C4D R25 Beginners Workshop (Part 3)

what's up everyone how's it going welcome back to another of our hands-on with max on beginner cinema 40 workshops in uh version 25 and as always i'm joined with matt how's it going matt hello yes it's going alright thank you again we're sunny it only ever seems to be sunny when we do ask the trainer that's good maybe we should just do one every day and then it'll be that's it that would be lovely yeah i agree with that also good morning to sue um happy afternoon to jay and hey jerry as well uh don't forget to um you know give us a shout out in the chat let us know where you're from um and just yeah what you've been up to today uh so for anyone who hasn't been on one of these sessions before the idea is to get you guys comfortable in cinema 4d in just six weeks so you know we've broken this down and this is kind of the layout of the course and so far we've actually already done weeks one and two so we have done our getting started where we looked at the new version 25 we looked at primitives performers and then last week we went through loads of different types of modeling so if you guys didn't happen to catch that uh let us know because we actually do record these and we put them on our youtube so let us know in the chat and we can link you to those as well so today week three is where we're gonna be looking at all things to do with lighting and materials and so yeah let's have a little look at what we're going to be kind of having a look at today so the idea is we're going to be going through the different light types inside of cinema 4d and this is going to be kind of native cinema 4d we're not going to be looking at anything to do with um redshift it's all going to be inside either standard or physical stuff today we're also going to look at setting up what's called a three-point lighting setup so this is like the most standard lightens up when it comes to things like photography and it's just like a really nice kind of introductory way of adding some lighting to our scene we're also going to understand what hdri images are like how how and when and why we use them and then we're also going to look at global illumination and that is a render setting and you're probably thinking but rendering is week six but global illumination is really important when we when we're lighting with like a hdri image we have to look at like kind of some realistic light balances so we need to make sure we look at that today we're also going to understand the main differences between a standard and a physical workflow as well as creating some of our own materials completely from scratch um and a little bit different to kind of if anyone did see this course kind of uh at the start of the year um we didn't actually do this next bit i thought it would be quite cool to add some dirt some scratches and smudges to our textures and materials to make them just look more realistic and we're going to take those textures from the asset browser so all of this stuff should be included if you guys have version 24 or 25 and we're actually going to add some lights and materials to the shelf scene that we made last week if you don't have that let us know and we can link you to the project file or we can just look at creating this anyway but kind of just maybe adding some textures to some primitive objects instead so we can all follow along so let's get into it so matt did you want to grab the screen and hey to everyone so roll barry uh deborah christine rick it's um lovely to have you all with us live and don't forget to you know drop any questions throughout the next two hours in there and then me and matt will be answering pretty much most of them live for you obligatory question can you see my screen yes i can hazard right okay lights uh camera action or at least just lights at this point uh so lights exist inside of cinema 4d over here now um under my little light bulb icon and if i click and hold we've got a few things here we're not going to use every single one of these not today anyway um we're just going to look at a couple of them so a light inside cinema 4d is exactly as you would expect it to be it is a light it is an omnidirectional light which is why it's called an omni light and if i press render which will allow me to see what it does you'll see it's black what sort of light is this i hear you ask ah that's because it's got nothing to shine on so light going nowhere has nothing to be seen and it's not visible by default either so let's create a little simple scene so i've got my light i'm going to create a floor plop and i'm going to create a cube dunk now i just want to prove something for you as well so i have my cube and i have my floor and i create a light and my scene goes dark and i do that and my scene is black again i get i i work in tech support as well and one of the things that we get sometimes is i've created my scene and i've created light and everything goes black yes that's what happens when you have a light inside of a box please remember that lights are created at the center of the universe at least the center of this universe um so if you have anything in the middle of your universe it will be created inside and you will need to make sure that you move your light outside of it so now if i render you can see i have me my light it is illuminating my scene it's not doing a particularly pleasant job but nonetheless it's doing what it does okay lights themselves inside of cinema 4d are relatively simple they've got a lot of settings but they're relatively simple with what you largely need to do so we've got our general tab okay and our general tab funnily enough allows you to change the color it's exactly as you'd expect other things to do and you can change the hue saturation value and you can make them all different sorts of colors which is absolutely wonderful you can also change the intensity this way as well um and i sometimes change the intensity using the color value but that's just an old workflow that i use and you can change things like that um they're pretty similar settings across all of the different types of lights so this is an omnidirectional light which means it will create light in all directions no matter where it is um light doesn't actually kind of get any less depending on where the light is so it is not a physically accurate light but we'll come to that sort of stuff a little bit later on for the moment i'm going to delete that dunk then i'm going to look quickly at another type of light which is fun enough a spotlight now a spotlight is exactly as you'd expect it to be it is a light that shines on a spot so it is defined by this cone whereas the last one was omnidirectional so it didn't have a sort of cone of viewing and i can just sit here and i can rotate my spotlight and choose where it's going to be kind of like you know like a stage show maybe if i put a bat in front of it i can signal batman although you'll never see me in batman in the room at the same time um and i can also use the little orange handles yellow handles to widen or constrict the spotlight itself so that's that's fairly simple and again it's very similar to all of the others which is i can change its color with the color values um just clicking and changing is is no problem whatsoever and then i'm going to get rid of that one one thing that i do like is the fact that it the little icon next to the light now shows you what color it is that's got to be one of the best editions we've done in the last couple of years um so i'm gonna get rid of that i'm then going to create a target light and a target light looks very similar to a spotlight and the reason for that is because it is however it is a light with a target tag and a light target null object created and if i move my target object you can see that the light points to it no matter where it goes and i can move it anywhere and the light will always point to it or i can have the target where i want it and i can move the light and if i move the light it will always point at it can i rotate the light no why well i can rotate it round in one axis but i can't change which direction it is pointing at because it is always going to point at the light at the light target which is the null object so i can move one and then if i want to i can move the other so there lights super fast let's get rid of both of those we've got a few other lights an area light funnily enough is a light that emits from an area so it's very similar to uh normally directional light except light goes in just like two directions one from one side and one from the other this is also not physically accurate so it doesn't matter how far away this is that cube will always remain lit okay so it doesn't change its intensity if i just bring the cue back neither does it matter how big or small that light is the amount of light from it remains the same okay but we will look at that and again that's the difference between a standard and a physical or pbr workflow just going to get rid of that very quickly and then not that one we have pbr lights okay they are based on physically based rendering um but i don't think it's going to work properly until i change my renderer but you can see that there is an absolute difference already in rendering even with the normal renderer that there is a lot of light emitting from that whereas if i move it over there there is less light this may not be physically accurate because i'm not in physical renderer but nonetheless you can still see the difference between the type of light and how much light will then be sort of created i think i need the proper render on but you can see how it has an effect which is quite nice dunk um ies lights i'm not going to demonstrate because it requires an ies profile an ies profile is um every time a light manufacturer creates some form of new type of fitting like literally a light fitting they create or can create an ies profile which is basically a picture of a light dispersion pattern so the the shape that the light creates on the wall that this fitting is creating wall ceiling floor or whatever and it's largely used for architectural visualization so that someone says this is the light fitting that we want to use you find the profile you put it in and you know that it will be physically accurate to the light fitting that they would use in real life there is the infinite light and the infinite light is a bit like a giant dome so think of the infinite like a bit like a sky because it goes all the way around um because light is coming from all the way around you that's what that does and the other one is a sunlight which funnily enough acts like a sunlight so it has a direction it has a time of day it has a coordinate system you can choose what year it is longitude latitude distance from something you know it's it's really interesting you can do all of this sort of stuff and you can see the difference that changing the time will make um so it's quite a useful thing to do and then there's a physical sky which does that for you okay um that is a super quick look at the different types of lights inside of cinema 4d is there any questions on that thus far uh yes uh sorry if you answered it as well i'm just going through um the chat is there a difference between for example an omni light where you change the light type to area versus a real area light no no um that's just it's just a quick way of doing it so if you've got a light and exactly where you want and you've got an omni light and then you go actually i didn't want an omni light i wanted a spot you can simply just change the type it is it doesn't make a difference um it's just changing the light type and you will notice that there's a few different types of lights a few presets here that haven't been that don't have their own little icon basically in the light drop down and not used a great deal but i like the parallel spots um they're kind of a useful light to have for various weird and wonderful things anything else cool uh i just had another one pop in what kind of light works like the sun for shadows and fill but it's subject to the time of day position or color the area kind of does it but i need a whole bunch of them um i don't know i mean the the light i would use if you're trying to replicate sunlight is you need a sunlight and that's because that's exactly what that will do it is subject to time of day position and color and things like that and it it tweaks itself the way that works can you have i'm assuming you can have multiple sunlights i've never tried yeah so you can have one set to different times of day if you want to what sort of interesting look that will create i've got no idea oh there you go washes everything out but it is doable cool uh yeah a few more coming in um how do you link a target light to an animated object uh that can be done a couple of different ways if i create mimi target light again if i had an animated object and you you'll get to see my exciting skill here in in 3d animation don't worry we cover animating next week how exciting that is there are several things you can do you can make the light a child of the cube so that the target is where it is where it will follow or under the expression so on my light is a target expression this is a little tag that says what do you want me to point towards and it was pointing towards before i deleted it pointing towards the light target but i could and if i wanted to stop deleting that um use the cube instead so i've got my light target and it's saying i will point at that or i can simply drag and drop the cube in there and it will always point at the cube instead without even the need for the light null any longer that's how i would do that cool um dawns are something similar can you link a spotlight's target to an object yep that's the same thing um joe was wondering can you save a entire lighting setup um in theory yes that's it that's that's your answer jay sorry no i'm um what you should then be able to do if you like if you get a lighting set up i'll tell you what we'll try it in a bit when we do the three-point lighting you should in theory be able to go to your asset browser which is now over here on the left and you can add file to database um so you could create a lighting setup and add it to your basically your own asset browser for you to choose to use other times that should do it cool um also joseph was saying regarding kind of a question about the sun um it can be kind of challenging to find the right time of day to get a good color or intensity you could always try an infinite light and then control the color within the infinite light and then kind of control the rotation it might be a little bit easier than actually trying to find the right time to get the right color in the sun because that always gives a nice light light and set up as well um another quick one a little bit off-topic um but always useful uh what's the use of the coordinates manager if all the coordinates of an object are located in the attributes manager um [Music] good question it's a backup but it also allows you to change various things and the coordinates manager will also show you the coordinates of points and edges which the coordinates manager of the object will not do you can also do um a quick reset straight in the coordinates manager as well which i don't think you can do yes no you can't another quick one why are the shadows deactivated for lights and how can this be activated as a preset well that is my next point so as you may have noticed there are no shadows on by default and the reason for this is it's a speed thing so the amount of i mean computers have sped up an awful lot since the creation of cinema 4d but the basics the setups and presets of cinema 4d are designed to be fast and not every time do you want a light to be on so you have lights that are always set with the shadows off sorry i'm just going to change that back to an omni light and get rid of the target because i don't need it as you see yeah if i render this there is no shadow that's one of the things that we miss so there are different types of shadow here and you turn them on by going to the general and you go to none actually i'm just going to reset that default that's cool um i'm going to change my shadow to i'll show you the different types we've got ray traced hard which gives you a consistent hard outline no matter where the light is in comparison to the object we have shadow maps soft which gives you a blurry outline no matter where it is in comparison and then you have your physically accurate one which is area and that is the moment if i didn't accidentally zoom in you can see that where the object is closer to the object the object casting the shadow is closer to the object receiving the shadow it is a sharper shadow and then it fades out the further away the distance between the object casting and where the shadow is so this is the most physically accurate type of shadow you can save that as a preset if you want so you can have your shadow on and you can save it like that all the time and you can say light with shadow shadow no um and then click save as default and then in theory if i create a new light again my light has an area shadow on each time i create one that's got to be one of the most useful things we've added for 25 that is just so easy much easier than it used to be yeah i think they're great i've already got a whole bunch that's cool um [Music] so moving on from that i guess we need to look at the three-point lighting setup don't we yeah okay so let's create ourselves a floor which i just had to remember is in a slightly different place so let's create a floor there and let's create as i like to say my most amazing 3d scene known to man there it is um so you can tell why i am a modeler there it is this is a useful thing to do because of the type of object that it is so if i render this it's very weird because the light is coming from well technically this is a bit cheaty really there is actually now so i don't know if you know this a three-point lighting system is the default light for cinema 4d you just can't see it and no you can't make it appear um it just happens to be in the background originally the default light inside of cinema 4d was like someone had attached a torch to the camera so wherever the camera moved around the object there was always a light pointing at it it's very similar now except that it's not just one light it's a three-point lighting system so we actually get quite a nice look of the object that we have here but we are of course missing the fact that it's interacting with anything else there's no shadows as such because this is just a if there's no light in the scene you can't see anything sort of light not a this is a light that we need to render light which is what we're about to create so let's create our first light and i'm going to create an omni light and i'm going to raise it up and this is the light that is wherever you want to have the main focus of the light come from okay and same as you look look at that i don't even have to turn the shadow on because it's there already because i've made it a default that's pleased me more than you know so there i go i can render and instantly i've got my light with my shadow but the problem that we get of course is kind of like the moon half of it or some of it is incomplete shadow so we can't see it and we lose that object between the object and the shadow as well and that's not a very good lighting setup if you want to try and show off some form of object or model so what we then do and i'm just going to create a camera very quickly so that you can see where my camera is pointing we will get to cameras next week so don't worry but that's just a camera button and i'm not even looking through it i'm just using it as reference because then what i'm going to do i'm going to look at my top view and you can see here is where my camera is and here is where my light is and what i'm going to do i'm going to create a new light by copying and pasting that one and i'm just going to drag it the other side so now the other side of the sphere is going to be illuminated but i don't want it to be quite as bright so i am going to lower its intensity to about 60 65 percent and some people do have a lovely tendency of just making this ever so slightly blue and now if i render i mean like that might be a bit too blue even there so i'm going to make that five percent oh forgot i did that but now i'm no longer losing that side inside of the shadow um and i can see a lot more of my sphere and this one i find remember this is called a fill light isn't it i do this every time and i forget every time one day i will write this down yeah we did have this conversation during my last um last time yep i know and i can never remember well people definitely had like different words for the different ones and then it became a massive conversation some call it phil some call it key i think don't they yeah i do i think do you think can you fill and room oh that's another one oh that's what they call that one okay that one feel on that one room oh well we'll see what this lot say um and very similar i'm gonna copy and paste this one again and i'm going to look at my top view which i've used f2 to get to this light is designed to fill in the rest underneath so i'm going to lower it a bit as well because what i want to do is not have that dark patch here you can see if i just turn off the light the difference between here we're still losing information and shape here if i turn this one on and render i now see where the light is and again people normally whack this down to about 30 and this one is ever so slightly brown or orange and i suspect but i may be wrong that it's the two other colors to make natural light because actually when you do things outside there are two colors that influence your images and that is the color of the sun being yellow and that is the color of the sky being blue so i may be completely off there but that's why people do degrees in photography and i didn't so you can see that with a little bit of that i now have a three-point lighting setup which easily allows me to see um all the way around my object for curvature and the other thing that you can do which is the joy of cinema 4d and 3d is i can turn off shadows that i don't want to see so that it doesn't overkill my image and i'm gonna do that with those two um so that i only i have a three-point lighting system but only one shadow which makes life a lot easier and then in theory what i can do i can select all of these and i can group them with option or alt g to group and i can call it three point writing and then in theory going back to j's question i can go to my asset browser i can create and i can add objects to my database and i'm going to call it three-point lighting system click it there click ok and there it is i have a three-point lighting system so if i created a new file and i double click that there's my three-point lighting system two birds one stone there i like that um and there we go there's my three-point lighting system so another useful place to stop any questions uh not at the moment uh joey was saying key is primary and phil is to feel the shadows thank you that's what i go with as well um yeah i haven't got any questions i mean they may they may come in nope just to thank you you're welcome um is there any way to get rid of that ring like the dark area which that's very difficult to figure out what you mean are you talking about the back there on the sphere so the bottom dark area or like the side or the yeah this this back bit or on the sphere itself or the dark the fact that this just disappears into nothing on the sphere that's just light positions so that's entirely down to you so that will be however you want to move the lights around and now there is a tool that's really useful for this although it has annoyingly moved i'm not gonna lie that isn't a that is a shame there used to there is still the lighting tool but it's now no longer under the lights um and i don't think it's been put anywhere else other than under tools but there is a lighting tool and what that allows you to do is you can control kind of like where that light is by using this as a kind of highlight feature and what area of the thing you want to create and it's all down to movement lights and shapes and brightness is basically yeah if you didn't want that kind of contrasting area on the right hand side just up the intensity yeah on the fill light to have an all-over natural look but normally if you were doing a three-point lighting setup you would want to have a little bit of contrast um but i mean it's personal preference in the day yep well that one went fast anything else um can the brightness be specified in any other units other than percentage no um not that way but you can turn on use temperature so you can use a color temperature i think instead although i have to say i've never done that i think that's more the um color yeah so i think it changes the color of the light based on the temperature yeah that's about it that's all it'll do i don't think it will do the intensity so oh actually hold on brain that's not photometric intensity come on come on where is it details actually i swear you used to be able to do something have i forgotten how to do this it's not project it's not the lens it's not noises it's not the caustics it's in theory you can change the intensity but i don't know what unit that's working in oh units candela or lumens yes you can but you have to enable it under the photometric tab it's not available as a different thing under the general tab cool um cast is wondering how would you do a setup to illuminate translucent objects like glass very similar to what we've just done with the three-point lighting system to be honest you know you've got to think about what would an actual photographer in real life use and they'd use lights the same way and you just have to have some form of background or backdrop and light it in such a way that it gives the highlights that you need cool um is the lighting tool uh does it behave as a force light or is it controlling it's controlling the light so if i do another setup so let me just create a sphere let me create a spotlight i'm going to move that there and go to my tools go to my lighting tool what this allows me to do is saying is sort of select a point and go that's the center of it i want the center of it here without having to manually adjust where that light is throughout the universe manually by moving it up moving it left rotating it pointing it whatever i can use the lighting tool by selecting the light that i want to move saying here is the center clicking and holding with my mouse but saying i want the light over here to highlight that bit instead cool thanks that's all right can you add an infinite wall to solve the black background in theory yes um yeah there's a couple of different ways people do it um one of the quickest ways is this which is if my brain will allow me to remember where the splines are is grab an arc do that and then dick it in and extrude and then make it big and then you've got a curvature and a ground that you can kind of use to cheat that so if i had a floor as well and that was lower or above or whatever and i could also cheat and make that arc editable and then create another point how many points has this thing got does it have more than one point i'm just going to cheat i'm going to create another point there with a control click and then i'm just going to move that one out and i've created me a photographic background that's how i would do it i do pretty much the same thing but plain and bend yeah that would work too um intensity wise can we go past 100 i believe you can there's my light what yep one million percent i don't know that dread to think how bright that would be but yes you can go above a hundred percent cool thank you you can also go below zero percent not quite sure how that works with a light does it start removing light from the scene but that's a science question i have never tried it no i didn't think you could before an an unlight anti-light don't know i'm sure that's something that star trek will solve um those are all the questions for now yep okay cool three people have said exactly the same thing which is that if i do make the light too dark i will create a black hole see i'm not the only sci-fi geek here that would have known that that's awesome definitely went straight over my head okay right let's i've got 25 minutes let's have a look then at hdris so an hdri is a high dynamic range image that is an image that funnily enough if you rearrange the words contains high dynamic range information these images are created by taking photos of an area with different levels of brightness data and then compiling them together to create a single kind of layered image that contains brightness data that 3d programs like cinema 4d can translate into there is more light coming from this bit than this bit so therefore there will be light bits and dark bits is pretty much the fundamental way that that works so if i create me missphere and i will need to create something to put the hdri on um in cinema 4d the hdri is placed upon the sky now there's two skies in cinema 4d under the lighting there is a physical sky for which we will ignore under this one which is listed like a apparent sort of gridded sphere that is actually a sky object so create the sky object and we now have a sky which is an infinite sphere that goes all the way around my scene it doesn't matter how far out you go it will never be there you'll never get to it so that's why it's infinite and then i'm going to go to my asset browser and i'm going to search for just to show you hdr now an hdr is the back plate because that is the type of file that we use and if i just double click this it will download it because it's from the internet and load it up in the picture view and here is my lovely hdr now an hdr doesn't have to be a 360 degree image but if we are using hdris to light scenes generally they will be because they are mapping 360 degrees around it so they are a 360 degree image in these instances and they contain lots of levels of brightness data which i don't think i can kind of really demonstrate here i'll need to do it inside of cinema itself so these are the back plates and they are useful for things like redshift when because you will use the hdr file in a dome light in redshift for those people who are going to ask me that so there's the question um in cinema we have these already created for us so i do hdr i and here is the material that has the back plate already installed so if i create one which one do i like let's create that one so download and pop that and then that plonks itself in my materials manager which is now over here and hidden i've got to remember that and i can click and i can drag that to my sphere no ignore that to my sky and that will then create a lovely sunny park just outside of the bad hamburg hotel in germany [Music] it's a bit blurry but that's not a problem because when you render it you'll see the light as it were um but what effect is this having on my sphere the answer at this particular point is none at all because as ellie mentioned earlier in order to allow the hdri the hdr material to affect this world i need to turn on something called global illumination and global illumination is a render setting so let's go up here i'll tell you what just for kicks i'm going to press that button so you guys can that's tiny you guys can see what it was like without the hdri on which is a very weird image because it just looks like basically i've thrown a terrible 3d sphere over a really lovely photo and what i'll do i'll go to my render settings so edit render settings a little cogwheel and we'll go through more about what these things mean when we do rendering but for the moment i'm just going to create them or maybe we'll do it in a bit go to effect and i'm going to create something called global illumination click and what that does is it forces cinema 4d to think of light as something that properly bounces whereas in cinema 4d it doesn't by default and i'll show you that now we'll come back to this image well i'll render this image and then we'll come back so you can see the difference between the two so this is being lit by my fret my fake three-point lighting system that exists inside cinema this is now being lit by the hdri around so it's figured out that there is more light coming from a certain direction which at this point is over there because that's where the sun is coming from so that area is much brighter you can see that it is brighter there and darker here because if i look that side there is less light coming because there's trees in the way um and it's it's a really useful thing so just to demonstrate let's create me my scene so i'm going to get mimi floor again and i'm going to get my sphere again maybe i should create a preset with this and then i could save it and i'll just load it up um i'm just going to create spotlight no i'm not i'm going to create an omni light and by default because i've said it if i render i should have a shadow yeah look at that but we've lost as i said this information however in real life this wouldn't be completely black because light would be bouncing off the floor back onto the sphere to illuminate it this is what global illumination forces cinema 4d to do so go to my effect go to global illumination and render again you can see i get this now pre-pass stage where it's doing an irradiance cache where it is figuring out all of those little dots are photons literally cinema 4d is firing out dots and going where does this bounce what does this hit and where does it bounce off to so that it can figure out where light properly bounces and you can see that this just by turning on global illumination is a very different image to what i had earlier because light is properly bouncing off the floor and illuminating the bottom of the sphere i think in a nutshell that's pretty much hdrs or hdris um but they really give you a nice ability of setting a scene and getting the appropriate lighting without having to do anything else other than basically go which one do i fancy that one and then dragging it onto my sky although i will need to get rid of the other one impressing render and seeing what you get and look at that so because there's a lovely sun over there it creates all of that and it's dark this side so if i look this side it's got lovely sun color coming from over there i think it's just so useful any questions on hdr's hdris uh yeah we have a couple um so i i don't know how to do this but do you know how someone would make a hdr image from a location i know if you have like a 360 camera it can do it but i don't know like the technical information sort of but i don't know it well enough to do it i know that what you do you take six to eight images using a 360 camera at different levels of exposure and then you somehow use um photoshop to comp them all together but i don't know any more than that because i've never done it um but there are tutorials out there i believe yeah um in the first example you can see the hdr image and its effect in the second one you you see the effect but no hdr how did you turn it off uh the hdr wasn't there in there there was no hdr in this one this is just global illumination so global illumination is using the spotlight to light the scene and that's what global illumination forces light to bounce in these i used an hdr to light the scene how you could hide the hdri from ah that that i can do so with an object that i want to have this lovely lighting setup but i don't want to see the sky behind i can create a tag for the sky that can hide it so i'm going to create sky or click on the sky sorry go to tags go to render tags go to compositing and turn off scene by camera okay so this one will be turned off so now when i render the light on the sphere remains the same but the sky is hidden cool thanks we had a couple of people ask uh that same one same question quite fair enough quite a big one uh is it possible to rotate the hdr yes because the hdr i is stored on [Music] a sky the sky object is what actually you rotate so i can select my sky and i can just rotate this around [Music] i can even turn it sideways and have it upside down if i really wanted to there you go this is something something trippy for you that's weird uh it makes me feel like i'm on my side yeah anyway yes you can uh cool so thanks once you engage the uh global illumination do you still have access to the three-point lighting setup to be adjusted yes um i mean obviously i would need to put that in so let me go back to my three-point light setup and we'll see what difference we make so this is without global illumination in the scene so let's turn that on um sometimes if you can get away with not having it rendering will be quicker it's just a simple thing may not be as accurate but if you don't need it to be then it's fine you can see the difference that i get with light properly bouncing off the floor now but lights and global illumination help each other but you can also use both or either individually without having lights or seeing if you see what i mean cool yeah later on when we do the um when we light the shelf scene i like with area lights and i like with the hdr yeah i'm using redshift or whatever i'm using native cinema 4d yeah you generally use the two because you can use an hdri to set the scene and give you a natural light where your object is and then i will cheat and use um lights without shadows in areas to highlight bits that i want to be just a little brighter yeah um does it make sense to change the number and depth of the bounces or the gi parameters already set to be physically correct i think that's a very good question sorry can you adjust the bounces yeah you can do that via i mean all sorts of things like that i mean the number of samples yeah i know we can do samples um number of bounces is generally done with options so it's wraith threshold depths and those sorts of things that will be um created and then global illumination there's all sorts of stuff that you can edit and adjust and change um i guess it depends on your render like so if you render with default and you find that things are like overall a little bit darker than you'd perhaps want then yes up in your gi balances i'm doing it with my redshift brain i have my gi balances um if i need to bring in some more light but the trouble is the more you up your gi balance is one the longer things will take and the more washed out things can become so it's like it is finding a balance with there is no kind of like one rule for everything one is depending if only it was one rule it's yeah depending on doing a couple of test renders and always just adjusting the right kind of settings for it i actually don't know where you can adjust the number of gi bounces i didn't think you could not in not in standard rendering we might be able to do in physical i still don't think you can actually can you nice that's samples isn't it yeah not the same sort of thing that's more like noise but you can change the number of methods and things like that which helps but that's something a little bit different yeah okay so that's gi isn't it illumination hdri things like that so let's it's time to look at materials it is now the materials manager now exists in r25 over here with this little sphere in a don't know cradle do you think is that what that's supposed to be i'm never quite sure what that's supposed to be but nonetheless the material manager now exists here on the right hand side this little active palette which is really useful and you can click and hold and you can see there's a lot of different types of material that we can create but the only one i'm going to be focusing on at this particular second is the new default material now by default the default material is a standard cinema 4d material so not a physical material a standard material and you can see that with that selected it appears in my attributes manager but i like to double click it and bring up the material editor just because i'm old school and i prefer to see all of the things here it's just easier to work with now the color tab does exactly what you think it would do it allows you to change the color of your object very similar to the light setup you can change your color you can change your brightness if you have images that you wish to input into things you know like the idea of television screens or posters or stuff that you want to have textures on then you can double click the sorry just click the three dots find an exciting image look test sphere and click ok open and it will put that into it um it will put the image as something that you can then put on a plane and just to demonstrate super quickly i'll create a cube and i will drag and drop my image to the cube and you can see that my cube now has that picture on it all the way around i can then just click the drop drop down and do clear and i can go back to my color and material so that's the color channel very easy diffusion not to be confused with diffuse diffusion is kind of like a dirt map it allows you to add other things on top of the color channel and affect different channels like luminance specular and reflection imagine you've made a really nice shiny chrome ball and some oik has come along and put a big greasy hand print all over it you would put the hand print in here in the diffusion and you would affect like specular and reflection so that it would be less reflective and less shiny where the hand print was so that you could see it luminance is exactly what you'd expect it to find and to activate a channel that is not on you just put a tick in the box and you can see that i now have an exceptionally luminant cube and you can control the intensity of that luminance cube you can even control the color of that cube so i can have it being a pink cube with a pink light inside or i can have a pink cube with a purple light inside you know you could mix and match all the two green that's interesting um and that's something that you can do with luminance channels you can choose that and again that's got a color channel it's got an image value so if you had specific areas that you wanted to be luminance only in areas then you would use that and use the image to do it transparency does exactly what it says on the tin it makes something transparent there it is and it's even set to glass now so we don't have to do that anymore reflectance i will come back to because that's a longer explanation and then leads me into the physical workflow environment ignore fog ignore uh bump makes stuff bumpy now you will note that this doesn't actually seem to make anything bumpy if i create sphere and i put the material on the sphere and i turn on the bump channel absolutely nothing happens this is this is because a bump channel requires a bump map and a bump map is a grayscale image of some sort now the quickest way for me to demonstrate this is to create a pre-made one which is to go with my little drop down and use one of these lovely little things here called noise and i'm going to click noise and you can see instantly my preview display looks noisy and bumpy and if i render my sphere now looks bumpy now you may have noticed i did have to press render to do that some instances do although now inside of cinema 4d if i go to options and i do hq noises it will show me the bump this is a guess preview you can see it's very different from the render do not necessarily rely on the viewport this is just a kind of simulation of it to let you know that this object has bump on it um so just be aware of that but this bump is a fake because as you may have noticed the outside of the sphere is still completely round it's completely smooth so this bump is a lie um but it's very useful for faking scratches dents all sorts of things where you don't need to get too close to the camera if you wanted to have real bump then you would go to something called displacement down the bottom okay and i'm going to put a tick in the box and you'll notice that nothing happens even if i render nothing happens this is because funnily enough the displacement requires a displacement map of some sort and i'm going to use the same one to show you what it does so if i create noise you can see that this time my preview has a lot of bumps on it and if i render nothing happens okay because there's a few things you need to do when using displacement one is to press this button sub polygon displacement what does that do i hear you say well we did polygonal modelling last week and we sub divided to smooth out a system and what that subdivision did was give us more segments this does the same thing so per polygon it will subdivide and it will subdivide four times now if i render still nothing happens because the sphere is a parametric or primitive object so it doesn't have any actual polygons in order to subdivide so i need to press this button here the make editable button and now finally when i press this button wow i have a severely displaced object based on the noise map that is is given here okay um and you can change that and use it but it does take a little longer to render it certainly takes a little while to process if you have a lot of them so we'll worry about that another time let's close that uh normal requires a normal map and that's something that you need to generate differently because that is a sort of strange mix of a yellow green and red no red green and blue image that is largely more used in games engines to be perfectly honest because it allows for better reflections and curving edges of square objects but we'll get to that another time uh alpha does exactly what it says on the tin what you would expect to be an alpha channel like you have in photoshop and other editing programs but this of course requires an image as well and i'm going to use not the noise this time i'm going to go to surfaces and i'm going to go to checkerboard so that's a little drop down surfaces checkerboard and you can see i have a checkerboard image here it's highlighted here and even in my preview without rendering you can see that i have taken things away so this is different from transparency which is an object that is see-through this removes it so that it is not there and then glow does exactly what it says on the tin it allows you to make things glow it works as a post effect so in a way it's very similar to just shoving this image in photoshop and adding some form of glow over the top which is very useful if you want it to work it is very useful for making neon signs um but it isn't a render effect so if you had a mirror in the scene it would not show that the object is glowing you would need to then stick that in photoshop to do it okay and that is materials superfast um any questions on that um yes can you change the sphere thumbnail in the material editor to be a cube or a plane for example yes you right click on that area and you can choose whether or not it is a cube or a plane or a double taurus which is quite an interesting one or what's the strange one that they use object animation oh that's the that just looks bizarre i always think that looks weird um okay i'm not even sure why that's a thing but nonetheless that's there you can even make it bigger although i absolutely dispute the fact that that is huge i love that it's small medium large huge is that is that the official next ever that's it yeah oh god i never knew that's that huge no i mean small is tiny huge is visible but there we go that's that's us um we've got another quick question will luminance from the material work as a light ah now that's a fun one because the answer is no not by default however using our wonderful friend um global illumination the answer will be yes so once again i'm going to set up my amazingly exciting scene and let's create a something disk so create myself a new material by double clicking in here you don't always have to do the plus you can just double click to create default material load that up turn on luminance turn off anything else stick that on the disk and press render and you'll notice that this is very ugly just in general it's a really ugly scene however if i turn on global illumination and press render i get something very different it takes its time to think and then it renders and it's in the dark and it's quite small so my disk is too small so let's whack up the size of my disk because global illumination will work out the amount of light that's coming from this and it will change it in response you can see there's more light coming out here and all these little bounces and i have a scene and i even get a shadow so yes you can use a luminant object or an object with a luminance texture to light your scene as long as you have global illumination cool thanks um those are the questions for now amazing oh right waiting is it possible to use the light from luminance but not render the disk shape good question yeah can't you have it not be seen by in theory it should be exactly the same way as the sky yes so the object is not seen by camera but the light is still having its effect that's really weird um so yeah same as we did earlier choose the object choose tags render tags compositing and turn off scene by camera exactly the same way as we did for the sky object earlier cool thanks that is uh everything for now right okay so now is the discussion that we talk about the difference between a standard and a physical workflow now what is the difference and what do i even mean by standard and physical standard is because standard is our standard renderer it is the renderer that we had millennia ago when cinema 4d first started um and then as 3d started to improve and computers started to improve people said wouldn't it be really nice if renderers were physically accurate so cinema 4d along with other places created physical renderers physically accurate renderers and they mean physically accurate to this is how light really works this is how reflections really work this is how materials should really be built when you're using a physical accurate physically accurate scene and when would you use physical ovum standard if you're trying to get photorealism that's generally it standard renderer still has its fun quirks it's completely configurable so that you can mess with the laws of physics and light and do what you want with it sketch and tune doesn't exist on anything else because funnily enough cartoon people aren't really real sorry um so sketch and tune is a really nice quirky thing that we have inside cinema 4d to give cell shading and rendering and line art and that would be exist inside cinema 4d's standard renderer physical render is if you are trying to do physically accurate rendering and to change that you go to your render settings and you go from renderer from standard to physical now on the face of it not a lot has actually changed in your scene but the way you set up a material does need to change so just to delete that and leave my sphere for a minute and turn off global illumination just so i don't have to do this again i have a new material oops and the first thing i would need to do to do a physically accurate material to work in a physical renderer is turn off color color isn't real sort of the way light and color really works in the world is everything is reflective if it didn't light wouldn't bounce off it and therefore when light bounces off of something what is reflected back is the color that we see that is the rest are all absorbed all the other way around um so the light that comes back is the light that we see and this is all done through reflectance the other thing that we do when setting up a physically accurate material inside cinema 4d is we delete this specular because the specular is also a lie okay this is a fake thing that we did many a year ago when people said what do we want in 3d we need to control how reflective something is and we need to control how shiny something is and so they made two sliders reflection and specular but this is a lie so the only other thing you should ever do with this when you're doing physically accurate stuff is press remove bye we then have layers that we need to create and one of these layers is a diffuse layer and this is the the color basically but this is the color that exists inside the reflectance channel so this is the the base color the stuff that will reflect back and i'm just going to choose a lamb version okay and that's that's going to be mine then we need to choose some form of top reflection layer and that is how does light bounce off of this thing and here we have our four different types of reflection algorithms beckmann ggx fong and ward what are the differences between those i hear you say without typing well beckmann is used for pretty much everything use beckman ggx metals okay so if you're doing some form of metal use ggx thong ignore i've never found a use for it ward rubber and skin okay so if you want to see the differences let's have an example i'm going to create a beckman and this beckman creates it super shiny okay i'll come back to why it's super shiny in a second but let's actually have a look at the difference and here is something exceptionally useful inside of cinema 4d that i don't think we've yet shown you which is contextual help find an object or an area or something like this what is a beckman what is the type right click and do show help and this will take you to the help file on that particular attribute and here you can see the different types of percentages with roughness values of beckmann ggx fong ward and astro which anisotropic diffuse i don't even know that one um here is the difference between reflections and roughness with lots of roughness and the different types of light dispersion algorithms that are dependent on the others and my favorite game spot the difference beckmann ggx thong and ward and if you think i was just really clever with what i was telling you then beckman is physically correct and fast type and should be the preferred method for both ggx produces the greatest dispersion and works for simulating metals ward is best suited for soft surfaces such as rubber or skin and you can see that there is a slight difference between these so depending on the look that you are going for you may want to change the different type of reflection algorithm that you use if you are also bored and you want to know an awful lot more about this this is possibly one of the longest articles i think that we have in the cinema 4d manual about the reflectance layer and all of the things that you can do with it and the differences between all of them and all of the different settings you can sit and play with and change and everything else underneath it so if you get bored and you really want to know about it look have a look um but going back to this i have my beckman so i'm i'm using a plastic material that's what i want to try and create but i it's currently just a giant chrome ball that's absolutely no use if i wanted to make a red shiny like plastic ball so let's go to my lower layer and that's white so let's change the color and make it red oh yeah i don't have to click ok anymore it's made absolutely no difference because i've still got this strange shiny chrome ball over the top and this is because the beckmann reflectance layer is layered up over the top and it's taking up the entire surface what we need to do we need to turn on something called fresnel and this exists down the bottom and currently is off by default because it is not physically accurate by default and i have two options what three options none dielectric and conductor conductor metals dielectric non-metals and it's pretty much that simple am i making a metal conductor am i not making a metal dielectric and what this does this works on the fresnel principle that everything is reflective at 90 degrees and you can test that theory a bit by getting really low to your desk and having a look as you look at the floor or desk and stuff like that everything becomes reflective which actually explains the theory of mirages in deserts because it's very rare that you get light that is reflecting off something at 90 degrees that you can actually see so when you see a mirage of what looks like water in a desert you are actually looking at a 90 degree reflection of the sky so that's why that happens and heat haze and other things add to it um and this principle needs to be turned on very much like global illumination by turning on dielectric boom now you see i have a shiny sphere because it is shining all the way around but it is only going to be 100 shiny at 90 degrees to my camera which basically gives me a nice shiny ball and that is the difference between a standard and physical workflow you would use as much as you can in the reflectance channel the others you can use like luminance and transparency um and even if you look here my layer color my reflectance strength i can choose an image to go in there my reflection roughness i can choose in an image to go in here so i can even do bump inside of my reflectance channel and the more you do in the reflectance channel the better it is now that you know that so that you understand why you would use the materials that way when you click and hold you have a new pbr material the physically based rendering physically biased rendering i remember which one it is material if i double click that look i have a reflectance channel and by default i have a diffuse and a reflection channel already in there which is a beckman with my fresnel turned on to dilate why it's on milk i've got no clue but nonetheless it is on dielectric so now you understand the difference you can use that in a physical rendering environment such as cinemas physical renderer any questions um yeah so people are wondering is um pbr basically the way to go then when it comes to creating things this is why i said it's entirely down to you guys if you are trying to create physically accurate and a photo yes go for physical and ppr if you're not why bother with the rendering times like i say uh sketch and tune cinema 4ds cartoon material system is a standard renderer thing only so it depends on what you are trying to do also if you're working with depth of field or motion blur then yes it's got to be physical to stand yes absolutely um dan was wondering is one of the um like reflectance types faster than the other i'm saying badminton processes faster than gdx slightly does it not not that i'm aware of oh i thought that's why beckham's recommended because it's slightly faster good question i think it's possibly actually it i mean we're talking minutia faster i think um i can't remember what it said well he says it is a fast type be honest the difference depending on what you're doing between a gx and a beckman is is minimal you won't notice much of a difference i would yeah as matt said i'd still stick to if i'm creating metals using ggx yep anything else uh just have one come in since we're talking about realism is it possible to set an object's stiffness for how it interacts with other objects during animation for example a sponge for cleaning dishes would cave in if a plate sat in it but would not if an identical sponge rests on top of it that is a question i think for our thursdays ask the trainer rather than this beginner's uh session i'm afraid so if you come to one of our thursday ask the trainers feel free to ask that question and challenge us on a you know to enable us to get sidetracked on that yeah because yes it is possible um yeah they're the only questions that have come in so far phenomenal okay in which case i shall throw the screen at you and you can show us some cool stuff for a bit because i've rambled on for a lot longer than i meant to really sorry no it's all good oh good oh there you go see what we get to uh show my screen right a little wave right cool can everyone see my screen yes cool right so uh first of all thanks for that matt that was um some amazing stuff um so guys what we're gonna do this next kind of like 40 45 minutes we're gonna basically look at lighting our scene that we made last week and also creating some textures for it we're going to build these from scratch and we're going to do these um in a couple of different ways as well as looking at adding things like imperfections which i think is a really nice sort of addition when it comes to maybe making things like photorealistic um so for anyone who doesn't have this scene so the one that looks kind of something like this it's not quite as pretty um what you could do is you could just grab like a bunch of spheres and then just do the same thing and then put your materials on those and we can still get like quite a nice looking set up here if i just turn on my interactive render region we can still create this nice look so don't worry if you don't have this actual scene just kind of like um grab some different primitives and unfollow along cool right so let's move this out of the way so we are going to basically start with adding we're going to start with doing like a three-point lighting setup but what i also like to do i also like to add a top light so we come back into here um let me find my camera and so this is kind of like the setup if we come out of here we can see we have our um our key light our fill light our rim light and then our top light um and i like to use a bit of like a two-tone effect um just to create a nice a nice mood but we by all means you guys don't have to do that and it's also being lit with a hdr image and then we're going to build these textures so let's let's do the lighting first so first things first um i'm actually just going to grab actually let's just let's just make it why am i being lazy so i'm going to delete this cube at the back and i'm actually going to switch off my work plane because i know it's getting in the way last time and the first thing i'm going to do is build this backdrop so i built i build mine in a slightly different way to how much showed i use a plane um 900 by 900 what should work fine and then i like to use a bender former and i'm just going to make it a chart on my plane and then let me just see kind of where we're at with this okay so i need to do some rotation so i'm just going to rotate it 90 degrees and then another 90. cool right so in my bend i'm going to have it minus 90 and i'm going to shrink this down just so we have this kind of like flat bit this nice curved bit and this other flat bit and it's looking a little bit weird we kind of have this kind of it's a little bit jaggy and that's because we don't have enough segments to create this nice smoothing because we want like a bit of a seamless backdrop so all we want to do is inside of our plane we want to up our height segment so something like 70. and now we have this nice backdrop which we can just position maybe somewhere like that and this one is going to create a nice seamless backdrop for us and two it's also going to help when it comes to kind of like the light bouncing off um on to then the back so we don't have these really kind of like dark areas at the back of our objects so it has a it will serve a couple of a couple of purposes for us cool so let me just delete this material so we can see we have like a our normal gray now and what i'm going to do i'm going to actually do a quick render because i like to do i like to do comparisons to see how my lights are looking so i'm just going to change this to 1920 by 1080 and then i'm not going to change anything else i'm just going to leave it as it is maybe do one no actually it is and let's just do a quick render and so this is our starting point this is what it's looking like it's not it's not very fancy at the moment and let's now add some light and then we're going to do another render and just to see kind of an exact comparison as to what our lights are actually doing to our scene so i've come out of my camera the first thing we're going to do is so i'm actually going to make i'm going to create pbr lights and so i'm going to come into my light and i'm going to grab a pbr light and so a pbr light as we know is just a normal area light um but it has some settings kind of like preset for us to make it the most physically accurate so for a start the light type is an area light and we have area shadows and one of the main things is in our details we have a fall off which is set to inverse square which is as it says the most physically accurate and those are the lights i'm going to be using so this first one i'm going to be calling my key light this is going to be my main light and i like to um i like to use nulls to target my lights i find it a really kind of like quick and efficient way of just working and so what i'm going to do i'm going to grab up here is our null so i'm going to grab a null and i'm just going to position this kind of like the front center of my shelf and this is what i'm going to have my lights um look at so it's going to be facing this null and then it's great because if i move the null they're going to remain facing it so the way that we can connect these two things together is on my key light so this is the thing i want to be um facing my null i'm gonna right click and i'm gonna go to animation tags which is the very top one and then a target tag and then inside of my target tag all i have to do is put in a target object i could put an actual kind of object so i could put like the shelf in but i'm actually going to put the null in and then if i just move this out move this key light out and now if i grab my null and i move it around hopefully you can see that my light is always going to kind of face it or target it so let's just call this light target cool right so where do you want my key light to be i'm thinking kind of maybe somewhere like this just kind of like off to the left but i can see already that it's way too intense so this kind of 100 intensity is going to be way too much especially because we're going to end up with four lights and also then a hdr image so we can kind of like we can dial these down quite a bit so i'm going to go to something like 50 and i may even change these later on um but for now 50 should be fine and then i'm just going to duplicate my light and this is going to be my fill light this is going to be the one that's going to fill in those kind of like darker areas so we can see already here we're getting some really dark areas so let me just pull this to the other side and make it like 40 because we don't want to kind of we still want that contrast so i don't want to kind of um lighten up these dark shadow areas too much um like i don't want to be all one overall kind of brightness i do want a bit of contrast in there as well cool right so the final one of our three point lighting is um people have different words for this i call it a rim light and then what i'm going to do i'm going to position this sort of to the side i'm going to make it a little bit skinny and what this is going to do this is going to just sort of highlight these edges all along here cool um i'm gonna leave that on 40 i think that should be fine cool so this is how i normally set up my three-point light in and then as i was saying i also like to add a top light especially for this so if you look here we kind of um we would have some quite dark areas up here and so i'm going to add a light at the top and instead of duplicating them um i'm just going to grab another pbr light pull it up and i'm just going to rotate it minus 90 and then i might make it a little bit bigger and maybe pull up a little bit more and again um it's way too intense so i'm actually just going to change this to 50 definitely not 50 000. 50 cool maybe up a little bit more cool so this is the lighting we have at the moment so let's just do like a quick render uh maybe i'll go into my camera and do a quick render cool so it took a little bit longer so this is what we've got so far so we have a nice sort of like shape some nice light in and like shadow going on but i'm gonna do what matt did and i don't like that my top light is casting some shadow down here so i'm actually going to switch that off and i'm also going to have it not affect the backdrop because i want there to be a noticeable kind of contrast between the shelf unit and the backdrop so let's have a look at how we could do that so i'm going to be in my top light so the first thing i'm going to do is just switch off um my shadows and then the way that i can not have this light affect my backdrop is to actually exclude it and the way that we can exclude things is inside of my light inside of my project tab we have an exclude or an include mode so if i leave this on exclude i can say okay right cinema 4d i want my top light to not be lighting my backdrop so my backdrop is my plane so i'm gonna drop that in and we can already see immediately that this is how different so we're now no longer lighting um this bit back here so yeah so we just switched off our shadows and we've also had it not illuminate the backdrop and so this is the light setup that i went for the only other thing i did was i like to add um kind of i like to add colors to my lights just to create like a different kind of mood and this is kind of personal preference um dependent on what you're creating and so for me i tend to keep my key light and my top light one particular color i do a bit of like um like a two-tone thing and then i leave my fill and my rim to be another color so if i just sort of put them together i'm going to grab my key and my top light and i'm going to do like sort of like this really light pink and then on these two i'm gonna go with i'm just gonna pull this out so i have a little bit more room maybe sort of like uh well it's way too intense sort of a bit of like a purple and it just adds like an extra little bit so again so we're getting some sort of strange like shadow going on here so there's a couple ways that we can fix this one we could actually just kind of move the bend to create more of like a seamless backdrop so let's grab the plane and move that down to do and then come into here and we can just sort of move it across just so we still create that nice look hit render again and so far we've got so we have set up now our four different lights so we've got a three point light in we've got our top light and we now have our nice like seamless backdrop as well and so the only other thing i would do and the only thing i did in the other scene with regards to lighting was um to add a hdr image as well and so the way that we do that as we know we can grab ourselves the sky so let me just remove this one and start fresh cool and so matt showed us that we can kind of come into here and we can search hdri and we can grab a material but let's say we wanted to set our own one up and so i actually have so down here are a whole bunch of dot hdr images which we can then save and then use um in the same way that these are set up and i quite like this uh this empty room but unfortunately we don't have a preset for it so what i did was i just saved it to my desktop and so i should have it on here somewhere here we go so i have this uh hdr just saved on my desktop and the way that we can create one of these luminance materials is to just come into our materials and we're going to double click to create a new one and i'm going to open this up i'm going to switch off my color and off my reflectance and all i want to switch on is my luminance and inside of my luminance this is where i can drop a dot hdr file and it has to be a dot hdr file it can't just be like a normal png and you can find these on like google hdr haven and places like that and so let me just load this where is it there we go let me load this and so now we have basically just created our own version of these hdri materials so i can now drop that onto my sky and so now i'm also going to be lighting my scene with this hdri but we know we also need to switch on uh global illumination so i'm just gonna quickly switch that on and i'm gonna leave everything um as like default because we'll go through like render settings in more detail in week six and how we can kind of get nice clean renders based on changing things like you know anti-aliasing and ambient occlusion and stuff like that cool so let's just give this a render it might take a little bit longer just to see kind of where where we've got to okay so straight away everything's way too bright and washed out so there's a couple of things we could do one we could change our three-point light and set up we can kind of adjust our intensity of those and turn them down but we can actually change um the stuff in hdr so i quite like how the light my three-point lighting was set up i liked how it was looking um and i just want to use this hdr to bring a little bit more light in not as much as it is doing now so what can we do so the few things we can do for a start we can come into our luminance and we can actually just turn our brightness down so we could turn this down something like 50 percent we can also on our texture if we come down and go to filter and then click this we have a whole bunch of like color correction settings so this is also super handy if you find that you're using a hdr image and you think it's either too saturated or too much of like a particular color um you can use this filter option to control that and we also so we can also control our brightness so i'm going to turn my brightness down if i find it's way too bright that was obviously way too much another thing i'm going to do for this particular one because i know it kind of because i use this one quite often it comes out a little bit too blue so i'm actually just gonna kind of turn my saturation down just like slightly just so it doesn't add like a blue tint or any kind of like color tint to my um to my scene because i don't want that i want my scene to be kind of tinted based on my pbr lights cool so let's um give that a go again see what this is looking like hopefully it should be a lot less bright now so it's still it's still like pretty intense i should have probably turned the brightness down of my um of my hdr as well so just quickly when i come back into here i'm just going to turn my brightness down not my contrast my brightness cool i'm just going to leave it at that because i want to get to creating some actual textures as well i don't want to spend too much time on this lighting but this was the light setup that i went with on this here so as you can see you know we have our same four lights all set up in that same way so reduce my intensity added a bit of light color in here and i've got my sky my hdr lighting this scene as well so let's now get into actually creating some textures so let me come back into here so what we're going to do we're going to build a whole bunch of textures from scratch for the scene let me just come out of my cinema 4d camera and we're going to get right in here so i'm going to do these ones first we're going to do like what people are going to laugh i'm i i say aluminium um so and that's the texture we're going to create first so i'm just going to create a new material and i'm going to name it aluminium and i'm just going to drop this onto my love lamp and what i like to do i like to use what's called an interactive render region and so if you press option and r it gives you this interactive render region i might even do i'm going to switch my sky off just so everything's just being lit by my three point light in and we have like a quality slider so at the moment it's in the middle which is why it's looking a little bit pixelated but it will render quicker or we can just pull this all the way up and we now get um a pretty true representation and we can see kind of our the changes we make to our materials in real time now so let me open up my aluminium so the way that we're going to create this we're going to create this particular one in a physical way so you know we can switch off our color and we're going to build everything inside of our reflectance channel so i could have just created you know material new pbr material but i thought for the first one would i just show it like this so i'm going to delete my default specular and i'm going to add a ggx and so because i'm creating a metal texture i'm going to use the ggx reflectance type then what we can do is we can come into our layer fresnel and we can choose conductor because it's a metal and then what i love about these custom presets is you can then choose um pretty much any metal that you could think of and it's either gonna start off by looking pretty great or it's a nice kind of starting position to then make some adjustments so if i choose some aluminium and then we can kind of like up our roughness because i quite like this sort of more brushed effect and then we have our our aluminium texture cool so that was our first one so we're going to start small so we're going to go and then we're going to make glass and then we're going to kind of um start to make some more advanced materials the the more we go on so let me now create a new material so now we're going to do the glass for our lava lamp i have a quick question yeah sure um does using the filter hdri options in the sky material increase render times um no it's just color correction like effects that's it cool right so let's now create some glass and this again is super easy and we can use sort of like some presets for this so let me just drop that on there and i'm going to open this up and we're going to switch off our color and in our reflectance we're going to start by setting up our kind of the reflectance type that we'd want before then adding some transparency so if i grab a beckmann and i'm gonna go into my layer for now and this is gonna be kind of like the recurring um workflow and we're gonna be going for dielectric and then inside of our preset we have glass and so this is now our accurate reflectance type but you're probably thinking it's not really looking like glass and that's because we also need to switch on our transparency channel and by default our refraction preset is set to glass and therefore our ior is automatically set um to the refraction number that we need which is great or we can come down you know dependent on the things that you're creating these presets will give you the correct refraction types as well cool right so those were our first two textures um we looked at kind of using the reflectance channel for them and then looking at presets and how we can set these up kind of really really quite quickly so the next one we're going to create is going to be a bit of like a ceramic material and this is we're going to set this up in the same way in the reflectance channel but we're also going to take advantage of using um like a noise texture to create those sort of like speckles you'd have and then we're going to use that same shader inside of the bump to add some texture so let me not do that create a new pbr material and i'm going to drop this onto here and we're just going to call this ceramic cool right so let me switch on my interactive render region just by pressing option r again and this is going to take a little bit longer to render maybe i'll drop this down a little bit just so it doesn't take too long so inside of my reflectance channel so i have my diffuse and i'm going to actually change this um layer color let me switch off my reflection for now and i'm going to change this to a layer and this is because i want to layer up um two different textures i'm going to layer a color and i want to layer up a noise so the way that we can do that is once we've selected layer we can click this and then we can now add a bunch of different kind of shaders or images and use blending modes to blend between them so the first thing is i'm going to grab a color shader and i'm going to make this a little bit kind of like an off-white and then if we go back we can then add another shader which is going to be a noise shader and so this is taking a little bit longer to render so i'm just going to do it within the viewport and we can still get like a pretty good representation of how it's going to look um like this and so there's a couple things i need to do i need to perfect this noise because it's not really looking like the speckles that i'm after and i also need to adjust my blending mode so i'm going to change this to multiply and so now it's multiplying our two shaders together our color and our noise and so the way that we can adjust these individually is just by clicking the little kind of thumbnail display so if i click this noise i then get access to all of my noise settings i would normally have and so the way that we're going to create this ceramic effect is for a start we're going to keep the noise to this default noise but we're going to reduce our global scale all the way down to something like two and so now we can start to get that effect but there's there's way too much going on and i also don't want these sort of these areas to be 100 black so i'm actually just going to come in i'm going to choose just sort of like a darker like a darker brown and then we can use the low clip and the high clip to kind of bring more of the whites out and therefore that will bring more of that base color so if i adjust my high clip and start to bring it down we can see if we look at the at the thumbnail and then now in the viewport it now looks more like this um ceramic texture and we can even maybe pull this down a little bit more just so we get some some of those little like speckle bits on our ceramic cool right so another thing that i'm going to do so the final part of this is going to also be to add some kind of like fake texture by um dropping this same noise layer into our bump so i'm just going to right click and i'm going to go to copy shader and that was on my noise i'm going to go into my bump and i'm going to switch it on and i'm going to go and i click this and i'm going to go paste shader and so hopefully everyone can see that we now have this sort of bumpy texture first thing we're going to do is i'm going to change this back to black and then we are going to go and we're going to put a minus value in because i don't want my bump to give the impression of going out i want to give the impression of kind of going in and so i can just do a minus five and then now it looks like these sort of bumps are going in and all you need to do is turn back on my default um reflection as well and then my this is i'm going to change to asphalt just cause that's kind of like the most similar preset that if you think of like the texture of um ceramic cool so that was a little bit more slightly more advanced when it came to creating a material we kind of looked at how we can layer up shaders and we layered our base color or our diffuse with this noise to create this sort of like um ceramic speckles and then we use that same noise inside of a bump with a minus percentage to give the impression of some of those sort of um areas and those marks like going in to our into our like bars um any questions like i know sometimes i forget to ask and i get carried away nope cool right right so 15 minutes so so let's which one do i want to do let's do this this plastic texture and we're going to um add some scratches to it so let me switch on my interactive render region and i'm gonna up this cool so what i'm gonna do i am going to just create a solid material and okay i'm i'm gonna do something that maybe we shouldn't be doing i'm gonna do the color in the color channel if you're doing this in a pbr way do it in the reflectant but um for speed and because i want it to show up in my interactive render region i'm gonna do it in the color and therefore it will just be um a bit quicker but yeah do it the correct way if you are doing um pbr cool so i'm just going to stick to sort of like a light pink and it would be lovely if i'd actually put it on my object cool so we're going to create a plastic but we're also going to create a scratched plastic cool so first things first i'm going to come into our reflectance we're going to delete our default specular because we do not want that and we want our beckman because we're making a plastic so what we can do we can come into our layer fresnel and we want to choose dielectric and then a great preset for plastic well there's two there's pt and there's plexiglas i like to use p t and it gives you this really nice kind of um plasticky look so we have our pink plastic right so how do we add imperfections to the surface of our texture well there's multiple different ways i'm going to do it inside of the roughness channel i'm going to do it inside of this roughness here so first thing we want to do is we want to grab a um like a surface imperfection some kind of texture map so inside of my asset browser let's search scratch cool so maybe we'll grab this one here let's use let's use this one because we can also look at inverting it as well and how we can how we can do that so where do we want to put this we want to put this inside of our roughness so if i drop down my roughness as matt showed us we have this texture um sort of area and all i have to do is i can drag and drop this into here cool so we can't really see we can't really see anything yet and so there's a few things we're going to want to do first so if i come right in here so hopefully we can start to see some stuff i actually want to up the percentage of my roughness so we can see more of this um texture map so if i add this to something like 40. so we can't really see any of this happening and there's a couple of reasons so the main reason is we actually want to invert this so the way that we can invert a texture map is by just swapping the black and white point values so we can go to one and we can go to zero and so now what's happened is our texture map has gone basically the the white and the black values have swapped around and so now it's not super clear so let me make this a bit clearer so if i pull this all the way up we should hopefully start to see some scratches onto here so let me switch this back on see if we can get a clearer look so i can see them on mine but i'm just trying to make them so clear that they can be seen through um the screen share so hopefully you guys can now see that we have some scratches now clear yeah cool just switch the switch the sky back on just to get some um more of a clearer look cool so so how so what else can we do so we can we can dial in more of these values as well if we come in to our texture so if anyone uses redshift a lot of people use what's called a ramp to either invert a gradient which is what we just did so we swapped over our black and white um point values but they also use the ramp as a gradient to really dial in the white and black values so what's happening if we look at this so everything that's 100 black um is being our um glossy beckmann kind of texture and everything that is then white is being represented by a a more rough value and so it gives the impression of sort of like marks and scratches and so what we can do we can we can increase or decrease these values um to perfect this uh this look and the way that we can do that is with our texture set up we can hit this little drop down arrow and we can grab a colorizer and then what that does is if i then click this we then get given this gradient and so don't worry about looking at my interactive render region i would stick to looking at this thumbnail preview i'm going to pull my white values across and so now what's happened is i've increased and i've really upped those white values and so now we can see we have um much clearer scratches all over our um our texture or we can do it the opposite way if we find that it's way too intense we can then pull our black values across i mean not so much that they disappear but maybe kind of something like this and then our effect or our kind of imperfections aren't going to be as um obvious as they they were so i'm going to pull this back over because there's more things that we can do i'm very aware that we're quickly running out of time but i think this is a really cool thing to show um what else can we do so we can come into our texture and then we can adjust the scale and so if i find i want more of these scratches i can start to tile this so let's go let's go two and two and so now what's happening is it's going to tile this texture and now we have a load more let me try and get really in here so we can see this clearly so now we have a load more oh there we go we can see that a lot better now so now we have a load more of these little scratches or we can go the other way and we can then increase it so we have larger scratches or larger imperfections based on whatever texture map you are you're using cool so that is a way of adding some imperfections so let's let's do some more let's let's quickly create you know what actually let's take a thing from the asset browser and we're going to add some stuff to that so inside of this original scene i actually took a couple of textures from the asset browser and one of them is this ash ash texture here we go this one here i'm gonna double click that and then i use that on these shelves so i'm just going to drag and drop that onto my shelves and the first thing i notice is my projection type of uv mapping kind of comes out a bit stretched so let's kind of pull this in here so you can see some of this and so i often find yeah when using these sort of like wood textures matte i don't know if you find it the same that the projection type uv mapping tends to look a little bit strange yeah it's because by default it's trying to map the same image across the same space so one polygon that's nice and square is not the same as a polygon that's thin and long you know so it tries to wedge it so definitely moving to cubic will always improve the look of most things yeah yes that's one thing toys like take note of cool so with this with this ash texture we can we can add some of our imperfections to this already kind of pre-created texture so we open this up the way that this is made is um it actually uses texture maps so i don't know if people have used um texture maps before when creating materials but this is a a way of doing so so they have um the kind of ash color texture map plugged into the color and so sometimes this will be called you know diffuse color albedo those are your color texture maps then they have a reflectance map inside of this layer color here and they also have a bump map and some may even have a normal map as well and so the way that we can add some kind of additional like so like like a smudge or dirt map is we can do that inside of this reflectance layer so i'm gonna so so they've got layer two here which is got our reflectance map in and then we also have another layer which is our beckman so i'm going to actually pull this all the way up and it's going to make it super shiny and this is so we can add a roughness map to this so what we can do we can come back into our asset browser and we can grab what shall i grab dirt some kind of dirt map um what should we go for maybe this one this one is quite cool so i'm going to drop down my roughness again and i'm going to drop that straight into there and so we need to just invert this and then if we switch off our color and our bump this is where we can start to see um this a lot better so if i up my roughness we can see we are getting this really nice kind of um sort of just more rough texture like it's slightly been worn away and we can come in again and you know we can grab our colorizer and we can sort of read up these values if we want more of these sort of um rough patches we can pull our whites over and so yeah switching off my color and my bump one is gonna render quicker in my interactive render region and it also when it's just this sort of dark glossy texture we can see um our imperfections a lot a lot easier when we're working and then we can just switch back on our color and back on our bump and then now we have um the original ash texture that we found from the um from the asset browser but we've just added our own kind of sort of dirt imperfections do it cool right so i'm i'm very aware that we've pretty much run out of time so i just thought i'd quickly talk through um the other textures which are basically the exact same um thing that we created so let me kind of come into here so yeah so we built our aluminium we got our glass so i also created a chrome texture which was the same way that we created the aluminium so you know we just have a ggx with a layer for now set to chromium um and then yeah duplicated the pink plastic to make some white plastic and then i used the gold so the gold ggx and then gold preset again inside of here and then i added a another kind of like surface imperfection scratch map to it and sort of like really dialed these values in and that was put on our dolphin and so if you guys have the um project file you'll be able to break these down and have a look at these and then this wood texture was just another one just taken from inside of the asset browser um any questions on any of those materials yep we've got one um so how would you deal with the end grain on the shelf um the methods projected that you've used is projecting obviously the same texture on all sides but if this was a a wooden shelf rather than a like a laminate wood shelf um the end of the board would look different than the side of the face so how would you deal with that so you could set up two different textures for that if you wanted to and then you could so if we come in and if it loads so if you come into our cube here there is you could make it editable and then just texture set one texture for this part or one for this so i mean we may as we could do that so if i hit my if i make it editable i can then come into um here and then i could drag and drop and texture just on to that so what we would do you would have a another image that would be look that looks like end grain and we would plant that on here instead um yes because you can texture various different polygons inside of cinema 4d with different materials if you want to so that would be a a way of doing it but other than that kind of different texture on the end sorry other than isaac asking if we can send the links to the webinar recordings that's the only question so well done ellie bombarded with so much information yep cool thank you very much for all of that no worries right let me get my um i think up again so yeah sorry we're slightly over running um you know that's what we love to do so i thought i'd really quickly for everyone who's uh left thank you as well for everyone that is here still with us i thought i would um just show or go through the stuff that we're gonna be doing uh next week so yeah it's gonna be week four and we're gonna be taking a look at all things to do with animation and dynamics inside the cinema 4d so we're going to look at actually how we can animate inside of cinema so things like keyframing whether that's manual or auto as well as looking at some kind of cool camera animating techniques as well as things like f curves the timelines of our our dope sheet um all of those things if you don't know what those are don't worry we'll absolutely be going through them all uh next week then we're also going to take a look at cinema 4d's diet like really powerful dynamic system in particular things like rigid body tags and collider body tags um and so i did say the new presets but matt showed us those today so we can kind of like scratch that off because we've already had a look at those um and as always there is going to be a project file um which will be week four dynamics and there'll be a couple of different scenes i think that we're going to be taking a look at in the practical part um of yeah next week's session so be sure to it is for everyone downl who's watching this recording as well um thanks to matt for all your great stuff as always all your great knowledge you're welcome thank you for showing what we can do with it no worries um yeah so it's been great guys and we'll see you we'll see you all next week yep see you laters bye everyone bye

Channel: Maxon Training Team

Views: 907

Rating: 4.875 out of 5

Keywords: Maxon, Red Giant, C4D, Cinema 4D, Trapcode, Universe, VFX, Post production, tutorial, webinar, Magic Bullet, Redshift

Id: jUvM8a0V7Co

Length: 122min 31sec (7351 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021