field can create a
really beautiful looking finished image.
| | 03:50 | But you now do have to worry
about keeping your objects in focus.
| | 03:55 |
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| Animating rack focus| 00:00 | Blur is one of the primary tools of the
cinematographer, and shifting the focus of a scene could be
| | 00:05 | used to excellent storytelling effect, whereas
haphazard focus can be distracting or even stupefying.
| | 00:11 | Let's take a look at some
variations on animated focus.
| | 00:15 | In the first, I'm going to be
adjusting the focal distance of the camera.
| | 00:19 | We see that the background starts in
focus, then the foreground, then the background.
| | 00:23 | This is probably the most common animation of
focus that you're going to see or adjustment
| | 00:28 | of focus you'll see in film, which is
the pulling of the focus ring.
| | 00:31 | In fact, that's a job on a film set, the focus puller there
is a person dedicated to just adjusting that ring.
| | 00:36 | Next, we have an aperture adjustment,
where we're animating the F-Stop.
| | 00:41 | This is less common, but an interesting effect.
| | 00:44 | The focal point is staying the same but
the amount of blur in the scene is increasing
| | 00:48 | or decreasing as we adjust the F-Stop.
| | 00:51 | Lastly, I'm going to use a constant focal
distance and just animate the position of the camera.
| | 00:56 | We see the in focus is changing over time, but not the
distance at which things are in focus from the camera lens.
| | 01:04 | Let's take a look at how to
re-create this in CINEMA 4D.
| | 01:07 | Doing a quick render of this scene we see
that we've got Depth Of Field already applied.
| | 01:11 | And we're focused on this front ring.
| | 01:13 | Let's make a duplicate of this camera, and
we can animate it in a few different ways.
| | 01:18 | I'm going to hold down the Ctrl key on the keyboard,
click and drag to make a duplicate of the camera.
| | 01:22 | I'm going to take the duplicate and
change its name to AnimatedFocusDistance.
| | 01:29 | And I'm going to make it my active camera by
clicking on the icon to the right of the Camera object.
| | 01:34 | Let's take a look at the Camera settings by going into
the Object tab, and we'll see that it says Focus Distance.
| | 01:40 | This is the point at which
something is perfectly in focus.
| | 01:43 | Let's take our picker and pick this front ring
just to be absolutely certain that is our focus point.
| | 01:48 | Next, let's hold down the Ctrl key on our keyboard
and click next to it where it says Focus Distance.
| | 01:53 | This is going to add a keyframe at frame 0.
| | 01:57 | Now, if I go to frame 90, I can now adjust
the Focus Distance either by using this picker
| | 02:03 | or by going into one of my four-way
views and adjusting this focal plane.
| | 02:08 | I can hold down the Ctrl key to
record, and that'll add a keyframe.
| | 02:12 | So, as I play through my animation,
you see that the focal plane is moving.
| | 02:16 | And as we render our animation, at
frame 0 the foreground is in focus.
| | 02:21 | As we move through time, the mid-ground is
in focus, and finally our background is in
| | 02:26 | focus with our foreground blurred.
Next, let's go over how to animate the aperture.
| | 02:32 | Let's simply take our
StationaryCamera and duplicate that.
| | 02:34 | Again, I'm holding down the Ctrl key, clicking
and dragging, and I'm going to name this Aperture.
| | 02:39 | So, another name for
at least some part of F-Stop.
| | 02:42 | I'm going to go ahead and make
this my active camera by clicking.
| | 02:46 | And now I'm going to go into the
Physical tab and adjust my F-Stop.
| | 02:49 | I'm going to start from something very wide open,
like an f/1.0, and I'm going to add a keyframe.
| | 02:54 | I do that by holding down
the Ctrl key and clicking.
| | 02:57 | And now let's go to frame 90 and adjust the
F-Stop from f/1.0 to f/22.0, so we're really
| | 03:03 | shifting this pretty severely.
Hold down Ctrl and click.
| | 03:06 | What we're going to see is a huge
shift in the amount of focus in the scene.
| | 03:10 | At f-22.0, most things are pretty sharp
and at f-1.0, most things are pretty blurry.
| | 03:16 | Last but not least what we're going to do is animate
the camera while keeping the focus distance stationary.
| | 03:21 | Let's go ahead and take our StationaryCamera, duplicate
it by holding down the Ctrl key and dragging.
| | 03:27 | And let's rename it MovingCamera.
| | 03:29 | Let's make it our active camera, and at
frame 90, I'm going to do a quick render.
| | 03:34 | We see that this front ring is in focus, and
this is where I want our image to in depth.
| | 03:38 | So, let's go ahead and press Record right here.
| | 03:40 | Now, let's go back to
frame 0 and push our camera in.
| | 03:44 | Let's just go ahead and take the Dolly tool and dolly your
camera in, until you are seeing just the grid and press Record.
| | 03:51 | What you'll see when you render is that it
starts out a little bit blurry, the background
| | 03:55 | to get into better focus as we go and different
objects at different depths are going to be in better focus.
| | 04:01 | So, by the time we get to frame 90,
our front ring is in focus.
| | 04:05 | So, let's just go ahead and take a look
at those finished animations one last time.
| | 04:09 | The first is our animated rack.
Next, we're animating the aperture.
| | 04:15 | And lastly, we were simply moving the camera.
| | 04:18 | Shallow Depth Of Field can be really beautiful,
and it helps to direct the viewer's attention
| | 04:23 | to the part of the scene
that you want them to look at.
| | 04:25 | However, if you've got that your camera
animating or any of the objects in your scene animating,
| | 04:30 | you want to make sure that you're
paying attention to your focus distance.
| | 04:35 |
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| Tweaking shutter speed and motion blur| 00:00 | Renders coming straight out of CINEMA 4D
typically are very sharp, too sharp.
| | 00:05 | And when you're looking at an animation, there
is a distinct lack of what's called Motion Blur.
| | 00:10 | So, your animations will often look very stroby.
| | 00:13 | Objects will sometimes seem to jump from one
part of the screen to the other without any
| | 00:16 | real connection between those two points.
| | 00:18 | And what I'm going to go over in this video
is how to add motion blur to your renderings
| | 00:23 | to make them more realistic and
really just more visually appealing.
| | 00:28 | What we have here is a windmill that's been
inspired by the kinetECO logo, and we see
| | 00:33 | that it's spinning probably because of wind.
| | 00:35 | If we stop the animation at any point, what we'll
see is that these blades are not perfectly crisp.
| | 00:41 | They are blurred because of their motion, and they
are blurred in the direction that they are moving.
| | 00:46 | So, let's go into CINEMA 4D and add this effect.
| | 00:50 | When you render in your Editor View,
you simply will not see motion blur.
| | 00:54 | To see any sort of motion blur, you
need to render to your Picture Viewer.
| | 00:57 | What we're going to notice, though, is that
we don't see any when we first render out.
| | 01:01 | And that's because we haven't turned it on yet.
| | 01:03 | So, go into your Render Settings and change your Renderer
from the Standard Renderer to the Physical Renderer.
| | 01:10 | Now, there are other ways of adding motion blur to your
scene, but we want to stick with the Physical Renderer for now.
| | 01:16 | And in the Physical Renderer, we
want to turn on the Motion Blur option.
| | 01:19 | We just click on the check mark there, and the
default settings usually give you a pretty good result.
| | 01:23 | Again, we're going to have to
render to the Picture Viewer.
| | 01:25 | So, you can hit Shift+R to do that.
| | 01:28 | And we'll see now that there is a
slight blur on our blades as they rotate.
| | 01:33 | To adjust the strength of this
blur, there are some settings.
| | 01:36 | Go into your Camera Object
and click on the Physical tab.
| | 01:40 | Inside of here, we have
the Shutter Speed option.
| | 01:44 | Now I'm going to go into a
different scene to demonstrate this.
| | 01:47 | In this scene, what I've got is a very simple animation
of a cylinder that is being rotating about 45 degrees a frame.
| | 01:55 | I'm going to go to my middle frame here, and let's
take a look at how this looks at different shutter speeds.
| | 02:03 | I'm going to choose 1/250 of a second first by clicking
on this Camera and rendering to my Picture Viewer.
| | 02:10 | We see something that looks a little bit blurry.
| | 02:13 | If I choose No Blur here, which is an
incredibly fast 1/1000 of a second and render, we'll
| | 02:19 | see something that looks pretty crisp.
| | 02:20 | There is still a little bit of blur in the
edge, because the object is moving within
| | 02:24 | that 1/1000 of a second,
but it's not too significant.
| | 02:27 | Now, if we go to something like 1 second for our
shutter speed, a very long exposure and render
| | 02:35 | to the Picture Viewer, then I see something
like this, and we see the beginnings of an
| | 02:39 | artifact, we see sort of what
looks like a polygon outline.
| | 02:43 | And that's because our render
settings aren't set to be quite high enough.
| | 02:46 | So, we go into our Render Settings and go the
Physical tab, you'll see the Motion Subdivisions
| | 02:52 | option right here, and that defines
how many intermediate steps there are.
| | 02:57 | And if we increase this number, to say 5,
and we render again, we'll notice that our
| | 03:01 | line gets a little bit cleaner.
And at 6 it should be nice and round.
| | 03:06 | Now, a 1-second exposure is not something
that you're really going to see in a film
| | 03:11 | or video, because video tends to operate at
30 frames per second, film at 24 frames per second,
| | 03:16 | so really the slowest that you can get with
video is 1/30 of a second and film 1/24 of a second.
| | 03:22 | So, when you are adjusting your Motion Blur
settings by adjusting your Shutter Speed,
| | 03:26 | make sure that you're staying
within the bounds of what's possible.
| | 03:28 | Now, there are other approaches to creating
motion blur in CINEMA 4D, but for the best
| | 03:33 | looking results, I really
recommend using the Physical Renderer.
| | 03:36 | However, when you're up against a wall,
you might just have to use a post effect like
| | 03:39 | real smart motion blur for After Effects.
| | 03:42 | Whenever you can, make sure that
you add motion blur to your scene.
| | 03:45 | It adds that little extra bit of realism and takes
some of the CG-ness away from your finished image.
| | 03:53 |
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| Creating textured surfaces using blurry reflections| 00:01 | Aside from perhaps aboard the Hubble
telescope, there are no perfect mirrors.
| | 00:05 | Yet, almost all CG images feature impossibly
sharp reflections. Adding a bit of blur to
| | 00:11 | your reflections can drastically
improve the quality of your images.
| | 00:15 | Here is a kinetECO logo, and it's got
a simple sky that it's reflecting.
| | 00:19 | It's on a perfectly mirrored
surface, and it looks all right.
| | 00:24 | perhaps a little trapped in the 80s.
| | 00:26 | If we look at a blurry version of this, what
we see is that the metal takes on the sense
| | 00:32 | of solidity and weight
that it didn't have before.
| | 00:35 | And for me at least, it's a
much better looking logo treatment.
| | 00:38 | And to achieve this
effect is really quite simple.
| | 00:42 | What we have here is a scene showing our text.
| | 00:46 | When we render, again, we get
those really sharp reflections.
| | 00:53 | Let's go ahead and turn on blurry reflections.
To do so, double-click on your Metal material,
| | 00:59 | go into the Reflection Channel, and activate
the Blurriness option, which by default is 0%.
| | 01:05 | If you crank this number up to say 30% and
render again, you'll notice a couple of things.
| | 01:12 | One, your render is much slower, and two,
that you're actually seeing some blur.
| | 01:18 | Now what you'll also notice is a
bit of grain in your image now.
| | 01:21 | And this is a product of the way
that the blurry reflections work.
| | 01:26 | For each and every blurry pixel that's
being rendered, tens or hundreds of samples are
| | 01:30 | being sent out into your scene to see
possible things that the service could be reflecting
| | 01:35 | and then it's averaging those together.
| | 01:37 | When there aren't enough
samples, you see a noise like this.
| | 01:40 | Now, if we go into our Render Settings, we can
change from the Standard to the Physical Renderer.
| | 01:46 | The Physical Renderer has been optimized to render
things like blurry reflections and blurry refractions.
| | 01:51 | So, when we turn this on, we should
notice a significant increase in speed.
| | 01:56 | If you simply update the Sampling Quality
here from Low to High, we'll get a bit of
| | 02:02 | a speed hit, but the quality of the
finished image should be dramatically better.
| | 02:07 | So, as you can see, each and every one of
these rendering buckets come in, it's giving
| | 02:11 | us beautifully smooth image
with a nice blurry reflection.
| | 02:15 | A couple of other things to know, the more you increase
the Blurriness percentage, the longer your render will take.
| | 02:22 | If I was to cut this value down to say 5%,
we'd get a significantly faster render.
| | 02:28 | But it's giving us a very different effect.
| | 02:31 | Blurry Reflections help you to more
accurately simulate the real world, and when using the
| | 02:35 | Physical render engine, the speed
hit isn't as quite as bad as you think.
| | 02:40 |
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| Using blurry transparency to create frosted glass| 00:00 | Glass is a transparent material, and in
part its quality is judged by its clarity.
| | 00:06 | However, not all glass is perfectly clear,
and in fact, some of it is quite cloudy.
| | 00:11 | Blurry transparency allows us to
simulate imperfect transparent objects.
| | 00:16 | Here is a rendering of a bathroom
scale that has perfectly clear glass.
| | 00:20 | In fact, it's not really clear what
this object is just looking at it.
| | 00:24 | However, when I choose the Blurry transparency,
immediately this becomes recognizable as something
| | 00:30 | that we've probably seen in our bathrooms or
at least on somebody's Pinterest Board for a bathroom.
| | 00:35 | And this is something that
is often called frosted glass.
| | 00:39 | It's created by taking a perfectly clean piece
of glass and then just roughing up the surface
| | 00:44 | at a very fine level and to simulate this
is really pretty simple. But before we do this,
| | 00:49 | I want to get into how refraction works.
So, let's take a quick look at a graphic here.
| | 00:57 | Reflection--as we saw in our previous video--occurs
when light hits our object and then it bounces off.
| | 01:02 | And a blurry reflection occurs when light hits our object
and then bounces off in a number of different directions.
| | 01:09 | Refraction works a little bit
differently, in fact, quite a bit differently.
| | 01:13 | If you look at a refractive object, what's
happening is that light is hitting the surface
| | 01:18 | of the object, but then it doesn't bounce
off, it passes straight through the object,
| | 01:24 | or rather, it passes through at an angle defined by
what's called the refraction index of your object.
| | 01:30 | So, as light is entering the surface, it
hits the surface and then it bends and then as
| | 01:35 | it's exiting the surface, it
bends at the same angle to leave.
| | 01:41 | And this is what gives us our nice
clean looking refraction like this.
| | 01:45 | We can tell that it's a glass object
because the background on the other side of it is
| | 01:49 | a little bit distorted.
That's that refraction kicking in.
| | 01:52 | Now, a blurry refraction--and this is perhaps
simplification--works where light enters our
| | 01:59 | transparent volume, and it gets refracted
or bent out towards the other end, but it
| | 02:05 | splits off in a number of different directions.
| | 02:07 | Now, if you were to get in really close to
the surface, you'd see that it behaves in
| | 02:12 | the exact same way as refraction, but what
we're seeing here is a surface that's so minimally
| | 02:18 | distorted that it looks like each of these
individual rays of light is splitting off
| | 02:22 | into a bunch of different directions.
| | 02:24 | And so, when we see our finished render,
we're seeing not what's just behind our object,
| | 02:30 | but also what's behind our object and bit off
to the side and a bit off to the other side.
| | 02:34 | So let's go ahead and activate these
blurry reflections in our own scene.
| | 02:39 | So, what I've got for you right here is a
simple bathroom scene, and it's not a very
| | 02:45 | realistic bathroom, because it's
way too clean, the tile is a bit off.
| | 02:50 | But we can see our transparency right here.
| | 02:54 | So let's go ahead and open up the Glass material, and
it's a very similar process to the blurry reflection.
| | 03:00 | All you've got to do is click on the
Transparency Channel and adjust the Blurriness setting.
| | 03:04 | I'm going to increases this from
0% to 10% and give it a render.
| | 03:09 | It's a little bit blurrier,
but it's almost imperceptible.
| | 03:12 | So let's see what happens when
we crank this up even higher.
| | 03:15 | Let's go to 30% and give it another render.
It's looking pretty good.
| | 03:19 | Now, if you go into your Render Settings,
you'll see that I've already activated the
| | 03:23 | Physical Renderer, and this is because the
Physical Renderer is able to calculate blurry
| | 03:28 | reflections and blurry transparencies
much more quickly than the Standard Renderer.
| | 03:32 | So, if you're using any blurry transparencies,
I really recommend turning on the Physical Renderer
| | 03:36 | and then adjusting the quality of that
blurriness using this Blurry Subdivision setting.
| | 03:42 | Blurry Transparencies are one more weapon in the fight
against the perfection that is endemic to most CG.
| | 03:48 | Blurry Transparencies do take longer to render, but there
are some surfaces that you just can't simulate without this tool.
| | 03:54 | So, when you have the time to spare, turn it on,
crank up this Blurriness Subdivisions, and render away.
| | 03:59 |
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| Optimizing physical sampling settings| 00:00 | While the Physical Renderer is extremely
powerful, getting an image without grain might seem
| | 00:04 | to take longer than a human lifespan.
| | 00:06 | So, let's take a few minutes to optimize
our Render Settings so that we can get a good
| | 00:10 | looking image in a minimum of time.
What I have are two images right here.
| | 00:15 | One is rendered with the Adaptive Low setting,
and it's taking about 20 seconds per frame.
| | 00:20 | The other is rendered with the Adaptive High setting, and
it's taking about 5 minutes and 5 seconds per frame.
| | 00:26 | Now, I would say that the visually
superior is clearly the Adaptive High setting.
| | 00:31 | But at 5 minutes and 5 seconds a frame, it's definitely
going to make me think twice before I use that setting.
| | 00:36 | Let's take a look at how the Physical Sampler
works and then go into how to optimize these settings.
| | 00:41 | I currently have my Interactive Render Region
turned on, so I'm just going to turn that off.
| | 00:45 | Now let's go into our Render Settings
and take a look at the Sampler.
| | 00:49 | By default, it's on Adaptive, and I think
that's a good setting, and it is the one that
| | 00:53 | you're going to use for pretty
much all of your production rendering.
| | 00:56 | But let's also take a look at what's called the
Progressive mode, which gives us a peek under the hood.
| | 01:02 | In Progressive mode, when you render, what you
get is a rough approximation of your scene first.
| | 01:06 | Now, this portion is actually global
illumination, but what we see here that sort of
| | 01:10 | granular-looking image is the Sampler at work.
| | 01:13 | Now, if you look at the lower left-hand corner of
the screen, you see something called Progressive Pass,
| | 01:17 | and it's a number that's slowly climbing upward.
| | 01:21 | What this represents is the number of times that
each and every pixel in the scene has been split in two.
| | 01:26 | When we're first rendering the scene, it's
a single ray that's being sent out for each
| | 01:30 | and every one of these pixels.
| | 01:32 | And so we get a very rough approximation
of our scene, because sometimes more than
| | 01:36 | one object falls within a given pixel.
| | 01:39 | As we increase the number of passes, we split those
pixels in half, and then we average that final result.
| | 01:45 | And then we split it in half
again and average that result.
| | 01:49 | And eventually, each and every pixel will
have been split into 256 or 512 or 1024
| | 01:56 | sub-pixels, which should give us
a really clean final result.
| | 01:59 | The problem is that to split up each and every
pixel this many times is going to take forever.
| | 02:04 | And also, that it's grossly inefficient,
because not every pixel is high contrast.
| | 02:09 | And that's what the Adaptive
Sampler is great at dealing with.
| | 02:12 | If I turn on my Adaptive Sampler,
there is a shading error threshold value.
| | 02:16 | And what this does is it determines
when to split these pixels in half.
| | 02:21 | We start with our sampling subdivisions,
which start out of two, so that means that every
| | 02:24 | single pixel is going to
get split once and then twice.
| | 02:28 | And then if that pixel looks at its neighbor and sees
that there is contrast lower than 20%, it stops right there.
| | 02:34 | There are no shading
subdivisions in the minimum setting.
| | 02:37 | However, if there is contrast greater than
20% between those two pixels, we see that
| | 02:42 | the shading subdivisions climb up to 3, so
we're splitting it again and again and again.
| | 02:48 | And you can see that these
numbers get pretty high pretty quickly.
| | 02:50 | Now, the Low settings are a pretty good place
to start when you're just looking at your scene.
| | 02:55 | But when it's time to really try and get a
good looking finished render, what I like
| | 02:59 | to do is start with Low and then use my
Interactive Render Region to take a slice of that image
| | 03:04 | that seems to be especially problematic.
| | 03:06 | I do that by pressing and holding my Middle Render
button here and choosing Interactive Render Region.
| | 03:11 | Now I've pre selected an area that should
give us a good selection here, but I'm going
| | 03:15 | to increase the width just slightly.
| | 03:17 | Next, I'm going to go into my
Output tab and turn on Render Region.
| | 03:22 | This is going to allow me to do a full
resolution render of this small area.
| | 03:25 | Next, I'm going to choose Copy
from IRR to load those settings in.
| | 03:30 | Next, let's render to our Picture Viewer and
take a look at what this is in terms of timing.
| | 03:34 | We're looking at 3 seconds for the Low setting.
| | 03:36 | Now, let's play around with a High
setting to see what that looks like.
| | 03:40 | We want to be comparing
apples to apples if we can.
| | 03:42 | So, I'm going to set this to High, and
we're going to try and beat that time.
| | 03:46 | Now, while this is rendering, I'm
going to go over a couple of more settings.
| | 03:50 | Down below here, we have our Blurriness, Shadow,
Ambient Occlusion, and Subsurface Scattering Subdivision settings.
| | 03:56 | And what these are here for is increasing
the number of subdivisions per pixel whenever
| | 04:01 | CINEMA 4D runs into one of these things.
| | 04:03 | Blurriness is a blurry
transparency or reflection.
| | 04:06 | Shadow is if you're running into an area
shadow and basically every shadow that the
| | 04:11 | Physical Renderer sees is going to be an Area Shadow.
| | 04:13 | Ambient Occlusion and Subsurface
Scattering also will be subdivided.
| | 04:17 | What I'm going to do is take all of these
values down to 0 because I'm not sure that
| | 04:22 | we need additional quality on these just yet.
| | 04:25 | Now, I'm going to take a peek back into my
Picture Viewer here, and I see that at the
| | 04:29 | high quality, it's going to take 23 seconds
to render this, which is quite a bit.
| | 04:33 | So, what I'm going to do is swap
back down to Low and adjust the quality.
| | 04:37 | So, I'm changing from High into Low.
| | 04:40 | And now what I'm going to do is try and
increase my Sampling Subdivisions here until
| | 04:44 | I get rid of the worst of the blur in my image.
| | 04:47 | Sampling Subdivisions is really what's going to
control the overall quality of any Depth of Field effect.
| | 04:51 | So, I'm going to crank this up to maybe
4 and see if that gets me what I need.
| | 04:56 | It's definitely looking better,
but we're just not there yet.
| | 04:59 | So, I'm going to jump up to 6, and I've done a little
test beforehand, so I know this is the value I'm trying to hit.
| | 05:05 | What I would normally do is just slowly crank these up one
value at a time, until I arrive at something that looks good.
| | 05:11 | This is pretty good, and we're noticing that the blur
itself especially on the left edge looks pretty good.
| | 05:16 | But it's in the reflection on the front
of our face that we're getting some issues.
| | 05:19 | So, what I want to do is now increase
some of these other quality settings.
| | 05:24 | If I increase the minimum level that means
that every single pixel in our image is going
| | 05:29 | to get cleaned up a bit more.
So, I'm going to render to my picture here.
| | 05:32 | You see it's definitely looking better, but
we're running into a bit of grain still, and
| | 05:37 | that probably indicates that we need to crank
up our maximum setting. So, it's currently at 3.
| | 05:43 | I'm going to crank that up to
4 and see what that gets us.
| | 05:46 | Much better, there's only the slightest bit of
grain left, and I'm going to try and eliminate
| | 05:49 | that by lowering my threshold value.
| | 05:51 | So, what this is going to do is make CINEMA 4D
more sensitive to contrast changes, and
| | 05:56 | if I set this to 5%, we're going to be jumping up
to that Subdivision Max level pretty frequently.
| | 06:01 | I'd say that's a very acceptable level of grain,
especially considering this is part of an animation.
| | 06:06 | We're looking at 10 seconds as opposed
to 23 seconds for High quality settings.
| | 06:10 | It's going to take us half the
time to render with our new settings.
| | 06:14 | Now, for a still image that you're just
doing as a quick test, it's maybe not worth your
| | 06:19 | time to do all of this optimization.
| | 06:20 | However, if you're going to be rendering a
lot of frames of animation, it's absolutely
| | 06:24 | worth the effort to try and optimize your render
settings, especially if you don't have a Render Farm.
| | 06:29 |
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|
|
2. Global IlluminationUnderstanding global illumination| 00:00 | In this video, we're going to go over what
global illumination is as it will come in
| | 00:05 | handy as we're talking a lot about
global illumination in these following videos.
| | 00:08 | This is just going to be a general overview,
and I'll get into more depth about how it
| | 00:12 | exactly works in future videos.
Imagine yourself in a room.
| | 00:16 | There is a light above
and below you have a table.
| | 00:20 | In the real world, you'd expect to
be able to see underneath this table.
| | 00:23 | However, in the 3D world,
that's not always the case.
| | 00:27 | In this image, we have a very simple area light.
It doesn't even have any shadows turned on.
| | 00:32 | So, we can't see underneath the table.
The lighting seems a bit off.
| | 00:35 | When we add in shadows which actually are
a more complicated calculation for CINEMA 4D,
| | 00:40 | we can no longer see under the table but we
do at least see some shadowing underneath the table.
| | 00:46 | This is that same image, re-rendered
using global illumination.
| | 00:51 | What global illumination has done is added
in bounce lighting and what we're getting
| | 00:56 | right here is what's called a diffuse
depth of 1 so we're getting one bounce.
| | 01:00 | The light is coming in from that skylight
up above, it's hitting the table top, it's
| | 01:04 | bouncing off the table top, hitting the walls
and then underneath our table what we're seeing
| | 01:10 | is color bleed from the two walls.
| | 01:12 | The light from the walls is bouncing
and hitting the area underneath the table.
| | 01:17 | As we increase the diffuse depth from
1 to 2, the image gets lighter overall.
| | 01:22 | As you increase the diffuse depth, you're
increasing the number of times that light
| | 01:25 | bounces around in a given room.
| | 01:27 | For a closed room like this, you probably
don't need of diffuse depth of more than 2.
| | 01:31 | Here's another way of looking at it.
| | 01:33 | What I've done is I've taken our first
render and layered over that first G.I.
| | 01:37 | Render using a Difference mode in Photoshop,
that's showing us just the difference between
| | 01:41 | these two images or just the
contribution of that first bounce.
| | 01:44 | So, you can see that the area underneath the table is getting
all of its illumination more or less from those sidewalls.
| | 01:52 | And it's the corners of our room
that are picking up a lot of light.
| | 01:56 | Also, if we look at the area on the ceiling,
it's pretty close to a bright white, and that
| | 02:01 | means almost all of its illumination is
coming as a result to this first bounce.
| | 02:05 | The second bounce, as we can see, is adding
in sort of a green light underneath the table
| | 02:11 | and a hint of light around the edges.
| | 02:12 | So, as you do additional bounces, it tends
to contribute less overall light to the scene.
| | 02:17 | But it does help seal the realism.
| | 02:20 | In the real world light comes straight from
light sources, bounces around, and eventually
| | 02:24 | finds its way into the lens of your camera.
| | 02:28 | In CINEMA 4D, it works pretty
much the exact opposite way.
| | 02:31 | Rays, sort of like light, leave your camera
lens and search their way out into a given space.
| | 02:38 | They hit an object, they see whether or not
it's got light on it, and when you're using
| | 02:41 | global illumination, they hit that object
and then they bounce off into a different
| | 02:45 | direction, seeing if there are any
other areas that might be lit up.
| | 02:48 | What I'm going to go over now is
something called bounced lighting.
| | 02:51 | This is one of the key
properties of global illumination.
| | 02:54 | What I've created here is a simple space, and you
can't really see it yet because we haven't lit it.
| | 02:59 | In the lower left, there we've got an area
light so just a little slice of light, and
| | 03:04 | we have a diffuse depth of 0.
| | 03:05 | So, we're using global illumination to
light the scene entirely, and because we have no
| | 03:09 | bounces right now, we're
not seeing any real light.
| | 03:13 | With a diffuse depth of 1, the light source
that's in the corner, lights up everything.
| | 03:17 | But we can see that as we get around this
corner, we are no longer lighting up our scene.
| | 03:22 | We're basically reaching
the edges of what's visible.
| | 03:25 | With a diffuse depth of 2,
we've added in a second bounce.
| | 03:27 | So, those areas they couldn't see the light directly,
could see the area that was being illuminated by the light.
| | 03:33 | And with a diffuse depth of 3, the light
can continue to bounce around the room.
| | 03:37 | So, when you're going to try to figure out
what diffuse depth to set, really just to
| | 03:40 | think about the number of total bounces the light's going
to need to make to reach those darkest corners in your room.
| | 03:46 | And as we increase this diffuse depth, the
amount of light overall continues to increase.
| | 03:52 | Another key property of global illumination
is something called color bleed, and it speaks
| | 03:57 | to an affect that happens when
light hits a colored surface.
| | 04:01 | So, if a white light hits a red wall, the
red wall is absorbing everything except for
| | 04:06 | the color red, and the light that is reflected is to going
to have the same color more or less, as the surface itself.
| | 04:13 | So, it's a little difficult to see here,
but if you look at these color patches on the
| | 04:17 | wall and especially the areas around them,
you'll see that those white areas have taken
| | 04:22 | on a bit of the hue of those
colored areas, and that is color bleed.
| | 04:27 | Color bleed, it is what allows us to use
image-based lighting and also it's what makes objects
| | 04:33 | really look like they're in
the same space with each other.
| | 04:36 | Because the light from one object is
contaminating the illumination of another, and it really
| | 04:40 | helps to integrate all of
the objects in your scene.
| | 04:43 | One of the really cool things that you can do with
global illumination is something called image-based lighting.
| | 04:47 | And what it allows you to do is
pretty much what the name suggests.
| | 04:51 | You can use a photograph--and in this case
what I'm using a something called an HDRI map,
| | 04:55 | and we'll get into that more later--
that allows you to light your scene.
| | 04:59 | I've got a panoramic photo of a seaside that
I'm using to light that same polygonal structure.
| | 05:05 | Now, simply changing the image to that of a forest,
the lighting on that structure changes entirely.
| | 05:12 | All I've done here is gone in and swapped in a different
image, and I'm getting a completely different style of lighting.
| | 05:18 | And here is that same scene again now
with a panoramic photo taken in an alley.
| | 05:23 | The colors have all shifted, the direction
of the illumination is also changed, this
| | 05:28 | is a really great way of lighting your scenes,
and it's used very commonly in film production.
| | 05:33 | To summarize, global illumination is a way of calculating
indirect lighting or bounced lighting within your scene.
| | 05:41 | Some of the key properties are bounced light
and color bleeding, and one of the neat things
| | 05:45 | you can do with it is
light your scenes with images.
| | 05:50 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lighting with Quasi Monte Carlo global illumination| 00:00 | Different methods of global
illumination are better suited to different tasks.
| | 00:04 | QMC or Quasi-Monte Carlo is a brute force method
that gives highly accurate, albeit often grainy results.
| | 00:12 | Let's go ahead and take a render of this
scene before we add in global illumination.
| | 00:15 | I am just hitting Command+R on
my keyboard, or Ctrl+R on a PC.
| | 00:20 | What we see is that we have a yellow sunlight
as well as some blue light being contributed
| | 00:25 | by our sky and all this is
coming from our physical sky.
| | 00:28 | I've activated a couple of special options
on that sky, and you can piece through the
| | 00:32 | scene file if you want to examine those.
| | 00:34 | To turn on Global Illumination, go into your Render
settings and go to the Effect tab, and choose Global Illumination.
| | 00:41 | Now by default, if you go to the
General tab you'll see the G.I. mode
| | 00:45 | is set to IR (Still Image). This is the
GI mode we are going to use for most things.
| | 00:49 | But for our purposes right now, I want you to choose
QMC for Quasi-Monte Carlo, go ahead and press Render.
| | 00:56 | You'll probably notice a few things, one,
we now have shadows long shadows that are
| | 01:01 | crisp at the base of our object
and are feathered at the ends.
| | 01:05 | And we also have a fairly noticeable grain
in our image and both the shadow and the grain
| | 01:10 | are coming from the QMC Global Illumination.
| | 01:14 | Let's go ahead and see if we can eliminate at least
a little bit of that grain by turning on Best Anti-Aliasing.
| | 01:19 | So, go to your Anti-Aliasing tab, and change the Anti-Aliasing
mode from Geometry to Best, and let's render again.
| | 01:26 | You'll still see quite a bit of grain, so
this is a case where I might actually switch
| | 01:30 | over from my standard renderer to my
Physical render, because the Physical renderer has
| | 01:33 | special tools for eliminating grain
especially that contributed by Global Illumination
| | 01:38 | or Blurry Reflections or Fractions.
| | 01:39 | So, I am going to change from my Standard
Renderer to my Physical Render, and in my
| | 01:45 | Physical Render tab, I can now see some of
these settings here to adjust the amount of
| | 01:50 | grain, and you can see that we are getting a
much smoother result already without having
| | 01:55 | to change any of our
Global Illumination settings.
| | 01:57 | I want to switchover to another scene now to
explain how QMC works so that you can better
| | 02:03 | adjust your Global
Illumination Settings in the future.
| | 02:06 | In this scene I've got a simple scene set up with a ball
and a room and a single polygon that's lighting my scene.
| | 02:13 | This is an interesting thing about Global
Illumination, you don't actually need light
| | 02:17 | objects, all you need are
objects that are luminous.
| | 02:20 | So, I've done is I created the single polygon,
and I've applied a material to it with the
| | 02:24 | Luminance Channel Activated, I've adjusted
the Brightness of this material, or my quote
| | 02:29 | unquote light, from 100% to 200% to make a bit brighter so
now when I render I see that my scene is illuminated.
| | 02:37 | Now the preview here looked a little bit
different, and that's because the Global Illumination
| | 02:40 | is set to IR so I am going to swap
that over to QMC and render again.
| | 02:45 | And what we're seeing is that we've got
smoothly lit front to our object, but that the backside
| | 02:50 | it has a really inky black shadow, and that's
because our Diffuse Depth is currently only set to 1.
| | 02:56 | Diffuse Depth refers to the number
of bounces of light in our scene.
| | 03:00 | So as we increase a few steps from one to
two, you should see that the shadows lighten
| | 03:05 | up a bit, and indeed they do.
| | 03:08 | Now to go over exactly how QMC is working,
we are going to change a couple settings.
| | 03:13 | So, go into your Sampling tab and change the
samples here from Medium to Custom Sample Count.
| | 03:19 | I also want you to turn off Discrete Area
Sampling and Discreet Sky Sampling and twirl
| | 03:25 | open the Sample setting here
change Sample Count from 64 to 1.
| | 03:30 | And let's go back to our General tab and
set a Diffuse Depth to 1 and re-render.
| | 03:36 | What we've done is basically stripped our
settings down to the bare minimum so that
| | 03:40 | we can really see the effect
of each setting as we work.
| | 03:43 | To go over what's happening right here I've
created a little object using MoGraph.
| | 03:48 | So, if you look at this asterisk at the center of our
scene--that sort of yellow asterisk--this represents a single pixel.
| | 03:57 | Imagine that at this pixel we are trying
to figure out what color we should use.
| | 04:03 | With the Standard renderer, we would look at
that ball, and we would see that it is white.
| | 04:08 | But because there are no lights in this
scene at a Diffuse Depth of 0, we would actually
| | 04:12 | return a black pixel, and that's happening
for a lot of these so some of these pixels
| | 04:16 | of our ball here are returning black.
| | 04:18 | Now as we increase the number of samples,
what happens is it sends out an imaginary
| | 04:23 | arrow or array out into our scene trying to find
some other object in the scene that might be lit up.
| | 04:29 | Right now, this arrow is just
going off into a black space.
| | 04:32 | As I increase the sample count, though, we
can see that we get more arrows pointing
| | 04:36 | in different directions, and some of these arrows are
going to be hitting this polygon light in our scene.
| | 04:42 | So, as our sample count increases, the
likelihood of hitting a light giving object increases.
| | 04:48 | And so, what we can see is that if we were to
increase the number of Samples in our renderer,
| | 04:55 | we will get a more even distribution of color.
| | 04:57 | So, let's go into our Render settings, go
into that Sampling tab, untwirl Samples,
| | 05:00 | and let's see what happens when we
increase the Sample count from 1 to 12.
| | 05:06 | It's not a big difference in terms of number, but we've
got a massive difference in the clarity of the scene.
| | 05:11 | We can actually king of
see what's going on here.
| | 05:13 | And if we up this number to something like 512,
we see that we get a much smoother end result.
| | 05:19 | Now the way that we're typically going to
adjust our Sample count is now by going in
| | 05:23 | here and manually adjusting the sample count, but instead
by using one of the presets for Samples, Low, Medium, or High.
| | 05:30 | I always like to start with a low value
and increase that value as need to be.
| | 05:34 | So, back to our who are QMC Exterior, we now
see that each and every pixel here is getting
| | 05:40 | its light from that sky object and even the
shadows here are being filled in with a little
| | 05:46 | bit of light that's bouncing off of these cubes.
| | 05:48 | QMC is a very accurate method for
calculating bounce light, but that added Fidelity does
| | 05:53 | come at the cost of increased render
times and very often a grainy image.
| | 05:58 | But when you need Razor Sharp Shadows from image-based
lighting where we have a lot of moving objects
| | 06:02 | and cameras, QMC might just be the way to go.
| | 06:07 |
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| Utilizing Irradiance Cache global illumination| 00:00 | Irradiance Cache Global Illumination is
perfectly suited to architectural renderings.
| | 00:05 | By sampling the bounce light in parts of an
image and smoothly blending between the samples,
| | 00:09 | it gives you all of the visual benefits of bounce
lighting with a minimum of expense at render time.
| | 00:14 | Let's just take a look at a
simple architectural interior.
| | 00:17 | What I've got is a polygon objects for my
walls, some simple chairs made out of cubes,
| | 00:23 | a few picture frames, and
then also a window right here.
| | 00:26 | I am going to take a look at the scene from
outside just to show you how it was constructed.
| | 00:31 | Click on the icon to the right of your
exterior camera to take a look, or rather,
| | 00:35 | just hit the H key on your keyboard.
| | 00:37 | What this will do in this Exterior View, and
what we see is that we have got some colored
| | 00:42 | walls, and actually transparent window, and
outside we've got a sky that is completely
| | 00:48 | white, and this is the only
source of illumination in our scene.
| | 00:51 | Or at least it will be once we
start using Global Illumination.
| | 00:54 | So let's go back to the
Interior Camera by clicking.
| | 00:57 | Again when we render, we are
getting the Standard default from CINEMA 4D
| | 01:00 | this is not Global Illumination, and it
just looks flat and not particularly good.
| | 01:05 | So, let's go ahead and activate IRGI, go
ahead and edit your Render Settings and then in
| | 01:10 | your Render settings, click on
Effect > Global Illumination.
| | 01:13 | Go to the General tab and make sure that G.I.
| | 01:15 | mode is set IR (Still Image)--IR is short
for irradiance cache--and give it a render.
| | 01:21 | What you are going to see is the light is
coming in from that window and hitting our
| | 01:26 | side walls or table the area directly under
the table is more or less black and the wall
| | 01:31 | where the window is is not getting any illumination,
this is because our diffuse depth or the number
| | 01:36 | of bounces is currently set to 1.
| | 01:38 | So, if we increase that Diffuse Depth to 2 and render
again, the light is going to bounce twice in our room.
| | 01:45 | And we'll start to see some color bleeding
from our red and blue walls, as well as some
| | 01:49 | illumination on the side of our room here.
| | 01:52 | We now have a much better looking image, and
you can see that we got a smooth grain free
| | 01:56 | result very quickly, setting your
diffuse depth is really scene dependent.
| | 02:01 | So, I usually stop increasing this
number when it looks pretty good.
| | 02:05 | You might try up this to 3, but my guess is
that the contribution of the light will be
| | 02:10 | fairly minimal beyond that second bounce.
| | 02:13 | Now if we wanted to be in a side room away
from this window, it might become very important
| | 02:16 | to increase that the diffuse depth,
as we've learned in previous videos.
| | 02:20 | And adding that extra bounce does contribute
to the brightness overall of the scene, because
| | 02:25 | light has more opportunities to bounce around.
| | 02:28 | It's looking pretty good, but there are
definitely some splotches in our scene, and that's
| | 02:31 | a product of how this Global Illumination works.
| | 02:35 | What I am going to do is a change setting so
that you can more easily see what's happening.
| | 02:39 | And I'm going to crank down
our diffuse depth as well.
| | 02:41 | So set the diffuse depth to 1 and go into your
Irradiance Cache tab, change the Interpolation
| | 02:47 | Method to None, and let's render again.
| | 02:49 | What we are going to see pre-pass, this is
the point where your scene is all gray, and
| | 02:55 | then you see these little white dots that are in
the center of each of these what are now splotches.
| | 03:01 | Each of those individual white
dots represents a sample point.
| | 03:04 | Now in QMC, which we just talked about, each
pixel is a sample point, and as we've learned,
| | 03:10 | that can lead to a very grainy image,
and also take a very long time to render.
| | 03:14 | In IR Global Illumination, only a few simple points are
taken and in the areas in between are blended or interpolated.
| | 03:22 | If you look at this image right here, we've
turned off the interpolation with a blending
| | 03:26 | between those individual samples, and we
can see that the quality of the sample really
| | 03:32 | determines how good that blending is going
to look, and as we look at our picture frame
| | 03:37 | here, there are some areas
that have some real issues.
| | 03:40 | So, one thing that I like to do is turn on
this option that says Details Enhancement
| | 03:44 | and what this does is it looks for areas where you're likely to
need more samples and then it adds those in. So, let's render again.
| | 03:51 | You should see that it a few more samples,
especially where objects are meeting the floor,
| | 03:55 | in the corners of our picture frames.
| | 03:58 | If you're still noticing some really sharp
differences in the brightness of individual
| | 04:02 | samples, what this means is that we probably need to
increase the quality of each of those sample point.
| | 04:08 | So, if we go to the Sampling Setting, we can
change Samples from Medium to High and Render again.
| | 04:13 | What this will do is send out more samples
of rays at each and every one of these white
| | 04:18 | dots, and should ensure a more even
distribution of color, and we will get fewer really high
| | 04:24 | contrast areas between samples, which will
make the smoothing easier in the long run,
| | 04:28 | that's looking pretty good to me.
| | 04:29 | So, let's change our IR Cache Settings again,
I am changing Interpolation back from None
| | 04:34 | to Least Squares and rendering again.
| | 04:38 | We now have much cleaner result and our bases of
our objects will look a little bit more grounded.
| | 04:41 | We can go back our General settings, increase
that diffuse depth to 3, Render one last time.
| | 04:47 | And as you look at this, you'll notice that
there's a really strong density of samples
| | 04:51 | in those corner points as
well as on our picture frames.
| | 04:55 | Each pass of the diffuse depth adds in
another layer of samples, and by the time we have
| | 05:00 | added in the diffuse depth to 3 with that High Sampling
Settings, we get a really nice looking final result.
| | 05:05 | Irradiance Cache Global Illumination allows you to pretty
quickly add smoothly blended bounce lighting to your scenes.
| | 05:11 | It's especially suited to stills or
scenes where only the camera is animating.
| | 05:16 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Choosing a global illumination mode for animated scenes| 00:00 | With all of the different approaches to Global
Illumination in CINEMA 4D, it can seem a little
| | 00:04 | intimidating to pick a GI mode even.
| | 00:06 | With any luck, after this video,
it will be a much easier choice.
| | 00:10 | Let's go ahead and take a look at
the GI mode in our Render Settings.
| | 00:13 | Right now I've got it set to Still Image.
| | 00:15 | So, when I render this image, my viewport first
renders a pre-pass where it is adding in sample points.
| | 00:23 | Each pass adds in another sample point,
trying to figure out where the illumination in my
| | 00:28 | scene is coming from, and then it
renders out a smooth and clean finish render.
| | 00:32 | Now, when I try and render out an animation
with this mode, what it does is it renders
| | 00:36 | out a pre-pass for each frame, and then it
renders the individual frames one after the
| | 00:41 | other, much like what we saw in our Editor View.
| | 00:44 | In fact, there's really no difference, in fact,
there is no relationship between the frames.
| | 00:49 | The sample points are all
original between each frame.
| | 00:52 | What this can sometimes lead to is a flickering.
| | 00:55 | So, let's take a look at a finished animation,
and these are all rendered at fairly low resolution
| | 01:00 | so that I could put these examples
together in a reasonable amount of time.
| | 01:03 | As we press Play, what you'll notice is that
with IR (Still Image), there is a bit of flickering,
| | 01:08 | especially in the edges of our scene, areas
where sample points are likely to shift around a bit.
| | 01:14 | So, IR (Still Image) should
really only be used with Still Images.
| | 01:18 | IR (Camera Animation) as you can probably guess
is best used when simply your camera is animating.
| | 01:24 | Don't include this in a scene where you've
got animated objects because it's not going
| | 01:28 | to take those objects into account.
| | 01:30 | When you render out with IR (Camera Animation),
it renders out a pre-pass first.
| | 01:34 | Now, let's adjust our output settings just
so we can see this entire pre-pass process.
| | 01:39 | I'm going to go to my Output Tab, and I'm
going to only render out frames 0 to 3,
| | 01:46 | which I think will give me a total of
2 frames at 12 frames per second.
| | 01:50 | So, let's go into our Picture Viewer,
so render to Picture Viewer.
| | 01:54 | It's going to ask me if I want to stop
the Renderer and start again. There we go.
| | 01:58 | So what we see is that we render out a pre-pass
for the first frame, and then it advances
| | 02:03 | to the second frame, once it's
finished with that first pre-pass.
| | 02:06 | And we can see that the second frame, the
pre-pass rendered much more quickly, and that's
| | 02:11 | because it was taking into account all of the
samples that had already been created before.
| | 02:16 | So, as our camera moves through the scene,
and discovers parts of our scene that we haven't
| | 02:19 | seen before, what we get are new sample points.
| | 02:23 | But it doesn't add sample
points unless there are new elements.
| | 02:26 | So, let's take a look at a finished render
using IR (Camera Animation) and press Play.
| | 02:31 | There is still a bit of grunge
in those corners, but it's static.
| | 02:36 | And that grunge will show you how to
clean up as we go over sampling settings.
| | 02:40 | But what's nice to know
here is that it's static.
| | 02:42 | It's not moving around anymore.
| | 02:45 | And that is the advantage of
the IR (Camera Animation) mode.
| | 02:48 | The illumination is constant throughout
your scene. Next, let's go to QMC.
| | 02:54 | And QMC as you've probably saw
before is a brute force method.
| | 03:00 | Every single pixel is being
reevaluated every single frame.
| | 03:04 | None of the illumination
is being cached or reused.
| | 03:07 | So, every single frame for every single pixel,
we have to go in there, and see which objects
| | 03:12 | in our scene might be
contributing some light to it.
| | 03:15 | The final result is really beautiful, and
that we get those really crisp and well-shaped
| | 03:20 | shadows, the illumination is very accurate.
| | 03:22 | But the problem again is that grain that
we see, and it's really not practical for an
| | 03:28 | animation being rendered on a single machine
unless you're only rendering out a very few
| | 03:31 | number of frames, or your
deadline is sometime next month.
| | 03:35 | It might actually come in handy,
though, when you're rendering out for NET.
| | 03:38 | As then you can have multiple clients rendering
simultaneously, and you can crank the settings
| | 03:42 | up high enough that you get a grain-free image.
| | 03:45 | Let's take a look at an
animation rendered with QMC.
| | 03:48 | As you can see, I've cut the resolution down on this
even further so that I could get the render time down.
| | 03:54 | But as we play, we see that there are no large shifts
in the illumination of our model. There is still that grain.
| | 04:03 | But depending on your project, if this is
a grain that you can live with, the benefits
| | 04:06 | and these shadows here might just be worth it.
| | 04:08 | QMC is really also the best mode if you've
got a lot of really complicated objects moving
| | 04:14 | around animated and relating to each other.
| | 04:17 | Next up, let's take a look at a scene with an animated
object, and see how we would approach rendering that.
| | 04:22 | So, I've got a simple cube that I've
extruded a few times that's rotating around, and I
| | 04:27 | did that just so we could get some nice
nooks and crannies to look at as they move.
| | 04:31 | Let's take a look at our finished renders.
| | 04:33 | Now, when you're animating objects, it's
typically best practice to use the full animation mode.
| | 04:39 | So, what's happening is it's
giving us a hybrid of IR and QMC.
| | 04:44 | We're getting slightly better shadows especially
in these quarter points, and we're still getting
| | 04:50 | the stored up illumination of IR, and
it's fairly constant frame to frame.
| | 04:56 | Although if your sampling settings are too
low as appears to be the case in this animation,
| | 05:00 | you're going to get a fair amount of
flickering, and then just for fun, I also rendered out
| | 05:06 | an animated object using the Still Image mode.
| | 05:08 | And what surprised me is that this
actually appeared to have less flicker.
| | 05:12 | So, another strategy for your GI might just
be to crank up your settings high enough that
| | 05:17 | each frame renders cleanly so that the
flicker between frames isn't really noticeable.
| | 05:22 | But for the most part, when you're trying
to pick your GI mode, your best bet is just
| | 05:25 | to go with a little description
in parentheses next to each mode.
| | 05:28 | It's a pretty good indicator of which is
going to be most appropriate for a given case.
| | 05:33 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing material settings for global illumination| 00:00 | Global Illumination calculates
the bounced light in a scene.
| | 00:04 | However, not all objects are created equal. Some are
more likely to contribute light to a scene than another.
| | 00:10 | And if we tweak our Material settings, we
can tell CINEMA 4D to focus on those objects
| | 00:14 | that are most likely to add light.
| | 00:16 | What we have here is a geometric
structure with some deep recesses.
| | 00:20 | And inside of those recesses are individual
polygons that have a material with luminance turned on.
| | 00:26 | Let's just go ahead and render
with the default GI settings.
| | 00:29 | We see that we get some
samples, but they're very blotchy.
| | 00:33 | And that's because--as we learned in our video on QMC--the
samples get sent out in every different direction sort of randomly.
| | 00:42 | And sometimes they're going to hit one of
these lights over here, but sometimes they
| | 00:46 | won't, which is why we see a lot of contrast
on the interior where there is a pretty good
| | 00:52 | chance of hitting a light
and also not hitting a light.
| | 00:55 | Let's go ahead and tweak our material
setting to improve the final look here.
| | 00:59 | Go ahead and double-click on the PolyLight
material, and go to the Illumination Tab.
| | 01:04 | Now, this is a tab you've probably never been
to before because you've had no strong reason.
| | 01:08 | It's very specific to Global Illumination.
| | 01:10 | In the upper-right here, we see a lot of settings for
Global Illumination, one is Generate GI, one is Receive GI.
| | 01:18 | Now, Receive GI is turned on
by default for most materials.
| | 01:22 | When you turn that off, it means that no bounce light in
the scene will contribute to the brightness of this object.
| | 01:28 | So, for a light emitting object, it
makes sense to turn off Receive GI.
| | 01:32 | Below that is an option for GI Area Light.
Go ahead and turn that on.
| | 01:37 | What this does is it tells CINEMA 4D to focus our samples on
any object that has this material applied. Let's re-render.
| | 01:44 | As you can see, the lighting is significantly
more consistent, and that's really the beauty
| | 01:48 | of this GI Area Light option.
You can adjust this setting in one other place.
| | 01:53 | If you go into your Render Settings and go
into your Global Illumination Tab, and then
| | 01:58 | go to Sampling, there is an option here for
Discrete Area Sampling, turning this on or
| | 02:04 | off controls whether or not we're going to
evaluate the GI Area Light option in our materials.
| | 02:10 | So, if we were to turn off Discrete Area
Sampling, it would be like we had never turned on
| | 02:16 | GI Area Light in our Illumination settings.
| | 02:18 | Let's take a look at a high resolution
render of this and just compare the difference.
| | 02:22 | So here is our GI Area Light Not
Optimized, and here it is Optimized.
| | 02:29 | I'm going to show you the QMC version of this.
| | 02:31 | Here is an Optimized version of this in QMC.
Let's move on to the next scene.
| | 02:36 | Go to the GI Portal scene, and
let's do a quick test render.
| | 02:41 | What we have is a scene of an interior of
an office with some chairs, a coffee table,
| | 02:46 | and a window that's letting in light from
the sky. The Illumination looks pretty good.
| | 02:50 | So, there's no real strong need to optimize
a scene for visual reasons, but perhaps we
| | 02:56 | can speed up our renders
a bit and indeed we can.
| | 02:59 | Go to your Glass material right here that says Window
by double-clicking, and go to its Illumination Tab.
| | 03:06 | Inside of here, we have
the option for a GI Portal.
| | 03:08 | A GI Portal is a transparent object through
which a lot of light is likely to be coming in.
| | 03:17 | And typically, GI Portals are single polygon
objects, so pieces of glass that are very thin.
| | 03:24 | And all of the illumination in our scene is coming
from the Sky object which is illuminating our scene.
| | 03:30 | Now, by default, CINEMA 4D will treat all
lights like GI Area Lights using this Discrete
| | 03:38 | Sky Sampling setting in our Render Settings.
| | 03:40 | Personally, and this is perhaps more
superstition than necessary, I like to go into the luminant
| | 03:45 | material that I'm using for my Sky, and
also turn on GI Area Light just in case I ever
| | 03:50 | apply this bright white
material or something else in my scene.
| | 03:53 | Now, I'm going to spare you the time of me
actually re-rendering the scene, and just
| | 03:56 | go into my Picture Viewer and show
you two different versions of this.
| | 04:00 | This is my IR rendering of this room, Not
Optimized, and this is the Optimized version.
| | 04:06 | There is a very subtle
difference in the lighting.
| | 04:09 | It's a little bit brighter
when it's been optimized.
| | 04:11 | And if I take a look at my render times, the
non-optimized version of my scene has a render
| | 04:16 | time of about 48 seconds, whereas
the optimized version has 29 seconds.
| | 04:21 | Now, imagine that speed up over the
course of a thousand frame animation.
| | 04:25 | It would be a really significant
amount of time that you've saved.
| | 04:28 | I'm also going to show you
the QMC version of this scene.
| | 04:31 | Now, it's rendered at a lower resolution
because QMC just takes longer to render.
| | 04:35 | This is the non-optimized version of the scene.
You can see that it's quite grainy.
| | 04:38 | And this is the optimized version
of the scene. It's much clearer.
| | 04:41 | So, because our sampling is focusing our
rays that are coming off of each pixel here at
| | 04:48 | the light giving areas of our scene, we don't
need as many samples to get a good GI solution.
| | 04:55 | We can also take a look at the
difference in our render time.
| | 04:57 | This non-optimized version takes us a minute and 7 seconds,
whereas the optimized version only takes 33 seconds.
| | 05:04 | Let's try and look at
this with even fewer samples.
| | 05:07 | Here are 8 Samples Not Optimized, and you can see
that they're being shot out pretty much randomly.
| | 05:12 | In some areas it should be clearly
illuminated or registering as totally black,
| | 05:16 | whereas 8 Samples Optimized, pretty much every
area that should at least be bright is bright.
| | 05:22 | And in order to get the same level of
quality more or less, I've had to crank my samples
| | 05:26 | up all the way to 128 in
the non-optimized version.
| | 05:30 | And that takes a minute and 37 seconds as compared
to the mere 18 seconds for the optimized version.
| | 05:35 | So, when you're using QMC especially, make
sure that you turn on GI Area Light, and GI
| | 05:41 | Portal for those materials where it makes sense.
| | 05:43 | Adjusting these often ignored settings can
both significantly increase the quality of
| | 05:46 | your renders and
drastically reduce render time.
| | 05:51 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Optimizing sampling settings| 00:00 | Global Illumination can make your finished images
look great, assuming you're using the right settings.
| | 00:05 | If you are using the wrong settings, you can get blotches
and flickering and all sorts of unsightly artifacts.
| | 00:11 | Let's take a look at a scene rendered
using the default IR Camera Animation settings.
| | 00:17 | When I press Play, we notice this is a very
short snippet of an animation, and I do this
| | 00:21 | so that we can see some of the major artifacts
without struggling through very long render times.
| | 00:26 | It's little difficult to make out by
default in the setting right here, but if you look
| | 00:30 | at the white wall along the back and
especially at it's crown molding, there are these dark
| | 00:35 | regions and these are areas where the samples that were taken
very significantly from their neighbors. So you get these blotches.
| | 00:43 | If we'd used the IR Still settings,
those would be flickering left and right.
| | 00:47 | So at least we don't have
that problem to deal with.
| | 00:49 | Let's go into our Render settings and see if we
can come up with some ways of eliminating this.
| | 00:54 | I am going to go into my Render settings, and I am going
to see what can be fixed simply by increasing my sampling quality.
| | 01:00 | By going into Sampling, I am going to change my
Samples from Medium to High, and I am going to render again.
| | 01:07 | What I am seeing is this is probably
going to take a long time to render.
| | 01:10 | So I am going to kill this, and I am going
to limit my Render to a small region, and
| | 01:16 | I do that by turning on my Interactive
Render Region which I have preset to a small area
| | 01:21 | in my image that shows a lot of these artifacts.
| | 01:23 | Then I am going to go into my Output
tab and turn on the Render region option.
| | 01:28 | Inside of there I am going to choose Copy
from IRR, and that's going to ensure that
| | 01:32 | I am just rendering out of full-res
version of this cross section.
| | 01:36 | Next, I am going to turn off
my Interactive Render Region
| | 01:38 | so it's not stealing any processor cycles
from my main render, and I am going to render
| | 01:42 | to the picture viewer now with
these slightly higher sampling settings.
| | 01:47 | What I would like to do whenever I am rending
out a lot of different tests is to write notes
| | 01:52 | for myself as to what it is I have changed.
| | 01:54 | Right here I know that I have
changed my Sampling Quality.
| | 01:58 | I have actually added Sampling High and
what this tells me is that is the thing that is
| | 02:05 | different between this and the previous render.
So looking at this I have those same blotches.
| | 02:10 | They are not quite as bad as these first,
but they are still very much present.
| | 02:16 | Also, when I look at my image I see that I've
got these picture frames in a few other regions
| | 02:21 | of high detail that just aren't been picked up.
| | 02:24 | So I what I want to do is go into my Render
settings and tell CINEMA 4D to pay attention
| | 02:29 | to objects that are in corners, that are
likely to have shadows or are really just sort of
| | 02:36 | mixed up in the business of other objects.
| | 02:37 | I do that by going into my Global Illumination
settings, going to a Radiance Cache, and this
| | 02:42 | controls how each of these samples plays with the
other, and I am going to turn on Details Enhancement.
| | 02:48 | Now let's render this out again.
| | 02:50 | Details Enhancement adds QMC Style
rendering for the detailed corners.
| | 02:56 | So when we've got an area where there's likely
to be a lot of shading difference what happens
| | 03:01 | is we are rendering the samples on a per pixel
basis as opposed to just those sample points.
| | 03:06 | So looking at this now I would say it's
looking much better, but in so doing I imagine we
| | 03:12 | have also ticked up our render time.
| | 03:14 | From 11 seconds for this one
before, all the way up to 14.
| | 03:18 | Now one of the advantages of using Details Enhancement
is that you don't actually need as many IR Style samples.
| | 03:25 | So I am going to go into my Global
Illumination settings and adjust my Radiance Cache Record
| | 03:31 | Density which right now is set to
Medium, and I'm going to set that to Low.
| | 03:35 | So when I render out now, you will notice
that there are fewer sample points on my image,
| | 03:40 | and that's pre-passed
Renders really quite quickly.
| | 03:43 | I'd say that this is looking pretty good,
but there's a problem that I'm running into
| | 03:47 | which is that we now have a bit of light
leak that's happening in the corner of my room.
| | 03:53 | You can see a white splotch that wasn't there previously,
and that's because we don't have quite enough samples.
| | 03:58 | So let's see if we can block
out that one errant sample.
| | 04:03 | In my Render settings what I am going to do is
turn on Distance Map and Check Record Visibility.
| | 04:09 | Both of these add a little bit to your render
time, but what they do is they look for samples
| | 04:14 | that are liable to change as the camera
view changes and filters them on and off.
| | 04:20 | Check Record Visibility looks for samples that
are not currently in view and does not include them.
| | 04:26 | So if you've got thin walls or an object that's
rotating, Check Record Visibility is a good thing to turn on.
| | 04:32 | So let's render out again and see
if we have eliminated that issue.
| | 04:35 | It looks like we still have that problem.
| | 04:37 | So I am going to have to
turn my record density back up.
| | 04:40 | I am changing my record density
from Low to Medium and rendering again.
| | 04:46 | A Render time is going to increase, but with
any luck the finished image will be of such
| | 04:49 | quality that it justifies this at a render time.
| | 04:53 | Looking at this now I have got a nice clean
looking image with no light leaks, good looking
| | 04:58 | shadows, and excellent details.
| | 05:01 | My render time for this was 15 seconds, and let's compare
this to our default settings here. It looks much better.
| | 05:08 | Now let's just render out the whole animation in full
frame so we can do it real honest-to-goodness comparison.
| | 05:13 | Let's go to the Output tab and turn off Render Region
and render it all out again. Our render is finished.
| | 05:21 | It looks like it took a minute
and eight seconds to do this.
| | 05:23 | Let's compare that to our initial time.
The default settings it was only 31 seconds.
| | 05:28 | So we have effectively doubled our
render time, but let's look at the results.
| | 05:32 | This is what our higher-quality settings.
| | 05:35 | I don't see any flicker or
really any blotches to speak up.
| | 05:38 | Now when I look at my default settings, I
have got a muddier looking Global Illumination.
| | 05:42 | Now it's really up to you and how much time
you have and how much of a stickler your client
| | 05:48 | is as to whether or not you can go with those defaults
or the higher-quality tweak settings that we ended up using.
| | 05:55 | One last thing I want to go over is how you
might start this exploration process yourself.
| | 06:00 | I usually tend to start by
increasing my Sampling settings.
| | 06:03 | If that doesn't give me the sampling quality that I want,
I then go into my Radiance Cache, and adjust the Record Density.
| | 06:10 | If that still doesn't give me what I want, I turn on
Detailed Enhancement and lowered my Record Density.
| | 06:14 | If that doesn't do it I will turn on Distance
Map and Check Record Visibility and then continue
| | 06:18 | to tweak my Sampling and Density settings here.
| | 06:21 | One last cool thing I want to show you is
that you can load in anything that you've
| | 06:25 | already rendered out in
terms of your cache files.
| | 06:29 | So if I turn on Auto load and re-render
this animation, you will see that I don't have
| | 06:35 | to re-render my pre-pass, and I get all
of the benefits of Global Illumination.
| | 06:38 | So if you've only made a minor tweak to your
scene, and you don't want to have to re-render
| | 06:42 | that whole pre-pass, go ahead and turn
on Auto Load for that Radiance Cache.
| | 06:47 | You will load it back up, and you
won't have to re-render your GI.
| | 06:50 | Global Illumination is a high end rendering technique, and
it's often difficult to get smooth flicker free results.
| | 06:57 | So if you have to take a while to
tweak your settings to get there.
| | 07:00 | There's no shame in that, everybody does.
| | 07:05 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making use of Net Render effectively| 00:00 | If you've ever used CINEMA 4D's NET Render, you
have probably discovered that it can be a bit finicky.
| | 00:04 | We are going to go over some settings that
might ease your workflow as you transition
| | 00:09 | into rendering longer
animations using CINEMA 4D NET.
| | 00:12 | Right here we have a simple room with a basic
camera animation and to render it on a single
| | 00:17 | workstation is just now
reaching the limits of my patience.
| | 00:21 | So to render this out on NET, we will
hopefully cut down on my render times, but there are
| | 00:24 | some things to take into account.
| | 00:26 | In terms of your Global Illumination mode
whenever you are preparing for Net you always
| | 00:30 | want to be using IR+QMC or QMC.
| | 00:36 | This is assuming that you're
sending your files straight to Net.
| | 00:39 | You pretty much never want to be using IR
Still Image just like you wouldn't want to
| | 00:43 | use it with a regular animation, because that's
going to lead to a lot of flickering and blotches
| | 00:47 | that are moving around in your image.
| | 00:50 | NET Render exacerbates some of the problems
that you sometimes see with randomness in renders.
| | 00:56 | Whenever you're preparing a file for CINEMA 4D Net,
you want to bake as much of your file
| | 01:01 | as you possibly can, and when I say bake I
mean take those elements in your scenes that
| | 01:06 | are subject to change based on a random value.
| | 01:09 | Basically, anything that has a seed value
and make the object editable or take your
| | 01:15 | texture and convert it from a procedural
into an image map or in this case with Net what
| | 01:21 | we are looking to do is
somehow bake our Global Illumination.
| | 01:25 | Now if you are just rendering a camera animation
and you are sending that straight to CINEMA 4D NET,
| | 01:29 | you can go ahead
and use the IR+QMC setting.
| | 01:35 | What this will do is send your
file out to the NET Render server.
| | 01:39 | The NET Render Server will then copy
it to each and every one of the clients.
| | 01:42 | Then all of them will simultaneously try
and render the entire animations pre-pass.
| | 01:48 | So if you have got a 100-frame animation, each
and every one of those NET clients is going
| | 01:52 | to be trying to render 100 frames of pre-pass.
| | 01:56 | What this effectively means is that while
you are rendering an animation with IR+QMC
| | 02:01 | over the NET Render, you are
locking out your NET Server.
| | 02:05 | You won't be able to render any other animations,
and you won't be able to see any preview frames
| | 02:10 | until the entire pre-pass is rendered.
| | 02:13 | Now if you don't have any other jobs on your
NET Render right now, this might be a perfect
| | 02:17 | solution to say IR+QMC (NET), save out your
project, upload it to NET, and start rendering,
| | 02:22 | and never have to worry about it again.
| | 02:24 | But if you've got a crowded NET server or
your workstation is the fastest machine that
| | 02:29 | you have access to, you are probably
better rendering off a GI pre-pass which you then
| | 02:35 | upload with your file to NET.
| | 02:37 | This is something that I want to go over now,
but first I want to go over how to reduce
| | 02:41 | some flickering in your animation.
| | 02:43 | So the same things that you want to consider
when you are just rendering out Global Illumination
| | 02:47 | animation are the same things
you want to consider for NET.
| | 02:50 | The main thing is to
adjust your sampling settings.
| | 02:53 | If you have sampling set to Low, you really
want to crank that up a bit higher, because
| | 02:58 | each and every sample is a random cluster
of rays that are sent out into your scene
| | 03:04 | and they may hit a light, they may not,
and when you have a low number, as you saw in
| | 03:08 | our demonstration QMC, you can get a very
grainy result, or if you're using IR animation
| | 03:14 | what's going to happen is you
get a flicker in your result.
| | 03:17 | By cranking up the Sample setting, we
minimize the risk of that sort of flicker.
| | 03:22 | Another thing that you might want
to do is adjust your Radiance Cache.
| | 03:26 | The Record Density by default is
probably set to Medium, and that might be okay.
| | 03:31 | If you can get away with setting your
Record Density to Low, what that's going to do is
| | 03:34 | minimize the risk of really high-frequency
blotches flickering on and off, and it will
| | 03:39 | also allow you to use a higher sampling quality.
| | 03:42 | Now if your workstation is the fastest machine you have
what you want to do is render out what's called a Cache file.
| | 03:48 | What this is is basically the pre-pass that CINEMA 4D renders
before it goes into rendering all of the Global Illumination.
| | 03:55 | In order to do this a really good best
practice is to do a saving of your entire scene, and
| | 04:01 | this is a good practice for
whatever you are doing in NET Render.
| | 04:03 | I go to File > Save Project with Assets and what
that's going to do is create entire folder structure.
| | 04:10 | I'm going to save this inside of my NET folder,
and inside of there I am just going to name
| | 04:14 | this room_for_net, and what this is doing is creating a
folder, and inside of this folder we see our CINEMA 4D file.
| | 04:23 | Now if I'd used any image-based textures,
we would see a folder called T-E-X, and as
| | 04:28 | we are about to see, we are going to
generate a folder called illum in there.
| | 04:31 | So let's go ahead and go to our General
tab for our Global Illumination and make sure
| | 04:36 | that we are set to IR+QMC NET Render.
| | 04:39 | Now we can also actually get away with IR
(Camera animation), and I would choose that
| | 04:44 | if I was just using a camera animation, and
this is a special exception to the rule of
| | 04:48 | always using IR+QMC Net, because we are generating a cache
file all of the clients will get access to the same data.
| | 04:55 | So I am just actually going to choose IR (Camera
Animation), in this case, and render to my Picture Viewer.
| | 05:00 | It's going to say I have no file name specified,
do I want to continue, I am going to choose Yes.
| | 05:04 | But it should actually be a red flag, because when
you are saving to NET, you do want to have a File name.
| | 05:10 | You just don't have a File path.
| | 05:12 | So in my Save tab here, I am going to make
sure that I have Save turned on, and I am
| | 05:17 | going to render out to TIFF and
give this a name room_fot_net.
| | 05:24 | Because I didn't have the save information in
here previously it is important that I save my scene.
| | 05:28 | So I am just going to hit
Command+S or Ctrl+S on my keyboard.
| | 05:31 | That was on a Windows machine.
| | 05:33 | That's going to save it out, and it's going
to give me a good default name for my files.
| | 05:37 | As we check back in on a render here we
see that our pre-pass has been going along and
| | 05:41 | look we are now rendering nice colorful frames.
| | 05:43 | I am actually going to
kill my render at this point.
| | 05:46 | Because we are done with the pre-pass.
| | 05:47 | It says it's already calculating an image.
Do I want to stop? And I say Yes.
| | 05:51 | Now let's take a look at our
folder where this was all located.
| | 05:55 | The room_for_net folder where we just were
now has an Illumination folder, shorten to
| | 06:00 | illum, and inside of here
is a room_for_net.gi file.
| | 06:04 | This is a saving of our pre-pass.
| | 06:06 | If I go back into my Render Settings what I
want to do now is go to Global Illumination >
| | 06:11 | Cache Files and turn on Auto Load for both my Radiance
Cache and might as well for my Radiosity Maps as well.
| | 06:21 | Now when I render this out again, what we will
see is that we are skipping the entire pre-pass.
| | 06:28 | We have just launched straight into the render.
| | 06:31 | If this was a many, many frame animation, I
would be saving myself this final rendering
| | 06:35 | step, and that would all be
done on the NET Render Server.
| | 06:38 | So once you are done creating that GI Cache,
you want to upload all of these files, your
| | 06:45 | illumination file, your CINEMA 4D file to that CINEMA 4D Net
Server, and then start your render. Some final considerations.
| | 06:53 | If you want to do an animation where you
are not rendering just the camera, but in fact
| | 06:57 | you are rendering out an animation of a
series of different objects, IR+QMC is an all right
| | 07:03 | bet, but if there is a lot of really complicated
objects, you probably going to have to use the QMC method.
| | 07:08 | You might also, if you are rendering out a
still use QMC, because NET Render will not
| | 07:13 | allow you to create a meaningful GI pre-pass unless
you want to render out that pre-pass for everything.
| | 07:19 | So in both of these situations if you have
a lot of render nodes, the QMC mode is what
| | 07:24 | I recommend and again as with all NET Renders
bake everything as much as possible and always
| | 07:31 | use nodes that have the same configuration,
especially Operating System and Processor.
| | 07:35 | Once you start throwing different machines
into the mix you're going to complicate everything
| | 07:41 | in terms of the results that you get.
| | 07:43 | Baking GI with NET is a
fairly complicated process.
| | 07:46 | So I would recommend practicing the whole thing start
to finish before you use this in a production environment.
| | 07:53 |
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|
|
3. Image SweeteningSetting up high-dynamic-range image (HDRI) lighting| 00:00 | Image-based lighting using HDR images can give you
really fantastic lighting with a minimum of effort.
| | 00:07 | In my Picture Viewer, I have opened two images.
They are both panoramas of the sky.
| | 00:11 | The first is an 8-bit, image and don't let this name
fool you, it's not an HDRI. It's just an 8-bit image.
| | 00:18 | If I go into my Filter tab, what I can do is
enable my Filter and adjust the exposure of
| | 00:24 | this image, and as any one who has tried to
play with Levels in Photoshop knows, I am going
| | 00:29 | to be able to shift of this around, but
at some point I am going to lose detail.
| | 00:33 | So if I bring my Exposure down what we will eventually
see is that I am just darkening my entire image uniformly.
| | 00:40 | The sun is just overexposed,
and there is no salvaging in it.
| | 00:45 | Now the underexposed areas I can increase
the exposure on and do all right, but I am
| | 00:50 | limited, and that's because this image is
an 8-bit image, and that means that there
| | 00:54 | are only 256 levels of possible brightness.
| | 00:58 | Now if I go to a 16-bit or 32-bit image
which is the standard for an HDR image, we end up
| | 01:05 | with millions of levels of brightness.
| | 01:07 | So taking a look at this HDRI image if I
go into my Filter and adjust its exposure, I
| | 01:13 | can bring the Exposure up just like I did with the
other, but I can also bring my Exposure down significantly.
| | 01:20 | What you will see is I am not ten stops lower
in brightness, and I still have image detail,
| | 01:28 | and that's because of the
way that HRDI images are taken.
| | 01:31 | An HDRI image is actually
composite of a number of different images.
| | 01:36 | To get this panorama, somebody probably
went out and used a panoramic head on a tripod
| | 01:41 | and rotated it around 360 degrees
taking a number of pictures.
| | 01:45 | But in addition to doing that just for the
panorama, they also took pictures at different
| | 01:50 | exposure levels by adjusting the shutter speed.
| | 01:53 | This allowed them to capture an image with
incredible levels of information about Brightness.
| | 01:58 | These images were probably brought into the
computer after the fact and taken into a program
| | 02:03 | like HDR Shop which allows you to take
these images and composite them to get together
| | 02:08 | into a single finished .HDR file.
| | 02:12 | Let's take a look at how we can use
an image like this to light our scene.
| | 02:16 | The scene that I have right here is
a simple MoGraph scene I have got.
| | 02:20 | A CFL light bulb in the
front and a few in the back.
| | 02:22 | They have got a white material on
them with a little bit of reflection.
| | 02:26 | But we don't see any reflection,
because they're in a black environment.
| | 02:29 | Let's go ahead and add a Sky.
| | 02:30 | Press and hold on the floor and
select the Sky object and render again.
| | 02:35 | We have that same cruddy automatic lighting,
but we do have a little bit of interest now
| | 02:40 | with the reflections on the edges of
our objects. Still it's pretty boring.
| | 02:45 | Now I might want to come in here and add a
bunch of lights and really tweak those, but
| | 02:49 | I don't have the time let's say.
| | 02:50 | Let's say we are under a deadline, and
we need something that looks good quick.
| | 02:53 | That's where HDRI lighting is really a hero.
| | 02:56 | To get this set up for HDRI
lighting let's grab an HDRI image.
| | 03:00 | Now you can find them on the Internet,
you can try and take them yourselves.
| | 03:04 | I typically just go to the content browser
where I have all of my presets from CINEMA 4D.
| | 03:10 | Now to get to where I am now what I want you
to do is if you have your Search Window open,
| | 03:14 | close it, and if you haven't yet, click on this Presets
ink well that will take you to the main Presets folder.
| | 03:21 | Inside of here are a number of different
folders, but I like to use the Search functionality
| | 03:24 | to find what I'm looking for.
| | 03:25 | So click on Search and then
just type in HDRI and hit Return.
| | 03:31 | This is going to bring up a list of images
and scene files that have the word HDRI in
| | 03:36 | them and some of them are good
candidates and others aren't.
| | 03:39 | You want to avoid the ones that look like
actual CINEMA 4D scenes as well as the ones
| | 03:44 | that look like images and they
especially avoid anything that ends with .jpg.
| | 03:48 | It is certainly not a
high dynamic range of image.
| | 03:50 | What you will eventually find
are these HDRI material previews.
| | 03:55 | These are pre-built materials with an HDRI
map loaded into the luminance channel and
| | 03:59 | frankly HDRI 001 has
served me more times than not.
| | 04:02 | So just go ahead and drag that over into
the Materials browser down here and then drag
| | 04:07 | the material on to your
Sky object and render again.
| | 04:12 | The image looks different, one, because we
have got a background, and two, because if you
| | 04:16 | look at the highlights on your object,
what you are seeing is not a specular hit from
| | 04:21 | a CINEMA 4D light, but an actual reflection of an
incredibly bright light source, in this case, the sun.
| | 04:27 | Let's go ahead and use this image now to light our scene
and the easiest way to do that is Global Illumination.
| | 04:34 | So go to your render settings and turn on
Effect > Global Illumination, and we are just
| | 04:39 | going to leave it at the default.
Now let's render again.
| | 04:42 | What's happening is that each of these
samples is looking outward from the surface of the
| | 04:47 | object, and because the sky is so large and
all-encompassing, each of those samples is
| | 04:52 | really most likely to hit the
sky as opposed to other object.
| | 04:55 | So it's getting almost all of its lighting
information from the sky. Now look at this render.
| | 05:01 | With basically no effort, we've got a series of objects
that look perfectly integrated into their background.
| | 05:07 | It's a beautiful look and
really simple to achieve.
| | 05:11 | Now let's see what happens when we
try in just a different material.
| | 05:14 | Go back to that content browser,
and let's just go with HDRI3.
| | 05:17 | I am picking that because it's got
a slightly different color scheme.
| | 05:20 | I am going to drag this on
to my sky and render again.
| | 05:25 | We can see that already this image has a bit
more of a green cast, the one that came before,
| | 05:30 | and it's perhaps a little bit darker.
| | 05:32 | Now it's got a little gray quality to it.
It looks really great.
| | 05:35 | If I open up my Picture view, I've also rendered
out another image or two with different HDRI maps.
| | 05:40 | So you can see just how drastically changing
the image can change the quality of your lighting.
| | 05:46 | Now what if you have something like this, but you
don't want to see the HDRI map in the background?
| | 05:50 | Well, the simplest solution is to use what's
called a Compositing tag and to get that you
| | 05:55 | want to right-click on your Sky,
Choose CINEMA 4D Tags > Compositing.
| | 06:00 | Go ahead and turn off Seen by Camera.
| | 06:03 | What this will do is take
that image out of the equation.
| | 06:06 | So now when we render it's only contributing to the
light on our objects and nothing to the background.
| | 06:12 | What if you wanted to swap in a
background of a different color?
| | 06:15 | Well, I would recommend using a background
object, because it plays well with the sky object.
| | 06:22 | So I am just going to pick a color.
| | 06:23 | This one is rather hideous, but what I have done is created
a simple material and thrown in on my Background object.
| | 06:29 | Our pre-pass is rendering, and now we
have a differently colored background.
| | 06:34 | The edges are gray, because that's going
to be cropped off in our finished render.
| | 06:37 | Now what if you wanted to have a higher resolution background
still say mapped onto a sphere? You could certainly do that.
| | 06:46 | But there are some things
that you need to be aware off.
| | 06:48 | We are going to use this
sphere to be high background image.
| | 06:53 | Let's pretend that this pink shader here is that
image, and I am going to drag it on to my sphere.
| | 06:57 | If I was to just render right now, I would
get a scene that was completely black, and
| | 07:02 | that's because this
sphere is blocking out the sky.
| | 07:05 | So what I want to do is create a compositing tag
for my sphere, and I want to turn off Seen by GI.
| | 07:14 | Now another thing that I am going to want to
turn off is Seen by Rays so that it doesn't
| | 07:17 | show up in my Reflections
either, and let's render again.
| | 07:21 | All of our lighting is coming from the Sky
object and none of it is coming from the sphere.
| | 07:25 | So by simply using an HDRI map, you get
highly realistic lighting that will allow you to
| | 07:30 | easily integrate your objects
into a real-world environment.
| | 07:35 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Grounding objects with ambient occlusion| 00:00 | Ambient Occlusion is a way to add in small detailed shadows
to objects that have otherwise softer undefined lighting.
| | 00:09 | This is something that you'll often run
into when you're using a radiance cache global
| | 00:12 | illumination and also sometimes when you
are using Ambient Lights, which are typically
| | 00:18 | something you should avoid unless
you are going to use Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:21 | Here is an example of an image with just
Ambient Lighting and here is an example of an image
| | 00:26 | with that same Ambient
Lighting now with Ambient Occlusion.
| | 00:30 | Let's compare this to a similar render
that's using a global illumination based solution.
| | 00:36 | The colors don't match perfectly, that's
because it was quickly set up, but I assure you, you could
| | 00:40 | get the colors to match more closely.
| | 00:43 | Let's take a look at the
difference in Render Time.
| | 00:45 | To get this level of fine detail with the
Global Illumination, was 4 minutes and 36 seconds.
| | 00:50 | To get the same effect using
Ambient Illumination was only 34 seconds.
| | 00:56 | So this technique at least in limited
circumstances can really save you on render times and also
| | 01:01 | cut out some of the headache of avoiding flickering
that you get when you are using Global Illumination.
| | 01:06 | To set up Ambient Occlusion for
your scene, it's really quite simple.
| | 01:10 | All you have to do is go into your Render
Settings, go to Effect and add in Ambient
| | 01:16 | Occlusion, and then render your scene again.
| | 01:19 | Temporarily I'm going to turn off Ambient
Occlusion, so we can see what it looks like
| | 01:23 | before, you can see that I've got a Sun light which
is a distance or an infinite light, and I have a Blue light.
| | 01:30 | The blue fill is set to be an Ambient Light, which means
that it is casting light on all surfaces in all directions.
| | 01:39 | It's basically like adding a certain amount
of blue to your image as a whole and without
| | 01:45 | Ambient Occlusion it looks a little bit funny.
| | 01:46 | So let's turn on Ambient
Occlusion and render one last time.
| | 01:49 | You can see that we're now
getting those nice detailed shadows.
| | 01:53 | There are a few settings you can
play within your Ambient Occlusion.
| | 01:56 | I'm going to go head and turn on my
Interactive Render Region, so we can focus on a small
| | 02:00 | portion, and that's a view that I like, and
I'm going to play with this gradient here.
| | 02:05 | If you drag the black slider over, the shaded
areas will become darker, more richly black.
| | 02:11 | And if I take the white portion of this gradient
and slide it over, the light areas become lighter.
| | 02:17 | And if I make it a really fine gradation
between the two, it's almost like I'm painting a dirt
| | 02:22 | map around the corners
and crevices of my object.
| | 02:25 | So playing with this gradient is the main
way to affect the way that this image looks.
| | 02:30 | Another thing you can do is play
with the colors on your gradients.
| | 02:32 | So if I take this right here, I might make
it a dark blue, and when we render again,
| | 02:39 | we see that those darkened
regions do have a slight blue cast.
| | 02:42 | Now let's see what happens
when we make it a bright red.
| | 02:44 | It's a very different effect and perhaps I
wanted it to be immediately useful but could
| | 02:49 | be used for a more abstract piece.
| | 02:53 | There some other settings here with regards
to Ray length, and basically what's happening
| | 02:56 | with the Ambient Occlusion effect is that
all of the cracks and crevices in your object
| | 03:02 | are showing up as black, or in this case red.
| | 03:06 | And the name Ambient Occlusion
has actually hinted why that is.
| | 03:10 | So Ambient says from all over
and occlude also means to block.
| | 03:16 | So what we're basically doing is we are
blocking the light that is coming from all over.
| | 03:21 | So anything that is unlikely to be lit up,
basically any sort of a cave, anything that
| | 03:27 | is concave is going to show up as a little
bit blacker, and so we see right in our corners
| | 03:33 | that we get these black lines.
| | 03:35 | Adjusting the maximum ray length sort of dictates how big
a cave you can be in before the black starts showing up.
| | 03:43 | Contrast will also sort of tweak a gradient
here, and if you only want an object to occlude
| | 03:48 | itself and have new shading on the floor,
you would choose Self Shadowing Only, and
| | 03:52 | you'll see that the red lines around the base of
your objects disappear, but I like to leave that off.
| | 03:57 | Once again, ambient occlusion is a really
cool technique that you can use to simply
| | 04:01 | and easily re-create the look of Global
Illumination for outdoor scenes, or to add fine shadowing
| | 04:08 | detail to IR cache Global Illumination scenes,
and you may find other uses than that even.
| | 04:15 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Preventing over- or underexposure with color mapping| 00:00 | Exposure is a product of the relationship
between the number, intensity, and proximity
| | 00:05 | of lights to your subject, as well as the
material properties of that subject in your
| | 00:08 | various camera settings, it's a lot.
| | 00:11 | Color Mapping works like an intelligent auto
exposure for your scene, ensuring that your
| | 00:15 | blacks are black, your whites are white,
and there is a good mix of values in between.
| | 00:19 | Let's take a look at a render of this simple scene,
it's when we are probably familiar with by now.
| | 00:24 | What I've done is I've really cranked up
the brightness of the sky outside, and what we
| | 00:29 | see is that our scene is, in a word, overexposed.
| | 00:34 | The white regions are very white, in fact, overly so
to the point that we are losing detail in our object.
| | 00:40 | The black areas are even quite bright.
| | 00:43 | Now I could go in there and start tweaking
all of my brightness settings for my sky,
| | 00:49 | I could play around with the closeness of
various objects and tweak my GI settings.
| | 00:54 | But perhaps a simpler solution would be to
use Color Mapping, and this is a rather extreme
| | 00:59 | case, but still a helpful one.
| | 01:01 | So go into your Render Settings
and choose Effect > Color Mapping.
| | 01:05 | Now let's just go ahead and render again.
| | 01:09 | Our once grossly overexposed
scene is now just pretty bright.
| | 01:13 | Let's take a look at the before and after
here, and a fun trick that you can use is
| | 01:19 | to set an A and a B
image in the Picture Viewer.
| | 01:22 | So I am going to click on this first image,
choose set to A, take the second image and
| | 01:27 | choose set to B, what we get is a slider that
allows us to see the two in relationship to each other.
| | 01:34 | And you can also swap whether this is
horizontal or vertical with that button right there.
| | 01:38 | So this is a good way to preview
these two effects next to each other.
| | 01:41 | So I would say that the color-mapped
version is significantly better.
| | 01:45 | Now how is this different
from just doing levels in post?
| | 01:48 | Well, if you are rendering out to an 8-bit
image, you've effectively lost all of the
| | 01:53 | detail in the white area here.
| | 01:55 | If say you are rendering out to a 16 or a 32-bit
image the difference is not quite as extreme.
| | 02:01 | But when you are rendering out to those larger bit
depths you are increasing the file size of your render.
| | 02:06 | And also Color Mapping is slightly superior to
both of those methods because what's happening
| | 02:10 | is it's getting all of the data before anti-aliasing
has occurred, and it's mapping it to better values then.
| | 02:17 | This means that your anti-aliasing is going
to look better in the color-mapped version
| | 02:21 | than anything that you are able to do in
port even with a higher bit depth image.
| | 02:25 | Now these defaults are pretty good, but we
can tweak these settings a bit if we want to.
| | 02:30 | So in the Color Mapping settings the Dark
Multiplier will make the shadows brighter
| | 02:36 | if we increase this value, and the Bright
Multiplier will make the brights darker, so
| | 02:43 | let's just play around with us.
| | 02:45 | I am going to render out a small portion of
my scene using the Interactive Render Region,
| | 02:50 | and now I am just going to tweak my dark plot
multiplier up, and we see that as we do this
| | 02:55 | the dark regions of our
scene get brighter and brighter.
| | 02:57 | So if we set this to say 0.9, our darks
would get a bit darker, 0.8, and playing around
| | 03:04 | with our Bright Multiplier we see that as we
increase this number our scene gets darker,
| | 03:08 | and as we decrease it, it gets lighter.
| | 03:11 | So I am going to set this to maybe 1.1, and
this gives us a pretty good range of values.
| | 03:15 | I am going to render out one more time, and we can
now see that the corners have a better looking exposure.
| | 03:20 | I am going to actually turn off my AB
Compare right here, by clicking on this icon,
| | 03:25 | and let's look at our most recent
render and then render just before that.
| | 03:29 | So playing around with Color Mapping you
can add some blacks back into your scene,
| | 03:32 | and it gives you a good way
of reworking your colors.
| | 03:35 | Now Color Mapping isn't going to revolutionize
your renders, but it will lead to a better
| | 03:39 | looking image straight out of CINEMA 4D with
very little effort on your part, so it's not
| | 03:43 | a bad thing to twirl on especially when
you are going to be doing a GI Rendering.
| | 03:48 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Strategies for Speeding Up RendersOptimizing and selectively applying anti-aliasing| 00:00 | Anti-aliasing is a tool within CINEMA 4D
to minimize jagged edges in your image.
| | 00:06 | These jagged edges are known as aliasing,
and it occurs when more image detail than
| | 00:13 | can be safely fit within a pixel
is fit within a pixel.
| | 00:17 | So if we scrub through this animation in our
editor even, what we'll see is a sort of dancing
| | 00:23 | ends pattern on the tops and
sides of our cubes in the background.
| | 00:28 | And this is because they
have a very detailed texture.
| | 00:31 | And as they rotate away from the camera,
that entire texture, especially as we near that
| | 00:38 | front view is compressing into
maybe a 10-pixel, 20-pixel width.
| | 00:44 | So a texture that fits comfortably at maybe
80 or 100 pixels, when we're trying to fit
| | 00:49 | into just 20 pixels gets
a very jagged look to it.
| | 00:54 | So let's go over how to treat
this sort of aliasing in our render.
| | 00:59 | Let's first just render out an animation of this,
so press the middle render button just render it out.
| | 01:05 | It's going to do a half HD res render, and
what you'll see is that the edges of our objects,
| | 01:14 | specifically the plain white objects are
nice and clean, whereas the surface of our cubes
| | 01:21 | with textures is a little bit jagged.
| | 01:24 | Also, the center of our crystal ball here
is definitely getting some jagged edges even
| | 01:29 | with those simple cubes on the inside of it.
| | 01:31 | So let's play this back and
see just how prevalent it is.
| | 01:36 | We see that the front face of our textured cube
is doing all right, but the sides and top are bad.
| | 01:41 | And then this smaller cube in the background is just dancing
the entire time, and so there's definitely some issues there.
| | 01:48 | There is aliasing on our ball as
well, so let's try and eliminate that.
| | 01:53 | Let's first go into our Render Settings.
| | 01:55 | Go to Anti-Aliasing and take a
look at the Anti-Aliasing mode.
| | 01:58 | Right now, we're set to Geometry and by
default what this does is it renders out the edges
| | 02:04 | of your objects cleanly, and I believe
that CINEMA 4D uses a 16x16 setting here.
| | 02:10 | So basically what's happening is it's splitting each pixel
along the edge of your object into 16 times 16 sub-pixels.
| | 02:19 | And then it takes all of those colors and
averages them to give you the final result.
| | 02:23 | And this ensures that your object
edges are always perfectly crisp and clean.
| | 02:27 | I think this is really good
move on the programmers part.
| | 02:30 | Now if you change from Geometry to Best mode,
what happens is you retain that really high
| | 02:36 | quality detail for your edges, but the center of
your objects now gets some anti-aliasing applied.
| | 02:44 | So let's render this out again,
now using the default low settings.
| | 02:49 | And as I do these renders, I'm just going
to name this so I know what's going on.
| | 02:52 | So I'm going to name this one Best 1x1 4x4.
| | 02:59 | And for this upper animation,
I'm going to name this Geometry.
| | 03:03 | And I'm doing this because later on we're
going to be optimizing our anti-aliasing,
| | 03:06 | and it's good to be able to go back to previous
versions to see what it looks like at that level.
| | 03:11 | So let's take a look at Best 1x1 4x4.
| | 03:14 | And we see that the fronts and side of
this cube are already looking much better.
| | 03:20 | The anti-aliasing on the
sphere is looking great.
| | 03:24 | But there is definitely still some dancing
on the top of our cube with the texture as
| | 03:28 | well as the cube in the background.
| | 03:32 | So what we're going to do is
crank up that setting even higher.
| | 03:36 | So let's go from a Min Level of 1x1 to 2x2.
| | 03:40 | We're effectively doubling the
subdivisions for every single pixel in our image.
| | 03:46 | And let's take our Max Level and
increase that from 4x4 to 8x8.
| | 03:51 | This ensures that if CINEMA 4D runs into a
pixel that he has got a difference in contrast
| | 03:57 | or color greater than 10%, which is defined
by the Threshold value here, from the pixels
| | 04:02 | neighboring it, it switches over
to a higher number of subdivisions.
| | 04:07 | This ensures that if we run into a pixel that
seems to be a likely candidate for aliasing,
| | 04:12 | we immediately go into a higher quality.
| | 04:15 | Now with this does come a render penalty, so
let's just take a look at our Picture Viewer here.
| | 04:20 | See that 1x1 4x4 is done
rendering, and let's render out 2x2 8x8.
| | 04:24 | We've got a couple of picture viewers open
so I am going to close one of them, and I'm
| | 04:28 | going to rename this Best 2x2 8x8.
| | 04:34 | Now you probably noticed that as this
quality increases, so too does the render time.
| | 04:40 | We're nearing a minute and 18, and right now
we've got about 30 frames rendered, whereas
| | 04:44 | Best 1x1 4x4 had already
finished rendering by now.
| | 04:48 | So let's just see what this looks like before
we start cranking up any settings and perhaps
| | 04:53 | we can get away with making that change.
| | 04:56 | So it looks like the front of this
textured object is looking good, no buzz, no hum.
| | 05:01 | There appears to be a slight buzz on the side face of this
major cube, and the top is looking pretty quiet, which is nice.
| | 05:09 | The crystal ball, again, is looking perfect, but
it was already looking good in a previous render.
| | 05:14 | Now a place where we might need to really
keep our eye on is on the front of this crystal
| | 05:19 | ball, we're starting to see a
refraction of the textured cube.
| | 05:24 | So what's happening is it's taking that
texture and it's compressing it into a smaller part
| | 05:29 | of the image, and it's also distorting it
along the shape of that sphere so that's really
| | 05:33 | going to be a prime candidate for some intense
aliasing that we might want to watch out for.
| | 05:38 | Now this small cube in the background is
entering our frame, and as we look at it we can check
| | 05:42 | now to see whether or not there is any buzz.
| | 05:45 | And I'm seeing quite a bit of buzz on the
top of this cube still, so I think we're going
| | 05:49 | to have to cut to the chase here and really
just crank up our Render Settings towards the Max.
| | 05:54 | So I'm going to take the Max Level, and I'm
going to shift it from 8x8 to 16x16, which
| | 05:59 | means that for every single pixel in our
image that hits a Threshold value of at least 10%
| | 06:05 | contrast with its neighbors, we're going to
render 16 times 16 sub-pixels, which is quite
| | 06:11 | a few, it's over 100 sub-pixels per pixel.
Now let's just try and render this out again.
| | 06:16 | Now it's going to tell me that the
external render is calculating an image, do I want
| | 06:20 | to stop it, and I choose Yes, and
this is looking much better already.
| | 06:25 | Now I've done this exercise before so I know that
it's 16x16, we've got a nice clean buzz-free render.
| | 06:31 | I'm going to let this keep going in the
background, and I'm going to go over how it is we can
| | 06:35 | optimize our settings so that we don't have to
suffer with the full render hit of this 16x16.
| | 06:41 | It's possible to apply Anti-Aliasing
selectively, so what I've discovered as I look through
| | 06:47 | my Picture Viewer is that at the Geometry level, the
edges of almost all of our objects look pretty good.
| | 06:55 | The problem is with this hard
shadow that's hitting our objects.
| | 07:00 | At Best 1x1 4x4, those
shadows look good for every object.
| | 07:07 | So I would say that at a minimum level our
scene should have 1x1 4x4 best anti-aliasing,
| | 07:12 | and that's what I'm going to do.
| | 07:13 | I'm going to go into my Render Settings, set
my Min Level to 1x1 and my Max Level to 4x4.
| | 07:19 | Now there are some objects
where I need to override this.
| | 07:23 | If I play through my scene right here, I
see that I'm getting some buzz in the crystal
| | 07:27 | ball, I'm definitely getting buzz on my
textured cube as well as buzz on that background cube.
| | 07:33 | So that means I'm going to need to apply at least 2x2
8x8 to those objects, so let's take a look at that.
| | 07:38 | As I scrub through my animation, I see that
my crystal ball is buzz-free at 2x2 8x8.
| | 07:44 | But there is still a minor buzz on my front
cube as well as a definite buzz on my back cube.
| | 07:51 | So I know that 2x2 8x8 is
good enough for the sphere.
| | 07:54 | So let's create a tag for the sphere.
| | 07:57 | So locate the sphere, and
suspiciously it's hiding in the Cubes.
| | 08:02 | Go ahead and select that Sphere, right-click,
and choose CINEMA 4D Tags > Compositing.
| | 08:08 | This is going to allow us to
adjust some very specific settings.
| | 08:11 | I'm going to move my Picture Viewer so I can see
what's going on here and adjust my Attributes Manager.
| | 08:16 | There is a Force Antialiasing setting on
the tag, and I'm going to activate that.
| | 08:21 | What that does is it overrides the
general anti-aliasing settings for the scene.
| | 08:25 | I'm going to set this to Best 2x2 8x8.
| | 08:29 | So Minimum 2x2, Maximum 8x8.
| | 08:32 | And now for the other two problematic objects in
my scene, I'm going to give them Best anti-aliasing
| | 08:38 | 16x16, so let's find
them and give them that tag.
| | 08:41 | I'm going to just take my Move tool and
select these two objects in my Object Manager.
| | 08:47 | They're the ones that have the textures on
them, so I'll just Shift-select them to select
| | 08:50 | them both, right-click, CINEMA 4D Tags >
Compositing and turn on Force Antialiasing.
| | 08:56 | I'm going to set this to 4x4, 16x16, and
now I'm going to render out my animation.
| | 09:05 | It says the external
renderer is calculating an image.
| | 09:07 | Do you want to stop it?
I'm going to choose Yes.
| | 09:09 | And what I see is that the 16x16 Best
which was my previous render, was clocking in at
| | 09:15 | about 3 minutes 50 seconds, and I only got
two thirds of the way through my animation.
| | 09:20 | I did eliminate most of that buzz.
| | 09:22 | What we see is that the buzz is pretty much
gone from our first cube, in fact, it is entirely,
| | 09:27 | and our back cube looks like we're just going to have to
live with some degree of moire which is sort of inevitable.
| | 09:35 | When you're trying to fit hundreds of pixels
worth of texture into a single rendered pixel,
| | 09:39 | you're just going to run into issues like this.
| | 09:42 | So, maybe try to avoid very
detailed geometric patterns if you can.
| | 09:46 | But that's why we chose these for this exercise.
| | 09:49 | Now let's take a look at this bottom render
right here, which was our Optimized Anti-Aliasing.
| | 09:53 | It's looking like each frame is taking about
3 seconds to render, whereas our Best 16x16
| | 09:59 | was vacillating somewhere between
3 and 4 seconds per frame.
| | 10:03 | Over the course of a very long animation, that
reduction of a second per frame is really going to pay off.
| | 10:08 | So let's see how we do
when we clock in at frame 60.
| | 10:13 | And so we see that at frame 65,
we're at about 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
| | 10:18 | So we've shaved 27 seconds
off of the best 16x16.
| | 10:22 | So this is not going to be a world-changing
optimization, but if you have only one object
| | 10:27 | in your scene that's giving you a lot of grief,
it makes a lot of sense to use the Compositing
| | 10:32 | tag to selectively adjust
the amount of anti-aliasing.
| | 10:36 | Because seconds saved on individual frames can add up
to hours when you're talking about a long animation.
| | 10:42 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Baking global illumination| 00:00 | Baking Global Illumination into textures is
a technique that video game developers have
| | 00:04 | been using for years to create
realistic lighting in real time.
| | 00:08 | What we are going to do is take this simple
environment, calculate the GI, and lock that
| | 00:13 | information into our texture maps.
| | 00:16 | So as we play through this animation what
we see is that the camera moves forward, it
| | 00:21 | twists around, and it shows the background.
| | 00:23 | And I pre-rendered this animation in my
Picture Viewer showing what this looks like with full
| | 00:29 | Global Illumination, looks pretty good, and it
looks like it took about a minute to render this out.
| | 00:34 | To bake an object in CINEMA 4D, what you
need to do is first make sure that you're only
| | 00:40 | baking one object if you can manage it, because baking
each individual object is a fairly intensive process.
| | 00:46 | So to start, create what's called a
Connect Object, then take all of the objects that
| | 00:51 | you want to bake and more often than not
you want this just to be your environment and
| | 00:55 | drag it into that Connect Object.
| | 00:57 | You'll notice right away that the shading
has changed a bit, and I'm going to fix that
| | 01:01 | by turning off the Weld option in my Connect
Object which was welding my points together
| | 01:05 | and smoothing out some of the edges.
| | 01:07 | Next I am going to hit the C key on my keyboard to make my
object editable. You can also press to Make Editable button.
| | 01:14 | When you open up your Connect Object, what you'll see
is that there is a Polygon Object below named Null.
| | 01:18 | I am going to drag that out
and rename it Environment.
| | 01:22 | Now the name isn't important except
that it helps me remember what it is.
| | 01:26 | Next what we are going to do is add what's
called a Bake Texture Tag, so click on your
| | 01:30 | Environment go to Tags >
CINEMA 4D Tags > Bake Texture.
| | 01:34 | This creates a tag that's
set up for baking a texture.
| | 01:38 | Let's start with Tag options.
The first it asks for is Filename.
| | 01:42 | We are going to be taking all of the lighting
information and all of the texture information
| | 01:46 | for this object and converting it into a
single image file, so we better give that file
| | 01:49 | a name, and I am going to
name it environment_bake.
| | 01:53 | I am going to just use that Photoshop file,
and I am going to opt for Single File, and
| | 01:57 | what this means is that if I'm using multiple
options here for my baking, instead of creating
| | 02:02 | 20 different maps, it's going to
create a single Photoshop file with layers.
| | 02:05 | And my Tag options here, I am going to set
my Color Depth from 8 bits to 16 bits which
| | 02:10 | is a good split between quality and file size.
| | 02:15 | And then my Width and Height here for the
purposes of this demo, I am going to set to
| | 02:19 | something fairly small like 1000x1000.
| | 02:23 | Now you can certainly crank these numbers
up, but as you do, know that you are baking
| | 02:29 | time is going to go up very significantly.
| | 02:32 | With these numbers what you're shooting
for is enough resolution that you're finished
| | 02:36 | animation will never show texture stretching.
| | 02:40 | So figure out how close you're going to have
to get to the smallest object in your scene
| | 02:43 | and try and to extrapolate from that
how big this image map needs to be.
| | 02:48 | It needs to usually be at least
as large as your output resolution.
| | 02:52 | Supersampling controls whether or not
there is going to be any anti-aliasing.
| | 02:55 | Now for the purposes of this demo, I'm not going to include
that because it will really slow down our render time.
| | 03:01 | And Pixel Border I am going to leave as is.
| | 03:03 | Now your Background color here, you want it to
be something that matches sort of the average
| | 03:07 | color of your scene or something
that's not going to seem out of place.
| | 03:11 | Now there is a lot of gray in my scene,
so I'm going to select a middle gray color.
| | 03:16 | Next I am going to go to the Options tab.
| | 03:17 | In here I get to choose
what it is I'm going to bake.
| | 03:21 | Now I could bake out a separate Color,
Luminance, Diffusion, all of these different things.
| | 03:25 | But in this case, because I am trying to prepare
something for let's say a real-time engine,
| | 03:30 | I'd only want to bake out Surface Color so that
there will be no need for any further calculation.
| | 03:36 | This means that all specular highlights, all
reflections, all everything gets turned into one flat image.
| | 03:42 | And down below here is
something called Optimal Mapping.
| | 03:45 | You definitely want to turn this On,
especially if you haven't pre-UV mapped each and every
| | 03:49 | one of those elements perfectly.
| | 03:52 | Optimal Mapping will automatically create
a usable UV map for your object, and it's
| | 03:56 | very important that every single polygon be
represented by its own separate set of pixels.
| | 04:02 | You don't want any overlap here, because with
overlap the baking engine doesn't know what to do.
| | 04:07 | Right now, I'm just going
to click on the Bake button.
| | 04:09 | The Preview button in my experience has been a
little bit finicky, better just to click on Bake.
| | 04:14 | What this is going to do is render out my GI pre-pass
and commit it to a single image like we can see here.
| | 04:21 | In fact, we can kind of see each of the walls
of our object and some of the tubes as well,
| | 04:27 | the different sides of the tube, and this is
just a product of that optimal cubic mapping.
| | 04:31 | When I render my scene, I'm still using
Global Illumination and an Irradiance Cache, this
| | 04:37 | is nothing like all of that speed increase
that I was promised, and that's because we're
| | 04:41 | not yet using this Bake Texture.
| | 04:43 | So let's go ahead and Create a New Material
and name this BakedEnv for baked environment.
| | 04:50 | Open up that material and turn off Color.
| | 04:53 | Because we've baked in the Illumination, we
are actually going to use the Luminance channel,
| | 04:57 | this object is self-lighting.
| | 04:59 | And the Specular channel I
am also going to turn off.
| | 05:02 | Now I'm going to load in the
environment_bake.psd and choose Open.
| | 05:07 | I now get this image into my texture here, and
I'm going to drag my texture onto my environment.
| | 05:14 | If you missed it, the texture is going to be
located in the same place as your CINEMA 4D scene file.
| | 05:20 | Now, as I press Render, we're still
seeing a Global Limitation calculation.
| | 05:26 | So let's go into our Render Settings and
turn off Global Illumination and render again.
| | 05:32 | We now have no pre-pass, and
we get a nice quick render.
| | 05:35 | I am seeing some artifacting on the edges
of my smaller objects, and this is due to
| | 05:40 | the limited resolution of
the image that we rendered.
| | 05:43 | If we had chosen a larger resolution for
our bake, we wouldn't have these same issues.
| | 05:48 | That said, we'd probably still be
sitting here waiting for the bake to finish.
| | 05:52 | What's cool is if I press the Play button,
you can get a sense of what this is like in
| | 05:56 | a real-time engine, and I am just going to
turn off my Gouraud Shading lines and just
| | 06:01 | look at this regularly, and you can now
see the quality of this preview in real time.
| | 06:07 | If you want to get a really great simulation
of it, go in to your material, click on its
| | 06:11 | Editor tab, and increase the Texture Preview Size to
1024x1024 so that we're looking at the full resolution texture.
| | 06:20 | So as we press Play, we are seeing all of the
beauty of full Global Illumination in real-time.
| | 06:27 | And that's why it's been used so
frequently in the video gaming community.
| | 06:30 | Now to bake an object is a fairly labor-
intensive process, so only use this if you're sure you're
| | 06:37 | not going to rework your lighting and
human time is cheaper than render time.
| | 06:42 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Baking your own HDRI maps| 00:00 | HDRI Maps can be a really beautiful way of
simply and quickly lighting your scene, but
| | 00:05 | how do you go about creating your own HDRI Maps?
| | 00:07 | Well, you could go out into the real world
with a camera and a panoramic head on your
| | 00:11 | tripod and take a series of exposures, or
you could make your own inside of CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:17 | To do so, the first thing you need is a good-
looking environment, and this is a simple studio lighting
| | 00:22 | setup that I have created,
but I like the way that it looks.
| | 00:25 | A few things I want to point out about it,
one, all of my lighting is being done using
| | 00:29 | these Key, Fill, and Rim Polygon objects.
| | 00:32 | They are not light objects,
they are actual polygon objects.
| | 00:36 | Now you could use lights if you wanted, but
it would be important to make sure they are
| | 00:39 | visible in the finished render.
| | 00:40 | Next, I've applied luminous materials to
these objects, and I want to point out that the
| | 00:45 | Luminance Channel, for example, in
my key light has a Brightness of 300%.
| | 00:50 | If you leave your Brightness values at 100%,
there's no real point in using an HDRI map.
| | 00:55 | And that's because HDRI stands for High Dynamic
Range, and if you're only using 100%, you don't
| | 01:00 | really need the high part
of that High Dynamic Range.
| | 01:03 | If you take a look at the Fill light, it's got a Brightness
of 100 and the Rim light a Brightness of 120%.
| | 01:08 | This also means that when our HDRI Map is
reflected, the key light here will reflect
| | 01:14 | at 100% brightness in a material
that's only 33% reflective.
| | 01:17 | So, that's why these values are what they are.
| | 01:20 | Now as I render my scene you see that I am
using a Radiance Cache GI, and now if I was
| | 01:25 | to render this scene out for a product
shot, that's probably what I would use.
| | 01:30 | However, when you're baking HDRI, the IR-GI mode can
lead to really intense render times or baking times.
| | 01:37 | So, what I want to do is go into my
Render Settings and switch over to QMC.
| | 01:42 | So I am going to change my GI
mode from IR (Still Image) to QMC.
| | 01:47 | Now as you recall from earlier movies,
this can lead to a grainier end result.
| | 01:52 | So with Adaptive sampling, this looks
pretty good, but something we want to take a look
| | 01:56 | at is how to get this looking good using a
constant sampling rate, and that's because
| | 02:01 | the Bake tag does not take in adaptive sampling.
| | 02:05 | So, go ahead and go to the Sampling tab here
and change from Medium to Custom Sample Count.
| | 02:11 | The Custom Sample Count is what the Bake
Texture Tag is going to use by default.
| | 02:16 | So when we render with a Sample Count of 64,
we see that we get a very grainy image.
| | 02:20 | I'm going to crank this up to
128 and see if it looks any better.
| | 02:24 | That's it, it's looking a bit better, probably
around 256 is going to be where he have to stop here.
| | 02:29 | You may want to crank this value higher at
home, if you've got a bit of time to do this
| | 02:33 | bake, but because we want to finish this video at some
point today, I am going to leave the Sample Count at around 256.
| | 02:38 | Next, in order to create a baked version of
my HDRI, what I want to do is get rid of the
| | 02:45 | main subject of my scene
and replace it with a sphere.
| | 02:47 | This is akin to what would happen on a film
set if you were trying to swap in a digital character.
| | 02:52 | You'd take out the actor that was
serving the place of that eventual digital
| | 02:56 | character, and you would bring in
a chrome ball to serve that part.
| | 02:59 | So, I'm getting rid of the CFL right here,
and I'm going to add in a single sphere.
| | 03:05 | Now this sphere by default
is got a Radius of 100 cm.
| | 03:08 | What I want to do is make this sphere as small as
I reasonably can while still have it showing up.
| | 03:13 | And that's because the larger the sphere is
the more of my background it's going to occupy,
| | 03:18 | and I don't want it to take up much room.
| | 03:20 | So I am going to give it a Radius of 1 cm, and I want
to move it up, so it's resting comfortably on the floor.
| | 03:25 | So I am going to set the Y position to 1, and
then I am just going to dolly in on this so
| | 03:29 | we can take a look at what
our render might look like.
| | 03:33 | Now if I render right now, what we have got is
just this sphere that's gray, reflecting the world.
| | 03:38 | I want to make it Chrome.
| | 03:39 | So, I am going to ahead and create a New Material, and
I am going to call this 100% Ref for 100% Reflective.
| | 03:46 | Next, I am going to go into this Material,
turn off Color and turn on Reflection.
| | 03:52 | I'm also going to turn off the Specular Channel, and
I am going to apply this material to my Chrome ball.
| | 03:57 | It looks like that drag and drop didn't
work there, so I am just going to hit Undo and
| | 04:00 | drag the material directly on to
my sphere in the Objects Manager.
| | 04:04 | I'm now going to render a small region of this sphere,
just so we can get a sense of what it looks like.
| | 04:08 | It's looking pretty good, all
of my reflections are showing up.
| | 04:11 | What I want to do now is
bake out this environment.
| | 04:14 | To do that, I select my Sphere,
I go to Tags > CINEMA 4D Tags, Bake Texture.
| | 04:20 | Now for the Bake Texture Tag to work, what
you need to do is first specify a Filename,
| | 04:25 | and I would want to describe the Studio Environment
in some way, so I'm going to call this DayGloStudio.
| | 04:30 | And I'm going to change my Format here from
Photoshop to HDR, and that's because whenever
| | 04:38 | I'm looking for an HDR Map I don't go looking
for .psds, I have a tendency to look for .hdr.
| | 04:43 | A Photoshop file would work fine because it also
stores High Dynamic Range imaging these days.
| | 04:48 | Now there are some special
considerations for Width and Height.
| | 04:50 | The first consideration is the higher that you crank
these numbers, the longer this bake is going to take.
| | 04:55 | Also, whenever you're baking a Spherical Environment Map,
you want it to be about twice as wide as it is tall.
| | 05:01 | So, what I am going to do is give
this a Width of 512 and a Height of 256.
| | 05:07 | Now this is a fairly low-resolution HDRI Map,
and I'm only using this because I want to
| | 05:13 | be able to quickly get through this bake.
| | 05:15 | Super Sampling would add a bit of Anti-Aliasing,
and I'd recommend turning that on at a value of 1,
| | 05:19 | if you plan on ever looking at these HDRI Maps
in your Reflections, because that Aliasing will show up.
| | 05:25 | Now I'm going to go over to the Options tab,
and I am going to a turn on the Reflection
| | 05:30 | option, and this means that we're going
to bake out whatever the sphere is seeing.
| | 05:34 | And then to start my Bake, all I have to do
is click on the Bake button right here, and
| | 05:39 | we can see that we are rendering our
texture, and it's going pretty quickly.
| | 05:43 | We can see each of our lights is showing up,
a little bit distorted on the left-hand side,
| | 05:47 | you can see that seamless backdrop.
| | 05:49 | And the lower half of the image is entirely
consumed with our backdrop, and that's because
| | 05:55 | it's what our object is resting on.
Now I see a little bit of grain in this bake.
| | 05:59 | So, if I had time and patience what I would
do is go into my Render Settings, go to that
| | 06:03 | Sampling tab, and adjust that Custom Sample Count to be
an even higher value, probably something around 512.
| | 06:10 | But our purposes, let's say
that this is going to work.
| | 06:13 | Now this baked image should be in
the same location as my project file.
| | 06:16 | I am just going to go ahead and open it
up in CINEMA 4D so we can take a peek.
| | 06:19 | We go to File > Open, and I'm going to
browse to my DayGloStudio Reflection that
| | 06:25 | I just baked out and open that up.
| | 06:28 | What we can see is that we have got our image,
we see a bit of aliasing, and that's because
| | 06:31 | we didn't have the Super
Sampling option turned on.
| | 06:34 | And if we go to the Filter tab here,
we can play around with the Exposure.
| | 06:38 | So click on Enable Filter, and tweak the Exposure,
and you'll see that you can bring the Exposure
| | 06:42 | value down quite a bit before we
lose that key light, we lose it last.
| | 06:47 | And that's because our key light had a
material that was greater than 100% in brightness.
| | 06:51 | So, that's how you create your own HDRI Maps.
| | 06:54 | You could load this in to any old
scene and light your scene with that.
| | 06:57 | You can also use this as an Environment Map.
| | 06:59 | Baking HDRI Maps is a really great way of
saving a really great lighting setup for later,
| | 07:05 | it allows you to load it into
any scene with a minimum of effort.
| | 07:10 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Using environment maps instead of reflections| 00:00 | Chrome, silver, reflective, shiny, these are all too
common requests for how objects should look in a rendered image.
| | 00:07 | Despite being incredibly popular, they
take a bit of effort to get looking right.
| | 00:10 | In fact, one of the keys to getting a good-
looking reflection is not to use reflection at all,
| | 00:14 | but instead to use something
called an Environment Map.
| | 00:17 | Here is a scene with the kinetECO logo.
| | 00:20 | When I render it, it looks flat gray, despite
having reflection in the Reflection Channel.
| | 00:27 | And that's because reflective
materials can only reflect what's around them.
| | 00:31 | And right now we have our logo
in a completely black environment.
| | 00:34 | So, outside perhaps a few reflections of
the logo reflecting itself, there's not going
| | 00:39 | to be anything of visual interest here.
| | 00:41 | Now, we could go to the trouble of creating
a really beautiful and in-depth scene,
| | 00:47 | or we create a Sky object
and apply an HDRI map to that.
| | 00:50 | But what I want to introduce you to is the
Environment Map which is a faster rendering
| | 00:54 | version of something
that looks like reflections.
| | 00:57 | So, what I am going to do is
start with my Metal Material.
| | 01:00 | Let's go ahead and open that up.
| | 01:02 | What we see is that the Reflection Channel
has a Fresnel Shader loaded into it, and the
| | 01:07 | Environment Channel here
has something preloaded.
| | 01:09 | Let's just go ahead and clear that out, so we can
go through the process of building it ourselves.
| | 01:13 | Click on the triangle
right here and choose Clear.
| | 01:17 | Now, let's find a good
source for Environment Maps.
| | 01:21 | And as we learned earlier, HDRI
maps can make for great reflections.
| | 01:25 | So, why not try them in our Environment Map?
Go ahead and go to your content browser.
| | 01:30 | Once there, click on the Presets
button to go to your Presets folder.
| | 01:34 | If your search field is already open, go
ahead and close it and reopen it so that we know
| | 01:38 | it's searching within the
Presets folder, and then type in HDRI.
| | 01:43 | I am going to search for HDRI 001 because
it's got a good combination of brights and
| | 01:51 | darks, broad detail as well as fine detail.
| | 01:54 | And I'm going to drag this in
to my Material Browser down here.
| | 01:57 | I am going to close my Material
Editor, and go back to my Objects Tab.
| | 02:01 | If I open up this material by double-clicking,
what I will see is that it only has one channel,
| | 02:07 | and that's the Luminance channel, and
loaded into this Luminance Channel is an HDR map.
| | 02:11 | We are going to use this here by copying it.
| | 02:13 | So, click on the triangle next to where
it says Texture, and choose Copy Channel.
| | 02:18 | This loads that texture into our memory.
| | 02:20 | Now, go to your Metal Material,
and go to the Environment Channel.
| | 02:24 | Click on that triangle next to
Texture, and choose Paste Channel.
| | 02:28 | Now, we aren't seeing any change in our Material, and that's
because we haven't turned on the Environment Channel yet.
| | 02:34 | What I am going to do is turn off Reflection,
and then turn on Environment, so we can look at it.
| | 02:39 | Well, this is a pretty good start.
| | 02:40 | So, let's apply this
material to our kinetECO logo.
| | 02:43 | I am going to go ahead and delete my HDRI map first,
just so we don't get mixed up about which one to apply.
| | 02:49 | Now, drag the Metal Shader onto the
kinetECO INCORPORATED logo object.
| | 02:55 | And what we'll see, especially if you have Enhanced
OpenGL turned on, is a really cool looking preview.
| | 03:00 | If you rotate around your scene, you'll
actually see in real time what looks like a reflection.
| | 03:06 | So, go ahead and rotate until you see something
that looks visually interesting, and then render.
| | 03:12 | I'd say that this is looking pretty good, but
there are some things that are a bit different
| | 03:15 | about this from our actual reflection.
| | 03:19 | And for one, it's that we
are missing the Fresnel Effect.
| | 03:22 | To get that back, what I'm going to do is copy
the Fresnel effect from my Reflection channel.
| | 03:27 | So, click on Reflection, click on the
delta next to Texture, and choose Copy Channel.
| | 03:32 | That means we're copying this Fresnel effect.
| | 03:34 | Next, I am going to go into my Environment Channel, and I'm
going to use this delta here to select the layer Shader.
| | 03:41 | And this is going to allow me to
layer together multiple shaders.
| | 03:45 | Once I've added the layer Shader, I just click
on this texture preview right here to open it up.
| | 03:49 | And we see this bitmap, which
is a fancy name for our HDR map.
| | 03:54 | And what I am going to do is
paste on our Fresnel effect.
| | 03:57 | So, I go to Shader > Paste Channel,
and that's going to load it in up above.
| | 04:02 | What's happened is that Fresnel is now in our
Environment Channel, and we've lost our bitmap.
| | 04:07 | What I want to do is use this Fresnel
Channel to modulate the brightness of my bitmap.
| | 04:12 | So, change the mode here
from Normal to Multiply.
| | 04:17 | And that's going to make any part of the
material that's white fully visible, and any part
| | 04:21 | of that Fresnel that's black
non-reflective or not visible.
| | 04:23 | So, now when we render again, we see this,
the front of our type is now more flat, and
| | 04:29 | the sides are more reflective.
| | 04:30 | And I like this pretty well, but I
want to tweak this Fresnel just slightly.
| | 04:33 | So, go into your Fresnel Channel, and take that
far right black Fresnel, and make it middle gray.
| | 04:39 | So, we're going from totally reflective to
sort of reflective, and let's render again.
| | 04:43 | This is looking quite good.
| | 04:45 | There is one last thing I want to show you
which is that you can get really cheap--
| | 04:49 | which is to say inexpensive at render time--
blurrier reflections when you use Environment Maps.
| | 04:55 | So, click on your Environment Channel,
click on that layer Shader again, and this time
| | 04:59 | click on the Texture Preview for the bitmap.
| | 05:01 | Once inside, you can go to the Basic
Tab and adjust the Blur Offset value.
| | 05:06 | This is going to allow you to blur your
reflection, and it's a really cheap and fast operation.
| | 05:12 | So, as opposed to a 20- or 30-second render
which is what a blurry reflection would cost,
| | 05:18 | we're getting this nearly instantaneously.
| | 05:19 | And if we want, we can even
shift the exposure of our HDR map.
| | 05:24 | So, click on the Shader setting here,
and you can adjust the Exposure value.
| | 05:28 | If you want to really blow out your highlights,
you can just crank this up, or if you want,
| | 05:32 | it to be much more subtle,
you can bring it down.
| | 05:35 | And all of this allows you to really adjust
the look of your HDRI Environment Map Reflection.
| | 05:41 | Environment Maps are a way for you to reflect a rich
environment without taking the time to actually build one.
| | 05:46 | They render incredibly quickly, and when you're up against
a deadline, they're an effective substitute for real reflections.
| | 05:54 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Lighting selectively with inclusion and exclusion lists| 00:00 | It's a common problem, how do you light one
object without contaminating the rest of your scene?
| | 00:06 | In the real world, this takes a lot
of time, patience, and black tinfoil.
| | 00:10 | In CINEMA 4D, there is a
quick method to do just that.
| | 00:13 | Inclusion and Exclusion list for lights.
Let's take a look at a rendered image.
| | 00:17 | Right here I have my
CFL on a seamless backdrop.
| | 00:20 | It already is looking pretty good, but the
areas that are giving me the most concern
| | 00:24 | are happening down below our CFL.
| | 00:27 | If we look at the base, what we've got is a
pretty good looking shadow leaving our key
| | 00:32 | light, and then down into the lower-right,
we have a harsh shadow that looks like maybe
| | 00:36 | it's coming from a rim light, and then we've
got a couple of other shadows, and then there's
| | 00:39 | also this sort of pink light that's
spilling from our rim on to the floor.
| | 00:43 | And it's a lot that's going on, and it's distracting
from the main subject of our rendering which is the CFL.
| | 00:48 | So, let's figure out how
we can go about fixing this.
| | 00:52 | In CIMENA 4D, you'll see a list of lights.
| | 00:55 | I've got my Key, Fill, Rim, and Backdrop,
and just to make our lives easier, I've already
| | 00:59 | gone through, and done some testing to
figure out what is doing what to our scene.
| | 01:03 | So, the Fill Light is throwing a shadow on
the floor, the Rim is contaminating the floor,
| | 01:07 | and the Backdrop Fill is also hitting the CFL.
| | 01:09 | So, let's just render this
out and see what we've got.
| | 01:13 | We see that this is a
global illumination rendering.
| | 01:15 | So, I'm going to turn off GI for our purposes right now
because it's going to slow down our render just a bit.
| | 01:20 | So, go into your Render Settings,
and temporarily tick off GI.
| | 01:24 | Now, let's render again.
| | 01:25 | We see just how much Global Illumination
was contributing to our scene, and that looks
| | 01:29 | really pretty flat and not very good.
| | 01:31 | Let's take a look at our Key Light.
It seems to be doing pretty well.
| | 01:35 | I don't see that I've made any notes there.
So, I'm just going to temporarily turn it off.
| | 01:38 | It's good practice to only have on the
light that you're working with at a given time.
| | 01:43 | I'm also going to turn off my Rim, and my Backdrop
Fill, and we're just now looking at the Fill Light.
| | 01:49 | So, let's render and see what this is doing.
| | 01:51 | We see that we've got a nice fill that's
hitting everything in our scene, but it's also casting
| | 01:55 | this unsightly shadow off into the right.
| | 01:58 | So, what I want to do is adjust some settings in my
Fill Light to exclude certain objects from casting shadows.
| | 02:05 | So, if I take my Fill Light, I can take my
CFL, and drag it into the Project Tab here.
| | 02:11 | So, in my Fill Light, I'm
going to click on the Project Tab.
| | 02:14 | And this Project Tab is what controls the inclusion
or exclusion of objects depending on the mode here.
| | 02:20 | If the mode is Include, the light will light
nothing except what I've dragged into this objects list.
| | 02:26 | If the mode is Exclude, it's going to light
everything in my scene as normal except for
| | 02:30 | the objects that I drag in here.
| | 02:32 | What I want to do is turn
off shadow casting from my CFL.
| | 02:36 | So, I'm going to drag my
CFL into my Exclusion list.
| | 02:40 | When I render, what we see is that there
is now no light hitting my CFL, and that's a
| | 02:44 | little bit more extreme than what I wanted.
| | 02:45 | So, what I'm going to do is take a look
at these properties to the right of CFL.
| | 02:50 | The first here is just my Objects icon.
| | 02:53 | Next is Diffuse Lighting, so I'm going to
turn Diffuse Lighting off from the exclusion
| | 02:57 | list, which means go ahead
and light my object diffusely.
| | 03:00 | I'm going to turn off Specular.
| | 03:02 | And because we're in the Exclude list, this
means I want this light to light my CFL, and
| | 03:07 | give it specular highlights.
However, Shadow I'm going to leave on.
| | 03:12 | And what this means is I'm going to exclude
the CFL shadows from being cast by this light.
| | 03:17 | And then to the right, we see what looks like
the Object Manager a little hierarchy icon.
| | 03:22 | And this means that this applies to all
objects that are children of the CFL object.
| | 03:27 | Don't get tripped up here by this being Exclude mode.
The hierarchy here always works in sort of an on position.
| | 03:33 | We can turn this off and see that we would
not quite get the results that we would want.
| | 03:36 | So, let's render again.
| | 03:38 | What we're going to see is that our CFL is
no longer casting a shadow onto our floor.
| | 03:42 | Now, it's pretty easy to make the mistake
of taking your seamless backdrop, dragging
| | 03:47 | that in, and turning everything off the shadow,
because you think, well, I don't want to see
| | 03:52 | a shadow from this light on this object.
| | 03:54 | Unfortunately, that's
not quite the way it works.
| | 03:57 | It's the object that is going to be casting the
shadow onto the floor that you need to turn off.
| | 04:02 | Now, let's go to our next light object.
| | 04:04 | So, I'm going to turn off my Fill Light, and
turn on my Rim Light, and give it a render.
| | 04:09 | We see here that I've made a note.
| | 04:11 | It says, Rim contaminates the
floor, and that's quite correct.
| | 04:14 | Our Rim Light, I really only want to
pull my CFL off from the backdrop.
| | 04:19 | I don't want it to contribute any additional light
to other parts of my scene if I can avoid it.
| | 04:23 | So, I'm going to drag my CFL into
this Rim Light's Project settings.
| | 04:29 | Right now, the mode is set to Exclude,
so we're not getting any light on our CFL.
| | 04:33 | In fact, all I want to light is the CFL.
| | 04:36 | So, I'm going to change the
mode from Exclude to Include.
| | 04:38 | So now, as I render, I get this, the
only object that it's lighting is my CFL.
| | 04:44 | Next up, I want to adjust my Backdrop Fill.
| | 04:47 | So, I'm going to turn off my Rim Light, turn on
my Backdrop Fill, and just give this a render.
| | 04:51 | And what we see is that it's filling our backdrop,
and giving a pretty nice grounding shadow to my scene.
| | 04:58 | So, let's just go ahead and go to our
Backdrop Fill, and just practice one more time.
| | 05:02 | Let's go ahead and say, we
don't want it to hit our CFL.
| | 05:04 | So, I'm going to drag my CFL in to
the Exclude list, and render again.
| | 05:10 | Now, let's turn all of our lights
back on, and see how this looks.
| | 05:14 | Render again, looking pretty good.
| | 05:15 | Now, let's turn Global Illumination back on
to see if we can get all of this to sort of
| | 05:20 | coalesce into a nice looking image.
| | 05:22 | I'm going to go into my Render Settings,
turn on Global Illumination, and render again.
| | 05:26 | And I'd say this looks much better.
The light appears to be floating a little bit.
| | 05:30 | So, I'm going to see if maybe turning on the
shadow for that Backdrop Fill won't in fact
| | 05:34 | make my light look a little bit better.
| | 05:36 | So, let's click on that Backdrop Fill,
and currently, it's set to Exclude.
| | 05:40 | I'm going to actually turn off excluding the
shadows, which means that this light will in
| | 05:45 | fact cast shadows from the CFL object.
So, let's render again and see how that looks.
| | 05:50 | It's a very subtle difference, but now,
there's just a little bit more shadow underneath my
| | 05:54 | CFL grounding my object, and I think
I like the look of this best of all.
| | 05:58 | I'm going to render this out again just so
we can do a comparison between the two images.
| | 06:02 | This is our after, and this is our before image.
| | 06:06 | It's a subtle difference, but I'd say that
the after image allows us to better focus
| | 06:10 | on our subject without contaminating the floor.
| | 06:13 | This also would save us quite a bit of
retouching work say in Photoshop, while it's something
| | 06:17 | of a cheat, including and excluding
objects from the effect of your light sources can
| | 06:22 | open up whole new lighting possibilities.
| | 06:27 |
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Faking global illumination with bounce lights| 00:00 | Global Illumination adds visual richness to a
scene, but it also adds a lot to render times.
| | 00:06 | If you know that you'll be rendering along
animation of an environment with a lot of
| | 00:09 | moving objects, it might make more sense to
spend some time lighting the scene in a way
| | 00:13 | that simulates GI with standard lights.
| | 00:15 | You do this so that you don't have to deal with
a long render times or the possible flickering
| | 00:20 | that you might get in a GI solution.
| | 00:22 | What I have here is a render of an apartment
using a radiance cache Global Illumination.
| | 00:27 | We can see that we are about a minute in, and we
are only at one of four passes through our image.
| | 00:34 | So I'm going to go ahead
and change some settings here.
| | 00:38 | If you want to accurately simulate Global
Illumination, the best reference use is
| | 00:43 | an image rendered with GI.
| | 00:45 | What I'm going to do is tweak my settings
here so that I can get a really fast and dirty
| | 00:49 | render that will at least tell
me where I should place my lights.
| | 00:52 | So I'm going to go ahead and edit my Render Settings,
and I'm going to change my Global Illumination mode.
| | 00:57 | In my General tab I'm
going to switch from IR to QMC.
| | 01:01 | Now this is typically bad practice, but
because I just want to get a sense of what things
| | 01:05 | will look like, we can do this.
| | 01:06 | Now I'm going into this Sampling tab and
change the Samples from High to Custom Sample Count,
| | 01:12 | and I'm going to choose a
very low sample count of 4.
| | 01:15 | Now I'm going to render to my
picture viewer one more time.
| | 01:19 | This is a very grainy image, but it is
rendering quickly and what it's giving me a sense of
| | 01:24 | is where the light in my scene is coming from.
| | 01:27 | I don't know if it's a particularly
helpful model with this amount of grain.
| | 01:31 | So I'm going to try and render it again at 16,
but we'll get started with this is our reference.
| | 01:35 | We can see that 16 is going to
give us a much cleaner image.
| | 01:39 | But looking at this I can see that I've got
a blue window light, and that I've also got
| | 01:44 | some light coming in from the sun.
| | 01:46 | So I'm going to do a final render here
without any Global Illumination, and that's going
| | 01:50 | to be my starting place for my render.
| | 01:53 | So let's go into our Render Settings, go to
Global Illumination, and simply turn it off.
| | 01:58 | This is going to allow us to see what
we are dealing with before we come in.
| | 02:03 | Another thing I want to set up is a
way of looking at my scene from the top.
| | 02:07 | So I'm going to go into my Top view and move my camera
around until I can see the entire top of my apartment.
| | 02:14 | I'm just going to do quick render here.
| | 02:16 | What I see is fairly blank, and that's
because there's a ceiling on my apartment.
| | 02:20 | So I want to just turn that off.
| | 02:22 | Twirl open the Apartment model, and inside
of here you're going to see something that
| | 02:25 | says SketchUp, and you're going to see a Roof.
| | 02:28 | If you click on the compositing tag next
the roofs which I have already added, go ahead
| | 02:31 | and turn off Seen by
Camera and just render again.
| | 02:33 | What you'll see is that the main light entering
our room is the sunlight, and it's creating
| | 02:38 | a large slash of light in
the center of our space.
| | 02:40 | I'm going to turn on Seen by Camera again,
and now that we know where to try and place
| | 02:45 | our lights we don't need
to hide the Roof anymore.
| | 02:48 | Let's just check in on
that render with a quickly.
| | 02:50 | So I'm going to look at my Picture Viewer, and
we see that are QMC render is looking pretty good.
| | 02:55 | So I'm going to delete these other two and
name this QMC16 just so I know what it is
| | 03:01 | and now I'm going to
render out this view right here.
| | 03:03 | So I'm going to go to my Perspective view
and render it to the Picture Viewer, and as
| | 03:07 | we recall we turned off Global Illumination.
So we now have these two renders to compare.
| | 03:12 | Without any Global Illumination our scene
is very dark, and that's because none of the
| | 03:16 | sunlight or skylight is bouncing around.
So let's try and simulate that first bounce.
| | 03:22 | The main slash of light again is
hitting right above that table.
| | 03:25 | So let's go ahead and add a light to our scene.
| | 03:28 | Now when you're simulating GI, you want
to use the cheapest lights that you can.
| | 03:33 | The whole point of this is to get a
faster render while compromising some quality.
| | 03:37 | So we're going to go ahead and add an omni-light
to our scene just by clicking and adding a light.
| | 03:41 | I am going to take my Move tool and my
Model tool and reposition it into the center of
| | 03:46 | my scene a little bit below the floor.
| | 03:48 | I do this so that it's not
casting light on the scene itself.
| | 03:52 | I also do this, because I want it to be
fairly broad based when it's hitting my scene.
| | 03:58 | I'm going to rename this
light to SunFloorBounce1.
| | 04:03 | So now it's my first bounce, it's coming from
my sunlight, and it is coming off the floor.
| | 04:08 | I also want to match the color of my Sunlight.
So I see that those colors are 255, 214.
| | 04:14 | I type that in 255, 214, and
then my third color is 158.
| | 04:19 | So I'm going to type that in for blue here.
| | 04:22 | I now have a light that is below my floor
stimulating that bounce, and when in my render I get this.
| | 04:28 | I'd say this is a bit too bright.
In fact, quite a bit too bright.
| | 04:31 | So I'm going to go into my SunFloorBounce, and
I'm going to activate something called Falloff.
| | 04:36 | So I'm going to go into my Details tab and
change Falloff from None to Inverse Square Clamped.
| | 04:44 | This creates a falloff, which basically means
that my light fades in intensity with distance
| | 04:50 | just like light in the real world.
| | 04:51 | If I render again with this Falloff, we see
that the light that's bouncing from the floor
| | 04:56 | sort of fades as it hits the ceiling.
| | 04:58 | I am going to go ahead and take this SunFloorBounce
and maybe drag it up a little bit close to
| | 05:04 | the floor, bring that falloff down again,
because I want it to fade very quickly.
| | 05:08 | Rendering one last time.
That's looking pretty good.
| | 05:10 | Now the problem with this is that
the Intensity is a bit too great.
| | 05:13 | So I am going to click on the
SunFloorBounce, and we go to the General tab.
| | 05:16 | I'm going to adjust my Intensity only be 80%.
| | 05:20 | That's because I expect the carpet or the floor to
absorb some of this light that's coming from the Sun.
| | 05:25 | It's s not a perfect mirror down there.
| | 05:27 | So let's render again, it's a bit
darker, but it's looking pretty good.
| | 05:31 | Now I'm just going to duplicate this light,
and I am going to move it over for my walls.
| | 05:35 | So I'm going to duplicate this light, and
I am going to rename its SunWallBounce, and
| | 05:41 | now the sun is not hitting the wall directly.
| | 05:44 | In fact, what's actually happening is it's
bouncing off the floor and then it's hitting the walls.
| | 05:49 | So I am going to move it over the area of
one of my walls, and I am going to maybe move
| | 05:54 | it back towards the center of my wall here.
| | 05:56 | I'm going to reduce the Intensity pretty significantly,
maybe down to 40%, because this is a secondary bounce.
| | 06:03 | So now as I render this we see that we are
getting bit a more light on this side of our
| | 06:07 | wall, the left-hand side, and because this is a secondary
bounce, I am going to add a 2 to the end of name here.
| | 06:12 | I am going to rename this
RightWall just so I know which one it is.
| | 06:17 | Let's duplicate it, move it over the left,
call it LeftWallBounce, and finally I am going
| | 06:23 | to add a third bounce from the back of my room.
| | 06:27 | So now I've got a bounce light
simulating each of the walls bouncing light.
| | 06:30 | I have got the bounce light from the floor
that's slightly greater in intensity, and
| | 06:33 | now when I render this, I get something that
looks a bit like this, looking a bit better.
| | 06:38 | Now what I want to do is add a bit
of blue to my scene as well.
| | 06:42 | So this going to be blue coming from my Sky.
So I am going to add another light.
| | 06:47 | I am going to call this Sky Fill, and I am
going to move it into roughly the position
| | 06:52 | of that Open Window, move it up, and I
am going to give this a falloff as well.
| | 06:57 | So I am going to go into my Details tab, Falloff,
Inverse Square Clamped, and I choose Clamped
| | 07:02 | so that I don't over-expose my scene,
and I am going to drag this down a bit.
| | 07:07 | Now I am just going to change the color
here to match what I would expect my Sky to be.
| | 07:11 | So I am going to my General tab, click on my Color
here, and select a light blue, choose OK, and Render.
| | 07:17 | Now this Sky Fill is overwhelming my scene.
It's just too bright.
| | 07:21 | So I am going to take my Sky Fill and set the
Intensity down to maybe 40% and Render again.
| | 07:28 | Now we are getting something closer
to something that might look good.
| | 07:31 | My one concern now is that we have so many
lights that don't have any shadows that our
| | 07:36 | scene is looking a little
washed out and ungrounded it.
| | 07:38 | So what I am going to do is add
some Ambient Occlusion to my scene.
| | 07:41 | I am just going to go into my Render Settings, go
to Effect > Ambient Occlusion, and Render again.
| | 07:46 | And that should darken up my corners.
| | 07:48 | And I would say this is looking good except that
my curtains, I actually want to be fairly bright.
| | 07:53 | What's happening here is that they're
getting dirty from the Ambient Occlusion.
| | 07:56 | So I am going to off Ambient Occlusion on a scene level,
and I am going to turn it on for individual materials.
| | 08:02 | I've got this white material
that's on everything, but the curtains.
| | 08:04 | So I am going to open that up, go to the
Diffusion tab, turn that on, and then I am going to
| | 08:09 | load into the Texture Fill > Effects >
Ambient Occlusion, and Render again.
| | 08:15 | We now have something
that's looking pretty good.
| | 08:18 | It's not quite as bright as our main Global
Illumination scene, and this can be accounted
| | 08:23 | for by just tweaking a few of the brightness
values for my fill lights, but overall I'd
| | 08:27 | say this is a pretty good start at
simulating that global illumination.
| | 08:31 | Certainly a lot better than our
scene before we started doing this.
| | 08:35 | Now because it won't bore you with endless
tweaking I've gone on and continued to work
| | 08:39 | with this scene, keeping the same number of
lights but just subtly changing their positions
| | 08:43 | and Falloff settings until I
got this image that you now see.
| | 08:48 | You can find a copy of this in your exercise
files with the name Tweaked appended to the end.
| | 08:53 | Now Global Illumination is a great tool, but there are
times where it's just not the right tool for the job.
| | 08:59 | When you know you'll be rendering long animations
or using very heavy geometry in an Environment
| | 09:03 | like this, it can sometimes make
more sense to use standard lights.
| | 09:07 | It's up to you to determine which method
is most appropriate for your current project.
| | 09:12 |
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| Using negative lights to darken parts of scenes selectively| 00:00 | Sometimes when you're lighting a scene, everything
looks great except for certain portion that is blown out.
| | 00:06 | On real-world film sets, the DP might have a grip
place a black cloth on the ground or a wall
| | 00:10 | near the brightened area in
order to absorb some of the light.
| | 00:14 | Light works a little bit
differently in CINEMA 4D by default.
| | 00:17 | But we do have the tools
to accomplish the same end.
| | 00:19 | Let's take a look at this
apartment model right here.
| | 00:23 | It's looking pretty good, but
the contrast is a little bit low.
| | 00:26 | I've lit the scene using
standard CINEMA 4D lights.
| | 00:30 | Now if I compare this scene to a quick GI
preview of the scene, which albeit a bit grainy,
| | 00:37 | we see some pretty distinct differences
especially in terms of the darker areas.
| | 00:42 | Our brights are looking fairly well matched,
but if you look at the GI version the area
| | 00:47 | under the couch is much darker as well
as the area under that little end table.
| | 00:51 | So what we're going to do is use something
called a negative light in order to bring
| | 00:55 | down some of that brightness.
| | 00:57 | Now that seems like a contradiction in terms.
A light is a bright thing, how are we going
| | 01:01 | to use it to make something dark?
| | 01:03 | Well, let's just start the
process, and we'll see how.
| | 01:06 | I'm going to start by creating a light object
in my scene, and I'm going to name this
| | 01:12 | Negative Table, and I'm going to use this to add
a bit of a shadow underneath that table.
| | 01:17 | Now as we can see, this light is absolutely blowing
out our scene. It's just making everything too bright.
| | 01:23 | So one, let's try and focus it in, so I'm
going to change the Type here from an Omni
| | 01:27 | light which emits light in
all directions to a Spot light.
| | 01:31 | Now because I want to focus in on a table and the table
is rectangular, I'm going to choose a Square Spot.
| | 01:39 | Now we are doing a bit better but I
just don't know where my light source is.
| | 01:42 | So I'm going to go into my four-way view, and I see
that I've created a light source at the world origin.
| | 01:46 | Well, the center of my room is not there,
so I want to take this object, and I want
| | 01:51 | to center it over my table.
| | 01:53 | So I'm just going to take my Negative Table
light, and I'm going to go in the Coordinates
| | 01:57 | Managers so it's easier
for you to match my values.
| | 01:59 | I'm going to switch over the X, I'm going
to increase the Z, so I'm moving it right
| | 02:04 | over the center of that table and then in
my front view I'm going to bring that light
| | 02:09 | up so that it's above that table, and I want
to move it to about the center of the room.
| | 02:15 | Now as I look at this, we're doing pretty well.
| | 02:17 | The problem is that it's
rotated towards the window.
| | 02:20 | So I'm going to take my R.P, and I'm
going to drag that down to a -90 value here.
| | 02:26 | We're doing pretty well, but the light
is not quite the same shape as our table.
| | 02:32 | Let's go ahead and go into the Details tab
of our Light, and inside of Details there
| | 02:37 | is something called Aspect Ratio.
| | 02:39 | That allows you to change the relative
width and height of your light object.
| | 02:43 | And I'm going to increase the Aspect Ratio here.
It looks like a value 2.1 should about
| | 02:48 | do the job, and now I'm
just going to render my view.
| | 02:51 | So we've definitely got a light in that area, but
it's over exposing our scene as opposed to darkening it.
| | 02:56 | And there's just one more property that we need
to change to get that effect to start happening.
| | 02:59 | So I'm going to take this Negative Table light,
go into the General tab and then set
| | 03:04 | the Intensity to a negative value.
| | 03:06 | So I'm going to type in -80%, and now I'm
just going to a turn on my Interactive Render
| | 03:11 | Region to focus in on this lower area.
| | 03:14 | The area under the table is looking all
right, but it is definitely pretty bright.
| | 03:19 | So I'm going to set the Intensity here to maybe
just -20% to just knock down the brightness a bit.
| | 03:27 | That's not quite enough so let's try,
-30 might be the final correct value.
| | 03:32 | Let's go ahead and tweak
some of the settings here.
| | 03:34 | I see that it's actually darkening the
table top as well, and I don't want that.
| | 03:38 | So I'm going to go into my Project tab, and
I'm going to exclude everything but my floor.
| | 03:44 | Well, that seems like a way of doing it,
but probably the more direct way is to change
| | 03:48 | the mode from Exclude to Include, and
I'm only going to drag in my floor object.
| | 03:53 | Now the floor here is all part of the
SketchUp object, so I'm just going to twirl open my
| | 03:58 | apartment model and drag in SketchUp,
and that's going to prevent the couch
| | 04:02 | and the table from being included.
| | 04:04 | Now I'm going to go ahead and duplicate my
Negative Table light and name it Negative Couch,
| | 04:09 | and I'm going to my four-way view and
just choose my top view here and reposition it
| | 04:15 | so it's resting over my couch.
| | 04:18 | That's looking pretty good and then I'm
going to look at it in my side view here, and I'm
| | 04:23 | just going to increase the Y value until
the triangle here sort of the cone of my light
| | 04:31 | is intersecting with the floor at
about the same width as the couch itself.
| | 04:35 | So now when I come back to my Perspective
view and take a look at this render, the area
| | 04:40 | under the couch is also darker.
| | 04:42 | Now if I recall the area under the couch in
my QMC render was quite a bit dark than this,
| | 04:46 | so I'm going to go into my Negative Couch,
go into the General tab and set the Intensity
| | 04:50 | to -35, and hopefully we
get a result that we'll like.
| | 04:54 | Now the difference between this render and
our original render is subtle, but it's real,
| | 05:00 | and I feel like this second version with the
negative lights better grounds these objects
| | 05:04 | and adds a bit more contrast to our scene.
| | 05:06 | If I was to keep doing work like this, I
might add a Negative Light near that far left wall
| | 05:11 | and maybe some in the brighter
regions of the ceiling and the floor there.
| | 05:15 | Now Negative Lights are a bit of a cheat,
but if they get you to the look that you want
| | 05:20 | it's good to know that they are there.
| | 05:21 | So whenever you find that part of your
render is blown out, don't limit yourself to the
| | 05:25 | Burn tool in Photoshop, know that you can selectively
darken your scene using Negative Lights.
| | 05:32 |
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ConclusionNext steps| 00:00 | Thank you so much for joining me for
Production Rendering Techniques in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:04 | I really enjoyed making this course, and I hope it's going to
help you out as you start making more images in CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:10 | If you're looking for things to do after finishing
this course, might I recommend Design in Motion by Rob Garrott.
| | 00:16 | It's a really fantastic introduction to
the world of motion graphics, and each and
| | 00:19 | every week he talks about a different part of
motion graphics, and many times he's using CINEMA 4D.
| | 00:25 | What I love about this course is that he's often talking
about concepts instead of just the technical aspects.
| | 00:32 | Most advanced 3D programs these
days have fairly similar feature sets.
| | 00:36 | Features might have different names,
but they have similar functionalities.
| | 00:40 | So you might, for example, take a course in
Photorealistic Lighting with Maya, or if you're
| | 00:45 | feeling comfortable enough to change 3D programs,
you're probably feeling good enough to even
| | 00:49 | leave your computer, and for that I
recommend a course on photography.
| | 00:53 | Ben Long's Foundations of Photography Exposure
is a wonderful introduction to
| | 00:57 | the technical aspects of using a camera.
| | 00:59 | And many of the settings that you've seen in
CINEMA 4D's physical camera will be mirrored
| | 01:04 | in his course and might perhaps
make better sense after you watch it.
| | 01:07 | But really, the most important part of working in
3D is not the technical, it's about the end result.
| | 01:15 | Can you make an image that looks good? And for
that I recommend just a plain photography course.
| | 01:19 | Douglas Kirkland's on Photography: Studio Portraiture
is a really wonderful introduction to a couple
| | 01:26 | methodologies for how to light a portrait.
| | 01:28 | Or you might even go and take a look at
Shooting with Wireless Flash by Jim Sugar.
| | 01:33 | This course and courses like this will help
you to figure out where to place your lights
| | 01:37 | in scenes, and when you see how a person
lights a product in the real world, you'll be better
| | 01:41 | able to get photorealistic
results in your 3D package.
| | 01:45 | Thank you so much for taking the time to follow this
course, and best of luck with your future projects.
| | 01:50 |
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