Getting Started With Arnold For Cinema 4D

in today's video you're going to learn how to get up and running with the Arnold renderer for cinema 4d let's go welcome back everybody its Nick here again from grayscale guerrilla giving you the tools training and tutorials to help make you a better motion designer now today we're going to sit down with Chad Ashley and learn some of the fundamentals of the Arnold render for cinema 4d but before we do I wanted to make sure that you're signed up and subscribe to our YouTube channel where we have a ton more tutorials like this coming out really soon and also if you're interested Chad Ashley actually built an intro to Arnold scene file that we're sharing on our website I'm going to link that up in the description and also right here so you could download it right now and kind of follow along with us alright so in today's video we get to sit down with Chad Ashley and he gives us an overview of texturing lighting and even render settings inside of Arnold for cinema 4d and what was really great was Chris and I were there in order to ask some questions and really ask them questions as a kind of a standard renderer and physical renderer user jumping into Arnold and just kind of asking questions on how to set all that stuff up so what you're going to see is the result of that video phone call we had just a few days ago where we learned all about Arnold so let's jump right into it and let's sit down with Chad Ashley and let's some learn some Arnold renderer all right let's go so yeah this is I'm just pretending right now that I've never opened this before so this is the standard layout and once you install Arnold even if you have like the the free demo on their site you can install it run it it's just going to have a watermark which is kind of unobtrusive really it compared to other watermarks so it's kind of fun to play around with before you even buy it or decide if you want to buy it at all so the way you find it is under plugins and it's going to be under C for D to a which stands for cinema 4d to Arnold and usually what I'll do is I'll kind of tear off this little menu item here and I actually have a a whole layout that I created just for Arnold but I'm not gonna dive into that because I'm gonna pretend like I've never used it before I think that'll be helpful for you guys so you're met with all of these buttons and they're pretty self-explanatory in fact if you click on the light it gives you option to create all these different kinds of lights you can create a skylight which is sort of like the one that you get in physical and then we have this procedural which I'm not going to get in today which is basically the saving and loading of assets like instance assets we have volumes which you can load in open V DB volumes from Houdini or fume or wherever you want to generate fog smoke fire all that sort of thing there Arnold driver will come in a little bit later Arnold AOV is going to come in later the teepee group will come in later and the most important button besides probably the light is going to be this IPR window so if I click on this IPR window it's going to launch into this IPR session and the IP Arda stands for interactive photo photorealistic renderer so what you're seeing right here in the IPR is it's black why is it black even if I load in a sphere it's still black the reason is because I don't have any lights in my scene at all right now so if you just want to open up Arnold and like have it make something and draw something in the IPR you're going to have to create a light for it to start off with and right now I'll just start off with a quad light which is essentially an area light and it gives you these kind of nifty little lines coming off of the area light so you can kind of tell what direction it's going but instantly right there we're actually able to see it render you notice I didn't even have to change the Global's I didn't do anything I literally just started the IPR created a light and it starts to draw something now the IPR window is is really my favorite part about this because it's super handy in many many different ways obviously you've got a play pause so when you hit play on this what it's doing is its loading your current scene and it's going to render your active camera you can tell because it says active camera right underneath there if at any point like I'm changing something and I don't want it to update I can just hit the pause button and I can change this all I want and and it's not going to update in the IPR until I uncheck pause that's handy if you have like a crazy dense scene and maybe you need to tweak something and you just need to pause this because it's taking too many of your CPU cycles right next to it these two things are equally as important as the play because what this is is it's a scale and a zoom so it's a bit confusing at first but think of think of your your render output which I think when you default to this is in our 17 so I think it's like 800 by 600 yeah so if I make my scale 100% it is going to try to draw it is going to draw 800 by 600 that is my resolution okay so I also have this zoom slider here and what the zoom slider is doing it's not changing the render resolution it's literally just zooming in on that frame so if i zoom way in it's going to get pixelated because you're you're obviously zooming in on a 800 by 600 render now the reason why having these two separate is really really handy is if I were to change this to a high resolution like let's say 1920 by 1080 okay lock that down I don't like number one if I'm at a hundred percent I can't even see my entire image now I could zoom this down which is basically making Arnold still have to draw 1920 by 1080 s worth of pixels but you can see that like in order for me to actually look at it I'm zoomed out I'm zoomed out 70 percent so usually what I'll do is I'll leave this at about 100 and I'll do that with scale because what scale is doing it's more efficient it's faster it's actually only rendering 30 percent of 1920 by 1080 therefore giving you a faster render speed in your IPR that's cool it's kind of like after low-resolution kind of style yep you just really see it it'll just render faster in that window basically without messing with your your liked output settings woohoo that's cool yeah you can leave your output settings at 1920 by 1080 or whatever and then just work at like a scale of 40% here and that way you don't have to ever you know go back and change it for doing look dev or whatever it's just a lot easier that way if we keep kind of going down this line here we've got all of our channels that you can look at individually it's pretty self-explanatory and then you've got this little thing that kind of looks like a weird wireframe globe and they call this the debugging mode and it's it's not going to be super apparent because I just have a gray ball in here right now but what the debugging mode does if I enable it it turns it makes everything like a like a white plaster material so that you can really kind of figure out your lighting and whatnot it's super handy if you're just trying to get your key to fill ratio going with your lighting and you don't want to look at any of your textures you can turn on this debugging mode and it will it'll actually you know to show you like a white clay version of your of your render right next to it is the render region which is really handy you can move it around and kind of like place it wherever you want and whatnot and there's also the short key for that is just holding down shift and clicking on the viewport anywhere you want and what that does is it just limits like you would think it limits the draw the Refresh to just this area right here the other thing that's kind of cool I never really use this feature to be honest but you can actually send this render region to your actual camera viewport so if I click this button it sends the you can see it sent the little region over to my my viewport it's kind of like the interactive or whatever you call this thing the interactive render region I never use it though because it's just weird and I just like to work in the IPR it's just easier that way for me keep walking down this line you've got beauty and alpha so beauty is what we're looking at right now we could look at the Alpha Channel if I had any sort of passes here and we'll go over that in a minute they would all show up in this list so I could I could actually look at them at any time during my little session my little look dub session let's go back out to full screen then you have the camera which you can then just like pick what camera you're rendering and then a nifty feature that I that I dig is this little camera icon right here which is just going to set take a snapshot to the PV to the picture viewer so that you can you know like oh I like this let me send this to the PV and like then I can a be it with a different render and see which one I like better and yada yada yada also at the bottom of the IPR when it might be hard for you guys to see this but you have it's actually telling me what my sample rate is and I'm going to get into that next it's telling me also how much memory is being used and the resolution that I'm currently rendering my IPR at and if you want to get really crazy you can you can actually change your debug mode to all these different modes like like the basic debug mode like I was mentioning is just kind of this white clay but if I wanted to be crazy I could actually change it to wireframe and like you know I don't know when you'd ever need that but it's kind of nifty I'm just going to turn that off and bring it back to basic so this is basic actually not only what basic I want just diffuse there we go okay so in a nutshell that's kind of the IPR window I'd like to dock it like over here but for right now I'll just leave it I'll just leave it up I just accidentally closed it ok so there it is so yeah this is in a nutshell the IPR this is where you're going to be spending most of your time now I don't have any render settings yet meaning if I come up to my render Global's right now it's still telling me that standard is my actual render output because I haven't told it to use Arnold yet so if I want to tell it to use Arnold to do a final render I just come down to the Arnold tab right here and then you can see it deletes everything that it doesn't need and it's super super and if I click on the render there Arnold render tab we're now met with all of these different sections we've got a main section a system section and AOV section and a diagnostic session so first of all before I move on to any of that you guys have any that you guys kind of grasping the workflow with the IPR yeah I pier that that makes sense to me I think um if you were to set up uh because my instinct like right when I open something is to just see something I want to see it like right away so instead of like I want to get a little bit more into some of these details but can you like just to get that unboxing moment for me like right when I open Arnold can you set up a little scene and just show like really basic like here's a texture here's a light here's this here's the backdrop and so we have something more to kind of see as we tweak more settings yeah yeah let me um I'm going to invoke my Arnold layout here which is just going to move it a little bit let me just reposition everything back to where it was okay so now this little layout here is what I kind of prefer to work in because it has those controls that I had floating before has them docked down here and has my IPR kind of docked here so all right let's do that really quickly here I'm just going to actually kill everything and I'm going to pull in like a simple model so that we can have something to actually look at I'm just going to grab a Buddha and we'll frame him up and we'll grab a Arnold quad light and we will just kind of make this a bit bigger and we'll go ahead and turn on the IPR so that's kind of fun to see that happening while we're drawing all right so let's just get a light in here you can see it's like really dim right now this light the way that lights work it's pretty interesting it's actually you adjust everything through the lights exposure so it's done in f-stops so if I make this if I bring this up three up stops and then up 5's stops it's actually doubling it with every stop and then the other thing to take into account too is because it is a physical based renderer when your light is really big like I can make this light ridiculously huge and in real life if this were like a giant big light it would be throwing out a ton of light right so if it's not like if you don't want that effect you can turn on normalize which basically says I don't care what size this light is I'm putting out the exact same amount of light but I don't actually like to work that way I like to work a little bit more physically correct so I'll turn the normalize off now watch if I make this light really small it it dims that light down it's much darker on that Buddha but if I make it really big of course the exact opposite happens so I'm going to leave the I'm gonna make it kind of big and I'll just bring the exposure of that light down and let's just go ahead and whoa I've made that really big let's actually pull him off a little bit and then I'm just going to throw like just a simple you know two lights on this guy and we'll throw in a psych and I'm just going to grab the psych from where do I want to grab that from I'm going to grab it from our own did you do like it Pro Sykes and I'll just grab this guy and we'll make him fairly large and there we go and let's go ahead and bring these lights up and we'll move them each of them out off of the psych wall so that they're not sitting there penetrating our psych wall alright so now here we are here we have a scene we'll make one of these lights a little bit stronger so that it's a little bit easier to see and we'll bring this one up a bit too alright so really simple II I just kind of created two area lights and put them on opposite sides of this Buddha and it probably easier if I just worked in shading mode so you can see what's going on all right so let's get in here is this what you meant like you wanted to kind of see something like this like that you could actually kind of see what's going on yeah that's that's perfect cuz I think just that that's the first thing I'll be doing what I open this no yeah no yeah I think it it kind of is like a very common thing like you want to you want to see what the heck's going on and right off the bat like it's going to enter it's going to like kind of do an internal like switch if you like right now these are just probably you know these don't have materials on them so Arnold's just going to give them a generic kind of white shaded material we need if you want to put if you want to if you want to change that you're gonna have to actually create what's called an Arnold material standard material and there's a couple different ways that you could do that now right now we're kind of at a fork in the road I could show you more about like the Global's and like what all this stuff means or I could show you just creating a shader and applying it given that the shape like the defaults look pretty good to me right now I think the next thing I would grab is like the textures just to see like I mean you know me I'm gonna I'm gonna put some reflections thing yeah no doubt okay so that there's a bunch of different ways I'm going to show you the most common way to create a shader and then I'll show you a cooler way to make a shader the most common way to do it is going to be just to come down to materials and hit create and go down to Arnold surface and grab a standard and then just literally like drag that on to one of your objects or you could do it here as well the cooler way to do it if you want to be cool and I know I want to be like yeah we want to be cool right you could actually in the IPR just hover over whatever object you want to assign a material to and right click and you could say create Arnold material and what that's going to do is it's going to create an Arnold material for that object apply it and open up the material network shader so it kind of kills a few birds with just one click so now I'm left with this open blank slate to determine what it is we're going to put on this Buddha right here so this is I mentioned IPR is probably where you're spend a lot of your time the other place that you'll spend most of your time will be in here so this is the Arnold shader Network and it looks familiar because it is familiar it's basically expressos you i but it's tweaked for oops sorry didn't mean do that it's tweaked for Arnold and if they've kind of used that language because people are used to it I think and it's also you know a nice it's a good visual node tree as far as what I've seen from other writers it's got a quick search here which you'll spend a lot of time in here clicking and trying to figure out what you need but the first thing that we're going to do is since we're just going to create a generic material I'm just going to type in standard and it just automatically shows me the standard material I'm just going to drag that in okay and it's automatically going to it automatically pipes it out to the beauty so this is a really important concept to to learn about Arnold so anything that's in here in my little editor here can be published out and I like to use the word published out I don't know if it's technically the right term but it's a term that makes sense to my brain so I like to think of it as like okay I'm publishing this material out to my beauty which means that it's going to show up in my render and if I publish something out to this one which I'm guessing you probably can't read with it because it's so small but it says Arnold displacement so and then this last one down here says Arnold viewport so think of these as three places that you can publish out a material a shader map anything you want so right now I've got this standard material applied to this Buddha on the left and if I come over to the color and I decide I want to make him red he's red and it updates in real time which you know if any if you've ever done if you're coming from not having done anything in octane or Arnold or anything with like an IPR kind of workflow this is that that this intuitive kind of like real-time workflow of like doing your shading and lighting is like ridiculously powerful and super addicting it makes everything go much faster so let's make this thing Nick friendly let's put some specular on it and you can tell right now so I through specular on this Buddha and let me make this a little bit bigger so it's a little bit easier for people to see and I'm just like regulars this isn't cinema specular where it's a fake this is um using the language of specular more true right like this correct lossy yeah reflection yes so um and and that's a little bit tricky to kind of wrap your head around in Arnold which because it does have this reflection tab down here and when I first started playing with it I was like well why what when would I want to use reflection and when would I want to use specular because coming from physical you know your brains like well specular is fake and I don't want to use that well not in Arnold in Arnold specular is actually a reflection and it is the preferred method of doing reflections because you have control over the roughness so roughness is kind of interchangeable with other renders they use the word glossiness sometimes so the higher and what I like about Arnold is it makes a lot of sense like right off the bat it just it just kind of like makes sense to me like if I want something to have more roughness I'm going to bring the roughness up and then that that specular becomes more rough oops I actually tweaked the anisotropy so right now let me just kind of frame up on this Buddha so it's a little bit easier to see and let's just drag a render region over him all right so this Buddha is very very rough right now and we could you know make him completely rough and now he's diffusing that reflection by a lot but and were you actually using a GTX micro facet distribution which is a really that's a good it has a good they call it tail which means that when you have a blurry reflection that fall off of that blurred they call that a tail and the ggx model is probably the most realistic so you definitely want to probably keep it on ggx for most things alright so you're wondering like okay that's great but it's it does it kind of looks like junk because it doesn't have any Fornell so just turn on refer now and there's two ways that you can do for now you can do it manually here by like increasing the the reflectance at the normal but I like to do that because it's not really it's not as an effective physically kind of plausible method I usually come down to the refraction tab because Arnold is physically based you can turn on the Frenette are and tell it to use the fernell the IOR from the refraction which is the correct method and give it like an IO R of a dielectric of like 1.5 or something and now we now we're getting that more realistic kind of looking reflection that make sense yeah what's that's really interesting so the refraction is tying into that that you're saying that's more true to to kind of how textures work in real life yeah exactly shaders like every surface has an index of refraction even though it might not even be transparent or have any sort of ability to see through it but that IO R is it's a real number and that's why I kind of got into the habit of of just kind of saying well I know that you know plastics are usually in like a 1 to 1.3 - like 1.8 range I know metals are definitely higher like in the 5 to even higher than that I could make this look like Chrome if I just brought my diffuse color down to 0 which means that it has no diffuse color contribution and it's purely reflection excuse my list that looks beautiful just like that yeah so like once you understand like how it's working it's the knobs are really really simple and because it's physically based you don't have to do as many like hacks to make it look good if that makes sense so like right now you saw I brought this weight down and it's this is was confusing to me when I first opened this program and I'm just going to turn the spec down so that you can see what's going on so now we have absolutely no specular contribution in the shader at all just purely diffuse and I have my diffuse weight to zero if I bring this all the way up to one he's going to take on the color that I've set here in my color tab now the way eight is just simply going to say how much do you want me to look at this color or map or whatever you have in here do you want me to look at it a hundred percent or do you want me to look at it zero percent or maybe fifty percent so this kind of comes in handy if you just need to adjust the the I guess I wouldn't necessarily call it the luminance but it's sort of like the luminance because I could make this let's say if we were going to try to make like an aluminum shader I might make this let's leave it at white okay so right now he's completely white I'm gonna bring the weight of that white down till he gets to be something like a gray like this then I'm going to slowly just walk up the weight of my specular okay so now we're just going to slowly start to make him more metallic and then I'm just going to slowly bring the roughness up and we're going to start to get to this almost like a powdered like a very like sandblasted aluminum kind of look we could even bring the color weight down a little bit more so yeah the IPR in conjunction with these settings and that's the other thing to remember too is like this is an uber shader which you know some people coming from other renders might know this term but what an uber shader is is it's one shader that can achieve almost any look so you don't have to create like several different shaders so with this one shader in its just the standard shader I can make things that look like metal I can make things that look like plastic I can do subsurface I can do all of it in one shader which is really really nice so if we wanted to make this guy for instance look subsurface I might bring and let's just make them red again because that'll be it'll be nice to be able to see that and we'll bring the specular contribution down to zero so that you can see it a little better I'm just going to make them a little bit pink so then we just kind of tab down here and we see that we have a whole subsurface little section and a lot of renderers like they get really crazy with the subsurface settings and it's really hard to understand like what it's doing this program so what I love about Arnold it's so freakin easy like I can literally just drag the weight of the subsurface up and that guy now is subsurface and looking good and then I can just say how deep do I want the light to penetrate ten centimeters right now so let's just I'm just going to grab a cube move it over and say well I know this cube is 200 centimeters by 200 centimeters so maybe I'll have it penetrate 50 centimeters that would probably go into the Buddha pretty far and let's just bring these all up to 50 and we'll change the color so we can kind of really see the subsurface working and let's just make it like yellow so yeah I mean there it is I mean and like in the higher what's editor butter Buddha and then just like the higher number you use right so like make this higher because you're like oh you know you want to make it look like the lights penetrating more it just makes sense to me to say okay the radius of that subsurface should be larger and it just it you start to realize that like why can't all subsurface settings be this easy because literally I've used a lot of different ones and they're all confusing anyway so yeah subsurface all in one shader I'm amazed I'm going to bring this down to zero what what other so if I'm coming from you know physical and all that what can I use things like gradients and noise and all that stuff that I'm familiar with in cinema does that even Charlie here yeah some of it does okay so they've got their own the reason that Arnold is is is fast and and and the way that they can make it kind of ubiquitous is that the word I'm looking for I guess standardized is a better word across all the different platforms that they use is they have their own ramps they have their own noises they have their own set of all of these things and that's simply because if they wanted to try to support like that's the same reason octane doesn't do it either it's because if they want to be in all these different applications okay they can't literally like figure out the noises in every 3d application because that would be crazy but to answer your question yes you can use their noise and I mean what do you want to see first we could just throw like a noise on them or something and see what that looks like I'm just thinking like things like checker boards and the variation shader and and some of those things yeah there's are those are all those are all completely there the workflow is different but the the ability is there to do those things in fact maybe maybe we kind of push those to another time or video or something so we could kind of show more of those differences I just wanted to make sure like I'm not going down a rabbit hole go yeah how do I do this no no the if you anything that you are curious to find if you start to type it in this little search bar here like um I think they have a checker board yeah they do okay so here's their checker board and we can just pipe that into the diffuse color and you see he's not mapped correctly right now so let's let's give him a cubic map so we can actually to see him so yeah but oh dude I got to show you this this is dope you're going to love this so this is this is such a useful thing okay so if you're working on a shading network like you're making the shader or whatever and I'm just going to throw an image texture in here so because it'll be easier to demo that so once you throw an image texture and it's it automatically will launch a browser for you to like you know say okay well what do you want to use for your image texture so let me just go down to my pictures directory and hopefully nothing questionable will pop up uh yeah let's uh I use this picture of me and okay ready there we go I know I'm sorry yeah I'm so sorry uh so okay so now this is just free-floating it's not it's not connected to anything in my network right this is so dope like when I found when I learned about this I was just like oh man where was this my whole career so let's say that I have this shader or have this this texture and I wanted to see it applied to my object so I can make sure it's matte correctly I can just take this texture and literally publish it out to the beauty and it's going to show it to me without any shading in real time right there just to map it just so I can see the mapping or the color and I could do that with anything so like it could be a noise like if I just grab a noise and let's just throw the noise in here and there's a shortcut to publish this out to the beauty which is going to be option WV and now I'm just looking at the noise so I could be like oh you know I want more octaves and the noise and I want more scale and the noise and up to much maybe not so much maybe like this all right perfect cool and now I can go back and look at my beauty so like that ability to just like it's kind of like isolating a node and After Effects or something where you just are able to just concentrate on that one layer and after effects by by soloing it and really kind of like figure out oh that's the right mapping or color it's like that but with your shaders which is like super awesome and you can and you notice like it doesn't affect anything else in the scene it's only affecting the shader that I've done that too so anyway let's put this let's put this texture into the diffuse that's cool so now it's in the diffuse and my face is wrapped all over this Buddha doesn't make any sense whatsoever uh but that's okay so yeah that ability to like publish stuff out to that beauty and check it is really really amazing I mean look I could spend a holiday owing you awesome stuff that you can do in here but I guess maybe I should probably talk to you about the Global's because I feel like that's something that and and before I do that let's at least make this like somewhat good-looking make it I mean yeah because it's like it's killing me all right so let's put like that on there and let's see speculate yeah how did you turn on a transparency just as a rope oh I didn't did I actually didn't mean to do that but that's a good point since we're are since we're here all I did was turn the refraction wait up so I just accidentally created glass there and I didn't even realize that I that I did it this will trip you up too like if you are doing glass right and you're like okay well I'm doing glass and I'm noticing that like my shadows aren't transparent like what's up with that so let me just hide these guys so you can see one of these shadows all right so I'm just going to zoom in on this shadow so if you look here at our Buddha his shadow is not really it's not really you're not seeing through it like it's pretty dark so anything that's glass you actually have to throw a Arnold tag on and just throw an Arnold mesh around parameters tag and tell and turn off opaque and now now that object is no longer casting these unrealistic two few shadows it should be casting like realistic glass shadows well that also the caustics and all that stuff - yeah it does a lot of that stuff for free I mean you're going to have to increase a lot of the samples to get clean and caustics out of it but I can get into that in a second but yeah so if I turn that off now we're back to this and sometimes like this doesn't look that bad I mean it's sort of believable but you know most the times you don't want that you're going to want to put that tag on there all right let me get this back to Orsini any shader questions or anything pop up for you I know you do a lot more texturing and intricate shader networks and stuff like that nope I'm just absorbing soaking it all in soaking in the Buddha do that's such a cool okay it's got a good natural look to it it's cool yeah I this this program has like a pretty awesome like realistic response curve it looks very filmic without like having to apply any sort of like in octane a lot of people are using those response curves what now this one just kind of has a good natural look on its own okay so let's talk about let's talk about settings and to do that I think I'm going to go ahead and throw these other Buddha's back in because I think it'll actually help us come on update all right there we go all right so now let me zoom out a little bit and let's get a little bit three-quarter on these guys okay so bring this render size down a little bit high right now forty percent all right so here we go so it's gonna be difficult for you to see on your side because the grain is going to be pretty much hidden by the by the compression but we are getting a pretty significant amount of grain in the shadows right now and it's okay when you're just doing look dev but when you're ready to render out for real you don't want to you don't want to have that in there so that's something that we know we're going to have to clean up and as far as GI goes just really not a lot of bounces but this is fine so let's go ahead and look at the Global's because the this is the other interesting thing about Arnold is that you know because it's been around for so long they kind of figured out the best way to do samples without confusing the artist which is nice because I've I've used them all you know v-ray octane mentalray they all of them have really weird ways of handling their samples and I think Arnold is probably the most simple way of handling it so it really kind of comes down to sampling and ray depth so they do what they say they do so ray depth means I'm shooting a one diffuse ray per pic or what Africa hat goes it's a one diffuse bounce I've got one glassy bounce and two reflection to refraction these can be done this can be brought to zero because I don't have either one of these on in my scene because remember it's not called reflection it's called glossy and specular is glossy so if I brought this down to zero it means that I've got one singular bounce sub specular on my Buddhas and it won't bounce that specular again and have it show up on the other Buddha or maybe on the same face of that Buddha so I usually keep this around one if you have a lot of like glass or mirrors or chrome with a lot of reflections bouncing to and fro you probably bring this up to like maybe a three or something like that diffuse now this is pretty much your Gi Gi is on all the time there's no tag there's no setting it's just it's there so if I bring this down to zero this literally has no bounces of light there's no GI it's just literally my area lights lighting up my scene and you can see my shadows just got really really black and fact if I turn off one of these lights you're going to see how black it gets so by bringing this number up to one it's telling Arnold okay it's cool you can bounce or light one time I'm going to let you do that if you have like a lot of surfaces that like walls in a in a room or maybe you need a lot more bounce light you can bring this number up to like two or three but you can see like it has diminishing returns on a scene like this because there literally is no other walls or anything for it to bounce light around so this and every time you do this this is expensive you know like you can't you don't bounce light around for free that's going to cost you in samples so let's let's leave this at 1 for our scene and the Ray depth total is basically how many rays are you bouncing around total well if I count these I really only have two so I could actually bring this rate up down to two and speed up my render times a little bit that way now notice everything that I've done right now has not had any effect on the grain that I've got going in my shadows because I am just playing with how many times light or glossies are bouncing around that's all I've done okay so now that I've got what I consider to be a good amount of diffused light bouncing around and a good amount of glassy Ray's bouncing around I'm now going to start to clean it up so up here in the sampling part you've got camera a a samples you've got diffuse glossy refraction SSS which is subsurface and then volume okay so this is pretty much where you're going to clean up everything so now I could if I wanted to I could bring down I could actually bring the samp the subsurface samples down to zero because I literally don't have any in my scene nor do I have any refraction in my scene nor do I have any volume in my scene but I do have glossy I do have diffuse and I I definitely have camera so now these are the three parameters in this particular scene that I'm going to need to mess with we're those useless parameters actually doing anything they're like zeroing those out there they actually increase your under time or would it be accurately ignoring them already um well that's a good question I do not know if they are even considered but just to play it on the safe side I'll put them to zero just because I'm like um you know I don't want them even if it if it recognizes that hey I know you don't have any subservice in here you don't need to turn me down to zero I don't care I just turn it down to zero anyway because I'm paranoid so then like okay so now we know that our grain here would be in the diffuse right because this isn't this isn't specular grain it's it's actually diffuse grain and there's a method that you can do and I'll show that to you in a minute once this starts to make more sense so I could if I wanted to just say well to hell with everything I'm just going to increase my camera a a which essentially if you look here the camera a a is at 3 but this little drop down here is actually this is this little window right here is really what what Arnold is doing is this is what really Arnold settings is if eyes type 3 in here it's actually the square of 3 it's actually 9 5 2 in here it's actually the square of 2 times the camera samples because everything is multiplied by the camera samples so like if I set this to 1 and that to 1 right now you can see that it is a diffuse of 1 is giving me nine diffuse samples which is equal to 3 times 3 which is 9 I know this is a lot of weird math and you don't have to know this stuff you just have to know where your grain is and how to clean it up and the easiest way to do that is to kind of identify which one of these areas is the grain existing in I could crank the a a up which essentially is going to do it for the entire image it's basically like saying alright I'm going to just throw a ton of samples at the camera and hope that it cleans it up and I could type this I could bring this all the way up to 10 and it's going to slowly clean up this this frame and you can see it's finishing up right now and it's cleaning up all that grain for me now that's not an efficient way to clean up that grain because what I'm doing is I'm just kind of throwing a blanket of samples over the entire shot and saying to hell with it to sample everything that's not really efficient you could do it that way but it's not advisable so if I brought this back down to where it was 3 I know that that like I said that grain is in my shadows now there's two ways I can clean that up I could clean that up in the lights themselves which have samples and they default at one which is generally very low so without changing any of my sampling here without touching any of it I could just come into my light and change this to 3 okay so now I'm basically sampling my light 3 times which is going to give it 9 samples time I'm not going to get into the math that's confusing me so I'm going to let that cook for a second and while it's cooking I'm going to go ahead and actually give it a smaller bucket size so that it goes a little bit faster okay so I gave again I gave the I gave the samples a sample of 3 and I still have a lot of diffuse noise that's because I've only got one diffuse sample right here if I bring this up to a more manageable number like 2 you're going to see that this grain is going to start to go away in fact it's already significantly cleaner if I bring the sample up to let's say for that grain will probably be gone completely and let me just zoom in so we can see it a little bit better would you say it's always better to solve this on the light than in the settings ah that kind of it's a general rule well here's what here I'm going to show you the the method that you should do you don't and once you've done the method a few times you'll start to get like a sixth sense for like oh the samples are grainy in the diffuse I need more light samples so the way to do that is to and I'm going to do it really fast because it'll confuse you if I get too far down this path I'm basically going to set up a Ovie's and a OVS are called the this it stands for arbitrary output variable and these are passes these are like your reflection refraction all that sort of passes so I'm just going to tell I'm going to tell Arnold to actually activate all the standard passes and the reason that I'm doing that is that I want to be able to come into this little drop-down that I mentioned earlier in the IPR and look at where these samples are grainy so now I can go into my let's say direct specular and this is just an it's so cool that it's like drawing these passes for you like right there in real-time so this is my specular and I don't see any grain here so I know that I know that I can then refer back to my glosses and say well I think two is good because I don't have any grain here let's look at our indirect specular and that basically indirect specular is the second bounce of specular and I mean it's not it's not super grainy looks pretty good now if I check my diffuse so my direct diffuse you're going to see okay that's where the grain is that's where that's where my noise is that I need to that I need to increase there's two places to do that if the light is really low in samples in this case it's not it's got four then I would increase the light maybe nothing crazy I would never have sampled a light over six samples or seven samples and a lot of them I'll leave at one if they're not like a really key light so that's good that's all good there and so my diffuse is looking pretty good let me look at my indirect defuse now this indirect diffuse is basically your GI so this right now I'm just looking at my my GI and let's go ahead and look at that it's pretty darn grainy so I'm going to have to increase my samples in my diffuse no matter what I do and that now I could change my my light samples all I want I could bring that back down to zero it has no effect on the GI because this is not the light is just a light right you know so it's not it has it's good of course going to throw light to make the GI brighter and darker but it controlling the samples of this light is only going to help to diffuse so I'm going to bring that that's only gonna be the first pass exactly so that's like that and then any bounce light off the wall or anything needs to come from that diffuse yep so generally yep so like why not when I'm startin like this I'm just I'm just gonna set it up to be clean and then I'll tell you how I did it so I'm gonna I generally would put my camera a - probably on the scene maybe like a four and let's go back to looking at our full up beauty so that it's nicer to look at and then I know that I've got grain in my diffuse and that's predominantly coming from and it's actually they're actually isn't that much grain it actually looks pretty darn good the GI actually looks pretty clean to me so I might leave the diffuse bounces right there but ideal I do see some grain from that area light still happening so I'm just going to jump into that light and just add one more sample to it and see if it cleans it up I'm guessing that it will and this is like physical right every time you add another number it's doubling the samples and potentially that part of the render time it's not it's not doubling the render time by any stretch it's just adding its it's basically saying all right I'm going to put more samples into this light that you've got going on right now and and four five is pretty good for this I see a little bit of and I'm just going to isolate this area right here so I can see it better so I've got a little bit of grain happening here and I don't think me putting in two more samples into this quad light is really going to affect it I think I need to actually come up in my diffuse so I'm going to bring my camera a a leave it at four I want to set my diffuse to three leave my glossy at two and that cleaned up the noise for me just fine and there we have it now we have a pretty decent render setting and like I said once you kind of get the hang of this it becomes a lot easier to recognize like where the noise is to kind of see it and as a a is that is what what is that like anti-aliasing or yeah that's exactly what it is so the camera a a is like this global sampling it's like basically like throwing the sample blanket over your entire frame and it's just going to clean everything up so if you notice here if you look at the numbers this is what Arnold is really doing its throwing 16 samples at my camera it's got 144 samples going through my diffuse 64 samples through my glossy so total of 224 so if I wanted to let's say you know maybe we're getting some jaggies on a texture or something I could bring that camera up to 5 and notice how all the numbers now went up so these are all related to the camera a a the camera is kind of like the master control so you want to kind of you obviously don't want to over sample because then your render times are going to skyrocket so basically you you find what works and then you're good to go like there's not a whole lot of twiddling of how many irradiance cache and quasi monte-carlo and you know I mean like it's pretty simplified once you kind of get the hang of it yeah so the IPRs is finishing up here and the IPR - like if you want to adjust the IPR the way it's set up and the way that I did earlier and why we now see these buckets and we didn't see them before is under the settings or sorry the system tab I can actually change my bucket size right here just like you would in physical I can change the order and all that when I'm working when I'm not rendering out for real I'll work with a small bucket size so that it kind of draws faster and I turn on my bucket corners just so that I can see where it's drawing you can turn them off if you want it's really up to you you can also tell it only to use a certain amount of threads on your machine I don't you know like maybe you want to save a few threads for doing other work I don't know but I usually leave it to auto detect and use all my threads anyway so um what's up with those texture previews is there a way to to see those and render those out the test so the way that's a good question that was a weird thing for me to when I first started using this program so when Arnold is working on the IPR it says it basically is like forget you I've got I've got one pipe I can go down and you chose for me to go down the IPR pipe and that's what I'm doing so if I stop the IPR it says okay I just you just freed up my pipe to go over here and be able to draw that because this actually is Arnold in the little wind in the little material preview like that's that's a little like yeah that's like literally a little tiny Arnold in there and so when you turn him on over here he goes black well this one I think because we hadn't it it well it's just not doing anything now it's just holding its last state but I'll change it or say exactly I changed it you're not going to see it here but yeah generally speaking I don't you when you're using Arnold like this the IPR becomes like your your palette and your little playground and where you're making stuff happen and I generally am not even ever looking at my shader balls at all really and that's true with the render like if you if you render this out to the to the render window that's kind of the same thing right it'll it'll like shut off your IPR yeah so if I have the IPR going right now like it's running and then I decide well I want to render this frame out for real I'm going to change my output size so it's a little bit more manageable in this so I'm going to go ahead and render this out and hit rendered a picture viewer and you can see it actually paused and stopped my IPR and it's actually rendering for real right now and that's that's the really nice thing too is like what you see in the IPR is what you get here there's no like difference between these two images in terms of if I let my IPR finish all the way to being done it would essentially look exactly like this so not just so this render like I said it's got I think it has to diffuse bounces and to area lights and some glossy surfaces and my bucket size are way too small I wouldn't I wouldn't render recommend doing a render with this small of a bucket size it's not really very efficient from a memory standpoint I recommend using like a and I'm just going to stop it really quickly here I recommend doing like a 64 a size of 64 and then we'll just go ahead and let that go again and this will be a little bit more efficient on my cores but yeah it's if you know like how to tweak this renderer out it can be really really efficient and really really fast and of course it works with team render too so if I don't have my laptop on right now but if I had my laptop on and set to team render I could get more buckets in here if you have like you know three machines or however many you they could all be contributing to this frame now they're not going to be they won't be able to contribute to the IPR that's completely separate and is not like a team render thing but they can help draw this the single frame in the render view your picture viewer I like that this looks great man this is cool yeah it's really any other pitfalls like like that yellow texture and or like applying stuff to models like do all those things work where it looks like the mapping works the same it looks like um as far as like how you distribute textures and all that that's all still the same as as cinema right like using you know polygons tags and stuff to restrict you have textures and all those things are just kind of handled by cinema in general it seems like it's really the textures lights and the render settings like you showed us is really the UM the huge difference yeah I'd say you're right I think the the biggest difference there the there's some similarities in terms of like a quad light is like an area light and it looks the same and it throws the similar kind of light around your scene and image based lighting we can get into that next is a little bit it's it's it's way easier than physical to be honest but yeah you're gonna the the steepest learning curve I think we'll probably be in here making shaders in a in a node-based environment as opposed to a physical where you're just kind of like you know clicking around in different inputs and outputs and things of that nature but yeah the tags are all the same UV mapping is the same what what here's another really rad feature that I wish we could do in in physical which is let's say that I have this I'm just going to pipe this node out to let's go ahead and start the IPR and so we can see what we're doing alright so I just you know I'm looking at just this image of this photograph of myself and it's on these Buddhas it's not really a none of these are you vide properly so I apologize but anyway let's say that we like this and we're going to throw a color correction node onto it too so we're going to pipe this into a color correction node and we're going to desaturate it and make it black and white and so now we have a very artsy photograph of myself in black and white mapped on these Buddhas okay this is beautiful but I mean dude come on so let's say that let's say we like this so much that we wanted to use this on a completely different shader okay so let's just I'm just going to delete these shaders off these guys and I'm going to grab let's see we'll describe another Arnold shader and we're going to throw it onto that guy and just duplicate that shader and throw this one on to this guy and on to this guy so here we have two different shaders on these buddhas and we want them all to use this little color correction version of my of my picture so it this is basically referencing so if I open up the shader Network of this guy and I drag my little color corrector picture of myself up into here I now have a referenced material so I can actually use that into the diffuse color here and now I have a did I not assign that material to anybody thought I did I men didn't up there is okay I guess I did not okay so now check this out like this is pretty amazing sand in in physical you always wish you could instance a map or so you're not hitting copy paste copy paste and going back in and like changing something and then you forgot to change it because you had a copy there or whatever this allows you to create a ridiculously cool material and use it on several different shaders like right now it's being used in the diffuse channel of these two guys if I wanted to make me use it in a different place on this guy like I could have it driving I don't know the emission of this third one and this third one I believe would be on this guy and let me make sure that the emission power is up because it's not so now and let's bring the power up to maybe 10 so I'm using the same and this is a really crappy example with because my pictures not mapping but it's not mapping correctly but you see what I'm doing like I'm using the referenced basically I'm using a reference little shader tree node that I made in two different places on two different materials so it allows you to be get really really creative and not have to redo or or copy/paste your work over and over and over and over and over again so I know that's kind of a weird thing to wrap your head around did that make does that make sense yeah in in concept theory like just thinking about expresso and using that and using the same number and piping it in in like four different ways yeah yeah that makes sense so this is cool yeah when you start to like wrap your head around that then it's like oh man this is crazy like I there's a lot of weird interesting stuff you could do with this thing and like it you know you can you can make really complicated stuff or you can make really simple stuff it's really kind of up to you but let's get back to a more simple scene so again you know if I just wanted to if I'm let's say I'm working on the shot and the way that these guys are shaded I can't even tell what my lights are doing this is where that debugging mode comes in handy that we talked about earlier I can just click on this debugging mode and you can see it applies like a like a white kind of a plaster II kind of material across my across my scene so it's it's just all these little features that these guys have put in over the last god I think this render has been around since like 2003 or something I mean it's it's insane I didn't even cover I didn't even get to the randomization the being able to create mats for objects well let's let's T's then let's let's tease the next video I think I mean we're already in like an hour into this thing and and I've yeah I think um as far as like a quick start or you know just for me to like have enough to jump in to Arnold and start like playing and break and stuff I think it's um I think it's good I'll probably have some questions after we play and maybe Chris too if you want to play around and maybe we you know kind of do another one of these after we we have a little bit of time and say hey I'm missing this part or I wish I wish I could find this and you could kind of walk us through those things that that make sense yeah yeah did you guys want I guess the only thing we didn't show that I wanted to show is image based lighting but if you want we can tease that well yeah let's wait on that too because um we might have some stuff to show with that soon oh right yeah so um that might be good though the thing that I think maybe will help people that are opening this for the first time is maybe having a file like this is there um I don't think we could share this because of the buddha model but is there maybe um if you just swap those buddhas out with um you know some spheres or like something basic and cinema that we can maybe share this scene file with everybody yeah you know I'll just uh I'll I'll just build I'll leave the psyche in there I guess and just stamp it down and then throw a bunch of primitives in there just so that you have something to look at I think that'd be helpful if like if people for the first time whether they bought it or they have like the demo or something have a scene like this to kind of fly around in and instantly see that window moving around and they could be kind of cool so yeah I only want that file if the photo of Chad is in there never I feel like I need to change this this map type right here how do I do that I think I can do it up here I need to like at least make this thing a accuse that way your YouTube photos are you pointing at the camera I have like um my Macbeth chart l as your color yeah here you know what this is better so at least it's a cube and my face isn't all distorted and weird-looking that's kind of a cool thing too you can actually come in here and use like an Arnold shader ball and then let's go open up this window like if you wanted to actually so you can see the IPR is actually like I said it's it's doing its thing on the reels if you wanted to like kind of like work this way to build a shader you totally could but yeah you can see it's the a thank God the logo is covering up my face so that's that's perfect perfect for me I love it fact all this well why don't we why don't we do that next one because if I think getting on an hour on this one is pretty good for a start and then we'll kind of try to do this again cuz um I already have like camera questions and stuff but I think we should hold it off for now and and maybe also see what other people have so if we if we could put this out and you know if you guys have any if you guys out there watching this thing having questions - maybe we could kind of wrap back around in a couple weeks or a month and do another one cool all right sweet anything else from anyone before we wrap this one up no good for me thanks Jed yeah no problem guys thanks Chad this looks great alrighty thanks again for watching everybody quick question of the day for you before we go what renderer are you most excited about learning put it in the comments down below we'd love to hear from you guys now also be sure you're subscribed to our YouTube channel and if you want that scene file be sure to check the description down below and also check up right here we're gonna link it up in a YouTube style all right we got ton more videos coming soon stay tuned we'll see in another one buh bye everybody it's too long you're talking too much hey Nick you're talking too much you're talking too much that was it boo mother

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 237,433

Rating: 4.9343042 out of 5

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, cinema 4D tutorials, Cinema 4D, cinema 4d arnold, arnold for cinema 4d, arnold c4d, arnold render, arnold renderer, chad ashley, getting started with arnold for cinema 4d, C4DtoA, arnold quick start, greyscalegorilla arnold, arnold vs, c4d arnold tutorial, c4d arnold renderer, c4d arnold features

Id: WAIq2sJfkxw

Length: 65min 19sec (3919 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 09 2016