Lighting Tips for Arnold in Cinema 4D

in this video I'm gonna show you some of my favorite techniques for making reflective surfaces look awesome let's jump in hey what's up everybody Chad here from Greyscalegorilla.com where we bring you the tools training and tutorials you need to make yourself a better motion designer today's video was taken from a twitch stream that I did a lap I think it was last week where I covered some of my favorite techniques for making reflective materials look great I'm gonna be using hgri link and Arnold but a lot of the techniques I'm gonna show you you'll be able to follow along and any renderer so let's get started today we're gonna be talking about metal and not the kind of metal that you may have seen me post when this when our pro metals pack launched I had this hilarious picture of me you know drinking Jack Daniels and wearing a really long haired wig and I looked like a metal dude well guess what that was just Halloween I was not I don't really look like that I never really had long hair in fact I wish I could have had long hair but alas I am balding so bald ding so the key end of that phrase okay so what are we going to talk about we're gonna talk about how to make metal look awesome in any render but I'm going to be using Arnold why am I using Arnold I have it I love it it's easy to demo and it'll work fine for what I'm doing and we're also going to be used using H dry links so you can see here we've got this this frame this car frame that I got from turbosquid it's really awesome kind of exposed frame that you might see in like a product shot or you might see in like a catalog or something for this car and we're gonna make this thing look awesome make it look metallic now it's not as simple as just throwing in an HDR I making a metal shader and calling it a day it's actually gonna be a bit more complicated than that because so let's just kind of walk through a typical scenario in our case we're gonna be using HDR link just because it's faster so I'm gonna go ahead and create a sky an Arnold sky I'm gonna go ahead and activate my IPR and I have fairly low settings in here so that it goes a little bit faster for this demo in fact I might actually lower it a bit more and this is probably gonna look a little bit ratty but whatever its it'll be fast and that's really all I care about right now okay so let's add an H dry link tag and we're gonna jump back into Arnold sky and change our color type to texture it's gonna immediately open this pop-up to want you to you know navigate to find your HDR but we're going to close that and we're just going to drag the word color right on to the HTR link tag and it's instantly going to load our HDR I so what do we want to do then the next thing we want to do is dive into the tag and change the resolution from full to preview this is going to load a slightly lower resolution version of the eight of the HDR I just so that it goes faster okay so let's also just start from scratch here we're gonna grab a new Arnold surface so I'm just going to right click in the IPR I'm going to say create Arnold material it's gonna create and assign an Arnold material to that particular object actually I think because these are different pieces I'm going to actually do it a little bit differently I'm actually going to do it to the entire thing so with that guy selected I'm gonna go ahead and drag him and replace that texture okay so now we've just got a white plastic and we have our HDRI in here and it's going to default to I believe the pro the pro basic studio basics but that's not the pack that we're gonna deal with right now so right now I'm going to show you typically your instinct might be oh I'm doing metal let me find an HDR eye that works and let's try this daylight and I'm gonna go ahead and turn off the contribution to the camera so that it doesn't show up in the background okay so let's jump into the material and make some metal because that's really what we're after here and I'm not even gonna get that detailed into how we're gonna create this metal I'm just gonna select that shader and I'm gonna I'm hitting ctrl tab to open up this little quick search I'm gonna type yeah god I can't talk start typing surface standard and then hit enter and it's going to finish that up and put that in the scene for me I'm going to kind of move this around so I can see a little bit better and there we go alright so Arnel has these nice little material presets that I like to use in fact I'm just going to twirl down to metal and instantly gives me a metallic kind of surface the other thing I'm going to do is select a metal preset and in our case I'm gonna choose aluminum because I feel like I don't know this is some sort of aluminum alloy probably so let's just give it a roughness of point to make it make it sort of sort of rough okay so that doesn't look good right because it's just it's a daytime HDRI this is a product shot and that that's really not what you'd want to use you wouldn't want to use like a regular old HDRI so what do you want to use well you know your instinct might be well I know I know GSG has these Pro Studios like would that work like is that something I should use so let's just dive in and grab one of those and you can see I'm just gonna actually rotate this light around so you can see it when it hits the the front of the car here that doesn't look good either because it's really a harsh light it's a single source and it doesn't look good on metal what metal needs to look good are gradients and hot spots and little pieces of gray and like little areas where if the light isn't hitting you're still getting a definition of what you're seeing it's you want that sort of in-between value a lot of range an outdoor HDR is not going to work outdoor it sure is not going to work in sand these harsh like studio lights that look great in some situations are not going to look good in this situation so what does work well that's why I created the pro Studios metal pack because if I come up here and I kind of just let me just make this a little bit easier if you has to see if you look here a lot of these H dries have gradients they have little bright spots and grays that fall off into black and little highlights and some of them have these like little streaky bits and that's what's gonna pick up on the metal that's how you would shoot it in real life you'd be shooting into bounce cards you'd be shooting through cookies you'd be shooting into all these different surfaces to get the metal to reflect the way that you want so if you approach it like that if you approach it like a photographer you're gonna get a better result so right off the bat before I dive into setting anything I'm gonna hit the little scene debug in my IPR over here which basically just loads a white shader onto everything in my in my scene here and Arnold's really nice way to kind of figure out if your light is too bright to dark if your ketta light key to fill ratios out-of-whack whatever so turn that on and I can see that I've got some subdivision problems going on because this lot this model is actually pretty let me actually just turn on this you can see it a little bit better maybe this bigger all right so this thing needs to be subdivided it's it's not going into a sub D surface and there are a bunch of parts in here okay so how do I I could just go in here and like multi select all of them and you know grab an Arnold tag and do it that way but we have this hierarchy here and I'm going to show you a cool little trick first I'm gonna take a swig of water sorry about that all right so grab our top level of our hierarchy go over to the cinema 4d to a tags grab an Arnold parameter tag now the Arnold tag knows that it's at the top of a hierarchy and doesn't really know what you want to do with it it doesn't understand because it's not being a it's not directly applied to a mesh so I'm going to force it I'm gonna say you are I'm gonna say well actually only go back I'm gonna hit the show custom parameters tag and I'm gonna force it to think of this tag as a poly mesh tag now why did I do that because that's going to expose the subdivision tab over here and then from there I can say cat Clark and give it an iteration of 1 and now we have a subdivision render time subdivision surface on our entire hierarchy happening only at render time and we have a nice smooth car so let's get back out of debug mode and now we can see that we've got the right subdivisions on our car model and it's looking pretty good but again this is not not the kind of lighting I would approach I would use to approach this type of shot I think what I would do in my case is something I would let my end result kind of dictate what I'm after in terms of lighting so if if I'm going for drama and I'm doing like a dramatic shot maybe this is for a print ad or the end tag of a spot or something or maybe it's gonna appear in the spot I want something more dramatic and I know that something very top light top-heavy with a little bit of a highlight like this one right here metals o.9 is going to do that for me and I'm just going to kind of frame up on this and I'm going to create a camera from this view after it finishes auto saving of course autosave always has to happen at the most inopportune times ok create a camera I'm going to make this camera like an 80 mil camera I'm gonna back it off quite a bit see what I didn't like about that wide-angle lens is that it was giving me too much of the the back kind of arm I don't know what you call this I guess it's the the window Ridge or the window arm from the other side and I want to create something a bit more dramatic and kind of special I guess is the word right alright so let's do 100 mil lens let's back that off and I'm just trying to create something that looks pretty alright now I'm going to take my Arnold Sky I'm going to zero out the rotation and I'm just gonna try to find out I know I'm using this HDR right here there's a little highlight and I'm gonna try to figure out where that highlight is I could come in here and start to twirl this this Arnold sky around and like try to figure it out but given that this is a pretty complex surface and there's a lot of glossies going on that's actually going to be pretty hard so another thing I like to do when I'm working like this I'll create a little sphere and this in this case I've got a little chrome ball just sitting off to the side here and this little chrome ball is going to be how I'm going to figure out where my reflection is so right away I can see that my little highlight is over there and actually you know what I'm gonna move that little chrome ball out in front of my car so I can see it a little bit better and I'm also going to raise it up a little bit okay cool so now I can kind of I have a better idea of what's happening with my HDRI so I'm gonna grab my sky again zero out the rotation and I'm just gonna try to put that highlight of that that little ping right off the front of that hood cool I like that let's go ahead and hide the chrome ball and that's a pretty good dramatic render but now I'm just gonna kind of kind of toggle through some of these for some other different looks for instance if like you wanted something even more dramatic you could kind of come down here there's some in here that are a bit more dramatic this one obviously we've got if we turn on our little ball here we've it's extremely front lit and anytime you're doing metals the last thing you want to do well not necessarily it's an artistic thing amen subjective right so I particularly don't like front lighting metal because it just doesn't look right it doesn't look pretty doesn't really show off the shape of this model so what I'm gonna do actually is just zero out the rotation of this guy and now all I've done is kind of brought the softbox to the back and this like little ring light to the front that's a little bit more interesting but watch how much more interesting it gets when I just knock it 90 degrees and then I just start to peek let some of that light just peek in on that surface not even all the way maybe we even go the other way there we go that's even better see we've got a little backlight action we got a little rim happening I've got this little blush of light it's all about the gradients when you're doing metal it's all about that so let's try another one actually let's this is this is one of my favorite ones here you can see again I got my chrome ball see what's happening I'm actually gonna bring that intensity up a little bit so I'm gonna go under the bank controls of my Arnold sky I'm not gonna touch intensity I'm gonna touch exposure and I'm just gonna bring the exposure up to maybe two yeah that's looking good okay so let's go ahead and hide our chrome ball and again not bad right it's looking a little bit a little bit grainy not worried we can clean that up not a big deal not even gonna get into that actually I just want to talk about why I'm doing these things so drama you want to create drama you want to rim light stuff you want to have fewer gradients if you're doing something like 4 maybe it's more of an instructional thing maybe it's something that's gonna appear in a catalog showing off the awesome structural integrity of this car in that case you'd probably want to use something that's a little bit more evenly lit this one 19 right here it's got a lot of gradients little washes of light and dark it's really pretty let's see how that looks on our chrome ball just so I can kind of line it up what I like to do also and you're gonna see me do this a lot I try to line up the darkest spot to be facing the camera the darkest spot of the HDR eye so you can see right here this is behind camera and that's not what I want I want to actually come over to the coordinates let's zero it out see what that gives us all right that's not what I want I want one-eighty this okay uh actually you know what that was what I want I think I just have my exposure to hi-yah my I forgot to bring my exposure back down so when you're doing metals one little trick always try to have whatever is right behind the camera fairly dark and in this in this particular HD riot is pretty dark in fact let's choose one that's actually black the reason that I like to do that is because like I said anything that is directly behind camera reflecting in metal generally doesn't look that good Plus in the real world it would be sort of difficult to have something directly behind the camera without the camera showing up in the reflection so it's kind of you know common sense so save yourself the trouble try to try to mask off or create some sort of flags to keep keep the area directly behind camera from being reflective or if that's a conscious decision like babe you know you're actually trying to make look look like you have maybe have a ring light on the camera that can look kind of cool too so it all depends on what you're after but in this case we're gonna leave that off all right so that's kind of how I lit some of these car frame shots that show up on our website I'm gonna open up a few other models here because this this model is great and I feel like you know we could kind of dive in here and do like a three-quarter e thing or maybe we want to like you know get a little fun with that and now of course like that that this H drives was not going to cut it for this I mean I could rotate it but again it's just not gonna work so let's go back into something that's a little bit more built for this sort of thing I kind of dig that one except for that one I think I might rotate this guy 90 degrees to kind of give it a little bit more maybe negative 90 try to rim light that a little bit oh that's nice a little bit better and man having the IPR whether using redshift Arnold octane whatever I don't know how the hell we did this stuff before we had the real-time IPR feedback because seriously whenever you're doing this type of work it is you got to have it I mean it's it's just so hard to to kind of figure out where the reflections are and if you if you don't have that real-time feedback it becomes a real pain okay so there's our car model now let's see what else do I have in here I've got I got some other fun models in here let's turn off the car frame let's do something really complex let's do this engine so hopefully this will load okay let's turn on this engine and boom okay and you know what we hide the metal frame so again I've got this really awesome model from turbosquid I'm kind of like addicted to going on turbosquid and like finding these like crazy complicated looking models to do lighting studies with Wow dude I didn't really have to do anything look at that it just looks cool anyway so again how would I approach something like this it's very cylindrical it's complicated again these are all built with these types of scenes in mind if you're doing product stuff this is like perfect way to handle this stuff so in this case like if I had something let's just let's just do the wrong thing first okay so let's go back and we'll grab going to Paradise we'll grab this outdoor right so your client says hey we need this you know render of this engine model and we want it to look all metal and chrome and your like chrome okay cool yeah I'll grab an HDRI right well look at that it doesn't look good that looks terrible I mean maybe if that was maybe if this was like where our engine was sitting and like we went out to and we had like some background plate or something and we like shot it like okay well yeah that I guess that kind of works but it doesn't look sexy it doesn't look cool so again getting back into why why does it look good well the why is because it's all about the drama it's all about that drama when you're doing this sort of thing and I forget which one we had in there I don't I don't think it was that one I want to say it was this guy well anyway let's just click through some of these and I'll you'll quickly understand like why I choose the the ones that I choose again let's turn on our chrome ball I want to see that chrome ball in there so I can really tell where my reflections are that's probably fine so in this case we've got a very cylindrical object so I personally would want to do something that was very top lit with a little bit of bottom and then some sort of interest in the middle so that I could pick up a lot of these details along the way and I'm just gonna experiment here until I find one that I like and that one is not it this one this one's pretty darn close this one has just kind of some foggy lights on the top and the bottom it's not bad but it's not giving me a lot in the middle you can see the middle is completely falling off to black so I'm gonna keep going until I find one that I like this one's not bad either I think I just need to boo-boo I'm gonna actually zero out the rotation of this guy and maybe go 180 now that's not gonna work let's go 90 degrees now let's try negative 90 there we go now we're getting somewhere all right this is looking cool but this particular metal is a bit too shiny for my liking so I think I might have had like a completely different shader on this guy I did so all right so I'm gonna open up that nit shooting Network and I'm just gonna give it a bit more roughness whoa way too much roughness let's just go like three that's pretty good and now I'm gonna just like find a cool angle on this thing I don't want to do anything straight on once again autosave doing its thing making me angry all right so let's find something that's a bit more dramatic I'm going for drama here that's not bad let's come in here I'm going to just bring that now that actually looks pretty good mmm so a lot of what I do when I'm working on these types of shots is just experimenting and I'm going actually I dig that you know what I'm gonna say that that is good I'm just gonna open up that shader and bring that glossiness down a little bit and I'm going to bring the overall exposure of this up okay now let's say this is the angle that we want to render and actually let's kind of yeah you know what I kind of dig it when we have a little bit of negative space around it something more interesting about that let's hide our chrome ball and frame up on our engine here this is looking good it's actually pretty pretty darn good yeah not a whole lot you have to do there once you kind of built the materials and again this this materials there's really not much to it like look at this thing it's really just a metal preset I don't even have any roughness Maps I don't have any dirt anything like that I might get into that a little bit later if we have time but I'm not gonna not gonna dive too deep into that let's just move on to another one okay so we've kind of covered this sort of thing and you're probably thinking like okay well you know he's showing a lot of these this HDRI pack but you know what if I need that finite control what if I need to like really get in there and and make it something my client wants a highlight in a very specific place all right well let's let's take a look at that what does that look like all right so let's jump in here let's take a look at some typography okay so we didn't talk about typography and typography I mean come on like you you're gonna have to do a metal logo at some point in your career it's just it's one of those things that's you know is just gonna happen to you let me take a drink here all right we've all been there we've all had to do these metal logos some people dig them I actually I don't mind doing them actually I mean they can be kind of fun first thing I'm gonna do is create a new camera and look through it and I am NOT gonna use a hundred mil lens that's gonna be way too long for this sort of work I don't know let's just do 40 because 40 is probably gonna look cooler on our metal so you how much more dynamic that looks already those those lenses make a difference folks they do make a difference all right so let's create a shader for this guy you could like I said right click in the IPR and say create our own material but it's only gonna create it for the object that it's directly sitting under and we have this little hierarchy here and it'll be easier I think if I just come over here and just do it the old-school way and grab a standard surface and then I'm just gonna drag it on to this entire hierarchy yep cool and let's just middle click to get into the the Arnold shader Network and let's just create a really simple metal I'm gonna say metal and for this one do lead okay so lead and whenever I'm doing typography metal-type I tend to keep the roughness pretty high I'm not and usually I'll throw like a bunch of grunge maps and whatnot but for this demo I'll keep it pretty simple all right so point two so it already looks pretty decent I didn't have to do anything in fact I still have this Arnold's guy in here with our HDRI and that's providing a pretty decent lighting setup I'm just gonna try maybe something else over here let's try ooh I just locked up hopefully hopefully I'll come back to life here okay there we go that one's pretty good actually you know what let's do something that's a bit more dramatic I'm gonna try something now I know that one's not gonna look good because this metal type is going to require a lot of little little highlights and little bits ok I'm liking this in fact okay we're gonna go with that one and I'm gonna rotate it I'm going to zero it out to see what it looks like okay that's very backlit not really what I want want just a little bit of that highlight to come through and now let's say that our client came in and they're like all right this is looking good but I want like a highlight you know the typical like throw a highlight on the front of the text comment that everybody gets so yeah what do we do here well lucky for you we can just grab a quad light and Arnold the artists one of the things I love about Arnold so I grabbed an Arnold quad light and inside the main tab of the Arnold quad light you have a look at a little picker right here it has like a built in point constraint in this light I love that so I'm just going to click that grab the word metal and now it's going to be pointing at that word metal and I'm just gonna dive out to a front view here and let's go ahead and make sure it's actually looking at the actual type here cuz it wasn't and I'm gonna just pull this light out and maybe walk it away from the what did I do here looks like I screwed something up I'm just gonna undo I accidentally pulled the the front of the lettering off alright so let's have it look at that metal type cool and I'm going to turn off the skylights now we're only seeing this area light in this quad light and just to make it a little bit more apparent I'm gonna turn off normal eyes and if for those of you that don't know what normal eyes is normal eyes means that no matter the size of the light it's always going to be spitting out the same amount of energy I tend to turn that off because I like big lights to cast or like throw a lot of light and tiny lights to throw a little tiny amounts of light all right so let's grab our metal and I think it'll be easiest to kind of describe what I'm going to do if I show you this without any roughness at all so this metallic surface right now is almost like a mirror there's no roughness happening you can see the edges of my of my quad light showing up if I pull it up in the frame you're gonna see it gets revealed here if I move it off I just want to show you right there okay so this is a this is not pretty this is not doesn't look real it doesn't look good because we've got a solid white in our light and if you're if you've done any photography your lights aren't solid white they have a blight bulb in them and usually a baffling on them so it covers them up and it creates really an interesting more interesting reflection well the Arnold quad light has some really cool features and some of my cool features I'm gonna show you actually let's try to get the corner if I can get the corner of one of these the show up there we go okay so right here you can see the corner of our quad light and we have this little in our main tab of our quad light we have this little setting called roundness so if I start to drag this up it's gonna introduce roundness to our quad light corner and I'm gonna drag that up until I feel like it feels a bit more realistic because in life there's no such thing as completely perfect 90-degree edges in this case we're going to have a we're gonna say our light is a little bit soft the other thing I like to do is turn on the soft edges because this kind of blurs that line a little bit okay so makes that feel a little bit more see how it already feels more chrome because again we're not using the harsh light we're not using the harsh you know on or off it's got some gradients it's got some flavor to it all right spring though spread down because what the spread is doing is it's actually going to say alright the hottest let me see if I can get a better view actually you know what we'll turn on our chrome ball that'll forget about our little chrome ball he can help us in so many different ways alright so here we go alright so you could see our light in our little chrome ball here if I start to bring this spread out you're gonna see and it's gonna be a little bit hard to see it's let me bring the exposure down so see if I bring that spread down I'm kind of like imagine like you're taking the bulb of the light and pushing it closer to the fabric on your softbox or pulling it away so if I lower this spread it's kind of like making it feel like the bulb is closer to the to the light kind of I guess the front is what you'd call it so cool all right I like that let's hide mr. chrome ball we don't need to see him anymore and let's actually make that even a little bit dimmer because I'm just trying to create gradients guys that's what I'm after here I'm out I don't like the the contrast ease stuff ok now we've got a highlight that looks a lot more realistic let's jump back into our shader I think it was that one yeah and now we can bring our roughness back up to a respectable level in fact probably a little bit less than that somewhere like in there cool so now we have our highlight now we have let's turn our skylight back on and now we have some metal type that's looking good and now we could even animate maybe we take this light and I'm just hitting ctrl on my timeline and setting a keyframe and then I'm gonna walk the light over to the other side and you know what maybe somewhere over here would actually be pretty good like something like just over there and I'm hitting ctrl and clicking on the timeline I just could know the keyframe on our light I'm going to rewind it and we're gonna see how well Arnold does in keeping up with me animating cool so it's showing you like a really low res version but now we've got this light sweep going across our text and if we want to make it even more apparent we could bring the exposure down on our skylight so then that light becomes more of the hero and then of course can come in here and tint the color temperature you know maybe bring it to like 50 200 or maybe you want it to look cooler so maybe it's like 7200 whatever you're into whatever the the flavor you're after so yeah that's some techniques of using this Pro metals pack in doing typography what else what other models do I have hiding around in here I got quite a few actually how am i doing on time look it looks like I'm running a little bit long but that's not too bad I'm gonna show you one more object and let's die actually and what we're gonna kill this quad light will kill that camera will kill all the cameras and we'll leave mr. crome ball there all right so let's hide this guy we're gonna hide that guy let's bring out my favorite model from the pro studios metal marketing stuff that we did and that is going to be this model that a good friend of mine Patrick gaskey created and it's a little hard to see so I'm just gonna turn off the edge mode here look at how crazy awesome this model is like Patrick really is out of his mind in the most fabulous way and we're gonna do a nice product render of his sculpt and this aspect ratio is not doing it for me with this model so let's go ahead and change that let's do a width of let's say 500 and a height of maybe 650 something like that and we'll lock that down and raise it up that's probably good cool all right so let's frame in on our sculpt let's go ahead and make a camera and look through that camera change the lens to be something like 120 and back it off cuz you know we're doing a nice photograph of this sculpture and we want to make sure that we're capturing all of its beauty and I'm gonna bring the scale down of my IPR there's a nice cool feature about the IPR in Arnold you can you can work with the scale of the render and the zoom level of the actual viewport so I can really kind of troubleshoot right now I'm just zooming in on this image looks pretty grainy because it's zooming in it's not actually changing the render size if I change the render scale to let's say a hundred percent now I'm looking at 100% output of my render and I can hold down shift and drag to get a little render region going but for this it's pretty straightforward I don't think we need to get that nuts with it I'm gonna do like maybe yeah we'll do like 49% so we can see what's going on with our with our model alright let's throw a on this guy he is a bunch of different parts like I said so I'm just gonna apply it to the top level let's grab an Arnold standard surface and drag it on to that guy and I'm gonna middle click to open up the Arnold shading Network and we're gonna choose like a gold fellow again grabbing a preset metal and we'll go down to do to do gold gold gold not really it's a little for my taste a bit too green so I'm gonna take the color here of the speck and just make it a little less green and that feels better to me again just a personal preference thing not really something you have to do and this is the the HDRI that we had in there from before and it actually looks pretty darn good on this sculpture and I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger cuz I figured why not you can probably hardly see it at home so alright that looks pretty good let's choose maybe a different one I'm gonna try to find one that's a bit more dramatic this I think is going to be awesome but it's rotated in the wrong direction again gonna go in the coordinates and let's just zero this guy out ooh yes I like this actually I like this I like this a lot it's very rim lit which I dig because it's really popping the the subject off of our background but it's too rim lit there's not enough going on on the on the front and there's just not enough not enough going on in this HR I can tell there's just not a lot going on so I'm gonna find something that's similar something that has two sides but maybe has a bit more going on like this one's not bad but it's just not dramatic and I'm after some drama here so I'm gonna go back to that first one because I don't know there's something really cool about this and I'm gonna use this one but I'm gonna make sure that I'm actually liking the way it's rotated I'm gonna choose like maybe 45 degrees yes that's much better see just just throwing it a little bit off-center now I've got this nice rim I've got this like highlight happening here it's a bit too bright for my taste so I'm just gonna walk it down in terms of exposure a little bit yeah that's that's looking dope yeah I dig that all right so I'm not gonna end there we still have a little bit of time left so what do we get let's make this better I mean we can always I mean this was too easy so let's throw like a ground plane in here and let's let this ground plane be like our shiny reflective floor for our nice little studio shot that we're gonna we're gonna send off to some gallery who's gonna make Patrick gaskey famous for his awesome sculpture with the big nipples alright so right clicking in our IPR create Arnold material let's go ahead and hit ctrl tab and say surface and we're gonna make it black so black boom and I like a little bit of glossy a little bit of roughness on there looks pretty nice right so this looks good right now yeah this looks awesome perfect done right no not done I don't want my skylight to reflect in my floor like that's not how I want this to happen it's ugly that's just weird-looking so I'm going to grab my sky I'm gonna jump down into doo-doo-doo project or project I don't know whatever whatever you like to pronounce it exclude is on so I'm gonna hit select and I'm gonna grab my floor and look at that now my skylight is no longer affecting my floor all you octane users out there very jealous right now so I apologize in advance so now we've got something that I think looks much much better but it's still not quite where I want it yet let's grab a Arnold quad light and let's go a quad and I am going to then just walk it straight up into the air and have it point down go to our main tab and tell it to look at our Patrick Body Sculpture it's not actually modeled after Patrick but that would be pretty funny if it was and we're gonna add some volumes to this we're gonna add some fog to this light because I want like a little bit of like something in this black I don't like seeing just all this blackness here so let's do let's try this let's go ahead and go to my Global's here jump into my Arnold in my environment atmosphere it's got this cool little thing here I mean they could make it any easier atmospheric volume add that to the scene nothing happens why is nothing happening well my quad light if you look down here I believe it is not actually gonna be contributing to volumes is it oh yeah it is I probably don't have them on in my actual render settings so let's go ahead and turn those on but booray depth volume let's give it at least one and let's just give us a volume indirect 1 ounces from these all to one just to make sure alright so we need to actually have some volume happening on this light right now let's see why is it not showing up it should be showing up it's very odd let's turn that guy on mmm density is at point 1 that's very strange let's turn this off is it showing up maybe it is showing it but it's just so low that I can't help stupid me stupid me forgot to turn off normalize all right so normalized just because the light was so small it was definitely having a hard time showing up so let's go ahead and give this a little color let's grab our color temperature and make it cool so maybe like a 70 200 Kelvin that looks good and I'm gonna walk it down in the frame a little bit so that it's a little bit closer to his head and I'm gonna also make it smaller so let's just frame up on it and really just kind of tilt till I'm happy with it which is generally I'm never happy with anything like this that I'm doing I'm just too too much of a perfectionist but whatever this is fine let's bring it up in intensity and then for this light as well I'm also going to exclude the ground because I don't want it to affect the ground all right cool so now we've got something that looks a little bit more interesting although I forgot to turn on our skylight back on and let's grab our quad light and we're gonna bring the exposure down now this is just again subtleties subtleties they probably aren't even I'm not even sure if this is gonna show up at home to be honest but I can see that this is no longer black this is like a little bit of a blue a little bit of a it's just not so stark and I and it's just all about creating something that just doesn't look too too stark so if I turn this off you're gonna see I mean that's kind of a cool look still it's really dramatic but it's just too much I think maybe I went a little heavy-handed on this fog so I'm gonna knock it down a little bit there I think that's pretty good and again this this reflection on the ground is kind of distracting my eyeballs so I'm gonna grab that and bring the specular down to where it's there and we just sort of feel it but we don't necessarily it's not a distraction if that makes sense because I want the I want the eyeballs to go directly to the sculpture all right cool so I'm feeling that I feel like that's looking pretty pretty damn good so anyway I hope I hope this was useful you know I think when you're approaching metal when you're approaching metal type products whatnot it's all about defining the shape through the reflection and having the right reflection the right environment to reflect your metals is key so yeah and also I wanted to let you know that the pro studios metal pack that we have sale for sale on our site this price is about to go up guys price is not a permanent price of 59 bucks for all these so if you haven't picked it up yet you should go do that because this price is probably going to go up maybe even this Friday so you probably want to get out there and pick this thing up is it's definitely one of our favorite H stripe acts and if you're doing metal up look there it is that's more of a coppery color but you can see I comped it this is heavily comped but you can see there's a gradient back here I kind of did the same thing in my render but yeah so this is gonna be going up in price so you're gonna want to get out there and grab that stuff anyway so thanks for tuning in thanks for watching hopefully this was useful for you and hopefully you'll start sharing some really awesome metal renders with me and share you know show me what you've created show me some crazy nippled monster that like I just did so yeah hopefully it was useful and we'll see you next time thanks for watching make sure you catch all of our live streams by checking out and subscribing to our youtube channel below and also making sure that you head over to our our twitch stream and subscribe there as well that way you don't miss out on any of our live streams alright I hope you had fun and I'll see you next time

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 50,428

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, tuts, tutorials, motion graphics, greyscalegorilla, Cinema 4D, chrome logo cinema 4d, arnold tutorial, arnold tutorial c4d, metal cinema 4d, metal material cinema 4d, shiny logo c4d, c4dtoa, arnold for c4d, hdri c4d, hdri link, lighting tutorial c4d, cinema 4d arnold, arnold renderer tutorial, how to use arnold c4d, arnold cinema 4d, how to use arnold, how to light in arnold, lighting in arnold

Id: 1xwyhAkPBm8

Length: 41min 26sec (2486 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 30 2017