Physical Render Engine Speed and Quality in CINEMA 4D

hey there people today I thought our take a good look at the physical render engine for you hopefully showing you some ways you can get better quality and improve your understanding jhin's if you open up your render settings in general take a look on the top left corner and you'll find that is the standard and the physical render engine now if you've never really taken a look at the physical engine I would suggest you do have a good look it's possible you might have had a quick look hit render realized it takes ten times as long thought why would I bother with that I'm just showing you why you'd want to use the engine first two broad things number one it potentially allows you to get a better quality image and the second thing is it can in a reasonably good number of circumstances it can render a lot faster as well now as for the image quality it is broadly down to two things you can render realistic depth of field and realistic motion blur into your images now sure you can do these things afterwards in Photoshop and After Effects and elsewhere but these will actually render it into the image so why should you we'll have some limitations with overlapping objects in Photoshop you won't have these issues with the built-in ray traced depth of field in motion blur so I'm not going to dive too much into those because depth of field makes things go blurry motion blur makes things all smeary yeah you just turn them on and you're pretty much good to go what I want to get into though is that this stuff down here these are your your subdivisions your samples how much quality does it put into each part of the object now first of all why would you use the physical engine to make it faster because if you've had a if you've had a go with it before you may have realized it's a lot slower now the answer is it can be faster and it can be slower if you're using a fairly simple scene if you're just doing a logo with some lights and shadows truth be told the standard render engine is probably going to be faster for you where the physical engine comes into its own where it actually gets faster is on complicated scenes if you're using high anti-aliasing settings if you're using ambient occlusion and global illumination and blurred materials and area shadows for example if you're going to be using a lot of these features which are quite slow those scenes will very very often render an awful lot faster with the physical engine the reason for this is that with a standard engine all of these effects the ambient occlusion we have got all these accuracy and sample settings light sources if I select this light and come down to these shadow settings you've got to choose how accurate it is how many samples it uses and you'll find the same thing for global illumination for motion blur or anti-aliasing for blurred reflections you know I've got to choose the samples and accuracy down there so it just for one reason alone if you've got all these areas the physical engine actually disables all of these settings and merges them all into one setting for you so if you've got a dozen light sources with area shadows you don't have to juggle around their quality settings anymore if just purely with the default settings if I render this out with a standard engine this is going to pick out the quality settings from all these different areas and render your image now the problem is let's zoom in here grain tons and tons and tons of grain grain in the shadows grain in the reflections grain everywhere so you'd have to go through all these objects bumping up their settings one by one to try and improve your image the physical engine watch this if I show you a material and I just click on a lights all these settings all these sample settings rather if I set my render engine to just move this over here if I set my render engine to physical BAM gone they're great outs so you could save yourself potentially dozens if not a good hundred or so settings which you no longer have to change instead do-do-do-do-do go to your physical settings they are now all merged into these few numbers here this is now a nice big overall control for everything in your scene so that alone is a pretty good reason let me show you that I must let me show you what these do and let me show you which ones you should be setting which ones should be changing first of all the sampler this render engine works by sampling your scene now I know that all render engines do but this one does it a lot more granularly so under your sampler settings we have fixed adaptive and progressive now quickly fixed you should almost never use this there's rarely rarely an instance where the fixed sampling is going to help you what happens with fixed sampling is every pixel gets the same amount of detail and this is just gonna be a waste big black areas you're gonna waste time rendering them and highly detailed areas well they might not have enough sample so fixed is rarely a good idea for many things maybe for benchmarks and testing here and there but I wouldn't really use it in any actual image progressive is also interesting it's not very good for final images much but it is good for tests because with the progressive mode let's render this out and now my machine will probably make a bit of noise here as a fan spin up but when I hit render it continuously renders it continuously refines the image so on the first pass renders it to seconds but then it renders it again and again and it'll continuously keep rendering over the image with progressively higher and higher settings until it reaches a level which we're happy with now this is good while you're working this is good for tests but I wouldn't recommend it for a final image because it's extremely inefficient to get a good quality image for this object actually takes me with reasonable render quality settings takes about 25 seconds now you can see here we're already up to 35 and it still doesn't look all that good it's still quite grainy so it's good for tests because it can give you a a result quite quickly but don't use it for your final images the only exception I'd really give you for this is if you're gonna render things overnight and you just want it to look as best as it possibly can for tomorrow morning okay let me just stop the render before my machinery eats okay in that case sure stick it on progressive hit render go home for the night come back in and it will look good the next day just keep in mind that it will churn through your electricity bill as your machine keeps rendering probably quite unnecessarily so where does that leave us that leaves us with adaptive adaptive is the smart choice parts of the image which need more detail will get more detail and parts which don't won't okay now my advice is as a starting point there are presets for low medium and high quality so sure you can use these but you know what just go for automatic if you use automatic mode it actually makes things easier because all these sample settings here they get grayed out we don't need to worry about the minimal most things will now be controlled with this threshold here and a couple of numbers down here now this number here this shading error threshold this is the big one this is the vital setting think of it as grain this setting is basically asking you how much grain are you willing to put up with in your image so if you just want a quick fast test render tell us enemy you know what I don't care about the grain just show me what my illuminations can look like show me where things are gonna go give me a broad idea so with 100% grain hit render and it takes us two seconds sure it looks awful but I've got a good idea about my lighting here now if you want a quick draft copy something which you could send to the client say how's this how's this looking you're probably looking at about 20% 20% grain it's just render over the top of this so with 100% it was 2 seconds if I render this now with 20% grain he's gonna take a little bit longer but the quality will be ok it will be be it'll be a reasonable quality so you could send this to the client say yeah you know how's this looking ignore the grain I'll get rid of that later but it's taken us 8 seconds um as for a final image you're looking realistically somewhere between about 3 and 10% although it does depend on other settings you have down here so don't don't just use this but for a final image I would say start at about 10 percent grain and work your way down I wouldn't go much lower than about two or three percent grain because otherwise you're really going to slow down the rendering and you could probably optimize it a bit better than that now I should point out this shading error threshold effects everything it will determine how your shadows look ambient occlusion your global illumination your reflections basically everything including how detailed textures are on the surfaces of objects so it's a good broad change but sometimes you just want to concentrate on one particular part and that's what these bits down here will do for you if you've rendered your image so let's let's hit render here dump dump dump so this is 10% grain this might be a reasonably decent quality this might start getting close to a final image quality okay that's gonna take you about 15 20 seconds but it's looking it's looking better but see our problems here there's a little bit of grain in the shadows yeah not the worst thing in the world and the problem is really are on this reflective surface here this is where we're gonna have an issue this these reflection on here not really good enough so we can either tell the whole image less grain again maybe 5% but this will be this will be increasing the quality of rendering on for example this material down here which probably don't really need so rather than going even further with this let's leave it set back at 10 these bits down here will allow you to get bit more specific so we can choose how much detail we have on blurred surfaces for materials for shadows ambient occlusion and so on so what are these numbers how should you change them should be should you be using ten twenty one hundred a thousand change them one at a time one digits every time these increase by one you are telling that setting to use a lot more detail so the difference between two and three for example could completely solve your issue if you want to get really fine with it maybe maybe change it in point five increments it's quite a strong effect so I'm gonna render this out to the picture viewer just so we can test and have a look between them okay this hit render this middle render button here to do so this is the default settings with ten percent grain on it and this is going to take just under twenty seconds I think I just put that down there and will also render it again a second time this time I'm going to set the blurriness up from two I'm gonna bump it up to three yes hit render there again now yes this will take longer but it won't take as long as if I set the grain down to 5% so the difference between me setting the grain down to 5% or me doubling up the divisions for the blueness it gives about the same render time however I will get more quality out of this by by by specifying its the blurred surfaces which I want fixing because otherwise if I just changed this setting here a lot of my render time gets wasted it gets used on things I don't care about like like shadows or global illumination so let's take a look here now okay so we're looking at about 18 seconds versus 24 and if I just zoom this in it's this fairly coarse grain compared to this quite a lot smoother grain so I've just flip between years again yeah that's that improvements certainly worth it but in this particular case I do notice oh hey my shadows also look quite grainy so this is one of those situations where you know what probably the whole image could really do with a bit of a boost bit of a kick so I'm going to drop this down to 5% notice that when I do change this these numbers here will automatically change for me you do need the latest version of 14 or above for this to work otherwise these numbers here just stay static it does actually change the number behind the scenes he just didn't show it to you but anyway with 5% grain so that's gonna be a nice good final quality image what I've done with the blurriness I'm also gonna do the same thing with the shadows so both can go up to 3 and hopefully when I hit render here this should give me zoom at 20% this should give me a pretty good quality now yes it will take longer but it's usually better to build up from having a low quality and increase it until it's good enough and then stop rather than just cranking up the quality settings and hitting render I think yeah that looks good enough but you know what you might have wasted hi for under time half that render time might have been totally unnecessary and yeah there you go there's a little bit of grain left so that would just be a little bit of tweaking maybe I'd nudge up my my blurriness setting maybe one more notch but I'm happy with the shadows I'm happy with the material shading I'm happy with the ambient occlusion and if I do need to increase this quality any further I know I can specify it in towards just the blurriness so yeah hopefully hopefully that will do us so just a quick recap do you go for the adaptive mode do go for automatic samples so you'd have to sit there saying all sample divisions shading divisions min max just leave on automatic the numbers it uses are pretty sensible and just just use this this is your main number and these ones down here and hating of a little boost to certain areas if you know the problem is in a specific part of the image okay so yeah do give the physical engine and go don't be put off if it was a bit slow during your first tests it is better for complicated scenes have fun go make some nice images go 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Channel: 3DFluff

Views: 107,972

Keywords: cinema 4d, c4d, cinema, 4d, mash, janine, janine4d, educational, 3d fluff, 3dfluff, 3d, fluff, maxon, tute, learn, tutorial, faster, speed, render, physical, 3D Modeling (Profession), gsg, greyscale gorilla, cineversity, digital meat, nose man, training, guide, lesson, how to, mograph, shader, effector, matthew oneill

Id: YjyiKN3jSkI

Length: 16min 34sec (994 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 06 2013