C4D/Redshift Beginner Friendly Lighting and Compositing

hi everyone welcome to another tutorial of friends of motion and today's tutorial is going to be very beginner friendly you don't need to know anything about modeling or materials because we will just be using cubes and material from our content browser and one or two models that I also found in the content browser this is going to be mainly redshift bass but you know most lighting engines were kind of the same I will add some free textures for you to download so you can follow along because at the end we will use gobos to sprinkle some Magic Lights into our scene before we render it out I will also show you how to render it out with compositing tags and object buffers so that you can composite it in After Effects with your design alright with that said let's jump in I'm going to start with a fresh scene but I'm going to cheat a little bit by just copy and pasting the basic geometry into my scene and this is so basic it's really just cylinders and procedural cubes and a cloner the cloner just have this thin and tall Cube that is making this the blinds or the room divider and then I still have a slight rotation on my cloner just so that we can control how much light is coming through the blinds when we add the lights in redshift now very important to always make sure that your scene is world scale so as usual we have that little mannequin he's like the size of a human being and make sure that steps and the walls and the ceiling is architecturally correct so usually walls are around 250 centimeters steps are between 17 and 20 centimeters it's easy to just Google the size and average heights of things and that'll always help immediately making your scene feel more real realistically scaled deleting my little guy next thing I'm going to add is the bay the background so you can just type in back and you'll find this background that comes with Cinema 4D I'm going to close my object browser what I love about this background is that you you can also change the curvature of the corners so because because this is a interior shot I'm going to make this quite tight the corner so it feels like a room and another thing that's great about this background is that you can change the the walls the width and the height of the walls so as you build a scene and you come in with your camera and you realize you don't have enough geometry to the left or the right or maybe your ceiling is not high enough this is great about the procedural aspects of these backdrops that you can actually just change them with a slider it's wonderful also make sure that your floor is definitely on the wall so let's just make sure they're touching great and this is it this is actually such a simple scene and I'm sure you will be able to build this in no time so I'm going to add a just a placeholder of where I'm going to put my my product so this is where I have my laptop that I have in my scene so my scene might be different from what you need to build this specific reason for this scene is I wanted to show UI design that I did but in an environment so maybe you have a perfume bottle or set of headphones but um it all depends on what you want to show I didn't want the outside to be very busy or distracting so it was just supposed to be a very simple minimalist scene now because I know I'm going to zoom in pretty close to my product I decided to create a table that has a bit more geometry so this could be totally fine just by using a cube and you can maybe just add some roundness to the corners and then call it a day but I am going to use the amazing content browser that Max on so generously gave us and search for table and the table I used was this one here there's two of them I think one is just uh I think they're the same the one is just redshift and one is a normal standard cinema file and I'm in the display options I'm going to switch materials off so that I can see everything and then what I did was I can quickly close this what I did was I deleted the outside and I will always recommend when you use maxon's objects it's just good to modernize it a little bit so you can make it your own and not just using it straight out of the box and the reason I love this one is just these beautiful seams that just adds a bit of detail to this to the set and when I'm starting to light it you'll see that this specular highlights will just be beautiful instead of just having an extrusion on us on a square just having a little bit of detail really takes it to a Next Level so I love having these seams and I even push it out a little bit or make just make a little bit more imperfect so that when we render it out it just feels like a real table I don't even have legs so I think the legs you don't even need the legs I think it was fine just floating in the in the air so that was my table then I'm going to go back to the content browser and search for laptop there we go I'm just gonna add it to my table and it's just going to float and because this is going to be a piece that's about UI design it's I don't need to show anything else but the UI I'm also just going to delete the keys and the body and the buttons and really anything I know that they also have a tablet here so you can use a tablet but they even have a phone they have so many things in here that it's just wonderful to start your scene with so even headphones these headphones are cool I saw a bottle there's like a whole bunch of bottles shampoo bottle and wine bottle so it's really nice to have something to start a scene with and then you can always learn how to model something if you need to model something specific or just buy something of Turbo squid anyway so this is now good enough for me for my UI design the next thing I'm going to do is to add the camera and then we can start lighting the scene all right so to start the camera let's get into redshift already click on my render settings toggle down to redshift and then that will immediately give you this redshift option I'm going to go camera standard and I'm looking through the camera by clicking on this little tiny icon and then I also want the camera to always look at this screen so to do that I'm going to need a null and also a Target so that no I'm just going to shift click on the null wait I'm just going to click on my lid my main lid and then when on that is selected I'm going to shift click on the null and that will immediately become a child of the main screen so I'm just going to take it out again because I don't need it to be on the main screen and then I'll move it up to the middle I'm just guessing here but I think that's more or less the middle and then while I'm clicking on the camera I'm going to click shift C to search for Target see I've already searched for it so click on target and now it's adding a Target to my camera and you need to tell the target what to Target and I want to Target this null it's always good to call your null something so let's say cam no there we go so it's connecting and connected and let's just tested out yes so it's following the camera or the camera is following the null cool so that is good now I'm just going to do a quick animation I'm gonna hold down alt rotate say about here click on the camera coordinates Ctrl click these coordinates you'll see this is this is a very cheap and cheap way to do it but it's just really to show you a quick thing so it's on zero and then I'm going to scroll all the way to 90. I'm going to hold alt down and just rotate around and then shift click all these coordinates and now it should just be nice rotation all right and the reason I do the animation now is so I know if I'm missing any geometry or if I need to fill a hole see this hole here I have a feeling I'm probably need to scoot this pillar out so that I don't have a gap there yeah so I think we're ready to light and texture this in redshift so if you're if you don't have redshift you can still follow along the basics of lighting is going to be the same for any software octane or standard renderer or Arnold but um hopefully just using my textures will also help with you with other render engines the first thing I'm going to do is just quickly create three nulls and organize my scene a little just do the nulls I like to make my main nulls uh the icon I like to just make it a DOT just so it looks different from the rest and then I like to color it I will also save you the pain of watching me organizing my project so hold on a second and let's start this with a simple light so to get that light make sure I'm in redshift yes I am just going to add a very simple dome light so this dome light is by no means going to be my light at all it's just to start off with because uh it gives you immediate idea of what the textures would look like so I'm going to go back to my content browser I'm just going to use this Studio HDR that I always use because I know everybody has this in their browser Studio 21 I think [Music] okay and let's add our redshift render go to Windows Rich of RS render View and I'm just going to click and drag this hamburger bar and just add it here there we go do a quick render to see what we're gonna get probably going to look funny yes but I think we're already on a good start we are going to start getting our materials and all my materials are coming from my content browser I always see it as like almost going shopping because you just throw a whole bunch of stuff in your shopping cart and then you'll audition it back at home and see if it works or how you're going to use it so I already know I'm going to look floor in the redshift folder there's a whole bunch of things and [Music] I'm going to put on list view so I can see and I've used Blaster fine double click on that double click on find 003 there's this grooved one that is pretty cool plaster rough this one um I think I downloaded this I don't know why I can't download it these I think you need to be on a entire tier of Maxon I'm on the monthly subscription so maybe all right I'm going to fast forward this as well I waited long to get all the materials but it's basically I got a bunch of plasters a bunch of glass and two types of plastic so one second right so let's close that and we're going to start with the floor because that's the one that's screaming out that it needs help so this texture here is actually a cinema texture and that's why it's so shiny so let's just delete it and replace it with my speckled plaster and the one thing I like about these Cinema 40 textures is that they make it very clear you don't even need to know anything about these nodes they make it very clear where to change the color so see here change color I just click on that and I change the color here I want it to be kind of like a white but an off-white not a pure white there we go and for the walls I am going to use let me where's my walls here so this is very unorthodox to just add the it onto the null but it worked for me I would say you should probably add it to each individual one and decide what scale you want but it's just fine actually I think I used the rough Blaster where is that plaster rough this one and then I had to go back and change the color to be slightly White and nothing is ever Pure White so always have a little bit of color in your whites yeah I can see it's a little rough I mean it's called rough so what I like is also just another thing that's very clear scale here so that just shows you how big the default the bump is going to be on your plaster so I think I dialed it down to 40. we can always come back once we start adding more lights we'll we'll realize which ones is too much and which ones are good so my blinds was I think that was a plastic let's see plastic rough Maybe and then these I don't really know what this would be in real life but I see it almost like a oh let me just get out of my camera I see this glass more like a sculpture like if you're futuristic art lover you'll have this sculpture in your house and let's add the frosted glass and we're gonna have to tweak this I remember I tweaked it a little and now for the fun one this painting so I didn't want a big focal point in this environment because my focal point is actually my product but I wanted some texturing and for this one I used this really cool trowel plaster let's see oh no it's not trowel it was let's go back it was something else it was um yeah was this one close that travel to add that to my painting yes that's the one it's very cool you'll see how it will it's going to be even cooler when I add the light so I'm going to add a area light just above it so that we can see that the shadows and again pressing shift when I click on it so that it goes exactly under the painting and then I'm just moving it up a little and then I'm going to dial down it way down super subtle and then this is now where the dome light we don't need the dome light anymore so I'm just going to bring the dome light down and bring this little close dial it up a little so I know you would think wow that looks already very cool but there's even a cooler thing you can do and just so you know if I'm looking at my the outlines you'll see that my geometry is very low it doesn't really have a lot of geometry it's got like segments four and four and I would just keep it like that but now I'm going to add the render tag R is object render tag and this render tag is really magical if you click on Geometry and you override it it will add geometry in the render view so it doesn't add geometry here it adds geometry in their interview and I'm going to check this box and enable it and minimum Edge length 0 and maximum subdivisions four and now if you click on displacement you will see quite a big difference in the way it displays it does feel way more realistic hope you can see it with my let me close this so maybe I wonder if you can see it well I can see it but um it looks really cool I also wanted to feel more abstract like some artist did like one Swoosh bigger swoosh so let's double click on the software on the the software the material and go to this scale here double click I wish they will this panel was embedded in here but I have to kind of work it around so I'm going to make it really big like uh 400 Maybe 600. foreign Distortion is maybe a bit much but I just want to show you how big it how crazy it could go so I'm going to move this to five see how deep it gets let's make this crazy numbers just so you can I don't think that maximum displays change much if this bottom one is not changed see how it gets super crazy and you can go have really fun with this but um I am just going to keep it to one and one because this is not the focal point it's just like a little tiny detail that adds to the realism there we go right so let's do the table and this is a quick trick I want to show you just to quickly um replace a whole bunch of textures but I don't want to show you a quick way of just replacing this coffee table because as you can see the the wood is in a few places not just at one place and you never know it might be hidden somewhere in the null so you just right click and say on the material and say select material tags and objects and you'll see It'll select all the wood that uses this texture and I just want to replace it all at once and I'm going to replace it with this plastic rough I think oh that's plaster plastic rough and then voila they all change at the same time let's do the glossy one let's check out the glossy one yeah let's keep it like that and then lastly the laptop I'm going to replace the outside with this plastic glossy and the inside with a plastic rough so I don't want it to be too specular since it's going to be quite it's going to distract from the design inside all right so I think everything has a texture on now and I guess we'll find out once we start adding more lights but this is pretty cool let me close my materials save just in case I crash and of course I just crashed but I am back so this scene is pretty straightforward right now doesn't really have much or Direction in it and now we are going to go into creating the mood or the vibe and that is what we're going to use the area lights for so first thing I'm going to do is just switching off these lights and using one of the lights the one from the painting let me just I'm gonna just move this guy up I have one light on I'm just going to control drag and duplicate it and then just move it underneath R for rotate e for move and just move it right under my behind my blinds like this and let's get that other view out again this one and I'm going to lock the screen again make sure we can see the camera view [Music] face the camera this light and I want to see the slide so I'm going to add the visible check box under the object tag and also this one I want to be a color so you can have the color either pick a color or you can be very professional and just use the Kelvin temperature but since I'm a visual person I really like to see the color so I like to use the Color Picker and for my test I did this light to be quite vibrant and warm so like a red orange color and we can add quite a lot of intensity to this one and I'm going to move it so I find a cool spot where it looks nice and then also the Clones these little blinds of mine they're Now hidden under a null but you can just hover over your object tags and press s for search that's how I remember it and it will jump to your blinds and it will select my blinds and then I just quickly move around with this rotation a little bit just so that I can sort of find a good spot where the light is showing but it's not too much and it's just nicely breaking up the the Shadows and adding some diffusion so I think that's quite nice is going to be a another light and that is going to be a light that's slightly cooler so I'm just going to control drag again and move this light to the right if I remember correctly I think it was oh I keep moving this scene and I don't want to move the scene let me just move it back this scene is what I want to move and then what I did was I think it was somewhere here in the corridor and I don't want to see this light so I'm going to switch it off and the color I want to be sort of like a complementary color and the way to get the complementary color you click on these two arrows you click on the circle you click on these two lines for the lollipops and then you'll get the complementary colors you'll see as I change this the color will change and the blue is just going to be this blue here so I'll double click and it will be blue now and this is where I know by the book this is the complementary color but I also feel like our direction is sometimes just you follow your intuition so for me this is a little bit maybe too blue and I would like to add maybe a tiny bit of purple and not as bright not as saturated so just subtly a blue and also don't want it to touch that wall so let's just lift it up a little and maybe a little bit brighter foreign cool so I think this is now great with the color and I think that also shows nicely that's a great thing about telling a story with lights and the story here is a very loose story I would say it's very deep but the idea is that we suggest that there are other worlds outside of this room so it's not just four walls we are suggesting that there is a corridor that leads maybe to a bedroom or maybe on the left ear there's a swimming pool or maybe behind the camera is a big window that has a big Forest outside so to to tell that little story the best way is to suggest it with lights or Shadows and that's what I'm going to do next I'm going to add the the magic light as I call it but it's just me it's actually called spotlights so I'm going to start with the first spotlight and this first Spotlight is going to suggest that there is a plant behind the camera and to do that I'm going to use something called a gobo it's um short for go between Optics it's also a word people use in film industry where the dop Director of Photography are using it to um break the light up to also suggest shadows and um exactly what I'm doing right now it's just a digital version of it I'm going to add the Gobo into my texture and these textures by the way will be available for you to download for free that I will link in my description and I will scroll all the way down find it it's just kind of like a palm Palm pot plant and I just made it in Photoshop it's really very simple I'm gonna add it to my scene and you'll see it's very sharp too sharp actually and all you need to do is just go to details check this little softness of effects Gobo box and just dialed his way up I think it was five that I made it and then I also like to add it just like a little bit like an angle so R for rotate let's see it's very subtle really I think I'm even going to dial down the the exposure so it's not so bright and defined so let's bring it down the exposure just like this nice all right the next um magic light slash Spotlight is going to be my fake caustics so let me duplicate by control dragging the spotlight and move it to where I want it to be dropped and if you know maybe you don't know but caustics is very expensive to render it takes forever and it's also hard to direct because if you want to have the caustics at a specific past spot or a specific shape you always need a light or glass or water and it's it's just really tricky to control so I just love adding it to my gobos and that way I can create whatever I want and it's also very cheap to render so double um positive on gobos so let me add the caustics or caustics and this one will also be available to download for you and this is actually going to be an animation so I'm going to select the first one and I'm just going to say no then in the texture the way to activate the animation and it doesn't you don't need to use the animation but I think animation is pretty cool you are just going to load it here you're going to say it's a loop and you're going to give the frame range is or detect frames I think it will find yes it will know how many frames there are there are 240 frames and let me crank up the exposure for you so you can see oh look at that isn't that just gorgeous love it and actually let me just bring the cone angle a little smaller just so we can have more control of where it falls because remember we're not really going to zoom we're not really going to have such a wide camera lens we're going to be quite close to the product so you're not really going to see it if if it's so wide but or maybe you will let's see how far we can get this out and then up yeah maybe it's a bit too much but I always feel like you can never have enough rainbow so let me just I can dial it down a little bit it's and let me show you the animation and hope it shows up yeah see how beautiful the movement is very flowy I I kind of imagine it's either a chandelier on the left or behind the camera or maybe it's a swimming pool that has some movement or a aquarium it's just like these little stories you tell or I tell myself in my head but um yeah better than just having no lights and then actually that's my point now I think almost we don't even need this light here let's see what happens so if I switch it on yeah maybe but I I feel like it's more impactful without it the dome light I think we do need because sometimes you need to fill some of that Shadows feels a little dark so it could be really low like 0.05 maybe four but yeah this looks pretty nice uh one thing I did do differently is in my original I animated the color of the light so in the beginning I made it very dark and the lights are this cold blue and purple and then as the animation go to the end it becomes uh warmer and brighter and it's kind of to mimic time difference but also you know in apps they have a day mode and a night mode so it was kind of to mimic that idea the Gobles are really powerful I had I had so much fun making them I actually there's a tutorial that I followed from um Stefan hka and I will also link his tutorial to show you how to make these kobos in After Effects um it's almost like a fun project by itself and um yeah so let's let's wrap this up and I'll show you how to render it out in to after effects to add your design all right let's get to the admin and with admin I mean getting your scene ready for After Effects by rendering creating object buffers adding compositing tags kind of boring stuff and it's my least favorite thing but it's very important because it will definitely help speed up your work process but also just overall make your quality of life way better by preparing your scene in the most efficient way let's go to my render settings my redshift render settings make sure your aov is has a name and it's enabled I'm going to quickly jump through my settings in my render it's my threshold is pretty high because I just want a quick render but I do have denoise on so that my thresh so it doesn't look too bad and too noisy then these are just standard settings I might usually I put Global illumination at brute for 16 caustics are off because we obviously we have fake caustics and aov is enabled and that is basically set up there in my savings make sure that your multi-passes are exr's because we're going to need the ex are usually I just say about pngs for my beauty pass and I'm going to first show you how to do this composite compositing project file which is a call there dot aec and this is how you get the data to After Effects so the first thing we're going to do is I want to split up this screen so the screen inside and the outside are two different pieces of geometry so a very quick way is just to click on my polygon editing mode click on the middle of the screen right click and say split and now we have two pieces of geometry I'm going to call this screen and this part is going to be the frame and that's nice so it's now two separate pieces of geometry there's already a redshift render tag on it but if you don't see it just right click and say render tags or is object and this is basically just to give each of them an object ID so this object ID is going to be I'm just going to give it a high number 12. this one 13 and the reason I make these high numbers is because if I do a one or a two there might be another one or two hidden somewhere in these nulls so a 12 and 13 is just a safe number to pick I feel and then we are now going to create the object buffer um so the object buffer we are adding it to an aov manager so aovs are exactly like object buffers in the standard renderer and all you do is you pick what you want to render and you just drag it into this middle bit and then when you click on it you will so we're going to use a puzzle mat but there's other ways of getting a mat like this crypto mats and I know that you can add a matte here in the render settings but the easiest one for me is the puzzle mat and a puzzle mat as soon as you add it and let's add the object ID you can also make a puzzle mat according to material IDs but we're just going to do a very easy quick object ID you'll see that the puzzle mat will appear here in the drop down in your redshift render View and to view this you have to have it in bucket mode and obviously nothing will you won't see anything yet because you haven't told it which project ID to use or object ID to use and I'm having 12 and 13. so let's say 13 and 12. and let's just toggle I realized we have to toggle this up and down before you see anything and there we go so that is the frame and the reason the screen is not working and this took me for out forever to figure out drove me nuts it's such a silly little thing but oh man these little tiny things basically when I split it up the the screen just moved a pixel back so you couldn't see the it was hiding behind the frame it's such a silly thing but oh man drove me nuts all right so you have both of them now but I only did this so that you can see how to do it if you want more than one object buffer but we don't need all this object buffers for what we're gonna do I'm just really going to make it super simple for you going back to my manager and I just want the inside which is the what's the inside 12 so make sure inside is 12 yes so I'm going to make all these Channel channels 12 and that way they all are going to be white because it's RGB combined is white nice so that is a very simple black and white Luma matte that you will render out and you're going to render out an exr and we're going to bring it into after effects and then last thing we need to do is we need to create a compositing tag for our screen and I'm going to right click render tags cinewear I think it used to be called composite external compositing tag or it had a different name I can't remember exactly the name and when I export it I want to make sure that it is a solid and let's make the solid small it's always funny these solids always come in super big in my case I don't know why the last thing we do is saving out a DOT aec file to get all the data and I'm clicking on my edit my render settings save and I've already rendered this out before so I'm not going to render it out again I'm just going to meet you in After Effects to show you how to bring in the DOT aec so before you can bring in the cinema file the aec file you need to make sure that you have the extension so very easy to find go to your Maxon Cinema 4D folder in your programs file scroll down to exchange plugins double click go into After Effects importer when I'm not sure how it looks on a piece and then on an Apple but I'm pretty sure it's similar place and then you are going to copy this into your After Effects plugin so go to support files plugins and then extensions and you just copy this in your extensions folder all right so now let's go to after effects cool so we are finally in After Effects and I'm going to show you how to bring in the aec file so this is my comp that I already made but I will make one bring in one from scratch so that you can follow along I'm going to go file import file and in my renders here's all my renders and I just saved out previous one I rendered in this folder it was an environment 17. if you don't see this that means you probably couldn't install your your plugin at the right after effects in the right after effects I know that with Every After Effects update I always get a new folder so make sure it's in the right after effects this is the latest After Effects 2023 um then you'll see so ignore these top folders you'll see you'll get a folder with the name of your aec file and there's a very nice comp already created for you in the right make sure it's the right frame rate that you rendered it out I rendered out at 30 frames a second and I think it will always bring it out in 30 frames a second so if you rent it out at 24 make sure your interpolation is 24. and to do that you go right click on your file you go interpret footage and go Main and change the the frame right there all right so now we have a render that looks very strange but it's actually just a solid that we brought in and see how big the solid is like I I said it should be small and it's still very big um and I'm going to use this to track my 2D design and then we have the puzzle map that is red I know you probably have a white and black one but I'm going to do one simple step so click on your puzzle map and search for extractor in this effect presets double click and it will appear in your effector control panels here and then because we want it to be just a white and black matte just change all these colors to Red because r g and B together makes white so now we have a nice let me just hide this solid now we have a nice simple matte now the next thing I'm just going to bring in my render which was I've done quite a few which was number 17. click on that make sure your PNG sequence checkbox is checked here so you bring in your sequence and then I'm just going to drag it on top of my mat and there we have it and let's make sure our solid is tracking with our camera that looks pretty good so now let's bring in the UI and I already made one it's just a very simple 2D I'll double click on that it's just a a comp that is a strange size because I couldn't figure out what is the size of the the laptop screen and it won't do anything because it's a 2d file and I have to make it a 3D file so I click on this little icon here to make it a box a 3D wired box and it's going to be way out the screen but the very easy quick way to take this press the parent pick Whip and press shift and control while you're dragging it on top of the solid and that way it will take all the position coordinates of your solid now let's change the size by pressing s for scale and bring this down to two percent and then also we can hide our solid now and let's rotate this R for rotate and 90 degrees and then you're going to I think yours will probably be fine but I realize my null was not exactly in the middle of the screen so I had to move it and voila it's stuck to the screen now the last thing we're going to do is just bring the mat in or just tell it to use a mat so I'm going to take this little pick whip drag it to my mat which is here and I'm going to say Luma matte and there we go so if you have an older version of After Effects I'm so glad this is a new thing um back in the day this was you had to make a Luma mat for each layer you want to use and you have to move this up above your layer to make a Luma mat but it looks like now you don't need that and that's pretty pretty useful and there you go so what I did with my test is I made a few shots so I did that whole process this a few times with a camera with a phone it's just like a fake phone and then another one with um a little closer because I wanted to show the details of my my UI that I designed um oh and actually this phone is shows you a really nice example of how the Acoustics is moving which is pretty sweet all right so that's all from me I hope for the beginners that I explained well enough or slow enough I would love to know in the comments if there is any way I can improve and um yeah hope to see you soon thank you

Channel: Friends Of Motion

Views: 45,600

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Id: yTrwac_p-Zw

Length: 44min 28sec (2668 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023