Blender 2.7 Tutorial #11 : Intro to Lighting & Rendering in Cycles #b3d

hello and welcome Modi series not to use wonder 2.7 in this video I'll talk about two very essential things to know and blunder and those are lighting and rendering let's get started though by clicking on the splash screen and I'm going to make a basic scene by deleting my cube I'm going to add a monkey head and a ground while I'm doing that though I'll just talk about the fact that in the last video I introduced you to the cycles render engine which changes the way in blender as opposed to the old blender render engine how we light scenes how we add materials and how we render out images or movies I'm going to go ahead and go to my side view and make sure it's for an orthographic view and rotate the monkey and put it up on the ground and there I'll get my tool shelf back and I'm going to add a modifier to this I'm going to add a subsurf modifier to make it all nice and smooth and I'll click on the smooth shading to make it all look nice when you're using the cycles render engine and your lighting a scene it's important to know that you get light for free if i zoom out and I delete this default point lab and I switch actually identify that window into tube I'm going to grab this little cross hatched area and drag it down and we change the viewport shading from solid to rendered the scene already has some light into it in other words we get some light for free where that light is coming from is the gray material yes it's the material that's on the world in the scene where we can change that is up here in our properties window in the world tab this surface where was the material that's on the world is this great color if this grey color is totally white you get more light in your scene because this is actually sort of acting like any MIT material that emits that color if I turn into a color the whole scene will get lit with that color I'll turn up point or red green and blue all the way to make it way to go but if I make it black there's absolutely no light in the scene to add a lap again just like the last video we can do two things we can either use an object as a light source if we give it an a mission shader or an emission material or we can use one of the normal lamp objects now when cycles was first new I'm just going to quickly add a lamp point object we'll talk about a few of the other types later in this video when I first set the scene in the last video I mentioned that cycles wasn't really meant for or labs weren't really meant for these cycles render engine and when the cycle is run your engine was new that was that was true you didn't really want to use these lamps when the cycle of our engine first came out they weren't really meant for it but no they do work better if I have a lab selected in this case I'm going to be talking about a point lamp and I go to the lamp tab my properties window again you have to have the lamp selected for that show up you'll see that we can change the size of the lamp now if i zoom out lamp right now you'll see it has very harsh or hard-edged shadows and I'm actually going to turn up the strength of my lamp right away now by the way this strength option is not available on your default lab and that's because just like objects just like the monkey head if I go to the materials tab and add a new material and may give it a color the way we get more options so the better way to add a material is to use nodes so I'm actually gonna divide this window into two I'm going to grab this little cross hatched area drag it over I to make this left window into a node editor window all materials on any object if it's a light or a mesh can use nodes so in this case we added a diffuse be SDF material to the monkey head and therefore we have two nodes the diffuse pedia psdf shader as well as the output but if I select my lamp it also has any mission material just or mission shader just like that square that we used in the last video and has a lamp output so we can use nodes for not just objects but also laps and even the whole world we're not going to talk about that in this video though if you have your default scene though is not enabled to use nodes that's what this little checkbox is for if you don't have a checked you don't get option to the strength that's why I have it in this video I enter the strength of my light up to let's say 500 and press Enter you'll notice this is what I was saying before the edge of the shadow is very hard and that's because it's a very small light source if you study photography or Summit ography although that small lights have harsher shadows bigger lights become more diffuse and therefore have softer edge shadows so I change the size of this lamp and I'll actually type in something like 10 you'll notice two things the scene actually got darker but also the shadow become became very soft which is quite desirable in some cases the reason why the light became duller is not because the strength of the light became less it didn't change it's still 508 became duller because the light is now spread over a larger surface so if your light becomes bigger if you're using a lamp object no matter what kind basically the you need to turn up the strength depending on how large the or small the light source is so I'll turn this up now to let's say 1500 and now we get a better lit scene the next lamp type I want to talk about is a Sun lamp because if you're using a normal light source and we'll talk about this a little bit later it's video after talk about the Sun lamp the closer it is to an object the brighter that object will be just like in the real world but just like in the real world the farther away the light source the less light makes it onto the scene so this is called light fall-off the way you can avoid this the easiest way is by using a Sun lamp I'm actually not going to change the type of I'm going to delete my original map and add a new lamp a Sun a Sun lamp works quite differently than a point lamp in that it does not matter where the lamp object is you'll notice that if I put the lamp below the ground nothing changed if I go to my front view and move my lamp way off to the side again nothing changes the only way you can change the let that the Sun is by rotating it and what that will do is change the direction of the Sun what this basically emulates is the a real Sun in the real world which you know you can't exactly and I put my son object very close to the monkey head and zoom back in if I'm animating an object I'm animating this monkey head and I have my cell right there I don't want the Sun direction of the Sun shadows to change depending on if he's right here or right here that wouldn't be the case in the Sun because the Sun is a very large object but very far away and so you can't really go from the left side of this on the right side of the Sun that easily so that's why you can put this on object anywhere for a big gainer and blender this is very good because you can just put the Sun anywhere you know rotate it in the direction that you want rotate it from any on any axis put it you know the way that you want and just sort of leave it there and forget about it so that's the Sun object again you can change the strength it has an emission material already on it and you can change the color of it so if you want to make it more like an outdoor scene you can make it a little bit more blue not very blue just a little bit and that could be your outdoor especially a night scene like that daytime it's a little bit even less blue than that okay that's the Sun laughs what if though you want to light a scene in very specific ways that's where the area lamp comes in and that's my favorite lamp to use so I'm actually gonna go back and delete that Sun and I'll press shift C to what my 3d cursor back in middle of my scene and I'm going to add a new area lamp an area lap is very similar to a point lamp in fact when you first add an area lamp it looks exactly the same but what an area lamp does is allowing to change the size in other words you can make it into basically a flat area large or small by default its shape is a rectangle so you can change both the X and the y dimensions oops meant to be ten and ten but you can make it a square or you can make it a rectangle depending on what shape you need or you can change it to a square if a square is always OK for you and then you can just change one of the values again notice that as the light becomes bigger the amount of light that it actually projects per area becomes less therefore it's very dull when you lamp is big but when it's small one by one it gets brighter in that specific area what if you want a lamp to go on forever in other words if I move this lap far away obviously it's going to get duller and duller on the object because as you move an object far away the light fall-off is called and there's two words that are associated with this either inverse square that's the law of inverse square light falls off more and more as you get further far way in sort of a exponential rate that's called the law of inverse square it's also called a quadratic fall-off but if we want light to go on forever this is how I normally set up lights for beginner users of blender is I want this light to go on forever in other words have a constant fall-off in other words it'll be the same brightness if it's near or far away for an object the way you do that is in nodes right now we have a lab output which is the output of this lamp we have a admission material and it has a strength now the strength actually has an input right here you get inputs are on the left side of a node so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a new node and that new node is called a fall-off or a light fall-off node as in the color section so you can go to the add menu or shift a and add color light fall-off node and there it is and here we have our three options normally a lamp has a quadratic fall-off so I'm going to drag the output of quadratic out to the strength and you'll see now that my I'm going to press ctrl and drag through that they're showing equals 100 and if I have a hundred in here this one the strength takes over and the light won't change at all if I grab the linear output though and drag it over to strength it will replace the other one and linear fall-off does not fall off exponentially it falls off and the words light becomes dimmer at set increments so it gets you know one times a doll or whatever that whatever the amount is every unit away from the light you get quadratic gets exponentially more dim the further where you go and that's how like acts in the real world but if I change just the constant it'll the monkey will get lit as if the light is directly next to the monkey it doesn't matter how far away we go the strength is way too high though so I gotta turn it down to let's say five maybe a little bit higher than maybe 10 and now I can move my lamp farther away and it will not matter to the scene at all in terms of brightness again though the closer you are to a scene and let's make this the size of this area lamp a lot bigger let's make it up to let's say 10 and let's make it up to 100 it still does fade away or get dimmer per area depending on how big your light is but I'm gonna come back down to 10 you'll see that I had a very soft shadow right now because of a big lamp that's near the object but if I move that farther away it's not going to get more dull or dimmer because the light fall-off is it's a constant but the shadow will get harsh let's look there's something to keep in mind I couldn't make this really large I could make this let's say a thousand and the light won't get any we'll go up to a thousand yes it will there we go and I can turn my strength up to match if I want really soft shadows but to like my whole scene very evenly very easily so that's a very quick introduction to lighting but now in the second part of this video I want to talk about rendering what rendering is is again drawing out your scene with all the lighting and materials taken into consideration but how do you set it up so that it looks the way you want to look from the camera angle that you want it to be from if you go up to the render tab and click on render it'll take over your most recent or most prominent 3d viewport in this case it's a particular for this one and it's rendering it out from the perspective and again it didn't you know render it out from whatever angle you're looking at the scene from in other words it's not going to render out the back of the monkey's head its rendering out from the perspective of the camera in your scene now you can change the position of your camera manually so what I can do is in this window I can put my house in that window and press zero on my numpad which will change the view to the camera perspective or if I just go down to the View menu and I can select camera and it'll change the view to the active camera in the scene if you have multiple cameras what I can do is I can change the angle just by moving and rotating the camera as I see fit but this is sort of a slow and cumbersome way to move the camera the better way to do it is to just use your normal orbiting zooming panning controls in this window but if I try to orbit right now it breaks out of the camera view I can tap zero but I'm going to try to orbit with my middle mouse wheel it it breaks out the way you actually can allow butter to orbit and navigate within the camera view which actually will move the camera it's like going over here to your properties panel or your properties tool shelf but it's called the properties panel this is called a properties window if you don't have it you can put your mouse in this window and tap n on your keyboard or just find that little plus and click on it the way to lock your camera to the view in other words to make sure you can orbit is under the view heading there's a checkbox for lock camera to view and if you have that checked you'll notice that now I can orbit in the 3d viewport from the cameras perspective and you look down here and if I'm orbiting you'll see the camera actually rotating I can also zoom which actually moves the camera by scrolling on that mouse wheel and I can hold shift in orbit to pan the camera around now if you set up letter to the way that I had it set up if you have an object selected in this case I have the monkey selected it'll rotate around that object so you see how the camera is and I'll zoom out over here the camera is kind of orbiting around my monkey head as I'm orbiting around it in this bottom rendered scene so that's how you can position the camera so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put my monkey head in the very middle of the scene I'm going to zoom in on it Center a little bit more and I want to render out a scene so I'll click on render but it looks very grainy and as I mentioned in the last video the way it's the cyclotron your engine works is it takes samples and right now the sample is limited both in this 3d viewport and when you click render is 10 samples and 10 samples is not very much the way you can change that is by going down to the sampling area in your properties window under the camera tab and you can see those two values here the number of samples when you're rendering it out is a 10 same thing with your preview this window in rendered shading view is my preview if you turn this up let's say 250 and press Enter you'll see the number of samples going up right here all the way up to 50 before the amount would have been up to ten so now that's 50 the normal amount that you would technically want to go to if you're making a good-looking scene is anywhere between five hundred and two thousand which is a lot which will take a lot of time but it's worth it the team will get less grainy the more and more samples you allow it to render now you can actually change these both or at least the preview value to zero and what that means is not zero samples zero means unlimited so if I want to let this sit for a while it'll keep going up it'll get smoother and smoother and I can actually make this area bigger I just by getting rid of my panels actually or if I uncheck lock camera to view I can now zoom in and it'll make the actual 3d viewport can review bigger I have this checked and I try to zoom it let's change the camera angle so if you want to make the size of the outline of the counter bigger you have to uncheck that there we go okay so I'm just going to let it do its samples now it's important to note that I'm using not the most modern a powerful computer with a powerful graphics card I'm using a Mac Mini which only has an Intel integrated graphics on a processor built in it's a 2012 Mac Mini it is specta but there is no proper video card if you have an Nvidia brand graphics card you could actually have vendor use your graphics card using what's called CUDA but I can't show you that because I don't have that and it'll dramatically speed up your renders so that's how you can make it appear better in your viewport let's go down to the sampling area again let's change render out to 500 and I'll press Enter now when we actually let's make it 100 now when we go to our render button so there's my scene it did take about 23 seconds to do that and of course the higher samples longer it'll take exponentially if I don't want my scene to render in just sum or take over some window what I can do is I can change the display of my render from M editor to new window now what that means is that I press render now this is one of the few times when blender will give you a new window on your screen and it'll render it out and wait for that and a last thing we'll talk about is saving images in blender because once you have the image rendered out it's not actually saved on your computer it's just inside of blender alright the render finished it took about 32 seconds that time it's just inside a blender so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go down to the image menu and select save as image and what that will do is it'll bring up again where these save dialog boxes that doesn't look much like a normal save dialog box in most of their programs on your computer and what I can do is I can save this to my computer so right now I'm on my desktop I can give this a name I can call it monkey render and I can choose the image type down here on my side panel right now it's set as a PNG image it's compression is quite low I can select other kinds of images like JPEGs or bitmaps or tips or any of these kinds but PNG tends to be a very good image quality for compression otherwise I was just jpg but again JPEG is lossy it loses quality I can click save as image and now that image is saved on my computer I can close Bunder and my separate JPEG or PNG image will be there the last thing I need to mention is the output resolution of the images that you are rendering where you can set the resolution of the picture that means the number of pixels across and up and down I'm go ahead and close this render window is under the camera tab in your properties window in the dimensions section under the render section where the render button is you can see the resolution which right now is 1920 by 1080 which is the resolution of high-def 1080p TVs but that resolution is scaled down to 50% so each one of those dimensions is actually half of that which means that the entire picture is one-quarter about high-def TV what you can do is turn this up to a hundred that's the scale of the image and then choose your pixel dimensions now it's important to note that if I change the ratio in other words the length of the width versus the length the height if I change those numbers the dimensions of the camera will change and what's included in your scene will also change so if I make the width of my frame the same as the height in other words making a square so 1080 and 1080 it will add the top and bottom of my render and I can see more above and below and so I might need to resume a reposition my camera in accordance with that also of course making a larger image will take longer to render with your computer that's going to be it for this video thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: BornCG

Views: 123,653

Keywords: Blender, Blender 2.7, Blender 3D, 3D, Tutorial, lesson, help, tip, tricks, class, dummies, beginner, teach, taught, light, lighting, render, image, scene, lamp, graphics, digital, art, computer, media, Tips, 3D Modeling (Film Job), Blender (Software), Rendering, Animation, animate, film, cartoon, CG, CGI, b3d, #b3d cycles, blendercycles, #blendercycles

Id: gTMORaEygRE

Length: 22min 47sec (1367 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 28 2014