Advanced Lighting Techniques in Cinema 4D

hey what's up guys this is 3d bonfire back with an amazing tutorial and you know what i started this master lighting in 3d course on patreon where you will learn all of this stuff so if you want to know how you can make renders like these ones i think my patreon is the right place for you and of course it will share assets and scene files and all of the good stuff all right and be sure to save 25 on an annual subscription on my patreon if you subscribe until the 8th of february 2021 alright so just be fast enough all right in class one two three we talked about the light fundamentals but i think now it is time to just build a complete scene something like this or like that also like this okay so you can see some beautiful night scenery some sunrise we will also talk about how you can make a beautiful desert landscape but of course the focus is on lighting alright so you will learn how you can really spice up your renderings with beautiful dramatic lighting so this will be the topic of class 4 on my patreon but of course for you guys on youtube i have also something special so we will just keep it a little bit more simple but you can see in these ones they are also really beautiful so if you want to know how you can light some beautiful objects in a really dramatic way this is the right training for you alright so i think we just hop into cinema 4d and try to make a light like this one or a scenario like this or like that i'm still not sure maybe we will go for this one because this is just i think maybe the most beautiful it's up to your liking but i think i will go with this one one last thing just be sure if you really want to know all of my knowledge on lighting if you want to have the whole master lighting and 3d course be sure to check my patreon alright so a second last thing i'm sorry if you really like this training and you learned something today just be sure to subscribe to this channel and also leave a comment if you like but now let's just hop into cinema 4d and have some fun alright alright welcome to cinema 4d your favorite 3d software at least it is mine alright so you can see i already built a simple scene here and of course i will share this one on patreon but for you guys on youtube i will just go quickly through it and we will build parts of it by ourselves just believe me this is no rocket science all right but i will take your hand and lead you through the whole setup okay so maybe we will talk first about some of the assets so this one obviously i didn't build this one by myself i'm not so deep into modeling and it would be just too time consuming so let me show you where i got this from and let me also show you where i got my textures from so sometimes you build your textures your materials by yourself but obviously there are really great material packs out there and sometimes you don't really have to build a marble or brushed metal from scratch alright so let me show you where i get my assets from alright so maybe let me start here myminifactory.com scan the world this is just an awesome site if you need like these beautiful heads all right just be sure when you click on them you have a license for it so this one seems to be a creative common license so this is great to use all right i just went through this and picked some of these heads i used this one of the jesus this one of venus and yes just be sure to grab your assets and of course feel free to use your own head models if you have something crazy good like this one alright and maybe one more tip if you need hdr eyes this one is a good side for you in our scenario this time we won't use hdris but just wanted to give you a hint where i got my assets from so of course there are also free hdris out there so so if you are really into free stuff hdri haven is the right place for you so i use these ones all the time and i think they're just awesome also be sure to search in your search bar for free ies lights alright so in this training we will use ies lights and i found this one from leo moon studios and i just love these ones okay and they are free so be sure to download them and send them a big thank you all right let me quickly talk about materials so i really like to use these packs from grayscale gorilla i think they are just awesome also you can find beautiful materials on polygon of course again polygon but hey they are just awesome so search for the metals whatever you need so you could use like a scratched metal for the floor or a marble just like i did so feel free to go to this site also i can recommend textures.com they also have these pbr materials so so just search for example for a marble and you will find beautiful stuff here so of course you can also put this crazy cool textures on your floor all right one last recommendation in my camera i use luts all right so if you need crazy cool luts go to visioncolor.com they were recommended to me by david raf and i think they are just awesome all right so much fun to play with these ones i will also show you how you can use in your scene and also just be sure to follow marcus gonzo3d on instagram this is the brain and the muscle behind free bonfire that's me and just be sure to stay up to date with my stuff and talk to me and show me your art for example all right so let's continue in cinema 4d all right so let me just quickly go through the basic scene and then we will concentrate ourselves on the lighting because this is the most interesting and important part about this scene so you can see in this null which is called dionysus after the hero here i have another null which is called cylinders and inside of it these are just my decorative elements around him so for now we can just get rid of this one temporarily we have another null which is called light rig dionysus inside of it i have three ies lights all right so let me just quickly go through them let me just quickly deactivate these ones and also get rid of the other light sources like these ones alright so now the scene is perfectly dark you just have to think about how you want to light your object in a most dramatic way so maybe i just duplicate this one let's call this one ies new okay and you can see you just go around your object and just search for a nice angle on it let me just do something that is not so great of course you could go here and just make a frontal light on his face now you can already see this looks super boring all right so basically all i can say about this is that it is just ugly all right so maybe for now i just unchecked the camera so i can get out of it but we will keep this one as our render view okay so you can see i just go around my model and search for something that is dramatic and impactful and it's always nice to have dramatic shadows on your object so for example this one is already a nice placement so now the face is litten in a beautiful way and we have this nice shadows on top of it this is all about your feeling as an artist where you want to place these lights let me just rotate it 90 degrees here let me try another scenario maybe from this side okay so this can also be interesting if you just combine it for example i just duplicate it by holding down sdrt and dragging it and rotate this one like 180 and you can see this one also looks quite interesting right right now they have the same power but you can go into your attributes and make this one for example to 300 let me just see if i can place it even in a more interesting way okay i like this one and now the other one is more like a fill light right so you can be subtle with this one put it to 40 just give it a hint of light here this is basically how you have to decide as an artist how you can sculpt with light in the most interesting way okay so maybe we will also want to put a light on top of it all right and you can see and this is already a pretty nice solution with these three lights one from the left from the right and from the top but of course you can just mix this one up to your liking okay so obviously you won't need this one so maybe this is what you will prefer you can go for okay i wouldn't do that but you can go with this one mix it with this one or combine it with this one whatever you like and what you feel will be fitting for your scene okay but maybe we should also talk about the nature of this light so this one is a special light okay it's not just an area light it is an ies light so let me tell you how i set up these lights therefore just as a demonstration i activated just the ies light from the left alright and now i go to store render buffer and now we compare this one with your standard area light okay so let me just give you a demonstration here so now i have an area light in my scene i just rotated it 90. let's just place it where i have the ies light okay i just make it similar in size here okay the position is a little bit off so let me just put it here and let me just show you how boring this area light looks okay so i think this one needs to be a bit brighter let's put it to 300 actually it looks quite good but you can see the ies light is way more directional and you can be way more specific with this one so the light fall off is really concentrated on this area while the area light is lighting everything here okay it is even going to the floor here and actually the area light is going in a 180 degree angle from here okay so therefore you will get a more boring overall light which has its scenario so often i really like to use area lights but in this case i want to go with the ies lights so let me just show you once more the ies light really concentrated here and this is just way better for art direction and to be really specific with it so let me just finally show you how i set up this beautiful ies light alright so i deactivated all my light perfect darkness here and now it is time to go to the magic button it's called octane ies light that came with a surprise right so you weren't suspecting that rotate this light here alright so you can see nothing here but let's just go into the light let's go to distribution image texture and inside of it this box is asking for filename ies all right and i already showed you the ies that i like to use so do i have it here yes download this pack send them a big thank you or donate something and then just be sure to go to your content browser navigate in the hierarchy to your place on your hard drive okay and inside of it you will have these crazy cool ies files also pngs we don't really need them so maybe i should just kill them but for now you can see you have a really nice selection of ies lights and maybe we just try something so how about this one defined diffuse just put it there say none so all right i already like this one way better than the area light with the 180 degree falloff so you can see now the light is coming out with a certain direction and i think this is just amazing all right so maybe let's try another one so go for the star ies light and i think this one will be a bit crazy now you can't see it here but of course the light fall off will also put something on the floor and stuff but i want to have something more directional so let's try the tight focused all right and i think this one is fitting perfectly for our scenes so you can already see the ies light is working nicely in the scene maybe one more thing about ies lights they have this beautiful pattern inside of it and to really get this pattern in your scene it is best habit to make your ies light really small alright so this one is 200x200 therefore you won't see anything of the pattern so i would suggest to put this one to one by one now go into your ies light and maybe get rid of surface brightness now it is strong again and you can see the shadow is already way more focused here so let me just make this one stronger so just check how sharp the shadow is here in comparison to let me just go to store the render buffer make it back to 100 by 100 for example and you can see now it is getting more soft let's put it to 500 by 500 and now it is really diffuse alright so whatever you need in your scene just be sure you adjust the light size and therefore you will have influence on the shadow quality okay now i just put this one back to one by one and maybe i will just show you how you can really see this pattern better so let me just put a wall back here for example let's make it bigger let's put this cube maybe here i don't know let's just put it on the floor let's just as a good habit give it some fill it all right so now let me just put this ies light straight to the wall and now you can really see this light pattern fall off all right so just put it close to the wall let me just because this is so beautiful check one more of them so go back to your content browser and let me just go through it i think i'd like to see this one okay i guess this one will be crazy okay so also a nice possibility to light your scene but of course in our case we want to have something more focused like we had it before alright and you can see this is basically what i did here so this is my scene setup i have three ies lights top left right and let me just check the strength of them so the top one is set to 80 so really subtle light here maybe we can also decrease this one to have just a hint of light the left one is 250 and the right one is 400 okay so this one looks interesting but now i just want to combine it with other lights all right and therefore my magic trick is to introduce surfaces with a luminance texture on it okay so i just built these little lamps here with a bright luminant surface and underneath it i have my ies light to give it more direction plus the surface light will give it a more diffused light combined with the more specific angle of the ies light this is just a beautiful lighting scenario so let me just show you how the scene will look without the ies lights all right so you can see soft shadows from all of these angles maybe to be honest this is too strong okay so let's just go there let's go into my material this is the emission so let's put this one down to a thousand for example let's make it more subtle so now we have some beautiful ambient light from all of these angles and i think i just want to store the render buffer and now my trick is to combine it with ies lights okay so just see how beautiful the ies lights work in conjunction with the surface lights alright so this is a beautiful lighting scenario but maybe you want to just have the ies lights on this head for example so maybe you feel like the ambient light from these light surfaces is just too much for it so let me just see how this one is looking store the render buffer now combine the lamps again with it so you can see this will make it just a little bit more dull maybe so if this one is distracting you you could go to your object and let's say this one will have an octane tag on it let's go inside of it and use some light linking here so let's just pick the light 4 for example and now this is telling octane lights with the id 4 won't affect the head okay so why don't we just go into this material go inside of it and let's give this one light id4 and now you can see this luminant material won't affect the head anymore so whatever you like you have all the possibilities right at your fingertips and i think combining ies lights with light surfaces is just a strong technique alright guys i think this is it for the youtuber lesson here of course the lesson 4 on patreon will be way more in depth so we will build some more complex scenes with more lights and just do some awesome stuff here alright so so much to teach so much to learn i really hope to see you there on patreon anyway i hope you learned something and sharpened your sword your skills thank you so much for listening see you next time bye guys

Channel: 3DBONFIRE

Views: 8,779

Rating: 4.916883 out of 5

Keywords: motion design, motion graphics, tutorial, tips, tricks, technique, learn, basics, design, mograph, cinema 4d, c4d, cinema4d, greyscale gorilla, greyscalegorilla, 3d, workflow, tutorials, cinema 4d tutorial, cinema 4d tutorials, c4d tutorial, c4d tutorials, lighting, studio setup, lighting setup, pbr lights, area lights, lights, hdr, hdri, sky object, light, area light, pbr light, photometric, ies, master, advanced, david ariew, poliigon, assets, patreon, 3dbonfire, markusgonser3d, octane, otoy, ieslights

Id: e_hW3Xqg0EM

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021