- [Martin] So, you have a 3D render, but something is missing. You can't really put your finger on it, but it doesn't have the proper feel, that last fine touch making your whole scene,
color, and lighting just work. Well, it may very well be that you haven't incorporated
some simple cinematic rules that can really push your
renders to the next level, and that is exactly
what we will be focusing on in this video. Hello, everybody, Martin
here for CGBoost.com, and welcome to this new video, where I will share with you
some of the cinematic tips that I've gathered throughout my career, and that I use pretty much every time I make 3D artwork or renders. The cinematic tips are closely connected to the general design
and composition rules. We, of course, won't miss the
all important rule of thirds. We will discuss various types of lighting, how different placement of camera changes the psychologic
effect on the audience, and also some EEVEE rendering tips. One note, guys, this is
not a step-by-step guide, rather a breakdown video. So, if you're not sure about Blender, definitely sign up for Zach's
free blender resources bundle, including a Blender's beginners course and a comprehensive shortcut pdf. These materials will get you
started in Blender in no time. I know, I've tried it myself. But with that said, I
think it's time to have a look at these then cinematic tips that will definitely help
you with your 3D renders. (light pop music) The first thing you'll probably notice when you open this scene, is that I've tried to make
it as simple as possible. Just basic shapes, a few extrudes
and bevels, nothing fancy. That goes to the characters as well, these in fact I downloaded
from the awesome online rigging tool called Mixamo. You can by the way learn
all about this topic on my own specialized channel, link is in the description. Right off the bat you can
see we have three characters. Some mysterious figure here on the left, and by the looks of it,
it is probably hiding from these two guys on the right. I actually imagined this to be some sort of dystopian future
where everybody is forced to stay at home quarantined, while police forces control the streets. Ah, wait. So, you can see I have
just a few shaders here, no textures and no fancy effects. The whole scene is
simple on purpose though. What I wanted to do was to create a cinematic-looking final result, using just camera work, composition, lighting setup, some atmosphere,
and a few EEVEE tricks. This way I believe you will be better able to apply these concepts
to your own artwork without relying simply on your modeling, shading, and texture work. All right, but now let's
jump into the first step I usually do when creating my scenes. The basic camera and composition. When placing a camera in your scene, the first thing you want to
think about is the story. Story? "Well, what if my render is
just a regular environment "or architectural render and
it has no story?", you may ask. Well, in my opinion that's wrong. Even without characters
you can, and you should, make your image tell
some sort of narrative. Give some background
information through various choices you make not only
when creating the scene, but also by placing camera and lights. This way, your image will be always much more relatable and exciting. First off it's good to ask yourself what is the main focus of the image and what is it that you
want to express through it. If I have a building as my focus, do I want it to feel pleasing, inviting, dark, obscure, colossal? In short: what sort of
emotion do I want to achieve? You can ask the same thing when it comes to nature environments,
scenes with characters, even hard surface and car renders. Every time you will be
deciding on how you want the most important aspect
of your image to feel. Unless you do some
boring shot with no story and emotions, which I don't even know why you would do such a thing. Anyway, here, from the
pose of our main character we can clearly guess she
probably doesn't want to be seen. On the other hand, while these characters seem relaxed and unconcerned, in their hands they hold
something resembling a weapon and a baton. So yeah, these are probably not some guys you would want to meet alone at night, police or not. While this all gives me a lot of useful information for how to create this shot, I know that it should be mysterious, so I will go for something dark, situated at night. I want the whole composition
to somehow tilt towards these guys while also focusing
on our main character. When it comes to camera placement, there is nothing easier
than to quickly create a camera and start playing around with it. You simply hit Shift+A, add a camera, and when you hit Numpad 0, you will be transported into it. If you want you can hit
Home key to make your camera view fill the viewport. To manipulate with your
camera from this view, you can hit Shift + tilde key, which is right underneath your Escape key. And if that doesn't work for you, you will find a command in the view menu navigation and here. Now you are in the walk navigation mode and you can move around
the scene as you would in any first-person shooter game. You know, like in Counterstrike, if you've ever played it. Using the W/A/S/D keys,
you can fly forward, backward, or to the sides, while Q allows you to fly down, and E up. If you scroll your mouse wheel, you can make this
movement slower or faster, while you probably know
all this from Zach's Blender Launchpad course, right? Okay now, so where should
we place our camera? Given what we've said,
that this scene should be somewhat mysterious, there are a few ways we can achieve that. First off, I want to see
both the main character and the policemen in the background, as well as the street and probably the back building over here. This in itself already limits
the camera angle quite a bit. So go to the camera and
fly to that position. Now a big topic is always at what height should you place your camera? So-called high angle shots
looking down on the ground are usually and logically
good for some sort of scene overview. When it comes to characters, if you want to achieve a feeling that your main character
is somewhat superior, then the other in your scene usually place your camera slightly higher, looking down on the others like in these movie examples here. In our case though, this
is quite the opposite. I think to achieve the slightly
and easy feeling I'm after, I would go with a low angle shot, placing ut below my characters, almost to the street level, looking up. For example, something like this. You can even fly around
and try to render different compositions and using this
render engine workbench, it doesn't take too long
to render each of them. Don't forget to use different slots to not lose your previous renders though. Now, can you feel it? Being this low, it already
gives an impression, like you looking through the camera are somewhat smaller than the
scene and everybody in it, feeling the weight of the
shot bearing down on you, or at least compared to this, right? The composition is still
a bit boring though, so let's try to improve it, shall we? One thing we can do to make
the whole image more cinematic is to play around with
the so-called aspect ratio of the shot in this output menu. This terminology in fact
goes back all the way to the good old days when movies were shot on a film
material called celluloid, and everything just seemed
a bit more real and gritty. This aspect ratio comes from a time when all of the camera's operating systems for the celluloid film
were more or less square, or rather 4:3 ratio. But films actually started using widescreen panoramic format. What they did to be able
to record this widescreen format on a square film material, is that they used something
called anamorphic format. It was made so that the
recorded film images in the camera were squashed horizontally and then, when they reprojected in cinema, they stretched it to its intended shape. Hence, you can see here
on Wiki, for example, there are some basic filmic formats which you can try out yourself. Just make your resolution square, 1080:1080 for example, and then add this 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which is somewhat of an
older film standard ratio, a U.S. widescreen standard. When you now render everything, you can see it's all squashed like this. And later, in the post-production, you would have to stretch
it to look normal. But all this said and done, this is just a curiosity
and it's pretty much useless for our purposes. I usually don't change
the aspect ratio at all, unless I need to work
specifically with some video files made with
various filmic formats. Otherwise, in case of digital images, I just put in this 2560
resolution here in the width, and you effectively get
almost a 21:9 aspect ratio, which, at least to me, always
makes things more epic. In connection with that you've probably heard about a certain universal principle called rule of thirds or golden ratio. In general, it tells you
that if you divide your image by two equally spaced
horizontal and vertical lines, all the really important stuff should be placed along their intersections. That's when, in most cases, things start to work out and feel good. Luckily, instead of you
having to draw these, camera settings in Blender give you a rather carefully
hidden option right here to activate a wide variety of
these compositional guides. Here you have the classical center line, good for example when you
are making some graphical elements or one-point perspective, which is centered. And then some diagonals
and also the mentioned rule of thirds and the slightly different golden ratio. Two things I will say. I believe that none of these rules should be adhered to dogmatically, and also that everyone's preference for how exactly to follow
these rules is a bit different. Me, for example, I usually
drift slightly more towards the edges of my composition. In any case I recommend learn more about the composition rules, but then don't forget
to follow what your gut tells you as well. For my scene here I will actually use this very cool variation
of the composition lines, which is this golden triangle. It adds some nice diagonal lines and since I plan on tilting
my image a bit later, I know I will find some use for this. Basically what I want to achieve is having the important stuff around these two regions over here. So, let's take the camera and
move it somewhat better now. For example like this. Another very useful tool for
achieving various psychological effects through your camera
work is focal length. Again, it is something that originates from how actual cameras work. Every camera has a lens or a device through which the light
goes into the camera, and then an image sensor, something onto which
the light is projected and where the image is captured. The distance between these two points drives the way the light is
projected onto the sensor, and thus how wide your
camera perspective gets. And thanks to modern
technologies like Blender, I can show this to you
right now digitally. See the camera here. So, this is our lens and
this point in the center is the image sensor. Now if you just grab this and move it, you can see our final image changing size, the whole composition
stretches or contracts, and also what you can see, the perspective grid gets distorted in these extremely wide cases. Okay, so, that's all well and good, but what does it mean practically? Let's have a look at the
normal settings first, which is around 40 to 50 millimeter lens, since that is roughly how
our eye perceives the world. By the way, you can
change the lens settings here in the properties to
get more precise numbers. This normal lens will give you
the most relatable results. You won't introduce much distortion and things will feel just normal, which is good if you don't
aim at anything dramatic. Which we are in fact. So let's try a long lens, that is usually anything
from 60 millimeter to 120, 210, and sometimes even
more, like much more. And what it does you can see for yourself. It basically squashes your perspective, making things look closer, the perception of the depth is contracted, and details in the scene come out. Thus, this is good for focusing on a specific point in your composition, making it more important. However, we want to do the opposite, focus on the whole scene
with its various elements. So we will instead go
lower with the focal length to about 30 millimeters. You can see the image expanding, showing more of the environment, and also introducing the
slight perspective bending. Not too noticeable at 30 millimeters, but already there a bit. This way we achieve a bit more unusual feel to the composition, making it slightly unsettling. Which is what we want for this image. To add to that feeling, there is also another
tool that I like to use, this time a bit simpler one. It is camera tilt. So far, we have this
horizontal positioning of our camera quite straight, which is good for more
relaxed compositions. However, to increase the
feeling of something wrong, you can take your camera and rotate it slightly on the y-axis, introducing this slight angle. And you have to choose where you want it to be leaning towards. In our case I want to tilt the attention of the eye towards these guys. Can you feel how the composition got a bit more ominous with this little detail? You don't want to overdo it though, and an angle of two or four
is usually quite enough. Now a very useful trick you can use is to flip your composition. This is one thing I learned from some of my concept art attempts. Concept artists love to do this regularly to give them fresh
perspective on their image and how good the
composition works for them. To do this trick quickly, I love to select the camera
and then use this shortcut, S to scale it, X twice to log the horizontal
scaling to local axis, and then Minus + one on your numpad. This way you flip your image just like you would in Photoshop. Other option is to
render your image again. Open up our compositing editor and in between this image
node and the composit you can put this flip node. This way you can check
and recheck your flipped composition and see the result. What you want to look for
is whether your composition isn't lacking in the flip view. Often times your eyes will restart, and start noticing something
that you didn't see until you flipped the image. You should check whether the
image isn't tilting too much, which often happens when you
rotate your camera like we did. In our case though, this
seems quite fine as it is. And I think with this we are
ready with our composition. Therefore, let's start a whole
new chapter: the lighting. Lighting is of course a
whole new type of beast, and it would take a whole course
to even scratch the surface of this complex discipline. Let me however give you a
very quick and practical overview of how I approached
lighting this scene. At this stage, having a
concept art of course helps. However, since we have such a
simple real-time scene here, it actually is often much
faster to just add some lights and play around until
you're happy with it. First off though, I started
actually with thinking about what I want to
achieve with this scene. So, mysterious, yes, we said
it like million times already. Usually just having a moonlight in the scene helps with that. So I decided to have my moonlight
as my first light source, probably coming from up here. I wanted some contrast in the lighting, so for the bluish dark
silhouettes of the policemen, I wanted them to be lit by
a warm street lamp light and possibly even a window light. I didn't want to go all out dark, mysterious, and evil on them
with red or green lights. I mean, who would really
put green or red light into their home, right? So I figured just a regular
orange tones would be okay. On the other hand, I did want
to add some mysteriousness to the red hero character here, so that's why I decided
to have slightly cooler, less intense lighting for it. Something bluish or magentaish? Magenta. There are generally three types of lights, depending on the intensity
and where it comes from. Key light, which usually
is the most prominent light in the scene, usually
lights the character from a slight angle from the front. Back light adds nice silhouette to it, helping the eye to distinguish between the object and its background. And finally, fill light
fills the nasty dark regions between the two main lights. So with that in mind, I
started lighting this thing. Let me now switch to my lighted scene and let's dissect it properly. You may wonder why everything
turned so very dark. That's because I switched
to the render preview mode of the EEVEE renderer and
also I made the surface of the world much, much darker, almost all the way to black. Oh, and by the way, let me mention again, you can download these blend files from the Blender resources course. Just sign up for it and follow along with the lighting process. It usually helps to
start with the brightest, most important, and also most
natural light in your scene, which in our case is the moon. So I decided to quickly add this cylinder all the way back here. Add an emission shader
to it, make it brighter, and to it I added a sun lamp. Back in our camera view
you can clearly see how much of a difference
this made immediately. I played around with the
intensity of the light, and gave it a very slight bluish tone, since it's a moon. With that done I moved to the other most prominent light source, which was this window. Here, I selected these
polygons in edit mode and added a new emission shader to them, this time tinted orange, like this. For the actual light source I added this area light here, made it rectangular, and made it to fit the frame. Immediately, this light gave
our policemen more focus. For the main heroine, I chose a spotlight with some soft edges
and bigger cone angle. I pointed it here so that
it did not illuminate too much of the wall,
but mostly the character. Then, this color, which is something
between blue and magenta, ensured it looked more like a neon light, rather than another moonlight, which wouldn't make
sense to have two moons. Anyway, this was a first step
to lighting my characters, but lighting can always
be taken a step further, which is what I tried to do, of course. For the environment, I decided
to add a bluish spot light back here to bring out this high rise. Having it shine from
below like this implies some sort of bright street light, and also, having a light
illuminate something big from below always adds some ominousness to it. I decided to add this glowing
shader to these polygons on the lamps and since
these are instances, both of the lamps were
immediately edited together. And of course don't forget
to add a light to the lamp, an area light will do. I set it up like this and
when I added it up here, it created a nice highlight on the top of the characters heads, which is another great
cinematic lighting tool. If you use this top light
in a daylight scenario in combination with other lights, you will achieve a pleasing effect. On the other hand, if
you just use this light, it actually makes the
result more sinister. Just look at this frame from the movie "Godfather" for example. Then I proceeded to add
orangy light back here, just to imply there is something going on in the other street as well. It is quite important to
make your audience feel like there is actually something going on outside of the screen's frame. Also, this light brought
out the car model a bit. By the way, I downloaded
this one from Blendswap from a user called mrhan15, and it's actually an
Indonesian police car. So, thanks mrhan. That was it for the environment, but I decided to highlight
my characters a bit more. For these guys here I actually decided I will not use fill light. If I did so, they would of course become a bit more visible and I would
get rid of these dark areas. But to keep them tiny bit mysterious, I decided to leave it like this. Instead, I wanted them to stand out from the background a little bit more, so some cool back light
would be ideal for that. And this is where we move to a stage where a bit of artistic cheating starts. This sunlight, or rather moonlight, by itself doesn't really make enough of a rim light on these characters. However, when I added a spotlight here, made it in a color of the moon, raised the intensity
and restricted its angle to envelope only these characters, I achieved a very nice back light on them, and also I got this very
nice cinematic feel. Then I decided to not have the light go all the way down to the street. You can do that by
activating this distance option and restricting it. I love this option in EEVEE. Beware though, it doesn't work in Cycles, so this might cause some major differences if you decide to switch later. For the main heroine, I
added two extra lights. One was a new spotlight
with a very soft cone and a small angle value,
shining only on her face, like there are these
rogue light rays reaching all the way towards her from this window, which is nonsense, of course. But it looks nice. As long as your lighting is at least a bit motivated by logical light sources, you can get away with
quite a lot actually. Just have a look at movies and see how often they cheat like this too. Finally, I made another
spotlight coming from behind her. Again, completely physically incorrect, but, you know, there
is a slight possibility that it may be coming from this
neon light out of the frame. And it adds a nice cool back light, or rather a rim light,
to our main character. Usually, rim light and back
light are interchangeable terms, but the way I personally use it, I rather make it shine from
the side or a sharp angle, so that it often illuminates my characters just from one side. And that's it, this is how I was able to light the scene cinematically
with just a few lights, following a few simple guidelines. However, we can still do more. Oh, and one little thing I did as well was to select these polygons of the curtains and added a slightly lighter
version of the basic shader, just to make it look
like it's translucent. Then we can for example add a huge cube and make everything invisible. Ah, nope, it was a joke. But the cube part is correct. Scale it so that it starts about here, and goes all the way to
the building back here. And then make a new material for it. In this case, it will be
this principal volume shader. Be sure to plug in the
material into the volume, rather than surface, and here we go, we have some very nice,
mysterious fog in our scene. Lower the density significantly, also the color, and
the anisotropy as well. And whoa, that looks nice, right? Another fast solution
to make things awesome is activating this bloom option in the render properties window. You can play around
with the settings here. I choose something like
this, pretty good, right? I love it when you light
your scene properly and then just use these effects to make everything just
a bit more awesome. You can then also experiment with your depth of field values, activating it here and setting
up the distance in camera. However, for these wide shots, I don't really like to use it, I rather focus on it when I
have for example a close-up, like this one here. There are of course
plenty other settings here that can make your EEVEE
render look better. Like these soft shadows, which may slow down your
scene significantly, but they make all of the
shadows much more convincing. Also, you can increase the
shadow resolution here, then you can even activate
real-time reflections, though in case of this simple scene it doesn't make much difference, since we do not have reflective materials. Oh, and we can also use this
ambient occlusion option, I usually like to crank
up these two values here both to two. Remember, when you are
done with everything, or even throughout the whole process, you can actually adjust your environment to fit your composition better. You can for example add
some simple planks here, since this spot is a bit empty. And while we're at it,
let's actually tilt them, so that they play nicely together with our established composition guide. Also, we can fill this spot with some cans and planks as well. And this looks better. Finally, when you're all done
and happy with your scene, you can increase these samples here, though in case of EEVEE I found it's not that necessary to go
overboard with the samples. Make your render size to 100 and render your image with F12. Then, with it rendered,
you can always improve it in a compositing software of your choice. So I choose Blender's Compositor. Here you can add various
post-production effects like Vignette to add those
little edge imperfections that lenses normally have. Let's quickly set it up. Add an ellipse mask here, blue node as well in between these two, and plug it into a mix
node, set to multiply. Then just set up the width and
height of the ellipse mask, and in the blur node set this to relative and about 40% for x and y is good enough. In the end you can have
a look at the difference between the two versions
with and without vignette, and you can control the
intensity of the vignette here in this factor value. One more way to make
all this more cinematic is to add a film grain to it, another thing that happens
to camera shots you record. They have this very
specific noise in them. So for that I have a noise texture, and I've added it to the project file, so you just find it in the
description and download it, and then you can import
it into Blender scene and mix it together with the
result using the overlay mode, which is the correct one for
mixing grain into your shots. Last thing we can do is
to add a curves node here, and play around with these lines. First let's go to the blue channel and raise the blue shadows down here. That's something most films have, some nice blues in their dark areas. Also, you can lower the green highlights, but let's actually add
one more point here, so that really only the
highlights are adjusted. With this change you
make the orange regions slightly more intense, which tends to be pleasing to the eye, since we as humans
simply love skin colors. Finally, let's try to
add a bit more contrast. And with that, have a
look at the final image. Not bad compared to the
original one, I think. Not bad at all. And here we are, my friends. Remember, all these
tips are just guidelines and nothing is really set in stone. You will do well not
to underestimate them, learn them and relearn them, and of course actively search for them in movies and paintings. Also, these tips that I provided are just scratching the surface of this topic. So definitely do some research,
buy books, watch tutorials. And if you want some
inspiration in this field, definitely read the
description of the video, I will share some books and courses there. But that's it for today. I hope you learned something practical that you will incorporate
into your workflows. Stay creative, my friends, and
until next time, Martin out. (dramatic music)
Very nice. Informative stuff!