Blender Archvis Tips & Tricks | Animation Breakdown | Lighting, Denoising, Camera settings | iMeshh

hello and welcome to this imesh tutorial or guide or walkthrough um sorry i don't have a webcam because i have moved house and i can't for the life of me find my wire so i only have enough wires for this actual microphone so i hope that you don't mind that so we created these new plants for eye mesh and i wanted to see how they looked into a scene so i put them into a scene and then i got carried away and ended up making a full animation so i thought for this video i can just tell you what i did some things that i learned and show you how it was all kind of put together this scene is actually available over at imesh so if you are an exclusive member you can download this as part of the exclusive subscription but for all the people who are not i'm just going to tell you how it is kind of basically put together and you can maybe learn something from that so okay so the next thing we're going to talk about is the camera setup because i wanted to create some sort of walking feeling so if we go from uh press play you can kind of feel like the camera is slightly moving as if someone has a steady cam and they're kind of walking with the camera but i didn't want it to be too jolty just something a little bit subtle so i was looking online to find a good setup for the camera rig setup so you can get that kind of feeling and i found from i believe it was creative shrimp and he has a good tutorial on how he set that up mine is a little bit different i don't know what happened but i was just kind of added what we needed to and each one had its own setting which i'll go over in a second but then as i kind of went on with the animation i kind of changed things and just it became a little bit different so what i basically did was each item is attached and does a different thing so this main box here which everything is attached to basically goes from one position to the next position so basically in the motion of where i want it to go what i did with the next one was this one would basically be moving transforming like this so if i go into the camera and press g this one will basically be moving like this so left right up down in relation to the camera the next one here this one i believe would be um if i press r and r like as if someone has the camera in the hand and they're kind of just um moving it like rotating it from the axis of basically the camera and this one i have not got any keyframes but i believe with this one i do and this one i believe i had set up a um aha okay here it is so added a constraint and then this tells it how much is going to be influenced by um the cylinder which is parented to this object so if if i show you under the graph editor and the influence if i go into here so i believe i added a noise to this or a cyclic okay so what i've done here is i have made it have a full influence and then it goes down and has less influence and then full influence and basically what that does is it creates the camera is almost following this stuff and then it's not and then it is and then it isn't but i wanted it just to be very very subtle because i found that the camera was then becoming quite jolty um which does give it a feeling of someone taking steps if that makes sense but it was a little bit too much and i just put it like way down and that was enough for me so that's that was that um what i then did was i attached everything to an empty because what i wanted to do was create like exact copies of this and then i wanted to be able to move it around but let's say if for example move this one over here it's then just going to go straight back to where it is with the frames but i wanted it to move in relation to something else so if i just move this empty um the animation will still go in that plane local to parented to this empty so a little bit crazy for the effect you can barely even see it and i don't know if it was worth it but it was just a bit of um fun from my side so that's basically how all the cameras are set up if i go out and i show you i'm a bit wacky what's going on here maybe this one over here go into here and this one is a similar thing it's just moving across this one has less things going on because in reality if someone is going to be up in the ceiling i don't think they're going to be walking with the camera because they'll probably have it on some you know some stand unless someone's really tall and they're walking with the camera on a tripod whatever but that was that one is a little bit more simplified compared to the rest so that's basically it for those cameras okay so the next thing i'm going to go over is the lighting setup and what you'll see here is i've got something a little bit weird going on i've got six different area lights and then each area light is facing in a slightly different direction because what i found was in my old bedroom you'll actually see this photograph now which had um this yucca plant and it had this similar kind of setup to what i've got here so that was my actual probably actual inspiration for where this whole thing came from and what i found was that the light being cast on the wall was a little bit funky there was almost like five or six shadows but there was only one window but what i found was that because the windows i had were like these old pain glass each window was kind of like letting light in at a slightly different angle so i wanted to create that similar kind of effect so if i move this up here so we just have one light here we can just see we have just one shadow if i then let bring down another one what my aim was is that every single light will then cast a slightly different angle of shadow you can't really see it in this preview that's kind of where the idea started from and then i ended up just keeping it because i thought that maybe it's creating some sort of effect which is like a so subtle that you don't really notice it but it is a nice effect anyway and you can kind of see it i know that there are interesting shadows being cast actually from the plant itself because it has so many leaves but still um having a very slight variation in the shadows i thought created a nice effect so that's basically where that came from and it basically just stayed until the end of my animation um i realized that they don't actually line up to the panes um this one actually is missing a pain because i realized uh nobody needed to see it and where i had my original light one of these um bits of i don't know what you call them bits of window holders was in the way so i just deleted it and it's behind a curtain so no one will see anyway so i remove the glass because you know that will help speed things up and over here there was glass but then i think actually i forgot to turn this back on it is visible only to transmission but not actually to camera so i think at some point during my animation if this was turned on to be visible camera but then for another shot um to speed up the render we couldn't actually see the glass so i just turned that off and i realized i have not turned that back on so if you're wondering why that is like that then that's the reason why okay so the next part i'm gonna talk about is this actual area light oh okay so this actual plug-in is amazing so this is actually this is gonna be a bit of a a side um tangent i guess so this is called photographer plugin and this allows you to organize all of your lights so if you have a a collection which has lights in it the collection appears here and then you can easily turn on and off the lights so you can turn that one off and then the outdoor is then off i think i'm not sure if i've actually touched on this since that video but i'm going to do it now so in a previous video i did a did one called um 3d studio max versus blender and i had spoken about i would really like it if each light had an on and off button and i got hammered by the amount of comments people saying oh by the way you can turn off the light from the outlier and that is that's true but the the problem i have is that let's say you go over here and you turn it off it's gone you turn it back on again and there it is but what what i quite like about 3d supermax is that it has an on and off button and you could for example set this to off the light is still there but it's just switched off and the beauty is that the light you can you can see that there is still one there and you don't forget that is is there and you can then just switch it back on when you need it now um i understand that you can just organize your layers and make sure that everything is nicely set up and you can have them you think okay which one was it it was this one i'll turn it back on again um but the reality is in a huge project for example you might have hundreds of lights and it might be really hard to find that one light so let's say i had um okay well this one is switched off so i need a i think it's window two window one okay so i wanted to let's say turn this one so this one was turned off and i wanted to turn it back on again i'd have to then try and find which one it is to turn it back on whereas in 3d studio max it has gives you the ability to keep the light there you know it's there but you can just turn it on and off anyway so so that is very true you can turn it on and off on that outlier but i would love still an on and off switch and at the about the time when i should create that video um photographer the plugin released an update and they allowed you to view all of your light collections in the plug-in so i found that to be way easier because let's say i'm i'm working on something down here and you know i want to find my lighting layer they're already here and it just makes it like a million times easier so this is the closest thing to it and i'm super happy i'd highly recommend you check out this plugin because i used it i don't know how many times in this actual animation so actually back to my point so what i wanted to talk about was out this outdoor light and why it's so big and why it's so bright so what you normally have is a hdr and then this hdr is going to be usually very bright and it's going to be bright enough to light the indoor area and when it's when it's that bright what you end up with let me actually turn off all these lights apart from the hdr you end up with the actual hdr being completely um overexposed so you can see how bright this light is here um oh sorry that is actually direct let me actually just make make another one so this one here and to actually light the indoor enough i'm going to have to completely bump this up to i know 15 or so and you can see that the outdoors could be then overexposed um which is you can see here the grass is very very bright and the indoor area is now relatively quite well lit now the issue i had was that i because a lot of my scene was actually lit from these special area lights i needed to create an outdoor floor area which didn't look like the um hdr because i didn't actually like how the hdr looked so i just quickly whipped up my um an outdoor floor some grass and then i had the issue was that this outdoor area was then no longer overexposed because you saw just a second ago this was completely over over overexposed and it kind of fit and it kind of worked so you know you take a photograph from inside the room make sure the indoor area is lit and the outdoors gonna look overexposed so i needed that to happen so what i did was i created a light and it's just one completely strong light and now that looks similar to how it just did when i just used the hdr a problem i had found was if i turn off all of these and um i think this one if i make it visible to all lights here it actually casts a lot of noise into the scene because the light was coming off here bouncing around and then bouncing into the room so you can see this so this noise was kind of a nightmare whereas this wasn't really meant to contribute anything so if i just go back to the object and turn it off everything apart from camera and you can see then that now it's not casting any light into the scene right so with that explained i'm going to talk about this light so this is actually uploaded on imesh and since then i need to update it because um i found that it was casting some noise into the scene which i think would be not very nice for a lot of people using the light so i'll be uploading this very soon with this fix so if i hanging light i believe so now each bulb has a oopsie has a light here so you can see inside every single bit of glass there is a light now i had the issue that this light was casting a lot of noise into the scene so if i go to the object and turn this this so you can see here that look at all this spec speckly mess that's coming off of this whereas this light didn't actually need the purpose of actually illuminating the scene all i wanted it to do was actually just look quite nice and have it look like it was on but not actually contribute to the scene so what i did was if i just undo this i plugged in the ray length into the strength and you can see now that it is not really casting much noise into the scene but it's still illuminating the scene quite nicely and this still looks quite nice so i think um in future if i wasn't going to do an animation just purely stills i could bump this up and then i could then some glare in the compositor and you can still get this a nice glare um but then you are avoiding the noise so that is just something to note what would be completely ideal is if blender finally released that include or exclude feature that is available in nearly every other renderer so that for example is that you would have an include and you would include these lights only to this object so this object will be illuminated quite nicely from these lights but then it wouldn't cast any light into the scene because you know for certain situations like this it can cast a lot of noise which is completely unnecessary so that's what i did for that one and i was actually amazed how simple that was to avoid all of that noise so that is that uh just plugging into the strength and you can see yeah so you can see the actual light from the room is um still being illuminated but just a lot less noise so that was fun um what else did i do so added some highlight lights which were just a couple of i mean actually turn on the denoising again because it was quite quick so these highlight lights are basically just these little highlights which and i tried them out for some stills but then i didn't actually end up using them i don't believe but i just kept them anyway and they are just a couple of lights above a table and i believe there is there was one here so the so there was a sofa light as well and that also creates a nice mood so if you want to do a nice shot if you want to use this scene you can there it's already basically set up so this light was to almost emulate the light coming from this light kind of um but for the actual camera i was using it kind of fit and this is just how it's ended up so yeah you can turn off the outdoor area and then it would look uh like a nighttime shot so that is probably it for the lighting and i will go on to the next part okay so this next part was a little bit more difficult to explain so i've had to try to really think about how i'm gonna explain this so i think i've also touched on this in the past but basically a denoiser nowadays is made with ai and ai is trained on a certain set of data and my understanding is that ai nowadays is trained on higher resolution images such as 4k images for example so when you try to give it a lower resolution image and then ask it to denoise it then does a worse job so the idea in the past which i have also mentioned i believe is that you if you want to render an image render it at 200 so it's a bigger image but then because you're making a bigger image like 200 percent you're gonna end up with four times the four times the images so this is one image and then you multiply it by two goes this way and this way so you end up with four times image so you'd end up with your render time going up by four so how can you combat that so what you can do is you get the sample and you divide that by four and then what you end up with is a render which takes the same amount of time you have less samples and yet the image quality comes out much nicer so i have done it render here slot one and slot two you can see this one is the 4k image and this one or the 200 image and this one is the 100 image and you can see the render time is basically the same this one took a little bit longer because i think the actual denoising process takes a little bit longer and just to see which one comes out nicer i've done a very quick comparison so this one is 200 and this one is 100 so you can see all the details are much nicer in the 200 percent because it is a bigger image compressed down to a smaller image now that is why nowadays if i do a still image i put it to 1920x1920 and i try to find out the amount of samples that i need to make sure that is relatively clean and then what i do is i bump it up to 200 and divide the samples by four so if i go here you can't even see the lines here but if i go turn this one on you can start to see that there is lines there now this is only 10 samples so um i think this was this was 20 samples so you can kind of see how good an image you can get from literally only 20 samples um so for stills that worked really well now the issue that i had was actually making this work on animations so because i was very limited on render time because what i was rending rendering with was render street and with render street i was using their their whole month package which means that you can pay a certain amount per month and then you get a set amount of nodes for that whole month which is freaking amazing they have literally saved my ass on this one because i got a little bit carried away and i was thinking how can i render this animation without it literally not costing me about six thousand dollars so you can you can pay a set amount per month um and you get a certain amount of rendering time per frame now my frame my time per frame on their system was about one hour per frame because on that service you're only allowed rendering your cpu which is usually uh slower and that meant that i was limited to one hour because i was paying a little bit more per month but it did mean that i could render a bit longer because this actual animation had a lot of um translucent materials a lot of subsurface scattering and a lot of complicated lighting so i needed as much render time as possible and i was limited to one hour and my frames were rendering in about 58 minutes per frame so i managed to get it just about right that i could just render this animation now because i was very limited on render time i really needed to push it as much as possible to try to get as much um as much detail in as possible so and as you can see here if you render it at higher resolution lower the samples and you get a cleaner image and i tried that out for the animation itself as well and i found this so if i go to the first and at first shot which is um every single shot they took about the same amount of time to render um maybe give or take on a few samples maybe 100 samples or more or less and everything rendered in about 58 minutes or so so what you can see here this one was rendered in 4k and uh and then compress down like i've just done it in this photoshop file and you can see that the details are quite nice and you can kind of see every single everything you need to for still image i'd be very happy but if i go to 400 and then scoot across the timeline you can see how gross that is so so you can every single edge is a little bit jumping around and and i was a little bit confused because i was thinking oh why does why is it so bad for animations whereas it's not um for actual still images so then if i go to the compositor here to just check it out okay so if we go to the compositor now and i've just plugged it straight into here i've ignored the denoiser and you can see it's 20 samples so this shows how much of a freaking good in job this denoiser has done so if i go over here and plug this into here like i showed you in the photoshop file it is just guessing all of these details so how how does it know that that is there like this line that yeah i don't fully understand it is it is mind-boggling so that kind of showed to me why i'm having such a problem so for a still image this will be a do a fantastic job bump this up to maybe 150 samples and it has a pretty clean image anyway and then the denoiser will smash it but what i found was that if you have a very noisy image the edge is not 100 clear where it is so for a still image it will denoise it and it will say yeah i think the edge is here and all the details are as i've just shown you but then when you go to the next frame all the noise is going to be a slightly different arrangement ever so slightly that the denoiser would then still do an amazing job but then when you go between the two you end up with a bit of a mess and then that's when i got onto this shot here which i rendered at 1 920 by 1 920 and um i wanted to then experiment with just increasing the sample count so this one actually rendered at about 600 or 700 samples rather than 130 samples of the 4k image and i found that this actually kept a lot more of the details so if i zoom into this one for example and you can see these veins here if i go between the frames you can still see that there is there is a lot less jumping around as there was in the previous shot okay so you can see here that the denoiser is still doing such a fantastic job you can still see that all the details are still there whereas if i go back to the other shot here um let me actually move over to this part you can see that it's a lot worse it's a lot more paintery and uh that effect so so that is what i found actually rendering a lower resolution with more samples for an animation actually was a lot more beneficial than rendering higher so that is what i found so um that was quite a long explanation for such a such a small thing but i think that this will be a lot of help for a lot of people that rendering at 200 or 400 and lowering the sample count does a an amazing job if you want to have animations i'd first try it out and see how it looks on a on the base size first don't go to 20 don't go to 400 push as many samples as you can in your time frame and see how it looks and then and then try decreasing it but i imagine you might hit a similar road block that i did so it's guessed all of these um veins pretty accurately but then between the two it's this vein is kind of jumping in and jumping out of existence here so that that is kind of here for that point i hope that i've made that clear um and i hope someone has something to take away from that okay so let's just go over a final other settings that i had i did originally actually save it as a png um 16 bit um and and that was what i used for my compositing um i could have rendered it in a tiff but with thousands of frames you end up with a a i know hundreds of gigabytes so i didn't want to do that png was fine for me um i did render it at 60 fps now the reason why i chose 60fps was because i have never done an animation in that higher frame rate before and what i find is that you know you're looking at a gif let's say you're on reddit and you come across a gif and you click on it and you think wow this one looks so realistic you can step into it and it's probably because it's a 60fps gif or on youtube for example you watch some 60 fps videos and it always looks a little bit more realistic the problem is if you want to do it on animations it doubles the render time so that is also why i'm absolutely amazed that i found render street and it did that kind of saved save the day i actually was able to render it in 60 fps now and so i can just tell you some of the things which i learned from this now on the animation there is this particular shot it kind of feels quite realistic i feel like there is a lot moving across the screen and the camera is moving quite fast and that i personally think sells the 60 fps effect whereas the first two shots they're not really moving very much at all so because it's moving so slowly and there's not really much detail happening i think the bit which looks most realistic is the actual curtain on the left because that has the most amount of motion whereas this one the camera is also moving very very slowly um but so you don't really get the effect of it 60 fps this shot here is which moves across the whole of the um the scene i think also has a very nice 60 fps feeling because there's a lot going on it's moving quite fast and you can kind of like step into the render so my learning from this is that basically if you want to have 60 fps make sure that there is enough motion going on because if you're just going a couple of steps forwards over the course of five or six seconds the 60fps won't really make too much of a difference it might it does still look quite nice but not to the effect of if you're going to move across a whole um plant for example like quite close up so for close-ups moving quite quickly and everything is quite a nice effect so that's something which i learned if you're going to do this in premiere one thing you do need to do though is is you need to um right click on it and click modify and then interpret footage and make sure that it's okay modify interpret oopsie modify interpret footage and make sure it's set to 60 fps because um premiere will always assume that it is set to i don't know 25 or 30 frames per second and so what you want to do is modify and set this to 60fps and then what you want to do is make sure that the sequence settings is also set to 60fps and then you won't get any issues um and then when you're finally exporting make sure that you i might as well go over all these settings if you're still watching um you go to media and what you want to do is make sure that you have it set to two past and what i did was set it to 20 or 40. i think that's actually quite high i think youtube actually recommends something between 10 and 18 but i bumped that up and personally i found that my computer actually did a better job at replaying the 60 frames per second i watched this animation probably 100 times i'm not even joking over the course of the day on my phone and everything and what i found was that 60 fps your computer needs to do more work to replay a 60 frames per second video and i found that when this was actually a lower um lower amount or set to one pass target bit and had just a one pass target bit rate of less there was a lot more stuttering and the animation just didn't look as nice but as soon as i said it to this the animation felt a lot more smooth um there is still a little bit of stuttering and i can't work out if it's my computer struggling or if it's some sort of output settings but i can't find that um 60fps this is my first time so um if there are any other settings you guys would recommend then please let me know and i'll pin your comment um i think that's kind of kind of it let me have a think if there's any other settings i i didn't really change too much in terms of um these settings i think in film pixel filter i set this to blackmon harris and 1.2 i think that's you that's set default at 1.5 but i found at 1.2 the images feel a little bit sharper um there is the there will be a bit more jaggedy edges on more contrasty areas but at a higher resolution that is a little bit harder to see anyway so that was easy to to kind of ignore i put that at 1.2 okay so this is an imesh video and you know that we do actually have a product um so for all of our new viewers it would be really cool just if i can mention what we do and see if we can you know interest you because the more people we have uh who are signed up the more products we can create in future and like for example we've recently just switched over to amazon s3 to have a much more stable network over their cloudfront system so all downloads should be a lot faster now and they should be a lot more stable which we couldn't do before you know the more people we have signed up the way better it is and we are 99 and you get a thousand assets which is which is pretty pretty crazy actually uh because every month we also release 30 new assets so that's at least anyway basically what we do is every month we create new products and we try to make sure that all of our new products are better than the last and as you've just seen we released some new plants because i found it was quite hard to find really high quality plants or plants which just looked good in a render that just didn't look like bad bad 3d plants so we created these plants and these this took a hell of a lot of time uh i i can't think how many photos we took of the actual leaves until we got it right um but we really try to work on the materials for a long time we post it to the community um just to see what they what they thought on it um because i think at one time we made these plants and and these leaves and they said it was too smooth so we added a nice noise map which i think was the finishing touch for that one that one came out super nice so um yeah these things take a lot of time and the more people we have signed up the more products the more higher quality products we can bring out in future and we really want to create this community of people who who get high quality assets because i think there's way too many places online we can get cheap free assets um and a lot of the blender community are using these cheap and free assets which look okay but they don't realize what a higher quality asset is meant to be um so that's what we're trying to do and you know the blender community is of course a lot of hobbyists and stuff so we know that there is um limited on funds a lot of times so we went as low as we possibly could on this um so you know if anyone's interested uh if you have any questions literally send it to us on imesh if you go to the contact page um you can actually contact us there or post a comment onto um the youtube video and we'll definitely help you out but um we have some more exciting assets to come in future this one i'm particularly proud of myself actually because i had probably the biggest hand in this and now these were the assets which i wanted to do for such a long time and it was finally good that we're finally able to do it so i hope that they are put to good use and wow this is a long promotional part if you have any questions please reach out but thank you so much for watching

Channel: iMeshh

Views: 7,246

Keywords: tutorial, guide, walkthrough, breakdown, animation, denoiser, lighting, tips, blender, 3d, b3d, arch, vis, archvis, arch-vis, explanation

Id: gwjuqJ0A6Ko

Length: 30min 56sec (1856 seconds)

Published: Mon May 31 2021