Interior Lighting with Cinema 4D and Redshift

hi guys ross here and welcome back to another video so where have i been i haven't posted in about four months well i went freelance at the end of last year and i've just been flat out ever since so it is that same old story of i've been too busy to post but that really is the case you know life kind of just gets in the way i've been busy chasing that money but i'm back and i'm back with a banging video today we're going to be talking about how you can light your interior scenes using cinema 4d and redshift there's not too many videos out there on the world wide web that i could find anyway on how to do this using redshift or not any tutorials i thought were any good but i'm here with a good one i hope so today we're going to be talking about how you can push beyond just using a hdri because that seems to be the common kind of approach to making these interior slash exterior scenes um but we're going to be talking about how we can push beyond that introducing area lights to kind of art direct our scenes and just make them a bit more stylized and get the results we want just have a nice professional finish to our work here you can see me just modeling the the the what's the word what's the word i'm looking for the scene i'm modeling the scene here i've sped it up because it's nothing too interesting um just set up a cube pretty much with a window which i'm building out of cubes again and then using a boolean tool to just cut it out the side and then applying a glass material to turn it into a window so that's basically the set for that i thought i'd speed through that because it's nothing too crazy so yeah i'm gonna stop waffling now and actually dive into how to light this scene if you find the video useful you know what to do hit that like button hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell so you know when i next upload whenever that is and yeah that's it all right thanks for watching guys and i'll catch you in the next one peace okay so this is our scene set up i'm going to dive out the camera so you can see what's going on basically it's just a box setup made of planes i don't know why i didn't use a cube but yeah it's made of planes um and then i've used a boolean tool to cut out three windows here with just some nice kind of borders here to create some nice shadows further down the line i've then applied a simple off-white material and here's a super quick tip get your pens out get your notepad out this is the first tip of the video never use a full 100 material i don't care what it is nothing in real life is 100 white um so you never want to push this all the way up to 100 because when you start to add your lights in even without any lights now i'm using aces so it's not going to be as prominent but if i was to turn this srgb look how blown out that is on the back wall there um so you never want to use 100 white always bring it down probably 90 percent at maximum but i'm going 85 just to be safe because you know you're better safe than sorry uh i'm then injecting a little bit of warmth by just putting like three percent saturation with the hue of 25 so just gives it a little bit of warmth which is going to lend itself to our lighting i then have a simple glass material which is just a preset glass slap that onto the windows and jobs a gooden so i've decided to set this tutorial up a little bit different basically i've already built the lighting and i'm just going to run through each of the lights one by one because i've recorded this already this is like the third or fourth time i've recorded this and it was way too long so we're going to just do it this way so i'm going to go into the camera and i'm just going to lock it in the render view here just get rid of those settings so now i can come out of the camera and it's going to stay in place on the render view so let's turn on our hdr so let's just hit the tick button and you can see straight away in our render view i'm not you i'm not using a hdr which is giving us really nice you know contrasting light it's not giving us a really nice light you see when it casts through windows it's giving us a very soft diffused lighting most common way people approach their hdri lighting is they kind of use that as their key light so they're using that to get all the really nice lights all the really nice shadows and reflections basically just trying to do it all in that one object which is cool if you can pull it off but we want to just take it to that next level we want to have a bit more control over our scene and that's what this video is talking about so i'm using a hdr from pg skies which i believe i've got open here that's my twitter if you're not following me go follow me man come on i'm active on there a little bit uh i'm using 1855 dusk so you can see just from the preview that you know we're not really getting any insane shadows it's very very soft um even this doesn't really show anything of any interest compared to if we find something like 1934 where we're getting these really nice kind of shadows on this wall so we're using a very very soft hdr but what i want you to pay attention to is you see we have this shifting color on the wall so we've got this blue wall here but then it's fading to like a warmer color here and that's because if we look at the little preview in the bottom right here um we have a really nice shift between like a reddish from where the sun is to a blue sky so we're getting that contrast in color now here's quick tip number two when setting up your lighting even though it's very very minuscule you do want to create some sort of contrast in color between warm and cooler hues so you'll see as we go further into this kind of setup i start to shift the colors of the different lights to get that contrast now it's a very minut detail but when you come to a finished piece those tiny little details are all going to add up and add more depth to your piece and add more visual interest so you can already see how that actually looks quite nice even though we're not getting any kind of really dynamic and interesting lighting that splitting color does give us quite an interesting look so that is the start of our kind of setup and you can see i've cranked up the exposure because by default an exposure of zero which is the default hdr will be when you put a light down and by the way if you really don't know how to set up a hdr or anything just grab a dome light from your redshift toolbar go to your path and just drop in a hdr file um if you don't want to pay for hdr because this one is paid it's 15 quid you can use something like hdri hdri haven or hdr skies they're both really good through free alternatives um which i pretty much use to be honest for most of my work because just for this one i kind of wanted to dive a little bit deeper so yeah go online check them out just figure out what works for you this is just one hdr but like i said i've cranked this up to 4.5 so this is already giving us quite a nice illumination for this room but it's very very basic still i then also reduce the saturation a little bit because i want to use my area lights to paint more color into here i don't want too much color coming from the hdr so i have just knocked it back to 80 saturation all the other settings are exactly the same so we don't need to worry about them too much but this is our starting point so i'm going to just make sure that's locked to the camera and i'm going to dive out and let's start looking through these area lights so i actually want to start off with this fill light here so if i just turn off the hdr because i like to solo my lights out one by one that way i can really focus on what each one's doing and sometimes by doing that you'll realize you know what i can probably bin off this light because it's not doing anything and it's just over complicating the scene so let's turn on this fill light and you can see we're using this to cast some more light on the floor here and on the back wall so we're starting to add that more interesting lighting you get from these window scenes which you see online all the time and what we're actually doing to get these soft results because like the example we saw a minute ago with hdr it had a very sharp result like this one here um we're getting a much softer result and that's because we're using a larger light if you look at how far away this light is compared to the actual building it's quite far away and that's giving us softer results if we were to move it like a bit closer you can see it's giving us a bit of a harsher result and it's also a lot more intense whereas if we move it further away it's a lot more diffused the lighting is a lot more even throughout which is kind of lending itself to the soft hdr we have going on so we're trying to blend all the lighting together now that is one disadvantage of this way of working you do have to work harder for these area lights to blend together with the hdrs or with each other in order to still achieve a realistic result but we do have more control over the scene so if we now combine this with our hdr we now have that additional light along the bottom along the back wall just a bit more injection of brightness into our scene which we weren't getting from the hdr alone like i mentioned with the hdr i have injected a little bit of color into this area light and like i said it has to be very my my new um you can see i've only added four percent saturation and then i've changed it to this kind of coolish hue here so if i was to turn this down to zero percent if my keyboard decides to work you can see we're now going back to that original kind of warm tone we have on our wall materials so by just putting in like four percent hue i need to just undo that because it's there we go by just putting four percent on a cool hue we're just injecting a little bit more detail into the piece and just adding another layer to it i've then reduced the intensity down to 40 40 and then the exposure to -2 because we want this to be quite a subtle light and we are layering it on top of the hdr which is already quite bright and then we're going to be layering that with other area lights as well so at this point we're keeping it quite subtle we can always go back and tweak these settings if we need to so that's our fill light i'm then going to move on to another fill light i actually haven't renamed these area lights so they make no sense but this one is now projecting that really nice light onto the back wall so let's have a look at how this is set up so this is facing the building at more of an angle um and it's closer it's smaller so we're getting slightly harsher results um and what i've also done is i've turned down the spread on this as well so if i was to turn this all the way up to one first of all it's going to be a lot darker but it's going to be a lot more diffused we're able to get slightly sharper results by turning the spread down the best way i can describe the way spread works is well if i cranked it all the way down and like moved it in line of sight you can see we now have a much harsher result probably push it down even more there we go so now we got really harsh light here which is going to allow us to capture the silhouette of the borders on the window but it does make the light a lot brighter so um you will have to then drop down the exposure so i'm just going to undo all of that so now we're back back in position i believe yep cool and with this one i've actually made it warm so i've turned the shoe to 25 and the saturation to 7 so if we now combine that with the previous fill light we have that cool tone along the floor and then we now have this new warmer light hitting that back wall adding that extra layer of detail to the piece so we're getting that really nice light that you would get or you would expect from like a sunset i suppose but we're just controlling it through individual area lights instead of just using one hdr so if we now turn on that original hdr you can see we're starting to lose a little bit of the kind of detail from those lights but that is how it would react in real life um another quick tip i think this is the third one the window should always be the brightest area of your scene if you just look at a window in real life or you look at photographs of interiors the window is always the brightest area and that's because the sun is pretty much the brightest element on earth if you study photographs you'll see how the window is always slightly blown out and we can achieve that through post effects like bloom and streak but you can already see how the window is the brightest area of this render and that is something you do want to keep in mind you don't want the window to be darker than any other area in the scene because then it's just going to look unrealistic like even if the rest of the scene looks really good our brains just know that the window is always the brightest source so just another quick tip that's the third one god this tutorial is packed full of goodness but you can see now that the kind of render viewers denoised it a little bit that those lights are working really well they're very subtle they're just nice kind of soft lights on the floor and on the back wall and we are getting a nice shift between those cooler and those warmer tones because we have dialed in that kind of detail into the area lights so just as a reminder our big light up here has a slightly cooler tone whilst our smaller light down here which is projecting this light onto the back wall has a slightly warmer tone so we're getting that nice split in color which is helping to add a bit more detail to our piece so the final light i know we're nearly there already simple as that really the final light is this super small light down here so i'm going to turn them all off like i said i like to solo my lights out um this small light here so i'm actually just going to hide the others so i can kind of show you clear what's going on that's definitely not supposed to happen there we go okay so this is a super small light you can see it's tiny it's got a crazy intensity multiplier of a thousand and that's to compensate for how small this area light is because if i was to leave it 100 which is the default look how dark that is if i was to turn on all the other lights right now that would not even make a scrap of difference like you can see maybe it's a little bit warmer you can see it very very slightly but compare it to when i put it up to a thousand intensity multiplier that becomes a really prominent light source in our scene which just helps to add that extra level of detail look how nice that looks before the area lights on i promise you if we were to just use an a user hdr not only would would we have less control over how sharp how diffused all the lights are but we're not going to get as a buttery smooth result as what we've got right here and we're not able to dial in those differences in colors we're just missing out on a lot of detail which we can dial in using these area lights now there's going to be people that tell me and you know it is true to a sense that this isn't the correct way of lighting your scene you should stick to trying to do it as physically accurate as possible but this is cg this is 3d right we're in the we're in a whole different realm right now this isn't real life we can stylize it as much as we want we can break the rules we can use whatever techniques we need to use to get the job done and this is a technique which i think works great now the example i put on my story which maybe i'll put on the video it was a quite a big scene and using just the hdr wasn't giving me the result i needed it wasn't filling the room so adding these extra area lights really helped me to get the illumination i needed and you can see just from using these area lights we've got a really nicely lit room if i was to go back to the hdr like it's a pretty bright hdr don't get me wrong but it just looks really flat like if we had a really contrasted hdr it probably still would give a bit of fall off in the corner so it wouldn't be evenly lit whereas we have that really nice base with the hdr which has given us quite an even lighting throughout and then we're able to dial in that interesting lighting through the area lights so i went off on a bit of a tangent there but back to the small light here we've got a thousand multiplier again we're we're keeping this quite warm because we want it to match the softer light which we have on the back wall which also has this warm tone to it because we kind of want these two to blend together because basically what this softer one is doing here is helping to kind of diffuse this harsher one so if we were to turn that off we now have this quite harsh result whereas when we turn this on we have a bit more spill around the edges of that light source and then when we combine that with the fill light on the floor we just get a really nice soft dreamy look and you can see that contrast between that warm and that cool mix it with the hdr boom we got a really nice soft dreamy light setup so the finishing touches for this scene would be to kind of go into uh post effects here and like i said if you look at photographs of a window it's gonna be all kind of like blown out it's gonna look like it's glowing almost because of how bright the sun is so we can use something called bloom which you can't really see too much but if i was to like crank out the intensity like all the way you can see how it's affecting that window it's kind of adding a little bit of glow to it and we can turn down the threshold and you can see how that determines how bright an area needs to be before it's affected by the bloom so i wanted it just to affect the window because if i go too low it starts to affect the light on the back wall so i don't think i can undo this so let's just uh get that right so that's a super subtle effect just to kind of add an extra level of detail and then we can combine this with a streak which again super subtle but just helps to add a little bit more glow to it you can see it kind of at the bottom of the window starts to blow it out a little bit and we can turn down the threshold so it kind of like captures the edges and i'll just turn that on and off to make sure it's not affecting anything else it looks like it's all good and then we can turn on our photographic exposure so now you can see that bloom and that streak is really apparent so i'm just going to turn that down there we go it doesn't need to be anything crazy so the photographic exposure can be controlled through the camera so if we go to uh redshift camera tag go to exposure and then enable it and basically this now takes into account like actual camera settings so i could decrease the shutter time ratio and that's going to brighten the image or i could increase it back to 200 it's going to darken it because that basically is how much light the camera is letting into the sensor we then have the f-stop which is to do with aperture which is important when you're using depth of field um probably not as much in redshift because you have the bokeh tab for that but you can basically affect how much light is coming in through using this as well um and then we have a loud over-exposure now this is actually really handy because if i crank this up to one you can see the back wall is super bright so is the window basically this is going to tone down how bright um or how overexposed your image can get so i like to set this like 0.2 0.3 you don't want to go too low because then you're not going to get any whites at all it's going to be a very flat image like you can see here if i just kind of uncheck it and check it you can see it takes out all the contrast of the image which is not what we want so i'm going to crank that back up to 0.3 which will give us those lovely glowing window and i think that's pretty much it the settings i've got in terms of render settings are basically brute force for the primary irradiance point cloud for the secondary four gi bouncers just to add a little bit more gi in there and then i usually for like instagram renders in particular just put automatic sampling on i'm always getting people asking me what are my render settings mate just bang on automatic sampling turn on your gi and you're pretty much good to go maybe bump up the reflection and the refraction if you need to i probably don't even need to for this one i could probably six six six simple as that maybe put up to like 12. um and yeah jobs are good so hopefully you guys find this video helpful and hopefully it encourages you to go beyond just using a hdr in your images start to branch out use area lights play with different color tones different scales different intensities different spreads all these different parameters and settings you can play with to completely change the look of your renders and just add an extra level of detail to your pieces of work so if you did find this video helpful hit that like button hit that subscribe button hit that notification bell so you know when i next upload but that could be whenever knowing me and i think that is it let me know in the comments if you have any questions i'm always around to help out if need be and follow me on instagram follow me on twitter that's where i'm most active i actually do post quite a bit on those and yeah i will catch you in the next video alright thanks for watching guys catch you in a bit peace

Channel: Ross Mason

Views: 9,496

Rating: 4.9260969 out of 5

Keywords: iamrossmason, Ross Mason, ross, graphic design, ross mason, cinema 4d redshift, cinema 4d speedart, rendering, cgi, cg, 3d, 3d render, motion design, motion graphics, animation, 3d animation, c4d process, c4d tut, redshift, redshift render, interior lighting, interior lighting cinema 4d redshift, how to light interior scenes, HDRI, tips and tricks

Id: uG59UtZaaSk

Length: 21min 59sec (1319 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021