Cinema 4D & Octane Tutorial - Basic Studio Lighting Preset Setup

thanks so much for the response on my previous tutorials it's been really great you guys asked for it so I'm going to give you my basic photo studio with octane render and cinema 4d let's do it so let's have a look at a standard three point lighting system so if you just Google three point lighting it will give you a really nice overview if you want to look into further how many people set up a lighting a basic lighting scenario so you would have your subject pointing at the camera over here your main or key light pointing at the object your fill light usually that half just to fill in so there's no deep dark shadows from the key light and then a hair light or a rim light that is outlining or highlighting the edges defining the edges of the subject from the background so I'm not going to do exactly this three-point lighting it's not to my taste I'll take you through my version of what I usually set up and you'll see the difference I usually like a bit more of a side lighting but I'll just show you so let's get into it first I'm just going to create it's like the objects go to fear just so I've got a basic object that my whole scene will rotate around and it's in like the default center position so if I select object turn off render perfect segments 248 I'm also going to create a null object and I'm going to rename it to target now select this to bring up my different views so that target naal is right in the center in the default of my scene it's like this to enlarge the scene and you'll see what that's for in in a minute so first what I'd like to do is create a camera so let me fire up octane octane live viewer so this is the default I get with octane I've got no lights no background no nothing so object octane camera so it's going to drop in octane camera in in the direction that I've been looking at through my viewer but I'm going to zero out all these coordinates anyway so in select the camera I want to choose a 50 mil lens and go to the coordinates and just zero out those coordinates so you can see now it's zeroed out I want to zero out these coordinates as well so let me just go zero zero getting as default and basic as I can and yeah that's fine I might make the Z minus 500 so now if I select my perspective select little icon it's going to look through the camera and you can see our sphere is front and center and we can see from these angles it's pointing there now the focus plane is way beyond the sphere if I select the F here and then press it on the object you'll bring the focus plane directly where I've pressed on that object so sweet now I've got my camera next I'm going to create a backdrop so I'm going to use let me drag this out of the way going to use the right viewport for that I'm going to use a pen tool and I want snapping on so I enable snapping the work I want to select the work plane snap and then make sure grid point snapping is on I just turned it off I just went turn on again so essentially you're just going to make a backdrop so I want it to start behind the camera and so we're all following along let's make o sort of one two three four five grid spots down and you can see it's snapping to the point which is what we want note to make a nice straight line five let's make it even on the back so one two three four five back there and nice and high maybe there press the spacebar to end that select the first point and then just delete that now select this corner point we want a nice curved edge so right-click and select chamfer and click and drag and it will start the shampo you can see this unit is starting there come across to our radius and increase that radius till it gets to about the couple of one two squares from where we started from and that gives us a nice curved edge for our backdrop so next I want to come over here and select extrude and drag that spline into the extrude select the extrude let's drag this up here so select the extrude now at the moment is default to 20 in the in the zip the z-axis and I don't want it there I want that to be zero and I want it to extrude along the x-axis you can see it moving along there so let's make that say 2400 and now I want to move the whole thing let me choose my model and move a selection tool but I can just select it coordinates minus 1200 so now if i zoom out from this window you can see it's placed exactly it's centered in the middle of the object which is exactly what we want great I am going to double click on that and rename it say Chlo excellent so if I select my perspective window then deselect the camera you can see kind of what we've got so far so next I want to add some lights come to my octane window objects first I'm going to add a HDR environment which is an octane sky I'm going to bring the power of that Octane's guy down to 0.2 just so it gives me some like if I drag it to zero you see no lights point two just gives me a little bit of feel light so I can see what I'm working with octane actually before I do that so this is why we've got this target now select the target null it's like the object octane targeted area light so what's that that's going to do is it has this tag which is a target object and you can see target null is slept it in there so if I move this light around it will always point at the target null which the sphere is right on top of see is it's always targeting that sphere which will make our job a little bit easier so for the first light let's make it make it the key light I like my key light nice and big so let's choose the octane light tag there and this icon here you just look down here with the power distribution is there empty if you click on this it sets those with some defaults which gives it a bit more of a nicer drop-off be more of a natural I found it a bit more of a natural light drop-off so select that select your octane light again come across into details and you can just choose these points here too you know you can see how that's affecting the light as I drag it bigger and smaller move it around I'm just gonna deselect the snapping so it's a bit smoother but for the purposes of the tutorial I'm going to plug in some some numbers so we can all follow along so details outer radius let's make that 200 nice and big you see their relationship there to the object size keep that 400 let's make the Y size 1200 okay that is our key light done just going to position it so let me just zoom out a bit from there yeah that's looking good so in coordinates drag the Y positioning up and down so it's the the pitch angle here P for pitch is about minus 20 we'll say it doesn't have to be perfect but around minus 20 and if we drag the x axis there get that so that's around 50 it was already around 50 but somewhere about there and then drag the Z depth so we're about at 500 on the X yeah so that gives us our first light control-c control-v to copy that light and it copies the the target null so like if I drag it around you can see it's always trying to point at the target which is exactly what we want so this field light I want it about half the size so let's go to the details once again feel sixty and that X is fine the size Y let's make that 240 and I like to have this quite close to the side so I positioned that close to the side so let's go to the coordinates something close to minus 88 and similar to the key light something maybe like minus 20 minus 20 here in the pitch so we have something like that once again control-c control-v to copy that and I'm going to drag a light to the opposite side drag it up to about there and this is going to be what they had in the diagram is the hair light for the rim light I just like it to be off the side but this is a more smaller focused light so the bigger the area of light the softer the shadows this smaller the light the sharper the shadows will be so this is what this light will be for so let's make this a back light and details radius 30 centimeters quite small we keep 60 and 120 that's fine but what we want to do is select the tag and come to the power and make that 1000 really bright so that's our three main lights I also like to add another light onto the actual backdrop itself and because our lights are free I like to add too so this time I'll just I don't want these lights targeted at the null target at the sphere so I'm just going to add some new lights octane area light you can see just so you can see it there it is there it's quite bright I'm gonna bring the power back to five really really quite small I'm gonna up the size to 300 and let's make the size Y 800 just a bit higher in the vertical this light is going to be off to the side so they go to coordinates plug in minus 30 puts a bit and a bit of an angle and let's put the coordinates at - 650 and 650 and the Z at 300 see it there it is right there I want to put another one of those exactly on the opposite side about there so this is going to be 650 in the exposition so now if I select perspective select the icon to zoom in my camera I've got a nice let me just select the fear object 64 so it's nice around default sphere and we've got our basic light setup right there I'm going to tidy up a little bit so select this actually let me drag out so I've got some renaming space key this was how fill this one was I'll call it back or hair or REM or whatever you want to call it this one here is our background left and this one is our background right we've got the sky Psychlo camera tagging owl beautiful let's select all those hold down shift and select them not the sphere alt G to group those into a null we'll call this basic studio and there we have our basic studio and what we can do with that once we have our basic studio we can save that as a preset so it's ready for us to use whenever we like so how can we do that select window content browser and in the content browser you'll see presets come up to file new preset library let's call this it's going to add a new folder to the preset so let's call it Studio rig there it is and all we do is we grab our basic studio we drop it into there now if we close that off if we close everything down not even going to save doing Save Changes No so I've started again I've just lost everything I've worked on I refresh that octane window to show it just say we were starting a new project from scratch here is our here's a sphere I just realized there's one thing I wanted to add to that studio rig but we can do that later on 64 so you go to your tab over here content browser and you'll probably be met with something like this presets find your studio rig basic studio and there you go yep populate go to objects populates our scene with all those elements even the camera if we look through there in that you can just roll with that the thing I wanted to add I like to also add a a like a default octane texture let me just delete that and do that again so if you come to materials obtain diffuse material and I'm just going to drop that onto my cyclorama oops sorry about that let me double click that and I'm going to make this 75% gray and I'll just call that 75% gray so it's just nice to have that as a starting material when I open up new files so what I can do let me redo that before so content browser let me see if I can just delete that one yes drag this one in so that's saved now with the backdrop just let me test that by go to content browser again double click yep and it's putting a new texture they come to objects it's like my camera again beautiful and that's it that's the basics of saving a basic photo studio three-point lighting setup and what I like about this setup is if i zoom out here I've got a flat background well lit but I've got lots of options so if I want a shadow underneath I've got I just select the Cyclorama make sure I've got my model and position tools selected and I just drag it up and then I've got a floor with nice shadows I can double click texture and then I've got a simple color change that is was really quick and I can undo that for one grade let me take the back drop out again or if I want to change my lights around just say I want no key light I can select the octane sky put it to zero so there's totally no fill lighting or default lighting take the background off and I've got all these different options just have one light source just have the fill light source just have the side lighting or I can just turn on just the key light or just highlight the background also if you want to lo certainly put this back to point to if you want to lo to HDRI so just say I have a glossy let's make this really glossy and select index put this right up I'll drag this to my sphere so I've got a glossy material if I want to get some reflection we can see already the studio floor is reflecting in this sphere but I can come to octane sky select the tag image texture and just search Studio HDRI on on google it'll come up with something I've got a few I've already downloaded open up that one no I don't want to save it and you can see the reflections are in the ball I can increase the intensity of that if I like better I like to drop it down to 0.5 or something a bit less but I usually don't even unless I've got something particularly glossy I want to reflect I don't even use that at all I just have it on default feel and that is usually good enough for me let's bring that back down specular 0.2 roughness point 2 you just have a default beautiful studio lighting rig I hope that helped you guys out and it's hopefully will speed up your process in doing your work you can obviously customise this rig however you like you can do a standard three point lighting system or to your own custom lighting system and then just save it as a preset and it'll save you lots of time in the future with numerous different objects so I hope you like that guys and I'll catch you later bye

Channel: Rhett / Mankind

Views: 137,284

Keywords: art, design, film, tutorial, render, cinema4d, cinema, 4d, octane, renderer, otoy, basic, studio, lighting, setup, photo, realistic, backdrop, 3-point, lights, 3d, model, mankind

Id: MEHZu-auw-4

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2018