Cinema 4D: compositing background

eight odd day from fathom video and welcome to the fathom lab this is a brand-new compositing background tutorial for cinema 4d this is going to be created in cinema 4d R 13 if you have our 14 or our 15 it's still the same ball of wax don't worry about it as a matter of fact our 15 has a couple other features that are going to be that will make it easier for you to orient your camera get your camera calibrated to your background photograph but let's not even talk about that because we don't have that right now okay so this was created for a client this isn't the finished version but this is all done in cinema 4d compositing backgrounds so you can see that we've got this beach scene which you are going to receive as part of the project file that you can play around with and we've got this double wide kind of motel sign that's out in the middle of nowhere and we've got you know some nice rolling shadows and all that other good stuff so I'm pretty much going to just you know go through this kind of quickly to show you how to do it alright so I've got one of the proof scenes right here and let's open recent files compositing background empty file okay all right I'm just gonna I'm just going to you know set that just like that for no particular reason whatsoever I'm also going to go into my view filter and I'm going to make sure that grid is turned on okay because we're going to have to orient the camera to the actual photograph and the horizon line and the grid are going to help us do that but before I do anything else I am going to create a new material by double-clicking in the material manager here double click it again go into color and I am going to find my this tutorial project stills okay open yes and I'm going to turn specular off I don't need any specular highlights or anything like that in my background although I don't think that they would show up anyway just going to going to make sure of that okay got the color here now one thing that you can do if you so desire is you can go to the textures color here and then click on the photo and you're going to be able to change the exposure if you want to make it darker you can adjust your black point and your white point just in case you didn't know that already okay a color profile here is going to be srgb because it is a photograph so that's basically it now excuse me when I went ahead and I retouched this photo in Photoshop I knew that I was going to be bringing it in for projects such as this it's compositing background so I made sure that when I named the file I put the width and the height of the file in there so I wouldn't have to open the photo again in Photoshop or say click on it and get info on my Mac to see how big it was and this is important because you need to set your output for cinema 4d to the exact dimensions of this photo if you do not then the photo is going to be squished or stretched or well it's not going to look right okay so let's go into our output and set that to 1600 by 1062 now in the original file that I had here I had my resolution to set to 300 okay complete because the client said hey I want to print it so just so you know okay so it did set it to 300 so that when it saved as a TIF a 16-bit TIF I was able to take care of things accordingly in Photoshop okay let's uncheck save here all right so that's the first most important point the next thing that I want to do is I want to go to my objects here I want to choose a background object and then all I need to do is drag my texture to my background and boom finished okay next thing that we want to do is we want to set up a camera now this is the default camera and remember what I said about gridlines and horizon all right you can tell right off the bat that if I put anything into this scene right here it's not going to look like it belongs all right so why don't we just add a cube and there you go that that doesn't look like it belongs at all so let's do ourselves a favor and create a camera now a couple things here if you don't want to be chasing your tail in a situation such as this by trying to align the camera and having your camera settings set incorrectly inside cinema4d there is a trick that you can use it's not even really a trick it's something that you should think of before you even get started if you know that you're going to be doing something like this whether for a client or even just for practice if you have the ability to shoot a raw image from your camera say it's a Nikon or a cannon or I don't know lummix or whatever it might be certainly do that and what I will do is I will set up my Canon to shoot a raw and a JPEG it's just a safety thing that I do but the nice thing about shooting raw is that you can bring that photograph into Photoshop get info on the file and it will give you all of the camera settings for that particular photograph so if your lens communicates with your camera which most do nowadays you're going to see right off the bat what your focal length was what your exposure was everything else and what you really need to have here is not only your focal length but also your sensor size okay now I'm not going to get into all of that on this particular situation but suffice it to say that if you can match those settings from your camera into the virtual camera of cinema 4d then you're going to be doing great because when we get to the next step it's going to help you immensely so where do you do that well you just simply go to the camera right here the virtual camera click on it go to object and you're going to see focal length and sensor size now I shot this with a Nikon d90 oh my gosh it was so long ago that I don't remember um really what the focal length was I in or the sensor size okay I could probably look it up right now online you can find that information put the sensor size end but I still don't know what the focal length is and of course I don't have the original photo it's around somewhere you've heard that one before right but that's one of the reasons why I'm choosing this photograph is because we don't have say you know any geometry going on in here we don't have buildings we don't have streets we don't have signs we don't have any of that stuff we can see that it's a very wide angle view it's probably 18 to 24 millimeter and that's about that that's it so in this particular instance I am NOT going to worry about that that stuff at all okay I'm just not going to worry about it any other situation you probably should okay well you definitely should all right that's the first bit of information on the camera now the next thing that you need to do is you need to align this camera to the photograph you need to align the horizon and you need to get your gridlines set up so it matches the ground plane all right so what we're going to do is we're going to bring the camera down all right going to tilt down all right let's now you can do this either you know in your viewport setting here you can do this through these icons right here or I am going to choose the three key I'm going to hold it down alright and I'm going to tilt down until I meet the horizon now in this particular situation the horizon to my eye is the most important everything else is going to kind of figure itself out after the fact all right so that being said I'm going to go up to my viewport click on filter and get rid of my gridlines all right now I'm going to put a box in here and we're going to see whether or not it behaves and you can kind of just eyeball it here and that absolutely looks like it fits in the scene do a little tilt up here you can see what happens my horizon line is screwing everything up here so you kind of see how that how not having things aligned to the photograph having your camera aligned to the photograph or oriented towards the point of view of the photograph is going to make it so that when you start compositing things in there it's just it's going to look weird okay it's going to look janky it's not going to work okay so most important thing right there let's get rid of the cube now that I have my camera lined I definitely don't want to move it okay let's say I move the camera by accident for whatever reason I do it by accident I screw it all up there is a way to get the camera settings back through a lot of people think well I'll just do and undo I'll do a command or control Z well that doesn't work for the camera in order to get it to work for the camera you have to do command shift C on a Mac or ctrl shift Z on Windows so let's just get our camera back to where it was and then so that I don't ever do that again I'm going to select the virtual camera I'm going to go to tags cinema 4d tags and I'm going to select protection tag and now I can't move the camera at all no matter what I do okay good first two most important steps completed next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to add a plane now the plane is really important because that's what's going to be catching my shadows and making this look realistic okay one thing that a lot of people who are starting visual effects are compositing don't realize and you you notice it if you if you see a horrific compositing job on television or you know in a project or something like that why does that not look right well a couple things lighting could be way the heck off you know that it doesn't belong there the other thing is is it's not casting any shadows and it doesn't look like it's on the ground okay casting shadows is one thing making it look like it's on the ground is a whole nother thing we do that by adding ambient occlusion to the scene and I'll show you that in just a moment okay so I want to add a plane this is going to capture my shadows okay one thing that you don't need to do is you don't need to UM make this piece of geometry complex because it's only catching shadows you don't need it to have this many width and height segments you don't need more than this you don't need 60 width and height segments you really only need a one by one oops why increase your render time right I mean because at at the end of the day that's what you're going to end up having to do and if you have you know 40 width and height segments you're going to say well you know why is this ticket so long as ridiculous well you're going to take a render hit ah you know doing it that way but if you have it on a one by one it's going to speed it up maybe not significantly but enough to be appreciated all right so this is our ground actually let's call this a shadow catcher okay and now the the second most important step we're going to drag this our original material onto our shadow catcher all right now what's wrong with this well we've really just put the photographic scene onto a ground plane and it's not working well why isn't it working simply because right now our projection mapping is not correct okay not our projection mapping but the projection of the texture onto the object so we need to change this to frontal well now I don't see anything well of course you don't it's okay it's not a big deal next thing that we need to do is we need to add a compositing tag this is really the most important step in the whole thing all right I'll just bring this over here all right I do not want this to cast any shadows I want it to receive shadows but I don't need to casting any shadows you can leave everything else on for now but most importantly compositing backgrounds you need that on and now there are no lights in the scene so let's add a light alright and it's going to it's going to look a little weird to you perhaps in here you know might look like it's getting stretched and and all that other good stuff but believe me when it renders it's it's not it's not going to look like that okay it's at a box to the scene so use our handy drop the floor plug in let's actually make this smaller let's move it back out here and now let's add let's say an area shadow and let's also kind of grab this color just do a quick render here okay see what I mean you can see that the texture on the plane that we created is absolutely fine all right the lighting doesn't work but we can see that a shadow is being cashed a cast there one thing that we might do is we might go into shadows I might change the shadow value here actually let's do this let's uh just grab this again and then we'll darken that up and let's also change our density to maybe 65% not too bad it could use a little bit more maybe and this is rendering very quickly because there's really nothing in the scene there's nothing for to do now let's see if we take a massive hit by changing our width and height segments on our plane here probably not too much nope not really but again as you start putting more complex things into the scene you're definitely going to want to make sure that's a one by one okay all right so those are the most important things those are really the only things that you need to know in order to create a scene like this you don't have to jump through hoops to place an object into a still photograph really all you've got to do is make sure that you know the size of your background image dial that into cinema 4d next thing that you need to do is create a camera and orient it properly to your horizon and also to your ground plane and believe me if you go out if you live in a city like New York City or you know Orlando or LA or something like that you you take photograph of a city street scene or something like that you're definitely going to want to make sure that you have your grid turned on and then it's a it's a line to you know the street and you know you're you're kind of guesstimating at that point where your horizon is because you can't exactly see it alright so in that particular situation use the grid and your ground plane to line it up two objects on the street level you know the the dotted lines on the street the curb that everything else and you'll get your camera oriented properly also if you have the EXIF data from your photograph that came from your camera that that shot the scene make sure that you put in there what your gate size is or your sensor size and also the focal length or the millimeters that you shut the photograph at and then at that point once that camera is set protect it make sure that it doesn't get moved and all that other good stuff then you can start adding your shadow catcher or your ground plane and all that other good stuff make sure that your shadow catcher texture it's projection is set to frontal and then add a compositing tag to that shut off your cast shadows and turn on compositing background okay one thing about this is let's do this let's some is actually no texture added to that at all so let's do this let's add a reflection to this just turn this up a little bit and we'll make this pure white and just leave the specular as it is we're going to drag this onto the cube here let's add one more light and this is really going to be more of an ambient light let's go back to this main light that we have here I'm going to go to color I'm going to copy that and I'm going to paste it here and let's do a quick render of this alright so you can see that the ground plane is reflected its textures reflected in the material here now in the plane where we have a compositing tag we have a bunch of other options here where it's not seen by Transparency refraction or reflection or by ambient occlusion so let's just go ahead and shut off all this stuff and let's see what happens after that okay so again if you have a lot of objects in the scene that are you know heavy duty geometry or finding that is taking a long time to render you don't really care about whether your ground plane is reflected on those objects or not maybe they don't have any reflective values to them you can shut this stuff off all right now I do happen to want the material to be seen but I also don't want it to be that crazy so I'm going to turn the blur level up to well let's just say 10% and I'm going to render this particular section again and now you can see I am once again getting some reflection it's not so hard now it's kind of slightly blurred so those are a few things that you can keep in mind now the other thing is remember when I was talking about lighting and also casting shadows and things like that as to whether the object looks like it belongs in the scene well the other thing that we can do is we can turn on ambient occlusion by going to our render settings going to effect in choosing ambient occlusion all right now ambient occlusion basically creates a shadow between two planes or two objects wherever objects intersect so for example if you were creating a room and you had a floor and you know you had your your walls with the corners and things like that in real life you'll see slight shadows where two walls meet or the wall meets the floor very subtle but definitely there all right now we can just leave this as it is but I think it's going to be a little bit heavy-handed we can see here that our ambient occlusion is going to start out dark where the shadow is and eventually lighten up to absolutely nothing all right this color is not going to match the scene and it's kind of heavy but let's have a look at it the other thing that we want to do is we want to make sure that scene by ambient occlusion is turned on or that's not going to work you know the ambient occlusion is going to show up just like we had with the reflection so let's do this really quickly okay and now you can see there's very very subtle subtle shadow in there okay let's go to our ambient occlusion settings and I'm going to turn the accuracy up to 100% now ambient occlusion definitely gives you a render hit alright so again keep this in mind if you need it in there but you don't need it to be 100% accuracy it's going to slow down your render just lower your accuracy lower the number of samples that you have I'm going to put 32 samples in here in 128 maximum okay still not too bad okay pretty quick a couple good things you're going to get this project file that I've just set up right here you're also going to get this still photograph in the background please don't use it in a commercial project that would be a not not be a good situation and you know go to town you know experiment you know find out what works and what doesn't what different settings do you know there are a lot of things in cinema 4d that you can do to make a scene better just through settings or worse alright so this is a very very simple scene here and go ahead and download it and enjoy it and I'm going to have a lot more tutorials coming your way new ones have been posting up probably for the last year and a half two years but all that's going to change now so sign up for the for the updates so that you know when a new tutorial is up but tell your friends or stop by often you know to see what's new alright thanks guys thanks for visiting fathom lab on Tod day from fathom video have a great day

Channel: fathomvideo

Views: 114,324

Keywords: Tutorial (Media Genre), tutorial, visual effects, VFX

Id: t3QYwGAG37M

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015