Houdini Everyday - Part 2 - Lighting Setup

okay so now that we have our little scene just quickly before we create a camera and set up some lights there's a website called 3d scans comm where you can go and download some free 3d scans some high-res geometry and and use them to render and test off with it's super helpful when setting up shaders to get things with uneven geometry and when you're just playing around it's it's easier to just work with a base and these are great bases but yeah good website cool so jumping back into Houdini we have a little scene here if we jump up to the object level what I'm going to do is just hit P to hide our parameters so that we can see a bit better we've got our backdrop let's call this our table we have our arch avaz and let's call this a obelisk obelisk yeah okay so just for cleanliness sake let's select all of these and then just go up to the this little button here click it and it will throw down this little backdrop and let's just move these over and let's call these ovj now if you don't like gray just hit C and this little color palette comes up and if you click it it will just change the color of whatever you have selected so I think even if you take these nodes and hit red it will change the node color I'm just going to undo that so these are our objects now what I'm going to do is grab a camera from the shelf tool over here so if you just if you just click on any shelf tool if you click on it it's going to ask you to place it in the scene so I don't usually like doing that you see it just created a camera there where I clicked the same goes for like a box or any object it will say where do you want it to go and usually I like creating things at the center so if you hold down command or control if you're on Windows just hit command and click on the camera and that's going to create a camera where your current viewport is just to demonstrate further if you click command and click on the box it's just going to create a box at the origin at 0 0 0 so yeah I usually whenever I hit the shelf tools I hold down command or control again if if you're going to use these any of these shelf tools it will just create it at the origin and it's so much easier so I'm gonna hit P to bring our parameters back again and I'm just gonna zero out this camera so if we just hit 0 a bunch of times and then where it says translate for x y&z I'm just gonna hit 3 to move backwards 3 meters let's go 5 meters in the z direction and then let's just go to point 5 to move this up maybe 1 and let's actually move a camera way back so it's gonna say maybe 10 we're gonna need a lot more if we go to the viewer so you see we're pretty far away if we go to view and just change our focal length to 125 let's maybe go 150 and let's move our camera up a little bit but actually what I'm going to show you is usually I only keep the camera translated in the Z direction and I'll show you why so right now we are basically pointed straight at the grid that's why we can't see it anymore if I move up we can start to see the grid but instead of moving around with just the camera what I'm going to do is hit tab and type down a null and then connect the camera to the null so this is just a null object the transform axis is at the origin 0 0 0 and now if we move the null up it will move the camera as well this is really handy when you have objects at the origin because I like to kind of keep things simple with just using rotations and we can start to rotate around the origin just by using the null so if we jump back into so here's the thing with a camera let's just just connect this quick to move around this dump me the first time I used it but when you hit alt to start moving around you'll notice that it looks like the cameras moving but as soon as you unclick your mouse you'll notice that the camera did not move and it's still in its same place over there so what you need to do let's just go up here which is no can click cam 1 and then what you want to do is hit the lock button so now you are locked to whatever you are viewing through so now we can move around with actually moving the camera ok I do not know what happened there ok so this just happened I think I jumped inside the now it looks like but what happened was our scene view just disappeared we're now and we now have a duplicate of this so to fix that just go over to the plus button go new paint type and hit scene view and let's jump back to our camera and now we're back so I'm just going to move this back to where it was and then delete this and and there we are so I'm just gonna zero this out again like 50 okay connect this back up you'll see how camera goes back to the rotation that I had hit zero let's go up by say - it's actually good three quite a big scene and let's start creating some lights and rendering this we're just gonna leave our camera just like that you can hit the backdrop again and just type can let's make it all fancy and change the color so backdrop selected change it to green okay so now lighting so that's cameras that's pretty much all all you need to do let me show you this quick so let's uncheck our camera so that we don't accidentally move it hit space ball one I guess we are already in perspective and let's just move out of the camera hit space h2 just home everything and there you see it showed it showed us the whole scene if I if I have the camera selected and hit spacebar F it'll go straight to the camera so let's do this and the one thing with the camera let's just select it and it's way back there what we need to do so you'll notice Houdini has a couple of these panels our toolbar just got hidden so if you just hit that little arrow it comes back you can do that with a bunch of these things you might want to render depth of field and it might look a little strange like super blurry and that's because if we have a camera selected which is sampling here we go so this is where you would set your f-stop and basically the higher the f-stop the less depth of field there's going to be the lower the f-stop the more depth of field there is going to be so for now we'll just keep it at 5.6 but currently this is the end this is where the cameras focus is so we need to change that so I'm just gonna select Z and just move this back until we get to our object now I mean we have moved the camera back 50 units usually it's not as far so say we wanted this to be our focus now when we render we will get a proper focus with the right depth of field which we said at our f-stop so you need to have the camera selected and you need to have the transform controls enabled so if I hit select you see it disappears so you need to hit this button for the transform controls to get or easily set where your depth of field is gonna be cool so that's kind of that's cameras for now that's all all we need to do what we are going to do now is hit tab type env for environment light just click that and click it down so now we have an environment like nothing's really changed we need to set our environment map here so I'm gonna hit this icon and I'm just gonna navigate to where my textures are so this is a website where you can get a whole bunch of free HDR eyes they're really really nice you can support Greg Greg's I'll he cruises around and creates these awesome HDR eyes that we can use for free which is super cool so take a look there's a whole bunch of different options I've just gone to the studio look I usually use the studio when I'm doing some look development stuff just because you get all round lighting and for this sake let's use small studio 3 cool so we're going to use small studio 3 which I have already downloaded so if we jump back here we're going to go to a small studio 3 and what I've done is I have just created another HDR that has been D saturated so I don't have any color pollution from from the HDRI sauce just so that when I'm looking at materials it's the light is neutral and then I've also D saturated and blurred a version which gives a softer a softer light but for now let's just click accept and if we you'll see we now have an environment light in our scene and it looks like coming from left to right right to left here which is good at least for now so with the environment light it's pretty straightforward you can transform it around like this you know whichever way you want we'll we'll get into that now so at the moment everything in the viewport isn't isn't getting any light so if we want to have a better representation we can come over here I kind of toggle between these I'm sure I think this one you know we get a little bit of light direction in the viewports if we transform this we should get an update of where where the light is kind of coming from okay we don't so let's jump down to this one there we go so now we get a better representation of where our light is and if we rotate it around this is what we get so let's maybe find I want 180 so we're gonna have the light coming from the right to the left let's maybe rotate it just get this transform control and that's rotated so that we get you let's get something like that for now it looks pretty bright so let's see how the the renderer handles it it's actually just knock it down because I think it's gonna be too bright let's go to 0.5 okay so that's our environment light for now we are just gonna use one of these and we will throw down an area light probably a little bit later so I'm just gonna save my project by hitting command S or file save now we have our light we have our objects now we need to create a render node so I'm just going to jump into our camera so that we can see what's going on and what I'm going to do is come up to the top here where it says render click render go to create render node and what I'm going to do is create a mantra PBR click on that and it takes us to our out context now so we went from object to out and this is a Rob this is a mantra Rob which is just a render operator so it's pretty straightforward mantra I really like the way manager calculates everything it's all additive it's physically accurate it might take a bit longer than than other renderers but yeah it does a good job I like the way that that works so just coming over from images let's go to rendering and this is what I do so you'll see that we have physically based rendering there's also ray tracing micro polygon rendering which i think is curves and particles and stuff ray tracing and physically based rendering is you know there's not too much difference but for the sake of it I like using PBR or physically based rendering so over in limits we're just gonna bring our reflection limit down to 3 our refraction limit down to 3 and then let's just get rid of our diffuse limit right now so this is global illumination this essentially right now once the light hits our objects it's not going to bounce if we had say a red box and we wanted it to come up on our background and cause some color around we would pump up out the fuse limit this means that the light is going to hit the red box it is going to absorb some of the color and then bounce again onto another object and transferred that color so for now let's just keep that down go over to our sampling and this is essentially all you really need to worry about like the limits is just basically saying limit everything to in the reflection limit it to three bounces in the refraction limited to three bounces an interesting thing is that if you have a lot of refraction so if you have a lot of glass in your scene this is very handy so once it reaches the Ray limit it is going to use the black background so after three bounces say this was glass this was glass and this was glass and it was all next to each other light rays that are traveling from this object through this object and through this object will probably only land up coming out at the end here and it will not get absorbed by this object because it's travel there's too many bounces and we've currently limited to three so at the Ray limit you can say use direct lighting as background color and that essentially is a cheat to basically say once it reaches its limit use the HDR eye and environment light that we just threw down to replace the black background that you would see so if you are rendering a Hall of Mirrors you probably want to use use this option because the amount of bounces you are going to need is probably terrifying so so that's all for this tab right now let's go to sampling so pixel samples this is your direct samples and then everything underneath here are your indirect samples so we'll we'll set up a few things and then go through this a little more in-depth so you have a better understanding but for now we're just going to keep it at default we're gonna say 3x3 pixel samples and we will leave everything else at its default so now I'm just gonna hit file save again now we can come over to our render view and where it says rock camera let's change that to camera 1 and then just hit render okay there we go we have something so it's not pretty right now but we'll change that just to show you guys quickly especially in the render view there are a couple of hidden panels so say I am zooming in and I'm looking at something if I want to be able to fit the image to my screen if I click this little arrow here or actually anywhere on this panel these options will drop down so we can click this little home button to go to the original size or we can click these little arrows here and it will make it the actual size of how it will just fit the size of our image to the screen that we are currently in which is super handy and then down here if you click this panel we can shuffle through the red green and blue channels as well as the Alpha Channel that's not relevant right now because we don't have any color we can take a snapshot so hit the snap button and now we can go back to if we change things especially in when we are updating materials and stuff it's nice to snap so that you can see where the changes have come you can up the brightness go down in brightness change the gamma as well for now we'll just keep that at 1 and yeah there's another little panel over here we can enable our rulers and it gives us a few other options and yeah I usually always use one if not all of these panels they are hidden when you first start so I'm just gonna stop this render and let's jump back to our scene view and what we're going to do is let's just go to objects let's go to our environment light and let's just zero out this rotation and let's see what that gives us it's 180 let's see what this gives us so hit render now we have some interesting stuff happening with the hard light okay just to quickly make some adjustments let's stop this let's go to our light let's go to point three five okay so what I'm gonna do is jump back to scene view and I'm gonna go to let's jump into our table I'm just gonna disable this is the disable flag the transform so now this is right in the center let's actually move it back let's not move it all the way there select got a transform and let's just move this forward a bit let's jump to our top view and let's grab our VARs and then obelisk okay prospective view cool I just wanted to pull that forward out of there out of the shadows so let's take a snap and let's hit render again now I'm going to show you something here that we're currently rendering with the IPR so that we can see a preview quicker and then this little button is whenever you make changes it will update so if I uncheck that and then I change our light here nothing's gonna update but as soon as I hit that checkbox now we see that it updates and if I say let's just go negative 30 you see now it updates so what I'm gonna do is I'm just going to try find a nice frame where I like the lighting so I'm just gonna play around with different values here this looks pretty interesting just go back to what we had let's go with more punch cool let's just leave it you can always change it a bit later let's just leave this at 180 let's go to point 2 so now we have just a little scene we have a camera we have a light we have a render node which we are currently rendering things from now what I'm going to do is just make some small adjustments and then we are going to get into we're going to get into shading and making this look nice and we'll probably add another light as well before we call it quits yeah let's let's do that

Channel: Break Your Crayons

Views: 2,350

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: houdini, sidefx, 3d, render, art, minimal, digital art, byccollective, tutorial

Id: B-0NBRfCrgs

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019