Brograph Tutorial 064 - Interior Lighting with Octane in Cinema 4D - Tips and Tricks

[Music] what's up Bros in this tutorial I'm going to be going over some tips and tricks when doing interior lighting in octave [Music] what's up bros i'm Matt Milstead and today we're going to be jumping into octane in cinema 4d and I'm going to show you a few tips and tricks in order to really good a scene looking nice there's a few caveats with octane when you're doing interior lighting like portal materials versus portal lights that you would have in like v-ray or Arnold or something like that so really they don't react the same way so I found a few workarounds in order to really get this to work well and so let's uh let's go ahead and jump into the project I'll show you what I'm talking about as you can see here I've got this scene set up and as a special incentive for doing the tutorial you guys can actually find all of the you can find this scene we have added this to the website so if you want to download the scene and go along with me or if you just want to use the scene for whatever commercial purposes you want feel free now it is all in octane so but yeah it's free for you to use so as you can see we've got an interior scene I've got a bunch of windows we've got three windows it does have four walls you can see it only looks like it's got three but if I go over here into my wall you can see I've got a fourth wall right there that's just actually hidden I use an object or a octane tag in order to turn off the camera visibility and then I just turn off the preview visibility so and then I've got a keyframe set for my octane so that it always goes back my octane camera now I've got a camera in here let's go ahead and delete this tag just so I can start from the beginning with it so we're going to go ahead and add an octane camera tag to this camera and let's see so we'll save that out and what we really want to start with first is getting our settings set up so let's start off with our settings and we'll do just our basic settings now when you're working with interior scenes the most important thing you do is not use direct lighting I know that stinks direct lighting is so super fast but really it does not give you the most accurate look as far as interior lighting goes it will create almost like a bluish hue to it and that's not really as realistic that's not realistic and the way that light bounces using path tracing or pmc is actually a whole lot better than direct lighting so we're going to switch this over to path tracing but we've got you know yes it will take a little bit longer than direct lighting but we've got a few tips and tricks in order to speed up your renders so first all let's change our max samples we don't need 16,000 let's stick with something like 1024 and if we need some more after that then we can move on and we can up the samples at that point but then let's go ahead and do diffuse depth and specular now the problem is I don't see anything so it's not really I'm not really going to have a good judge of whether or not I need to up the amount on the diffuse as a specular so I'm going to go ahead and turn off this fourth wall just so that I can get a good overview of what this looks like okay so now let's bring our diffuse depth all the way down and this is a little trick that uh that I learned online start with zero and slowly move your way up and then once you don't see a change that's about good so diffuse depth we're going to slowly push it up and in our path tracing we see a little bit of change there a little bit of change there it's still looking like it's changing and then I think right about there it doesn't look like it's going to change much yeah so we get much of a change between six and seven so I'm going to go ahead and keep that at seven then let's bring our specular depth down now you won't be able to see this too much because you've got I think the only glass we have is this little ball right here and then we're going to bring that up bring it out keep going okay you can almost see through the ball let's do a couple more tics that's good and then I think that's pretty good for getting rid of that getting rid of all the specular as you can see we got a little ball right here that's made of glass it looks pretty good let's see if we can if we up to get one more time will that change anything I don't think it actually made a difference so I'll bring it back down just to save us some time okay so next we're going to leave on alpha shadows we're not going to worry about all that GI clamp let's go ahead and bring this down so let's start and we'll start to bring it down bring it down bring it down bring it down until you'll start seeing everything get dark okay so that's too much we're going to bring it back up bring it back up bring it back up up until we don't see much of a change and then just add a little bit more now what the GI clamp will do it will help really like get rid of a lot of those little fireflies so bringing down that GI clamp really is a great for one speed and to getting rid of all the little fireflies because we definitely don't want that and in our octane camera settings we don't want to have to bring down a hot pixel remove removal we can if we need to but really we should be able to get rid of the hot pixels just right out of the bag okay so the rest of this we're going to leave the same with the exception of this adaptive sampling now as you can see I'm using octane 3.06 test for one and that's the absolute newest one that they have come out with I believe the test three as well of 3.06 also had this adaptive sampling in the path tracing but that's before you actually get it in the direct lighting as well so what's awesome about the adaptive sampling is that it will basically push more samples for a noisy area so in here or your settings for saying basically what's noisy and when do we want to start pushing more samples towards it and and so on so our noise threshold is going to be the amount of noise in an area we want like our absolute our threshold to be so once it reaches like above that threshold then we want to start focusing more samples on that so our minimum samples is the point in which this adaptive sampling is going to kick in so it'll do everything up to 256 samples and then it'll start focusing on where that noise threshold is on the individual elements and start putting more samples towards that now our expected exposure that's based on what our camera exposure is going to be so once we go through and we change our camera exposure then we can then we can go ahead and put the it in the expected exposure but we can put that around one for right now we'll just leave it there now group pixels what that does is that selects a section of pixels you've got none two by two and four by four none is just going to be one pixel two by two will be a group of four pixels and four by four will be a group of sixteen pixels and so it's reading that whole area to see how much noise is in that particular area now your best the best setting is going to be none but I'm just going to go ahead and stick it with 2.2 right now because that'll give us a little bit faster okay so we're going to click on adaptive rendering or adaptive sampling and let's see you can already see um let's see so right now we're running at about 51 seconds for 1024 wait till it gets to that okay 36 seconds we're just going to let this kind of chew through so that we can see if there's any difference I don't know if we're going to see a difference right now specifically because we don't have a lot of lights in the scene but let's go ahead and click that on that's about 36 seconds one 146 let's see once it hits that 256 doot-doot to c39 still same 39 seconds all right so I think right now it's about the same specifically because we don't have any lights on our scene so let's go ahead and get into this okay so we've got our settings set up for our render engine now let's go up a go and set up our specific settings in our camera tag or in our camera yeah so octane camera I've got a brand new camera tag on here and then I'm going to go over to camera imager and click on the camera imager now that didn't do anything right away because all these settings are default when you have this clicked on or off so when you click it on then you can change your settings now what we're going to want to do is we're going to want to change our response we are one of wanting to work in a linear workflow the linear workflow is the best way to really get to be able to work with color the best because as you can see on this the default Agfa color Futura 100 CD I've always noticed it kind of gives it like a greenish tint and I don't really want to work with some sort of response if you it's okay whenever you're just like doing normal logo spins or something like that but if you're going to be doing interior scenes you want to always want to work in linear so after linear and the first thing we notice is it's super dark that's because in linear mode you need to make sure that your gamut is set correctly so here our gamma is at 1 we need to change that to 2.2 now you can see instantly that one the scene looks a lot brighter because we change that gamma and two it's not as like yellowish green as uh as the default one so let's go back to the default one and we'll go there you can see it's kind of got this greenish tint to it you know versus our linear mode with our correct gamma kind of have a little bit warmer like a maybe a little reddish blue to it but this is what we're going to want to work with when we're working with interior lighting specifically with Octane's actually most when you're working in a linear workflow you want to do a linear response and you always want to do the gamut through point two okay so now what are we going to do let's go ahead and start with a sunlight so I need a light in order to be able to turn off this wall actually no you know what let's not start with that what we want to do is you can see right now all these windows they're just a blank windows now they also have a little bit of oh that's just the the non texture okay so we've got these blank windows and we want to turn these windows into glass now this is one of the biggest things with octane that took me forever to get my head around with any other render engine like v-ray or Arnold or redshift you have portal lights so portal lights basically you set up behind your window you show you set it to not be seen by your camera and then you set it as a portal light to where it kind of like it takes the light that's coming in and it spreads it a whole lot evenly a whole lot more evenly okay so but they don't have that in octane octane they have something called a portal material so in order to create a portal material you go to create shader octane and then portal material so on that portal material you'll see as I throw this onto my glass it will go straight through and then let me go ahead and add that to all my glass on the rest of the scenes so we'll go into window small I've got my glass set up here and then I'll go into my big window over here and I will throw my portal material on my class now here's the number one thing that's kind of annoying about octane and interior interior lighting there's no reflection on this glass in any other in any other render engine what you would do is you would actually put a like a a glass texture on the actual glass and then shoot a portal light through it this we're actually using a portal material but we're not getting any glass reflection like you would with normal glass now you would say okay Matt we'll just go ahead and throw a glass texture on there okay well let's do that but you see then it just turns into glass okay so which is okay but the point of using portal lights and portal materials is that it will evenly disperse the light instead of just throwing it through and you'll see I'll show you an example once we get some lights behind these that it will just blow out your scene if you've just got glass so what do we do if we want to add some reflectivity to it now this is this is a workaround until they get this fixed but something I've I've kind of come up with what you can do is you can create a new glass material so we'll just go ahead shader octane octane material we're going to make a specular material and then we're going to bring the transparency or opacity down to 0.2 so at point two and then let me see what I did here with this oh yeah actually okay I did do that okay so then we're going to bring our index down to a full mirror no that's not right I apologize okay we are not making a specular material we are making a glossy material and we basically want to bring it down to index of one because we're doing a full mirror so on this we're basically creating a full mirror and then we're bringing down the transparency to about 20% now as you can see I did that here and put those put each individual plane I put a plane in front of slightly in front of where the glass would be so what it's doing is the lights are going to be shooting through the portal material it's still going to disperse and then we've got the reflectivity on the plane that will give you that reflectivity so as you can see here it now looks a bit much more realistic because you've got that glass and you've got that reflectivity so let's go ahead and now start lighting the scene and now that we've got some windows I can actually turn back on that fourth wall and you'll see it gets a lot darker which is fine we're gonna we want the light to bounce how it would actually how it would in real life so let's start with a sunlight and so in here we're going to go to object object daylight I'm going to go ahead and throw this down in my lights and cameras and then I'm going to rotate this up until I get this sweet little gobo look where you've got it shooting through the the window here the door here and then it's creating the little crisscross here so let's go ahead and bring that down I want that to basically match up with the floor right here I think that looks really good that adds a nice warm feeling to your actual scene so and the biggest thing about interior lighting or creating interior scenes as it is is that you want to add detail detail will absolutely sell a scene if you don't have a lot of detail in there it won't look it just won't feel as realistic so being able to shoot through this and getting this little gobo effect on the floor that can really help sell it so from there we're going to go ahead and add some lights around our individual windows and stuff so I'm going to do an octane area light and then we're going to move this right behind this window right here and we're going to fill it up all the way here bring that bring that down okay now let's bring it just a little bit closer and then we'll go back to our scene and now you can see it in here so what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and click off and normalize when you're working with I've found when you're working with interior lighting you almost always want to turn off normalize because you want to be able to work with the lights without if you set a light here and you set it for say 6500 which is a outdoor lighting and then you put another light in and you've got normalized clicked on it's going to adjust the lighting if you change one or the other and we don't want that to happen we want individual control and we won't don't want it to adjust the way the other one looks and then we're also going to turn off surface brightness so in that on our tag on our visibility we're going to turn off camera visibility now you see here we've got good light coming through it's dispersing it really well like it would because of the portal light and then we've got the reflectivity from the lights now I want to show you something real quick let's go ahead and turn off the mirrored glass okay and then we're going to go to our door and we're going to just go ahead and put in some glass where the glass is instead of that now look at that it freakin blows it out and I'll tell you why because in octane when you're shooting a light through glass there's no way to turn an off that light through the glass you can only you actually just see the light the whole time so by putting glass in there we may get the reflectivity but it's going to it's going to completely blow out our scene so best practice is to have the portal material on the glass and then go ahead and add the mirrored glass in and then you see you don't actually see the light in the background so that's how you keep the lighting and the realism of the glass going and that really to me that was the hardest thing to get my head around was how to do this correctly okay so let's go ahead and add a couple more octane lights in order to put them right behind their windows let's see my daylight oh here's another thing on our tag we actually want to do shadow visibility and turn that off now you see we get a much better picture and we get to keep that that kind of gobo look from our octane octane daylight and we're going to go we will go in and like adjust all the all the the power on all of these in just a second once we get them into place so I'm just going to hit command and just duplicate this particular one bring it forward rotate it to do there we go 90 and then bring it out bring it centered make it smaller and this is the same type of thing that you would do with just about any other render engine except for you would make these lights specifically porta lights um and then let's bring it in right there and that should be good and then okay this light it's like duplicate this light using command look make sure it's facing the right way 180 degrees and then we're just going to line this up up against this window as well there we go we'll go in here and now you can see we've got a much brighter scene and so we're going to need to bring down all of the lights quite a bit so let's go ahead and start with bringing them all down to about 25 to actually think that looks pretty good so the left side we're probably going to want a little bit higher because it's got this light here it we've got the gobo kind of thing going so let's go ahead and bring that up to 50 and see how that does that looks pretty good that looks pretty good okay now another thing that we can do is see this recessed lighting that I added up here we want to make that actually like show up so normally with something like this in like v-ray or Arnold you would use IES lights now IES lights in octane don't work that well they're super super noisy and they just they just don't look that great so and you could also create a spotlight oh wait achtung doesn't have a spotlight oh no what are we going to do well bro graph actually offers a spotlight for sale specifically for for octane so let's go ahead and bring in this spotlight lights and cameras and then as you can see here we've got the cool little spotlight and we're going to go ahead and put one on each of these individual each on these individual let me go ahead and turn off the show inseam here so then we can see the actual spotlight there we go so we want it to go down like that and then within our spotlight settings we've got all the awesome set that you instantly get with a regular spotlight in cinema you've got your cone with your fall-off your focal distance is just for like a visual aid you've got your power your temperature your sample rates so we are going to bring in our cone with a little bit and we're going to add a bunch of fall-off here maybe bring that up to like 25 C okay that's really good that's really good okay so then let me turn on one of these lights light it can actually see and then we're going to put this light up in our little spotlight I like using the bro Graff spotlight in octane whenever I have some sort of light that needs to project like this I would much rather do this than IES lights now you'll see here this is one little thing that you need to change in the spotlight is this source size and we need to change this to zero so the source size is zero and then you won't get that shadow up there so let's just go ahead and duplicate these lights and we're going to put one on each of the individual recessed lighting let's go ahead - to throw these in spot lights now if you want the bro Graff spotlight it is $69 and I use it all the time now also that comes with it it's our luminous plugin you've got spotlight you've got a softbox a ring light quick sky which is fantastic anytime you're modeling it's great to just throw in a quick sky and then a quick psych wall and then also an IES tester to where you can just throw in a whole bunch of IES lights and instantly see what they look like instead of having to deal with the other the other way of looking at eye yes okay so we've got that we've got that let's go ahead and grab two outward ones that one and this one nope yes and we'll duplicate those I'm just hitting command and then we're going to turn down all these lights because we just want a little bit so spotlight let's do our power I'd say let's bring it down even more than that 15 and we'll see if that makes our scene too bright I think it's a little too bright so our power let's bring that down to 10 still think it's a little too bright bring it down to 2.5 oh we could change our temperature oh I think our normalize is on no normal eyes it's not on okay let's just we add a lot of them Oh nope we didn't do these two lights as well all right let's go ahead and grab all of these lights grab all the lights we'll bring that down to ten see how that looks that looks a lot better yeah you just get a little bit of light over here maybe we can even bring it up a little bit more let's do 20 see how that looks so realism in interior lighting it all comes from just these little tiny streaks of light and different shadows that are playing off of each other in order to make it look more realistic let's bring that back down to let's split the difference ago fifteen and then in our camera let's go ahead and bring down our exposure just a bit to like maybe 0.75 oh that looks a lot better yeah so you get that light coming in here do maybe like 0.7 that's pretty good and I think we could probably bring up our spotlights as well maybe only 20 see what that looks like I like that I like that okay that'll work for me so we've got the recessed lighting it's shooting down you know our spotlights Arbor grafts spotlights and stuff but here's one thing like you can't really tell where the lights are coming from so we've got these recessed lighting and stuff but we really want to actually like show it so what we can do is we can create a new emission material so we'll create a new material and then in our emission we're going to do a blackbody emission and then in our in our recessed lighting we've got just a tube which is the outside of it so if I can find the actual so I'll zoom in here you see we've got a tube and then we've got a cylinder on the inside real symbol for the recessed lighting we're going to want to throw the emission onto the cylinder so you see it actually cast some light so now I think it's going to cast a lot of light and let's go ahead and throw these on each of these individual cylinders make sure that my render instances is on okay and you see we get a lot of noise let's go ahead and go into our blackbody emission settings oh look normalizes on so let's turn that off for one and then cast illumination is okay I think let's make sure it doesn't kill it too much that's not too bad happens if we took on surface brightness I think that actually brings it up and then you start getting all the reflections in everything so now you can see you've got these spotlights and you actually now have a source for the spotlight it's not just some random you know light somewhere that you're seeing over here it gives it the illusion say this light here and this streak here it gives it a lusion that there's a recessed lighting over here and actually I want to adjust some of these spots the ones at the front I want them to actually point inward a little bit we're going to cheat this to where we're actually shooting kind of on the wall okay it's there cool all right so we've got all of that on now let's go ahead and turn this on turn add a light on maybe Matt's gonna blot our scene okay so now let's see how this looks yeah so shooting it that way you can kind of see it creates this nice little just like different type of lighting so that you can see like okay I think that your mind makes you think that the light here is going here so it gives it you're tricking yourself into believing that it's much more realistic so that's really the few like caveats with octane rendering really like the glass and getting the glass to look much more realistic is the hardest thing but with just the simple like ability of adding the portal light which evenly distributes the light as well as your windowed mirror glass adding that that mirrored with the 20% pairen see that really helps sell it now another thing that you could do like I've got here is I created three little planes that I believe are not casting shadows and then I've got them I just threw like kind of a background on them and within the texture on them you can see I've got a little background just one that I found off of Google just a little background I did surface brightness but I didn't do cast illumination I did it as an emission texture because I didn't want to do it as a regular texture just a regular diffuse because I want to give it that blown out look because if you look at a lot of interior Lighting's you can see like a big difference between outside and inside what it looks like so I blew that out quite a bit now if you don't want it to be so much you can go into your camera tag and you can actually bring down this high light compression come on and you can see it's not blowing it out so much so you want to do it there it compresses some of the highlights and makes it a little bit like more evenly lit so yeah that's basically it so the biggest thing is that especially with those mirrored glass you want to be able to to see the reflections and stuff and it just helps create a much more beautiful scene also just the many details that you can add is as much detail as you can add to your scene really helps sell it especially with the the spotlights and I would I would recommend staying away from IES lights just because they're so noisy and then just filling up your scene with really pretty stuff and that good composition as well will help really sell an interior scene but when it comes to lighting you know you want to stick with your portal materials you want to add that mirrored 20 transparency 20% transparency mirrored reflection in there for those reflections and you really want to use some good spotlights instead of the IES lights to get those just random streaks of light and stuff like that so until next time I'm Matt mill said this is fro Graff check out our podcast our YouTube page - this up on Twitter and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Brograph Tuts

Views: 30,806

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4d, c4d, octane, otoy, render, 3d, animation, tutorial, Interior Lighting, portal materials, portal lights, glass, reflections, spotlight

Id: ZEMOlX57wUg

Length: 36min 36sec (2196 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/brographtutorials]

Hey guys, we got a message from u/kerrmotiondesign that I thought I would pass along to you guys, because it's got a lot of good insight.

"Hey guys, I just wanted to pm you on the side to offer some suggestions for your interior lighting tutorial. I think the scene is fairly confusing in terms of the light language. By that I mean it's hard to tell where the light is coming from. You're also not taking advantage of the efficiency of octane's daylight. Octane's nature is to take fairly inefficient workflows and make them feasible by pushing the computing through a GPU. This principle applies to interior lighting also, in my experience. I quickly opened your scene, increased the diffuse bounces, removed the area lights in the windows, and increased the intensity of the sky for this result: https://puu.sh/vnumh/bd7c127d62.jpg some real life reference for comparison to above image: https://saman3230.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/lan09.jpg http://www.wallcoo.net/photography/home_space_02_1600/images/Interior_Photography_GK105.jpg If we're going for photo-realism, direct sunlight should either be overexposed or nearly overexposed. In your final render, theres no clear sense of light direction - which can feel correct if you're exposing for the interior with no direct sunlight visible in the scene. The issue is you have very bright ambient daylight in your image, which suggests the sun is behind us. However, there is a very dim sunlight coming through the window from the left - which feels incorrect. https://puu.sh/vnunO/d22643a2a6.png some real life reference without direct sunlight for comparison: http://2.design-milk.com/images/2014/04/Architecture-for-London-Islington-flat-1.jpg http://sfgirlbybayadm.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/table3.jpg http://sfgirlbybayadm.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/table4.jpg Anyway, not trying to 'call you out' which is why I directly PM'd you - just wanted to voice my thoughts because this could be misleading for people who are honestly trying to learn how to light an interior."