Cinema 4D: PBR Workflow And ProRender

[Music] hi guys it's Sam for digital me and in this tutorial we're going to be looking at the PBR workflow in cinema 4d and also the pro render GPU render engine I warn you now this is probably gonna be a long one so I'll try to put timestamps in the description of the video so this is just the scene that I've set up nothing special really I've got a camera in the corner and it's just a room with some objects in it really so you know nothing to write home about but this is gonna be the basis of all the stuff we're going to go through so let's get back into our camera view so first I want to talk a little bit about a PBR workflow and what that actually means PBR stands for physically based rendering because this workflow uses physical properties of materials and lights to achieve a realistic look and feel it's um it's a common misconception that you can just slap a PBR material or shader on an object and things would just look correct this is wrong and it is not what PBR is PBR is a multi-faceted workflow not only does our material need to be correct but our lighting model color space and light settings need to be correct too another tip scale is important if your model say a cup is 20 centimetres tall in reality their model it 20 centimetres tall there is no use having a cup 20 metres tall it won't look right and it may cause problems with pro render that we'll go into later also allow have an effect on things like depth of field in your camera it just won't look right so the first thing I want to talk about is linear color space here's two screenshots I took from a scene in the Unity game engine the materials for both scenes are physically based but the image to the left this one here is using a gamma color space and the image to the right is using a linear color space notice how in the right image there is a more harmonious dispersion of light and the scene appears to be brighter overall this is because the math is correct so you know we're getting some proper dark areas here also the reflections are really noticeable on this ignore the you know whether the reflections are correct or not I was using am reflection probe in this scene so doing all the reflections themselves but notice how the energy coming off the floor in the right image looks way more correct than it does in this image and notice the sort of light seems to be drop travelling further in the right image as well whereas this is a bit more washed out this is because the math is correct in the right image which makes linear color space a hard requirement for a PBR workflow other advantages of a linear workflow are over exposed regions will be reduced and you'll get more natural colorization this is why whenever I work in unity using the PBR shader the first thing I do is go to the player settings and turn on linear color space now let's talk about this in cinema 4d in cinema 4d linear workflow is not something we have to worry about actually because if we go to our document Saenz here I think you can get to it by pressing let's go somewhere else control D yep okay you'll notice at the bottom here linear workflow is already checked on linear workflow has been part of cinema 4d for many years and is switched on but by default so you know you can see that here it's not something you don't have to worry about in c4d okay so let's start with materials in C for D r19 which is what I'm using we have a new material preset called the PBR material if you're using an older version like r18 or our 17 you will not have this preset but you can actually just create it yourself so I'll talk about that in a minute so if I go down to the material thing here usually I'll just double clicking and create material but that is not what we're going to be doing we're going to be creating a PBR material so if I go to create new PBR material it creates this nice open it up okay so the first thing you'll notice is that only the reflections channel is active this is because in a PPR material what would normally go in the color channel here is now handled inside of the reflectance channel this may seem strange but it is in actuality physically correct so let me just grab another image consider this brick it could be described as matte or not reflective but it is the very fact that we can see it shows that it is reflective light rays come in from a light source and the light rays hit the brick some energy is lost by absorption and then the light is bouncing to our eyes or in this case the camera lens so we can see and perceive its color so even matte objects are reflective it's just that these reflections are highly diffused another property of a PBR material is energy conservation in general terms it means that the amount of reflective light from an object surface so in this case our brick we have light coming in it hits the surface and the amount of that reflective light that gets to our eye will not exceed the amount that came in initially this means that when we create a material a PBR material it will look correct under any like any type of lighting condition okay so let's get rid of this picture and actually have a look at our material so our by default the PBR material reflectance channel has two layers so let's click on that and here we can see what our reflectance channel looks like so I'm just gonna open this up a little bit so you'll notice at the top here we've got layers and a few default diffuse chosen at the moment so let's just select layers right so you can see that we've got two layers already in there a default diffuse and a default reflection so let's have a look at the default diffuse first you'll notice that under type here it says version defuse this will give us map reflections so this is basically the new color channel instead of being here is now in this layer called default diffuse and this is set to a lambertian diffuse in layer color so here we have a color picker exactly like we do in our color Channel and we also have a texture slot exactly like we do in our color channel and this is what is replacing these inputs here the color and this so like I said this default diffuse is our new color Channel it will handle all of that stuff in our default reflection layer up here the type is set to Beckman here so this is kind of like a glossy reflection Beckman is physically correct and should be the preferred method for normal use we also have controls for roughness so we can choose you know an or percent roughness this will be a hundred percent glossy hundred percent shiny and then obviously as we turn this up the surface of our reflected a reflection channel even our default reflection becomes more rough so I'm just going to wipe this back down to thirty so we've got controls for roughness and we've also got reflection strength as well so we can turn that down and you can see that it still looks like it's reflecting there and that's because of this specular strength or her turn that all the way down there won't be any but if I turn this up now we can see there are reflections coming back just a quick note specular strength is kind of like a fake reflection if you like it's like an approximate reflection so you know if you want you can turn this all the way down I'm just going to leave it as it was for now because when we render you're not going to see this anyway because it's all based on reflections okay and obviously we've got a bump strengths and if we twirl this down same for any of these by the way so if we turn send this down we can actually define roughness with the texture if we wanted to and the same for these we can define specular stroke for the texture also reflection strength and and also bump strength so for instance in roughness if I had a black and white texture in here so it was checker boards where it'd be black it wouldn't be very rough and wear is right 100% white that would be a hundred percent roughness so you can actually define these values with textures in terms of the layers here we've got default diffuse and default reflection but we can actually add layers and I think so let me add another beckman on top and then in this layer I can say okay well this is a Beckman it's layer finales dielectric and this one's gonna be really rough so if I change the order of this you can see the underneath we've got our you know really rough layer and then on top of that we've got a glassy layer so it's almost like I'm sort of building up layers of lacquer you know I've got well I've got a lacquer layer on top of this really rough layer so you just sort of building up layers like you would if you were painting something in real life you know you do an undercoat then you put a paint on top then you might put you know some kind of lacquer on top you know so it's it's a lot like that in fact this is a lot like um Photoshop because you can stack layers one on top of another so I'm just going to ctrl Z just undo what I did sorry back to what we had before okay so like I said if you're working with older versions of cinema 4d let's just name our material here PBR so we don't get confused between the two if you're using like are 18 or are 17 you're not going to have this PBR material but we can't create it so you just create a material like normal mice open that up and in the color we just turn that off in reflectance let's remove all of this and then we will add a layer and if you remember our default diffuse layer was a lambertian diffuse so let's do that and you can name this layer default defuse and we've got it set to land version and then we can add another layer and make it a Beckman like our default reflection and I think it's for now was a dielectric and I think it had a PT or something like that on it turn our roughness up to 30% and you know that matches our other other materials so you can actually create your PBR material yourself from scratch so it's not really a problem okay so let's get rid of that so let's just apply this PBR material to our objects in our room I'm going to apply it to everything I went the long right way around to do that but um okay so we've got all our materials on objects in this room now so let's just hit render and see what we get well that looks pretty awful lots of grain terrible lighting and the light in itself actually that's because our scene is currently being lit by the default light the default light is on automatically until an actual light is added to our scene so you can find the default light here if I go to our render settings currently in standard render but if I get out to options you'll see that we've got this default light checked on now if I turn that off and render you'd get what you'd expect to see in a scene with no lights pitch-black but I'm gonna send the default light back on I think basically this default light it gets over overridden when you actually add a delight to the scene okay like I said I'm currently in standard render so let's go to our render settings I'm actually going to switch my render method over to physical render because I prefer the level of control but I get from one place in the render settings humming provender their physical past well one so now we're in physical render if I get out of physical I can control you know a lot of the stuff with the samples here it's at this point I should probably note that a PPR workflow can be used with standard and physical render but it will be slower than using a normal workflow ie you know the normal normal color channel in your material and maybe adding some GI so you've been warned to your render times will increase if you're using a PBR workflow with either the standard or physical render a PBR workflow in cinema 4d really has been tailored towards use with pro render so let's get a physically correct light in our scene so let's close this we're in physical render at the moment let's get a physical physically correct light we have a new light type in cinema 4d r19 called the PBR light so if I actually drop this down you can see here we've got this PBR light so let's just drop that in our scene for the moment and pull it out of the way by default it has several properties that are enabled that make this light physically correct its shadow type so let's click on the light and go to it some attributes its shadow type is set to area and its fall off which i think is in details there we go is set to inverse square which is physically accurate you can see there in brackets so inverse square fall-off of light it's just like a real light behaves now again if you're using an older version of cinema 4d you won't have a PB PBR light as an option but you can create one by creating an area light so let's get rid of our PBR light just for a moment so let's create area light let's go to general and say that the shadow type is area and in details will change the fall-off to inverse square physically accurate not inverse square clamped and we can also go to a photometric intensity and turn that on and by default the PBR lights photometric intensity is set to think 5000 so there you go you we now have a light that is exactly the same settings as the D as a you know we've got this preset here this PBR light so you can create one yourself using an area line okay so now that's out the way let's set up some PBR lights at our windows here so I want to go grab this PBR light great I'm gonna come out of my camera actually and I'm gonna set it up at the holes in our room so I'm just gonna drag this up and obviously it needs to be pointing in the right direction as well usually in the Z direction in fact as always in the Z direction so let's turn this around there we go and I'm just gonna hold shift so I can clip to a 90 degree angle I'm gonna go to my side view as well so I can actually bring this light down to somewhere like that there we go so we can see these actually sort of near our opening there and then I'm gonna go into my top view and just make sure that it's dimensions cover you know the hole in the top of the roof there okay great okay so let's say I create another PBR light in fact on the rename this light so we know which ones which I'm gonna cool this top light great so let's grab another PBR light I know it looks blown out in the scene at the moment but don't worry too much about that we're gonna fix it so I'm gonna put that there get my rotate tool I'm going to drag this round so it's facing in and obviously holding shift so we can get a nice make sure there's exactly a hundred and eighty degrees and again I'm gonna go into my side view this one this time and I'm gonna grab my window are light make sure that it's height is big enough to you know cover the window hole and then I'm gonna go into my um top view and make sure that it's wide enough as well so that we go and then I'm gonna copy this so control drag out our light and then set it up at the other window as well so I'm just gonna rotate it so it's facing the right way then I'm gonna put this at this window here and I think we need to adjust it slightly so it covers window there we go and I'm just gonna go into the side view just to make sure it actually our thumbs our windows in height as well and it does okay so that should be our light setup and like I said I realize that it is very overblown so if you go to the general settings of the one our one of our light so you can see this intensity is a hundred percent so let's select all three lights and drop all of their intensities down to thirty percent something a little bit more manageable okay so we've got one PBR material that's just on everything and that isn't very interesting really so I'm actually gonna rename this PBR material to room mmm there we go and then I am going to control drag out this material so we've got a copy of it which is room one and I'm gonna just create some materials to put on our different objects just to make this scene look a little bit more more interesting let's make some shiny materials I'm going to call this teal okay and then in the reflections channel in the default diffuse I'm gonna change its color to let's go to RGB and then I can put in your actual hex value this is the color of my digital meat logo and then in the default reflection I'm just can actually take out the specular strap that's kind of annoying me and I'm going to bring this roughness down as well I want this to be quite glossy so maybe sort of 5% roughness not much and this can go on our main object in the scene this bad boy so now I'd like to do is drag this out I can rename this as well so let's call this red and then again go into our default diffuse I'm just going to change this to red like that something maybe a little bit darker than that yeah that'll do and I'm going to apply this to our bulls ear and then one last color let's make a weird green or something yeah let's call this green [Music] and something like this this will do in it okay cool so we've got we've got a green color and we can put that on our little tube now I'm just going to delete the the white materials off of the ones that we don't need it on anymore not because it'll have an effect but because I've got OCD so alright time to render so let's have a look at our render settings like I said effect flipped over to physical it's on adaptive I'm gonna per automatic and make the error threshold 15% you've seen me do this a million times so um let's just do that and hit the render button yeah before I do before I render I'm actually gonna render to the picture viewer and that's because like I said with the PBR workflow if you're using standard or physical you're going to get increased render times okay and because of the nature of a reflective sort of material workflow here are not sure upshot of that is you're gonna get um sort of global illumination for free you don't have to turn it on in the render settings and that's because we're dealing with real reflections here and because of that the render times are going to increase in a in the physical render so instead of rendering to this where I don't actually know the resolution you know you in the viewport here I'm actually gonna render to the picture viewer so let's go to our output and I'm gonna lower I'm gonna lock the ratio and actually lower the resolution of the picture just so it keeps it a bit more zippy for you guys so now I can rent it to the picture viewer at this resolution and it shouldn't take as long as rendering to this here okay so um let's just do it let's render to the pitch view okay so first things first notice how we're getting global illumination even though it's not turned in or on in the render sentence like I said is because of the reflective work material workflow it's a natural result of this type of workflow also notice how we have lots of grain in our image too but we can actually clean this grain up okay so it's taking its sweet time what I might do when i re-render is actually um speed up the footage for you guys so don't think my you know come this I'll do it once at normal speed but um next time I render I'll um I'll speed it up so you guys don't have to watch this every time okay so that uh if we look at the bottom here you can see the time it took about one minute nine seconds and this is a result we're getting so for that amount of time if you using a normal workflow with GI it probably render a lot faster in a scene like this and it wouldn't look as crap so you'll notice we're getting lots and lots of noise in this like I said we can actually clean this up because our reflector materials are now reflectance base we need to go into the physical render settings and increase our blurriness subdivision so let's do that let's go into our physical settings and it's this set in here that is gonna affect this noise so this blurry blowing a subdivision max I'm gonna crank this up to five and let's give this another render and see what kind of result we're gonna get okay our render is done notice how the image is a lot cleaner but our render times have gone through the roof and we if we look at the bottom down here we've got seven minutes 32 seconds and you know that is a long long time and especially when you consider that I lowered the resolution of this image to eight hundred by four for got what it was now for fifty something like that so it's not exactly a high resolution image and taken into consideration that I've got a rise in thread Ripper 1950 X which is thirty-two logical processors so it's no slouch you know if you were to do this on say a quad core you're going to be looking at even more time here so this may not be the way you want to go if you're wanting to use physical or standard render you may want to just go with the normal workflow and not a PBR one now there there are actually ways to reduce the render time by messing around with the samples and stuff if you if you want a PBR workflow with the physical render or standard but I'm not gonna go into that here I actually might do another tutorial I'm covering that topic so I just wanted to demonstrate that PBR workflow can be done with standard and physical render but may not be the best choice which brings me to the new render solution in cinema 4d r19 pro render so let's let's switch over to that so I'm physical at the moment let's go to pro render as normal we have output which I'm sure you're all familiar with and we have save as well and then we have this pro render section here inside provender you'll find that we have three tabs we've got offline which is where all our settings for rendering to the picture viewer are we've got the preview tab which deals with all the settings for the interactive preview mode and general contains general settings for pro render let's go into the general settings first okay so we've got default light this is just an internal light source that is used if there are no lights in your scene as soon as you create a light source the internal light source is disregarded then we've got static noise just leave this turned off it basically keeps the same noise from frame to frame so if you're doing an animation each frame will have the same noise distribution and it looks really really unnatural I honestly don't know why this is even an option there's a checkbox I can't think of a use case for that and but for still images that's fine if you want it the same you know noise distribution but like I said fat animation it looks terrible a real-life camera you know when it's when you're shooting through a real life camera the noise distribution will change from frame to frame so therefore more natural okay so ray Epsilon this is a bit of a difficult one to explain so I'm actually going to pull up the help on this one and this is and this is an example of a problem you might find yourself gang okay you may be getting results like this it kinda looks like shadow acne you get in game engines this is part of the reason that scale is so important if you're seeing this you can slowly increase or lower the Ray Upsilon until these artifacts are gone and you can do that using this here they've got it set to it's in millimeters by the way they've got it set to one so if you were to I don't know let's come out the camera from init and zoom into this if you were looking at a cube on the floor here next to this object and it was this big and you're getting dodgy results like in that image it's probably because of this you probably want to lower the rapes Alon and it will sort out your problem similarly if you were to zoom out like this and you were rendering a mountain or something like that it may be the case that this needs to be increased to get rid of this kind of are affected okay so devices we've got override global device settings so if we 12 down offline devices and preview devices this is basically the devices your hardware there's going to be used for the offline mode so when you render into the picture viewer or you know pressing the render button and then we've got the preview devices which is the devices the hardware is going to be using for when you've got the interactive preview window running and I usually check this box because by default you can see that it's got one of my gtx970 is selected but not the other one so I want to use both so let's just check them both on and now we'll be using both let's just as I'm back into my scene as well so you're not a million miles away so yeah like I said I'm using both of my um graphics cards for the preview window and the offline rendering as well now we've also got this area you CPU for offline and use CPU for preview so if I click this on you can see that now the my graphics cards are grayed out so you can't use the CPU and your graphics cards in conjunction with each other at the moment anyway but I'm gonna turn the CPU option off because I've got two graphics cards and this is actually an experimental at the moment it's not um it's not been fully realized on to the other tabs you'll notice that both these tabs actually share a lot of the same settings with a few exceptions so if you look at preview mode we've got render mode and raid apps and all that kind of thing and if we look at offline we've got an a render mode ray depth but there are some differences between these two so let's go through the preview tab first and what this actually is and what it does so to get an idea of what these do let's actually fire up our interactive preview so I'm gonna get back into my camera I'm gonna leave all the settings at default for the time being and what I might even do is actually attach this to my window here and then we can move this up and then we've got our render settings open at all times also as well I'm gonna you can see very very slightly I don't know if you guys can see that on the video but you can see the sort of edges of what will actually be rendered I'm actually gonna go to options configure and just pull this back out again and go to view and you can see this tinted border and the opacity is at 10 I'm gonna crank this up to 90% in fact I might do a hundred because then we will be able to see exactly what portion of our things rendering and also we get we get some information come up that'll be in this black area and it'll be easy it easier to see so you'll see what I'm saying we're not one over I actually start the interactive render view so the interactive render view can actually be turned on via the menu at the top of the viewport so if I go up here you can see this pro render menu and if I click this down we've got this start Pro render so let's just start it and straightaway we get in results and at the bottom you can see this information here which is why I made this black so we could see this and we've also got button here saying start Pro render as you can see it's orange if I click that it'll turn it off so now we've activated it up here in the menu I can actually turn it on and off from down here and you can also change the quality to offline or preview but I'm gonna keep it on preview because that's the whole point of this window really ok this is pretty important to know if this is the first time you're using Pro render you'll probably be looking at a black screen do not panic nothing is wrong ok so the first time that you actually fire up Pro render it has to compile shaders it only has to do this once and once it's done you won't have to do it again unless you update your graphics card that is and then they'll have to compile shaders the next time you run pro render so what happens is if I go to my ed preferences and bring this up and open preference it didn't happen to me obviously because this isn't the first time that I've used Pro render and I haven't had to update the graphics card recently but what happens is if I open the Preferences folder and we actually have a look at this you'll see that we got two folders here called GPU renderer and there I think there's a note in there yep and there's another one here and it you can see that all it's got all these bin files in there that's what it needs to go compile to make sure that for your graphics card is doing the right thing when it comes to sampling time mapping you know raycast in all of that stuff so it needs to do that so if you're looking at a black screen that's what it's doing don't panic once it's done the next time you start Pro render so I'll just turn that off and then turn it back on again it will be like this it'll be quick okay so I want to show you the interactive nature of this window so let's come out of our camera for a minute and so go back to our objects up here and I'm just going to come out the camera and look at that already you can see the interactive you know you can see the purpose of having this interactive window because it means you that you can go oh I'm through a wall I think yeah there we are so I can zoom in on this and change the view and it will update immediately and then progressively get better and better so as Pro render it raise the image quality gets better and better as it goes along every time you move ask to start the renderer again and goes through a load of iterations so there we go the upshot of this is we can very quickly get feedback when adjusting lights or materials there's no more back and forth you know tweaking then re rendering then tweaking again then re rendering again we get immediate feedback so let's just demonstrate that let's go back to our camera unless choose R or I didn't name this light so let's just name this left light okay so we know what we're dealing with and this one can be called right light because it's on the right hand side okay cool so if I select our top light here and I'm just going to pull this out I can actually mess with the intensity of the that light in it'll update so there we go that's the result of me dropping it all the way down to zero if I put it back to 30 we can see we get immediate results the same is true for the materials as well so if I take our green material here and then fancy changing his color to something like a orange or something like that that's more like a disgusting Brown but let's put that up immediately we get feedback we get an update in the viewport so that's a really good way to author your materials and your lighting before you move on to UM you know using these offline settings to do a a proper render so that's the advantage of having this interactive window okay back to these preview scenes then render mode so let's have a look at this render mode here we can select three different types of render mode we have global illumination which is what we're on at the moment this mode is probably gonna be the one you use the most this mode includes GI shadows reflections refractions and transparency this is basically where this is basically everything's turned on okay so the next option we have direct illumination without shadows so if we look at the picture here we can see the difference between global illumination and this option so what does this involve this option is no GI no shadows this is just direct light this is probably good for setting up lights maybe just to make sure that the intensity is okay who knows but yeah you can see the stark contrast contrast between this and the the first global illumination mode okay next we have ambient occlusion let's turn that on and there you go it pretty much does what it says on the tin it renders an ambient occlusion pass that can be composite over the normal render in post and as you see once we've got the ambient occlusion selected this ambient occlusion ray lymph is no longer grayed out if I go back to a direct illumination you can see is grayed out here but yeah on ambient occlusion this is now active and now I can change the Ray length so just take a look at this picture our image here and you can see what the ambient occlusion looks like at one meter or 100 centimeters but if I drop this down to say 50 it kind of rains it let's get more extreme than that let's go back to 100 and then just let's knock a zero off of it and see the difference there you go it's a lot tighter now the ambient occlusion doesn't travel as far and that's basically what that does so let's just get that back to default I'm gonna change this back to our global illumination ok depth of field is the next option we've got here this little checkbox this just enables and disables depth of field and is controlled in much the same way as the physical render through the camera settings so let's demonstrate that if I turn that for field on not a lot happens and that's because our cameras are have physical settings so like our ISO and all that kind of stuff so whether we get depth or field and is gonna be determined by the via camera so what I'm gonna do is come out of my oh excuse me come out of my camera and I'm actually just gonna set up a view and I've gone through the wall brilliant let's get back in there we go okay so I'm gonna set up a camera where this ball is so I'm just going to get that in my view let's get something make sure we get some of the background elements in there okay that should do is and I'm going to create a new camera okay and let's actually get into this camera so we're looking through it and pull out our pull that out and then pull I'm just going to put that there for now okay so we need to know where our focal plane is first so I'm going to actually use this picker to pick this object and as you can see our focal distance is 97 centimeters and if I go into the physical tab now and actually change our f-stop let's lower it we should get some depth of field effects so let's lower this to 1.5 and see what kind of result we get and already you can see that the backgrounds blurred out where is this ball that we picked a minute ago is InFocus the background elements are a you know game blurred so let's make this more extremist go to a hon realistic level and say naught point 5 and again our balls largely in focus but everything in the background is a is a nice and blurry so we gain that depth of field effect okay so let's go back to our settings again as you can see we've got the depth of field and if we turn this off obviously it turns off our depth of field effect and that's basically what he does so I'm gonna get rid of this camera let's delete it and go back to our regular one the one we had set up initially unless I have a look at than the next a lot of sense okay so next on our list we've got ray depth fear ray depth this is effectively the number of times light bounces but it also has an effect on transparent objects too so let's make a transparent material and apply it to an object in our scene so I'm going to create a a PBR material I'm just gonna call this glass something like that and I'm also gonna delete the diffuse layer because we're not going to need that and I'm gonna check on the transparency Channel now you notice that once we've clicked on the transparency channel and go back to reflectance we've got this transparency in here the types background and that is correct that needs to be in there that's that's absolutely fine but if you look at our little preview image of our material it's completely see-through you know we've got some specular highlights on there but that's about it so we need to go into our transparency and choose refraction which you can enter via numbers here we can you choose a preset I'm gonna choose a preset there's one for glass already where is it there it is glass so now you can see that this looks a lot more realistic so let's just bond this material I'm gonna delete the material on our big sphere so must get rid of that so you can see it's gone back to its default gray let's get the glass on there okay so largely that's okay but I just want to talk about this right right depth in a little bit more detail and how it pertains to transparency as well so let's put this all the way do it down Leicester as low as it can go right so here we go it's at level one now and you can see exactly what's going on at level one there's no reflection no refraction will take place and no global illumination will occur objects are directly lit okay so you know array from the light will fire out and it has one bounce it will bounce off the floor and into the camera lens so we can see you know what's going on and that's evident of the fact that here is completely pitch black and obviously there's no internal refraction here or reflection it's just hitting it and then into the camera lens so that's one bounce to light is bounced once okay before get into the camera so let's put this up to two and already you can see the difference we're getting a lot of instead of this being pitch black in here we're getting a little bit more deaf mission because there's a bounce inside there and this glass is looking a little bit healthier but not by much so let's go to three which is what this was on initially light is reflected twice transparent objects are in fact transparent and produce caustics now if you don't know what a core stick is I'm going to come out of the camera again and just route zoom around to this side of our image and let's have a loo the wall again I'm through the wall again zoom in Jesus Christ where are we let's choose our big sphere and center in on that there we go okay so finally select this render there we go this is a good example of caustics this is where light will be sort of projected almost through a transparent object this onto the floor obviously it's looking a bit grainy and we're going to come to that in a minute but at level three you can see that this is a transparent object so let's get back to our camera view and obviously by turning this up this ray depth it adds another bounce to to this computation and then we've got five and so on and so on the difference in values the difference in the values of one two and three is very noticeable while differences high levels of lesson of effect so going past value of twelve is pretty pointless to be honest as after the twelfth bounce the light rays will have lost so much energy that the difference between say twelve and thirteen is hardly going to be perceivable so let's test that theory and crank this up to twelve okay so there's twelve and obviously our render times are going to increase because it's each iteration is going to take longer because it you know has to bounce array several times from 12 times but so that's the kind of result we get in with 12 so let's crank this up to 14 there's literally no difference between these so I'd say 12 is the highest level and I think cinema 4d actually um recommend this as well I'm gonna put the right depth back to what it is by default which is 3 you want to know about 3 especially for the preview sentence because the whole point of the preview window is so this interactive you can move about and get resolved very very quickly and obviously the high this ray depth the more is gonna contribute a longer sort of you know render time and you don't you don't want that for it for the interactive mode okay just another note about this ray depth going over 12 if you look at the offline write mode by default is at 12 so you know even sort of Maxon themselves that's your name they're recommended if you like okay back to preview tab we've already covered the ambient occlusion by length when we did this so onto anti-aliasing samples okay this is pretty straightforward it basically smooths out samples to reduce what is known as stepping so I'm gonna demonstrate this I'm gonna come out on my camera again and I'm gonna try and find a region of this image that will probably suffer from stepping okay in fact because I'm recording this video on my GPU and the GPUs being used to render I'm actually gonna save this here just so if I have a crash I can relate the scene and will it be all good okay so I'm actually gonna change the material on this box so that it's a lot more evident so let's delete this for now and put a red material on it in fact I think it was a lot more visible women this was off yeah there we go so that's just this let this figure out now I don't know how well you guys can see this but if you look at this edge of the box you can see these steps in it there's a step there there's a step there and a step there and this is what essentially and you can see it along this line here as well hike this area of high contrast is and what essentially anti-aliasing does it basically smoothes out samples to reduce this stepping effect so we can see that stepping effect here let's crank out up to one and already you can see that that's being sorted out rather nicely there and along this line here it looks a lot smoother great and obviously you can crank it up again to two to make it even smoother and three and so on now again because this is the preview window every time you you know you increase this anti-aliasing setting up it will increase how long the an iteration takes so take longer for this image to get cleaner and nicer and again we're in preview mode we probably don't want that so I usually leave this as zero because this really doesn't matter while you're working sorting out materials and your lighting okay next on our list is filter and filter size you can see that they're grayed out at the moment and that's because this values on what 0 so if I put it on one these become available so this relates the anti-aliasing samples and what kind of filter they're processed through I tend to leave these alone but if you're interested there is plenty of information in the c4d documentation you can just right-click on one of these and say I'd like to go to help and then it will show you exactly you know what the filter size does and what kind of filter you can use to be honest I can't see a lot of difference between the actually this looks like a lot smoother than this it looks very sharp on the edges so take a look at that if you're interested in that I tend to leave it alone personally and especially in the preview mode because I usually have this is 0 which you know makes these um the this filter unavailable anyway okay so I'm going to get my red material back on this box and go back to not the red material sorry and it was this blue material on it yep and go back to our camera view and move on to our next scene so there are next day and there's this Radian it's clamp this second can be used to restrict the brightness of reflective or refractive samples so I'm gonna actually stop this for a moment and save the scene and let's close that and open up another copy of this scene okay so I can actually demonstrate this quite well using a male material so let's let's just create a PBR material we're not going to need we're not gonna need this diffuse we will move that and this reflects this reflective material I'm gonna change it to a conductor and let's make this I don't know crime or something like that chrome you've got a crime chromium yeah okay something like that that'll do and we'll put that on our box here and I'm also gonna bring the roughness down so it's very shiny like so so again let's um go to Pro render and then we can kick pro render off there we go and we are gonna need a light so PBR light here we go so this should demonstrate rather well I'm hoping what I'm actually talking about so the radians clamp saying like I said it can be used to restrict the brightness of reflected or refracted samples smaller values mean more restriction okay so let's get to our preview mode and have a look at this so like I said small of a smaller sample smaller values even more restriction higher values allow more brightness so let's put this at a very low let's put this at two okay and see what we gain so you can see that there are a few rogue sort of bright pixels here and obviously you know if you had higher iterations these can be eliminated but a low value like this you get in you know low value or two you'll get in this amount by default is ten but I'm going to crank it up to say something like fifty and now let's see what we get we're getting a lot more of these reflected samples in fact we could put this up to one hundred and see if we can force it in fact we could just turn off the radians clamp all together and see what we get so you get a lot more of these sort of bright pixels so it actually clamps the the Rays but only coming from reflected or refracted surfaces you can see a you know these bright pixels so this is what this radians clamp does so let's just put that back to default in fact let's get back to our other scene let's close that okay just to speed things up I'm going to take this transparent material off of our ball now and put the red one back on just keep things nice and zippy and we're going to be moving on to the next setting in our in our list we're on to the progressive rendering section now and this is where a lot of this noise and all that kind of stuff can be sorted out so in the progressive rendering section we have a something called a stop condition so this is where we can set sort of conditions and criteria for how iterations are handled so what actually defines an iteration okay an iteration has occurred when each pixel on-screen has been calculated once Pro render then moves on to a following iteration and so on with each iteration the image quality is improved so and we can actually see that so if I am if I move the camera you can see Pro render iteration and you can see it going up so it's done 50 out of 100 now seven eight now ie now nine eight hundred so it's completed and it gives you the progress here and some other information but that's what an iteration is it figures out every single pixel on screen at that time once then moves on to the next iteration so iteration two and then does the same thing again and obviously as iterations go along the image quality gets better so let's go back to our camera and so let's look at how we can define how many iterations occur with a stop condition so the first stop condition is iteration count and the underneath you'll see iteration count and if I am and I again move our camera again go in and out this will kick off again and you can see that we've got our iteration count set to 100 and this is working through the iterations until it gets to a hundred so I could actually define this there's something else if I wanted this image quality to get better I could say okay well let's have this at 500 then and now you can see that it started again and it's working through the iterations but this time you set a stop in a hundred it's stop condition will be 500 so I'm actually going to speed this up so they have it we've got to 500 it's a shame they don't give you a time in the preview mode because it'd be nice to know how long that took I don't know why they haven't done that but um when you do render to the offline mode you do normally get what you normally get in and say like physical render you get the time down the bottom here but strangely not here so yeah this is the result of five hundred instead of one hundred and it's plain to see that you know the noise is a lot less I mean there's noise there still but it's a lot less than it was a 100 iterations okay so let's have a look at the next one we've got time limit so instead of doing it by iteration count and sort of saying oh yeah aeration count here and we can do it via a time limit so you could say I don't know if you had an animation and you had a deadline you could say well how long have I got to render each frame so you can change that here currently it sets to 60 seconds so that'll lower this to something like 10 seconds and you can see again we've got iterations going up did it order and in 10 seconds we managed to complete 104 aerations so that's not bad so usually you know say you when I've got enough time to have 30 seconds of frame you can actually denote that and say okay the time limit for each frame is 30 seconds so if this was an animation you were rendering out to the offline mode it would iterate for 30 seconds and then move on to the next frame okay and the other option we've got never so if we turn never on I mean it's self-explanatory really it never stops iterating it just goes on and on and on and on and on so I'm gonna leave this for a little bit but I'll speed up the footage and then I'll come back in a sec I'm back and you know it's still going we're up to 1,500 samples now iterations even and you know a lot of this noise is being cleaned up rather nicely you can still see we've got some stepping here and along this here and that's obviously because I've got the anti-aliasing samples a zero I can't see a use case for having this film never unless you're just trying to get an idea of what the final thing will look like maybe but again soon as this is the sort of preview window I tend to keep iteration count of this and leave it around hundred maybe 200 something like that just because I'm just trying to get an idea for you know what the lighting looks like in the materials basically okay so moving on we have preview resolution okay the minimum resolution value defines the resolution to be used during navigation and the max resolution defines the resolution when the viewport is at rest okay so one shows the original resolution half merges four pixels into one 1/4 combined 16 pixels and so on so let's have a look at these one at a time like I said I was going to put this back down to 100 iterations so if we come out of our camera when we move you can see that remember we're actually when we're actually in motion you can see that this picture has a resolution and if you look at the settings here you can see that this minimum resolution is 1/8 okay so let's actually drop this down to 1 you know let's make it 1/16 and now you can see that the resolution is a lot lower when we move and if I just actually crank this up to 1/2 you can see that when we move the resolutions a lot higher I tend to keep this default setting because when you're moving especially the interactive window you're really not gonna need to see you know you get you can you can see like this ball I've got a basic idea of where it is and what's happening so you know this level it's okay even a 1/16 I still know where those bulls are I've got an idea of what's going on I'm gonna leave it as default 1/8 that's absolutely fine so max max resolution so this is the resolution when the camera is at rest so if I go back to my camera view now a resolution of 1 is the original resolution now I can half that and you can see that the quality's got a little bit worse there it's like a low really low quality photo or something and if I go wrong one if I go even lower so what 1/4 that's looking like a 32-bit game from the nine is a 16-bit game even and even lower so this will be what it looks like at rest and even lower I don't know why you'd want that it'd be good for creating an image that's you know pixelated or something like that but I'm gonna leave here is one so this is what this does so if your viewport is a bit sluggish or whether though you can you can lower this for when you move and even this if you wanted to so that's what that does okay default texture resolution this is a bit of an important one actually for the preview is default is say hundred and twenty eight by a hundred and twenty eight so this is the texture size and you're thinking texture size you talking about the texture size of all my textures that's not what this is at all let's get rid of this glass material we don't need it anymore and create a new PBR material and I'm just going to call this wood and now I'm going to explain exactly what's going on here this setting deals with the current limitation of Pro render some of cinema 4d shaders can't be rendered on the graphics cards especially things like 3d shaders that kind of thing so they need to be converted to bitmaps before and the GPU can render them this determines the resolution of these converted bitmaps pretty much so let's demonstrate this I've made this thing called wood I'm going to go into my reflectance channel and in the default diffuse I'm going to actually drop something in the texture channel so if I go down something like surfaces and choose wood here we get this now this is usually you know this is something that's a sort of internally built by cinema 4d and is actually a shader in itself so there's no way for the GPU to read this so it has to convert into a bitmap so let's get this on an object let's put it on our sphere here because it's usually our victim and I'm going to come out the camera and actually zoom into this bad boy it wasn't a massive delay but what it has to do is bake this into a texture in the background and then it can be used okay so the texture size is 128 at the moment and if I change this let's bring it down to something like really low let's say 16 by 16 you'll notice that the render hasn't kicked off again it's just um it's done nothing so let's give it a kick up the ass if I stop Pro render and then sty again we're getting the same result so maybe we have to UM let's give it a kick in the ass by going into our wood and I don't know changing the scale there we go so now you can see that a resolution of 16 this has got no detail whatsoever it's very blurred and if we put this back up to 128 128 I think that's what it was anyway let me just check come here yeah 128 great and then give this another kick in the ass by saying reset to default you can see that we're getting a little bit more definition now so let's let's boot this up to say like a 1k texture so 1024 by actually let's make this really extreme or really extreme but 2048 by 2048 and then we'll give this a kick in the ass again reset to default and you can see that it's having a right old think about it because it's having to break down that high-resolution texture but now it started we're getting a lot more detail in this shader so that is basically what this is doing this is determining the default texture resolution for shaders that need to be turned into actual textures so let's get rid of our wood so we're back to where we were okay so now we can move on to the offline tab let's get back to our camera view these settings here in the offline tab are for when you have finished rendering a finished setting up your scene and lighting using the preview window and now you want to render to the picture viewer itself a lot of these settings are the same as the preview tab so we don't need to go over those once again I'll just be going over the ones that that actually differ so let's close this so we've got a full screen and actually pull this out a little bit get our render settings up like this okay cool so this is the offline tab what we go in there then well we've got the we've got a render mode exactly like the preview so we've got global illumination direct illumination and ambient occlusion in the preview and we've got exactly the same in here depth of field we've already covered right depth again we've gone over that in here just notice that it's got a radius of 12 anti-aliasing samples by default they're set to 3 whereas this it's zero by default so that makes sense and again the filter relates to the anti-aliasing samples radians clamp that's exactly the same but we've got something new here called the Firefly filter and we've got the Firefly threshold so let's um let's actually talk about those for say the Firefly filter restricts Firefly is also known as hot pixels fireflies are individual pixels that are very very bright and stand out when compared to their neighboring pixels so I've got an image somewhere open up which is a good example of this okay so we've got an image here and you can see these hotspots are these hot pixels yeah and what the Firefly filter does is try and eliminate them so you're getting something a bit more like this via via a post effect these fireflies can actually be eliminated by increasing the amount of iterations that you do but the drawback of doing it like this is that when nearly all of your image is an acceptable quality you are increasing your render times for the sake of getting rid of these pixels so in a bid to sort of do a more efficient way of getting rid of them this Firefly filter comes in to remove these hot spots so just to explain the checkbox turns it on and off great and the Firefly fresh hold determines how bright a pixel has to be compared to its neighbors before it's eliminated okay so the larger this value is the greater the difference can be without the pixel being adapted to its surrounding pixels before the hotspots eliminated smaller values will result in fewer fireflies but two smaller value can produce spotty results so you know there might be if you've got a really really small value and then you've got say like a a bright reflection say of a window you could start blurring the edges of it or even create spotty effects so you don't wanna go too low so it's a little bit of a balancing act so if you do see hotspots in your image that's what this does it's a much better solution than you know just cranking up your iterations okay onto the next section which is this sort of level of detail we've got some render Hut options and stuff I don't really want to dwell on these options for too long as these are normal see for these settings that are either that are either included in the render or not so for example if I do a render to the picture viewer or whatever if I hit the render button I can choose whether this render HUD saw this in from he's actually included in the render or not same with the doodle display the LOD and all that kind of stuff so it's basically you know just checkboxes for options in your ender okay let's get on to the UM the main the main event here the progressive rendering section just like we had in the preview the stock conditions here almost identical to what we have in our preview tab with a few exceptions so let's have a look at this we've got iteration count just like we did in the preview time limit just like we did in the preview and we've got never just like we had in the preview but there is an exception in never that never stopped condition which is present in both tabs has the addition of an iteration limit so if you change this to never and then I hit render it will literally go forever which is what the preview one does so if I turn this to never it will just keep it around forever but if I go into the offline mode we've got an iteration count limit so even if I set this to never I can say yeah just keep it array until the cows come home but you know maybe when you get to 16 million iterations that'd be enough you know that so you can set a a account limit an iteration count limit which is baffling really because that's essentially what the iteration count is if I go back to iteration count I could just set this to 16 million iteration so it baffling there now the other difference we have we also have an extra stop condition called the threshold which is here which is essentially a quality threshold kind of like you get on the physical render low values mean less noise and longer render times and high values produce more noise but lower end of times very small values such as naught point naught 1 should be avoided as the render will just keep going forever so very low values as big no no lesser let's demonstrate this if I go to threshold and say okay our threshold is 20% I stopped the interactive renderer and actually went to the viewport so let's kick this off you can see that it's it right in he's saying that his progress is at 52 76 ie 9 comma we can get there and it's done so basically it said that when you get to a threshold of quality you know like kind of like the error threshold 20% you stop now if I put this back down to its default and render just gonna make sure yeah I have and then render again it will keep hit a right in until it gets down to this error threshold it's saying it's at 50 odd percent 68 and so on and so on but the point is that once it reaches this threshold of quality it will stop rendering which is quite handy because if you look at scene then render out to a threshold you're happy with you and it's an animation you can say right this is an acceptable level of noise or error if you like but when it gets to that you move on to the next frame so yeah very very handy and it makes sense why this isn't present in the preview because you know for various reasons okay so let me quit out of this the next thing we've got on our list is bucket rendering I'm gonna I'm gonna change this back to an iteration count of a hundred or so in it's nice and quick and actually sorry it's not bucket rendering the next thing I'll this is refresh rendering init ville so onto the Refresh mode the image can be updated in the picture viewer after each iteration but this is not recommended because this is a computationally intensive process so here we can define the number of iterations before an update occurs so I'm just going and just kick off a render and you'll see what I mean okay so we've got iterations and ten and it updated the viewport here and 30 updated again and here you can see when it'll update it says the next update after how many iterations so it counts down 7 5 4 3 2 1 then it updates if you had it update in every frame in fact we can do that if you want so we've got this in you know we've got this iteration interval we can change this to 1 so every one frames it update so let's render again update update update update update is updating every move every frame but what is the point of that when you're doing a final render and that takes computational power away from the actual rendering itself so by default this is actually set to 10 I think but I'm going to actually crank it up to I donate 25 and then render again so there's our first iteration it waits till it gets to 25 iterations here boom next update and then there's another 25 frames boom next update okay so you get the point of that and to be honest if I was doing a final render I'd set this it iteration interval to something like I don't know 60 iterations something like that but I'm gonna return this back to normal which is 10 and look at another option we have so we've got iteration we've got time interval in seconds so basically instead of saying when I get to 10 iterations I'll update you do in seconds so you can say when I get to 10 seconds I'll update so let's just have a look at that there's our first iteration it waits until it gets to 10 seconds this iteration count doesn't matter anymore it's all about time don't-don't-don't Doon 10 seconds as longer there you go so we got to 10 seconds in our updated so you can do it either one or two ways by iterations or by the time interval and again we've got so actually on to bucket rendering now so when I render out to the picture viewer so you're just making everything default well not rendered out to the picture viewer we get this kind of thing it renders the entire image every you know he tries to go through doing every single pixel on screen at the same time but if you wanted to you could have bucket rendering just like you get in the physical render so let's stop calculating this image and actually just turn on bucket rendering and hit render now it is doing it in sections now you can see here the bucket width and height is there 512 by 512 and seen as our image size is only 800 by 450 it's no wonder we're getting a result like this so let's actually change our bucket width and height let's change this and also let's change this so it doesn't do it erasing count because what will happen is for each bucket I'll have to do 100 iterations then move on to the next bucket so why don't we change this to threshold and say something like I don't know 5 percent something like that so let's change our bucket with some height I'm going to change it to something pretty small 1 to 8 maybe something like that and then let's kick it off again so now we get in bucket rendering so that little right right away until little this threshold of 5% has been reached then move on to the next bucket so you can actually render like that if you say wish also we've got another option here which is the bucket sequence so let's just turn this off at the moment is set to centered but we can do it from left to right right to left top to bottom bottom to top so let's do left to right just to give you an idea it's pretty obvious if you ask me so start in the left top corner right away until it reaches this threshold of 5% boom and then it goes on to the next bucket so you can really choose how you want this to render out with the bucket sequence so that's essentially that's essentially it guys we've covered the PBR workflow in general and we've covered Pro render there is a little bit more to the PBR sort of workflow when working specifically with the physical render and standard renderer but I think I'm gonna go into that how to sort of optimize that in another tutorial as always guys thanks for listening don't forget to check out the digital meat website at digital meat dot uk' and there you can vote for upcoming tutorials and become a member and comment on videos and all that kind of stuff so go take a look at that you can follow me on social media Facebook Twitter and Google+ there'll be links in the description and if you'd like to support digital me and get some extra content while you're at it there's my patreon page it's a dollar a month to be a patreon so go check that out there'll be a link on screen after the video thanks for listening guys bye [Music]

Channel: DIGITAL MEAT

Views: 29,953

Keywords: Digital Meat, Digitalmeat.uk, Cinema 4D, C4D, Cinema4D, Digitalmeat, Greyscale Gorilla, GreyscaleGorilla, 3D, Workflow, Cinema 4D Workflow, C4D Workflow, Tutorial, Tutorials, Cinema 4D Tutorial, Cinema 4d Tutorials, C4D Tutorial, C4D Tutorials, PBR, PBR Workflow, Physically Based Rendering, PBR light, PBR Lights, PBR Material, PBR Materials, physically based Light, physically based Lights, physically based Material, physically based materials, ProRender, AMD Prorender, Physical Render

Id: 7hWU3mKQf1E

Length: 77min 38sec (4658 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 30 2018