How to Set Up Cinematic Render in Marmoset Toolbag 4

hey guys welcome to another video in this Channel today we're gonna be talking about a very important topic which is how can we make our renders look more cinematic so here we go and here we are inside of Mormon set here we're going to start with our main construction of our scene and the first thing I've created is this final shot camera so this is just a normal camera I went here and created this camera but one of the most important thing that I always mentioned this when talking about rendering if you want to create a nice piece you need to take three things into account your camera your lights and your effects or post-processing all of those three things together will make up your cinematography shot so if we look for cinematography what the cinematography or what is the Cinematic shot means it just means that we're conveying things in a slightly different way that what we would get from just like taking a picture with our phones or with our uh or like just the webcam or whatever so usually it means that we are going to have some sort of like specific type of light specific type of Shadows and tones I would say one of the things that makes cinematic photography so obvious is the colors the coloring and the color grading that we get now I'm not expert on color grading but I'm going to be showing you some tricks that we can use to generate something a little bit more interesting and I found this picture right here which I think is a really nice one it's a soft kind of like dramatic sort of look for the whole thing it reminds me a little bit of like a Lord of the Rings so we're going to be using this one as our point of reference to try and create something here for our dwarf character and we might even go like here to try to mimic the exact same like a setup which will be something like this I'm using a puref of course and this is a the option to have everything on top so whenever I start building my lights I like to go to my sky and just bring the sky all the way down let's go now to our perspective shot here to our main camera and I'm going to create a point light there we go so as you can see if we take a look at the character we need to identify where the main lights are coming from and you can see due to the like nice little shine there on the eye that it's probably a rectangular light like a big panel light with a soft effect so in this case we can use at the spotlight that's perfectly fine we can change the shape to a rectangle which again if we had a more glossy surface we would get that sort of effect and we can just move this so that it mimics or we find the exact same place so always look at the shadows and the lights of your character you can see on this one right here we have a very bright shadow on the forehead which tells me that this light is coming from the top it's probably something like this let's go W another thing I'm saying is on the side look at this pretty much complete Shadow on this side of the face right now I'm not getting that I'm getting this thing right here which means that I probably need to move my light a little bit to the left like this so that we actually get the very nice like dark shadow here under the psychomatic arc now another thing that I know this and this is very very important when talking about lights the softness of the Shadow CG lights whenever we're using CG lights instead of Arnold instead of mine into the blender instead of anywhere they usually get this very harsh shape right here and this is because of the size of the light if you have a really small light think of it as like like a flashlight you're gonna have very like sharp end and strong Shadows however if you have a very big big light like the sun for instance the Shadows are always going to have a little bit of a blur and if you add like another sort of like curtain or something like diffusing the light you're gonna get even softer Shadows so here instead of marvelous one of the things that we can do is we can go to the shape of this rectangle and increase a little bit here and a little bit here and as you can see now we get this very nice like soft Shadows around the corners of the catch I do feel like this light is getting a little bit too much so I'm gonna just push it a little bit more so we get a little bit more light right here uh you can also see the Shadows here now of course the proportions of my character eyes are slightly different than the ones that we have here with this guy so first rule make sure to have soft shadows and to try to position the shadow as close to what you have on your character we can change for instance the sharpness of the spotlight depending on how soft or how like intense we want to be I want it to be a little bit softer and I'm also going to change the temperature of the element so I'm going to turn on temperature you can see this is a very warm light so if we start bringing the kelpins down we're going to get into this sort of like warm light effect I think something like that is more than enough now let's think or let's see how much intensity we have on the light because that's another very common issue that I see when people are lighting their characters they would not like match the proper like effect and even though I don't have a skim material this is just a clay render we can still try to push this brightness a little bit up just a tad bit to get to the proper values which would be probably around there okay we don't want to overdo it we can still push these things later on on the post-processing side of things so you don't want to do this like super in test so that would be my first Shadow now we don't live in a world where there's only one light there's usually a lot of lights around and if there are no lights around we at least have something called a bounce light so in this case I definitely want to add a little bit of a bounce light around my character if we go to our main sky and we start bringing the the brightness in you're gonna see that we get all of the light from this like Studio that we have right here and this is another one of those like super important tips so tip number two or three I'm not sure which one it is you wanna pick one a hdri that matches the sort of like like tone and atmosphere that you want to capture with your character so in this case I think there's like abandoned house attic has a sort of like green Hue that's a good option um there's also let's see which one we can go for like a forest or something we actually think that abandoned one's probably gonna be my go-to pick this fourth point is also a nice one you can of course download one if you want but yeah it's just a matter of finding one that matches what we're going for I'm gonna go with this abandoned house attic now very important we need to move the like the thing around so that we don't get the main line hitting our character and pretty much destroying all of the nice things that we did so in this case I'm kind of gonna go for like a rim light right there and I'm gonna bring the brightness quite down because I do want to get some information some light information into the scene so that we don't have the super like Dark Shadows but I don't want them to override what I already have another thing that's very important the background right now the background that we have is really light and if we compare it to the background that this character has that one's a little bit different we could add a plane but in this case I'm just gonna go here and the backdrop is going to be changed to color and I'm just going to select like a like a darker green tone color like an earth color right there perfect so that way the lightness and the contrast of the character is going to be way way more intense so now if we go to our cameras and we go to our final shot you can see that we're getting a little bit better I'm gonna rotate the character a little bit more and one thing that I'm not using right now is Ray tracing right now we're just working with the bass like marmoset option and that's why over here as you can see there's a lot of uh a flight where in reality we would expect this thing to be casting some Shadows if we go to the render options and we turn on Ray tracing you're gonna see that everything becomes darker and it becomes a little bit more cinematic as well I still think that we need to move the light a little bit to the side so let me go back to my main camera grab this guy right here I'm gonna push it to the side a little bit so we get a little bit more glow here on this part of the character now I I kind of like this sort of like light that we have on our sky but also at the same time it's it's a little bit weird because it's uh it's a white and I don't want that like camera or that light like Rim light so I'm gonna bring this and I'm Gonna Move It I know we don't have that on our character but I'm gonna move it to the back right here to give me a little bit of a nice Rim light being like or going around the character on this part now another thing that I see is that there is a little bit of a white light here on his shoulder I don't see the reflection but that could be like a nice little Spotlight on this side of the character so I'm gonna go to this side and I'm gonna do another light and this is where the Cinematic light becomes interesting because you can add as many lights as you want and you would be surprised how many like specific lights you can find on a movie set or in a commercial set because you just see the nice picture at the end but you don't see the whole preparation that goes into making sure that the shot looks as nice as possible so for instance in this case I'm going to use temperature as well to keep it like a warm tone so I'm going to push this into like warm tones pretty similar to the main light and one of the things that we can do is we can bring the spot angle down so that it only hits certain parts of the character like this or like front part right here I'm gonna go here I'm gonna rotate a little bit so we're only hitting like the side face right there so it's going to be very subtle that we have right there we're of course going to change the diameter of the shape so we get soft shadows and now again if we go to our final shot camera this is what we're gonna get so look at the difference without that light and with that light it might seem very very subtle but that subtlety is the kind of stuff that really helps like sell and and create a more like interesting shot for our characters I kind of want to play a little bit here not with the intensity Maybe maybe with the temperature just a little bit lighter on the tones right again we're going to be able to change a couple of things later on as well let's go back to the sky and I'm going to bring the brightness a little bit up again just to bring a little bit more light information not too much just something like that and now let's find a nice shot so something like this I think it's gonna work just fine cool so we got our camera set up we got a nice like light to like distribution if we want we can add another Rim light to like generally a little bit more contrast here but I actually think that this is looking quite nice however that's not it we're still missing a couple of things to really make the Cinematic one of those things that I think really helps a cinematic effect is adaptive field so if we go to our final shot effect we can go here to focus and we can turn off the Apple field right Trace depth of field and at this will allow me to find this because I'm gonna go Focus distance and I'm gonna focus of course to my character I can do sticky focus and click on one element let's see if that works no let's try the focus distance again this is a little bit too much so I'm going to bring this up to like a four aperture there we go let's bring it back bring it back bring it back the scale of the character is definitely influencing here so we definitely need to change this thing a little bit there we go so 45 seems to be a good number as you can see we're getting some really nice depth of field here on the shoulders and the character is like very nicely in Focus I'm still gonna like move this a little bit there we go because I don't want to have too much depth of field otherwise it becomes a little bit um weird so once we have this once we have depth of field once we have the uh the nice like background and the nice colors the next thing that we can do is we can play a little bit with the post effects and all of the post effects happen here on the final shot and post effects this is every single like TV series that you see every single commercial every single render that you see out there has gone through some post effects like it's extremely weird like the only thing or times I've seen like renders actually going like straight from the software into like production are those like kids TV shows where they don't have time to render and they pretty much just render whatever's on the viewport so most of the images are going to be seeing have some sort of like post processing on your characters in this case I think I'm gonna go to light one and I still want to like push the light a little bit more there we go I'm gonna go back to final shot here and if we go to post effects there's a couple of things that we can do we have all of this tone mapping and tone mapping is one of those things that can really help it before that I'm gonna sharpen things a little bit there's a question that we got like uh recently about some portfolio pieces someone was showing they were like how is it that my images don't look as sharp you just need to add a little bit of sharpen because Normal maps and everything tend to blur things out so you definitely want to like crunch things just a little bit to get something interesting a bloom is something that I use when we have some sort of like sci-fi light or something like that in this case I don't think it's uh it's particularly good so we're not going to use it let's hope this doesn't crash I'm going to be really mad if this crashes okay there we go I just saved to make sure that we don't lose all of the or I'm just saving to make sure that we don't lose all of the work the thing is I just decimated this guy this is not like displacement or anything so we're not going to be using blue so no Bloom here one thing we could use however I recommend always doing this carefully is Everyone likes we just click here we're gonna get some nice into our scene you can change the the amount of the fog I usually don't like the lights to affect the character so it's just like a like a intense fog right there I am gonna use this fog for instance to give me a little bit of this sort of like green hue-ish and we can play around and that's going to give me a little bit of color gradient as you can see right there so it's definitely gonna like change the the values of our dark colors into this sort of effect we can like modify a little bit of the lights there maybe a little bit of light to to just push things there and the fog is good it's it's not it's not gonna hurt you but just be careful don't overdo it because it's uh it can look like a cheap trick uh we're gonna go back to the final shot and again going down here I do like some like nice vignettes so I'm gonna add a little bit of vignette to the character that's gonna like Focus the character a lot more I do not like grain some people like to add grain to your to the characters to make them like pop a little bit more I didn't think it's necessary one thing we can do here is we can bring the roughness down a little bit so that the skin of the character shines a little bit more that's also going to give us some like nice highlights in certain areas and finally we're going to play with the tone mapping over here so exposure is going to change how bright the render is we can make this really really bright or tone it really really down however I actually don't like working with exposure that way um I'm going to go to the curves instead and the curves are the things that we can use to control certain things of our element so our blacks and whites the values of our image are mapped from this 0 to 1. we do have some presets so for instance we got this cool preset this Matrix preset we got this negative preset and I mean if you find something that you like that's fine but usually it's better to be a little bit more mindful of how you want to do things so one of the things that I notice here is that my light colors are not as intense so we can grab this point for instance and if we bring it down as you can see the whole tone of her image goes down so we're pretty much telling it hey if we have a really high value I want you to tone down that value and we're getting a little bit more contrast right here so where all of the high I point sort of the highlights they're bringing they're being brought down but then if we push this up for instance as you can see what we get is this very interesting curve where the mid values like the high mid values are being pushed up but then the high high values are being brought down we can do the same thing over here like maybe we want some really Deep Shadows well we break the Deep Shadows here and then we push this one here and look at that we get an interesting effect I'm not saying this is what I want to go for I'm just saying that that's what you can do so in this case a very common technique that people like to use is to do an s-curve we're going to bring the darks a little bit down and then the high points or the meter high points are a little bit high like this and as you can see by doing this we generate a little bit more contrast on the whole thing it's a very nice way to do contrast without just doing a contrast right here because contrast is just going to push things very very heavily now we can bring this down and then push this up so not all of the Shadows only like the darkest Shadows get to that specific point and again feel free to play around and find interesting things here on your curves now the way I'm going to use my curves though is I'm going to go for the green channel for instance oh my God sorry I'm gonna go to the green Channel and what I want to do is I want to tell it hey I want to have a little bit more green on the Shadows so I'm going to add a little bit more green here on the lower section and not as much green on the higher sections right here so as you can see we can push this and get a slightly different effect I can go to Red and then I can add again a couple points and be like I want my highlights to get this sort of like pale effect right there and there we go so as you can see we're generating a slightly different effect with this whole thing uh I maybe the blues we can play a little bit with the Blues it's gonna it's gonna get rid of the the effect so I kind of like it like this and there you go and if you find something that you like like let's say this new preset if we go to all of the rgbs you can see this is like my little modification of the curbs if you like this you can just save this preset and use it on another render one of the things that I'm seeing here is that my Shadows are still a little bit too dark so I'm going to go back to my sky and just a little bit more brightness just so that my Shadows are not like extremely extremely dark and we can go to the final shot again to the camera and here on the post effects we can play a little bit for instance with saturation I'm going to bring the saturation down a little bit are actually up maybe a little bit up actually just a little bit up I'm gonna bring the clarity up Clarity is kind of like a sharpen as you can see it sharpens things quite a bit as well and then Shadows we can play with the shadow we can make them darker or we can make them lighter by pushing the Shadows right here same for the mid tones we can make them darker we can make them Shiner so I'm going to make them a little bit darker and then highlights you can see that how we only push the highlights right there and I think this gets us a very very nice effect um kind of want to like sharpen things a little bit more right there and uh yeah that's pretty much it by doing this we now have a very nice like sort of like cinematic render for our character and this is one of the things that you can do again to elevate your whole thing I'm going to show you the difference if we go back to our main camera you can see this doesn't look bad like this clay right there here doesn't look bad but if we go again to our final shot thanks to all of those like little things that we've done now we can get this very interesting effect I kind of want to like bring the contrast down just a tad bit right around there now imagine this with textures and like proper materials and everything well we will have a more complete effect and that's it my friends hopefully you like this video If you do or if you did please let me know in the comments leave us a like share and subscribe it really really helps the channel my goal is to get to 10K Subs by the end of this year and it's only with your help that we can get there so yeah that's pretty much it but stay tuned because we're gonna have a very important message rainbow important announcement in the next couple of days so you definitely don't want to miss it and make sure to check our Discord Channel and our premium courses if you want to learn even more about the 3D world that's it for now I'll see you back on the next one bye

Channel: Abe Leal 3D

Views: 14,188

Keywords: Marmoset Toolbag 4 tutorial, cinematic render setup, 3D rendering in Marmoset, high-quality Marmoset renders, Marmoset Toolbag 4 guide, realistic rendering techniques, lighting in Marmoset Toolbag, Marmoset cinematic scene setup, Marmoset Toolbag 4 tips, advanced rendering in Toolbag, Marmoset visualization techniques, 3D model rendering in Marmoset, Marmoset workflow, Marmoset lighting tips, Toolbag 4 render enhancements, abraham leal, abe leal 3d

Id: 7R2dblQi3Tk

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023