Lighting 3D Products Renders with Area Light Maps for HDRI Link | Greyscalegorilla

in today's video I'm gonna show you how to use H dry link in area light maps to make this really cool looking shiny watch hey what's up everybody this is chad from greyscale gorillas and in today's video i'm gonna show you how to use area light maps for each dried link to light up a cool watch not this exact watch the watch i use and the in the tutorial is going to be a Rolex I don't have a Rolex so this is a prop it's a fossil whatever anyway I hope you like the video so let's jump in okay so here's what I'm setting out to make I made this test render promo render for aerial eye pops a while back and this is what we're gonna aim for and we're gonna try to do it using the brand-new area light Maps HDR I pack that works with HD I linked by grayscale gorilla so you can see here it's not a super technically challenging setup it's just a few lights with interesting reflections tastefully set up and they're really that's that's not going to be a super complex setup but it it is going to require us to change a few things around and really try to art direct these reflections the way that we want but before I jump in and start to show off like how that stuff is done I want to go through the way that I would sometimes used to do it which is using HDR link and dome lights and in particular one of our great it's dry packs called pro light metals or pro studios metals so if I grab a red ship dome light and I just turned on my IPR and I've got pretty generic render settings I'm not going to get too deep into that sets not really now what this video is about let's jump into our dome light and grab H dry link the right stir I link on to this dome light if you haven't checked out HR link it is definitely one of my favorite plugins that we make okay so let's double click that it's going to open up our HDRI browser you can see I've already got the area light Maps already loaded in here we've got 30 different map types which are a lot of them are taken from actual photographs from actual light fixtures and bounce cards so let's just jump into the pack that I mentioned before so if I was going to do this like this watch up with purely just an HDRI I would probably grab something in the Pro Studios metal and maybe grab something like this and then of course I would hide it from the background so we can just look at it like that and then I would sort of rotate it around until I found an angle that I thought looked interesting and that looks pretty good but it's really not gonna help you if a client comes in and says you know we like what's happening on the right side of this watch but we don't like what's happening on the left can you move that down a little bit you're kind of screwed because it's an HDR eye there's really you can't really break it apart very easily so you're gonna have to start adding lights and trying to figure it out or maybe try to recreate this using lights and it's just it's not really gonna work and then like hit pro 3 as amazing as it is you know it's a great tool but it can be overkill for a simple setup like this and that's why we made these these area light Maps and that's why it's exciting to happen to be able to use these on area lights so that's a new thing you know and that's that's a pretty cool thing all right so let's just start over here we've got default light really kick in I do have some bloom and whatnot going on but I'm not going to get into that all right so let's grab a area light and the first thing I'm gonna do is jump out into turn off the IPR out to my perspective view Here I am gonna set up a target for this area light so I'm gonna go to the area light general and we're gonna go to this little little flyout here and say add target and null and make sure that that null is right where my watch is right there I can move the area light out now it doesn't really matter I can just be anywhere it wants to be okay so we've got an area light set up let's go ahead and jump into our our IPR let's make sure that we're looking through the camera all right I am gonna turn off the loops I am going to turn off the bloom because it's extremely crazy right now oh it's actually very high that's why bring that bloom threshold way down and then the amount way down and we'll just turn it off okay so that light is extremely bright let's bring the exposure way down let's also do that cool so now we can throw a link on to this area light which is like I said it used to be something that we would only apply to dome lights but now that we have these area light Maps and it works perfectly with HR I linked on area lights this is just a great way to work so let's grab that one and we're gonna grab a stri link and grab the area light go up to texture drag the texture onto the tag just like you would in a dome light and boom there you go you can instantly see we've got this nice softbox reflecting in our shot if I actually put this behind that and I say visible you'll be able to see that softbox in the shot actually that's pretty cool and when you're lighting products like this that are very reflective very almost chrome like it's about where you put the reflections it's not necessarily about where you put the lights because chrome isn't really it doesn't really have any diffuse you're not really lighting anything the only thing that's you're actually lighting is going to be the stuff on the face here on the inside anyway okay so that's pretty cool so I'm gonna use I'm gonna basically set up my my key light which is going to be up in the right-hand corner upper right hand corner of this watch and then I'll go in and probably tweak which map I want but for now I think that looks pretty good I am gonna use a tool if you haven't checked this tool out I highly recommend it it's called the lighting tool so with the light selected I'm just gonna grab my commander search which is going to be shift C and I'm gonna type light tool lighting tool hit enter and over in my attributes panel now I have this ability to change the mode from specular placement all these different things I'm gonna use specular placement I am NOT going to be creating any lights on this so it is basically going to now give me this little yellow helper and if you notice as I sort of mouse over the different parts of the watch the yellow helper is orienting itself based on the surface normal now what that's going to do is it's going to position the light to reflect off of that normal and essentially what I'm doing is placing a specular so if I hold this down and I start moving this around you're gonna see that this light is going to start to be placed on wherever I choose to give it that high light I could just put it right on that edge if I wanted to get that edge I could put it right on the edge of this bezel here actually this is looking pretty good and this lighting tool is already in cinema it's just not something that a lot of people use and I'm not really sure why it's very useful anyway okay so that light is placed and I feel like I might make it a little bit smaller so I'm just gonna scale this light down a little bit something like in there feels pretty good to me all right now I'm gonna play around with some different light types right now I'm just using that sort of big softbox but I just want to see what some of these abstract ones I don't know if you notice these earlier but these abstract light types are based off of those exact same maps that we saw in Pro Studios metal so Pro Studios metal has a lot of these sort of abstract blot splotchy bits and that's because those types of maps look really great on metals so I wanted to bring some of those into area light Maps because I feel like they're very useful and especially if you have it in a situation like this where you could actually move them around and control where they are and how they how they're scaled it's very interesting so I'm just gonna try a few these and find one that I like that one's too much that's not bad I'm gonna rotate this light now and just see what that gives me oh I like that that's looking pretty good okay so now we have our main key light it's getting a little blown out here I might bring it down just a little bit there we go alright so we've got one light placed let's go ahead and duplicate that light and this next one let's jump back into our our main view and we're gonna grab that lighting tool again and this time I want to put this highlight on the opposite side because really what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to make the viewers eye sort of go diagonally through the frame at least that's what I'm doing this second alright so let's just jump into this view and I'm gonna scale this light up just to cover a little bit more space on that watch and for this light type I'm gonna try a couple of different ones so we could do something extreme like this but it's just this is too much detail in that I don't want that I don't want something that's like harsh either I want something that's sort of in-between so maybe I'll try the softbox gradient because what that's gonna do is that's give me a nice fall off but I do want to rotate it so that that gradient is sitting more like this and then I'm just gonna move it in local space and just try to push that gradient a little bit that way I don't know I'm not really feeling that either let me try one of the softbox edges so this is why I love using it this way because there's just you can just play around and experiment with exactly what you want to do yeah that's feeling better okay I'm just gonna bring the intensity of that down a little bit something like in there that feels pretty good okay cool so now I have a pretty decent arc going a line for someone's eye to go I think I need to add a nice backlight though so let's go ahead and add a backlight I'm just gonna pull this light behind I'll hold down control and duplicate it and drop it right behind everything and drop it right there it doesn't really matter if it's if it's squared or not turn off its visibility and let's turn off all the other lights I do like to work in a very isolated way I like to like just isolate the light that I'm working on just so I can like understand how that light is contributing to my shot all right so I'm just bringing the scale of this light way way up you can see it over here but it's giving me a nice a nice little rim light on on the watch which I really really like so if we start to bring these other lights back in you're gonna start to see this come to life alright that's looking pretty good okay so maybe this backlight is a too much on the bottom so I'm just gonna walk it up and I'm gonna throw a different texture on that one I'm actually gonna use the softbox gradient which is just gonna soften that up a little bit now I can bring that intensity back up and I'm gonna lower it back down getting it off that top edge if possible something like that okay all right I'm getting happier with it now maybe I want to add a little bit of something on this watch band on the bottom here so I'm just gonna take that first light I'm gonna copy and paste it and I'm just gonna pull it actually we're just gonna do it the same way we did the other one grab the lighting tool and let's pull that right off this band right here cool all right so that one's on I do think one of these artistic sort of abstractly splotchy ones it's gonna look best down there oops did I have that not selected okay there we go all right now I'm just gonna bring the intensity of that guy way down because I don't want that to be I don't want that to be the focal point let's just bring the multiplier down 50% 25% and 10% there we go I just want to feel it I don't necessarily want that to be distracting all right we're getting closer we're getting closer and all of this is completely editable all of this if a client came in and said hey I don't like where that highlights placed you can place it you don't like the reflection you can change it it's not necessarily a new workflow people have been texturing area lights for as long as there's been area lights but the difference here is that we're using the same sort of workflows HDRI linked which I really liked being able to swap out and try things and audition new lights and not have to jump into a file browser and like search for it and grab it and all that sort of thing that's just a huge pain in the butt okay so for this next one I'd want to throw a little bit of light at the top here just on the face just right there on the face so I'm gonna grab an area light because this one I don't want to copy with all of the Target and whatnot I want this one to be sort of like on its own a little bit and I'm gonna go ahead and turn off all the lights but the one I'm working with because that's just the way I like to work and I'm gonna make this light pretty small something like this let's bring it right over the top and I do want to make sure I am gonna change what do I want to do here I want to adjust this a little bit I'm gonna change the spread I'm definitely gonna change the spread because I want it to be very much in the center and I'm gonna bring the exposure way down like 20% something like this and I don't want it to affect the spec so I'm going to go into the glossy and turn that down and I'm just going to start to turn up the intensity now you can see what I'm doing I'm just lighting the face of the watch okay so let's go ahead and make this really tiny and let's adjust that spread down even more and the scale of it down even more I'm just see what I'm doing I'm just trying to get a nice little vignette of that watch face right in there sweet now I'm just gonna move this back a little bit to try to get more of that logo perfect all right cool so now I can start to turn on these other lights and start to see its contribution kind of looks cool just like that super moody there it is okay sweet so maybe now I'm not sure how that would look I would look I wouldn't mind seeing a little atmosphere coming down from the top into this shot so I am gonna do that really quickly I'm just gonna pull this light up as a duplicate I'm gonna make this very big not that big probably maybe something like this again I'm gonna turn off everything that I'm not that I'm currently working on and go into the Rays make sure that turned glossy back on actually I take that back I'm not even gonna affect glossy or diffuse with this light I'm only going to affect volume so let's give it some volume contribution and let's turn on a redshift environment and give it a little bit of uh that's probably a too much there let's increase our samples well I'm not going to worry about that right now we'll get into that later maybe if we have time okay so that's feeling pretty good I think I want to change I'm gonna use a linear fall-off on this because I want to be able to adjust the fall-off myself and I'm just gonna scale that intensity way down something like that and let's bring that a bit wider have it sit out of frame a little bit more and jump back into that lights to do let's do extreme the fall-off down a little bit okay now I'm just gonna adjust the spread there we go okay that's feeling better alright so now we can look at the contribution of everything plus that environment the fog and I feel like that is just way too strong let's bring the vaunt contribution scale knock that in half and maybe a little less cool something like that's working pretty well and I feel like it needs to be a bit wider there we go I'm just kind of adding a little bit of atmosphere to the top of this a little bit just to kind of make it feel a little bit more interesting okay so let's bring the fall-off back up it's the follow-up is so it's kind of harsh I'm not really into that I feel like the one I feel like the overall controls are getting better in redshift but they still have a little ways to go yeah but this is looking pretty good let's go ahead and bring in some of those post effects again and let's turn on our bloom and make sure our bloom is gonna be a little bit brighter something like that and maybe like the threshold so it's not going to bloom everything quite as much and this sort of compact view it's sort of hard to so like that cool yeah I'm digging this and now of course like all of this is completely editable and a client you know or you know director whoever could come in and like change things up and it really wouldn't be a big deal because you've got full control plus if they're like oh this is great but you know we really want to see like a light cutting across the glass on the Rolex that's really easy to do now especially with our our light Maps let's go ahead and duplicate this light over and again I'm going to isolate that light so that we can just look at its contribution and I'm gonna grab again grab the lighting tool and we're just going to place it right on the face of this guy boom alright so with this one I'm probably going to use a typical sort of a softbox large and then I'm going to just move it off to one of the sides let's see maybe like this direction right in there cool and maybe we want to rotate it because the clients going to be really prescriptive about how they want that highlight to what direction they want that to face maybe it's something like that I like that okay it's cool but I don't necessarily want it to affect the anything but the glass and in fact I don't even want it to affect defuse so I'm gonna go ahead and turn to fuse all the way off and now I'm just gonna jump into my perspective in my camera view and we're gonna go under the project and tell it to include only the crystal boom done and done now let's go ahead and turn on all the other lights and I feel like this fog is like way over the top I'm going to turn that off actually for a minute is that not contributing right now huh let's go ahead and turn it way up hmm maybe I actually accidentally picked the wrong item that's strange okay so let me just try the little troubleshoot this for a sec this definitely should be working let's try doing it to the bezel okay so now it's including the bezel now if I include the crystal it's there so if we remove the bezel now that's all working so a second I turn on that one it works turn on that one it works turn on that one it works get out of that selection mode that one's working so for whatever reason oh you know what I bet happening it's my fault so that light is actually occluding the light that we have up here so it's actually exists behind it so let's go into local transform mode and we're just gonna pull that light way way in which means that we're gonna have to make it much smaller and there we go so that's a bit more like it always something always something all right so let's bring that intensity way down again something like that I personally don't like it with the cutting on there so hopefully you'll be able to talk your client out of that choice but if not you have that ability to roll that highlight over the front face of the watch if you want more but in my case I don't like it someone's turned off anyway so in a nutshell that is the benefits of area light Maps and this is a little bit of an insight on how I light products like this and and my approach to to lighting jewelry and and small reflective items like those like watches and whatnot but some of these techniques that carry over to lots of different lighting doesn't have to be necessarily just product lighting but anyway I hope you got something out of it and I will see you in the next hey welcome back everybody thanks for watching hope you got something out of this video if you did give us the old thumbs up and if you haven't subscribed please consider subscribing to the channel if you want to learn more about area lightmaps check the description below will throw links down there for everything yeah and until next time I'll see you later

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 73,293

Keywords: Cinema 4D, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, area light maps, hdri link, product rendering, 3d lighting, c4d lighting, HDRI, redshift, arnold render, octane c4d, c4dtoa, redshift product rendering, 3d product vis, 3d product visualization tutorial, product viz watch, product viz cinema 4d, cinema 4d product design

Id: vc6y_J_x0v0

Length: 23min 9sec (1389 seconds)

Published: Wed May 22 2019