Quick And Easy Lighting Tips - Greyscalegorilla Live Q&A

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] well hello everybody hi chad ashley how are you buddy i'm doing good how are you oh fantastic hello there youtube hello twitch hello facebook thank you guys for joining us for another live show hope you're doing well uh as always i want to appreciate you guys for showing up here live and we we want to hear where you guys are from is my favorite part to kind of start the show off uh where in the heck is everybody from and i wanted to try something we got this new chat overlay check this out and i think if i do it right people will be able to say where they're from and it'll pop up right in here direct oh my goodness let us know where you're from everybody we love seeing this hey twit we got some twitch members here germany florida thank you guys so much for joining today we will be talking about lighting tips we're going to be talking about rendering and making beautiful lighting in cinema 4d a little bit later we'll be jumping into cinema 4d i know chad's got a really cool scene file to show you guys uh hey look at all this stuff chicago france germany michigan michigan michigan's here what's up dan cheers from michigan as well love it sweden ukraine switzerland thank you guys so much for joining uh so stay tuned we're going to be jumping into cinema 48 we'll also be answering your lighting questions so if you guys have lighting questions you've had thoughts on how to get a particular look in in when rendering or just lighting questions in general as you guys know lighting is such a hugely important part of rendering uh i mean literally nothing shows up if you don't have lights it's a little dark if you don't hey mike good to see you buddy mike's uh near near my part of thomas i saw mike go by i was like oh yeah i know that dude good to see you man that's great awesome uh and do us a favor guys uh especially those of you on youtube uh wake up the youtube robots help us wake up the youtube robots by hitting the thumbs up button uh it lets youtube know that we're live it and it recommends our video to other people who subscribe to the channel and uh and also if you're not subscribed you want to get notifications for this stuff that's what notifications and the bells and the subscribing is all about that's why uh that's why people say that so if you want to see more of these live shows or get reminders do the do the notification thing please milwaukee no walkies here oh i can't click in the thing i gotta click down here i get i saw rid ridven i'm gonna go with ridven it's asking uh to say my catchphrase see i i minted that catchphrase in nft now and somebody else actually owns it which means i can't say it so uh it's for an undisclosed amount somebody grabbed that but um yeah smart move smart move those years ago before the whole nft thing took off yeah you're ahead of the curve on that look it's why i can't say it anymore uh it's it's not mine um uh hope you guys are well i hope you guys are what did they say printing attendees i hope you're printing attendees and nft uh and diamond handing as well all of you guys um trying to stay cool guys you're doing a great job buddy thanks uh hungary and slovakia that's amazing that's that's well that is so cool from orlando to slovakia like that's crazy wow milwaukee what's up cheers to you thank you guys so much for joining today um uh please uh continue let us know where you're from we'd love seeing that stuff um like i said uh when we get rolling here we're gonna be answering your questions so if you have a question get it ready um and we'll have you type like question colon and then ask a question or um like a queue colon and then that way we'll know which ones are questions we'll try to answer as many as we can and then um after we do a few of those we're gonna jump into um uh cinema 4d and then uh show you guys some lighting um lighting tips right from within cinema 4d so um get ready for that thank you guys awesome look at that brooklyn poland this is cool yeah that's i'd love to really know like what's the thing that you guys get hung up on in lighting like what what is it that that trips you up like that to me would be great yeah that's actually a good question if you guys want to uh say that in chat i'm gonna leave the chat rolling um just for now uh let us know where you guys get hung up on lighting i know that one of my biggest mistakes i'll share one of mine first maybe it'll kind of spur some conversation um i know i've told the story many times of learning how lighting learning how to translate real world lighting studio lighting which i was familiar with with photography and bring that into cinema 4d which obviously started like it pro and all this other stuff but even more than that i think it was really an unlock to me early on understanding that a bunch of point lights uh no matter how many point lights you add to your scene it will never look good basically um i know with all the third-party rendering that this is kind of uh almost a moot point at this at this point but for anybody getting started with learning lighting uh understanding the power of area lights and the sizes of your light was a really big unlock for me not only in 3d but in the real world going from the flash on my camera to a flash that was off of my camera in another direction to a soft box to a ring light that i used to carry around literally around my camera chad remembers those days i have a little four inch five inch ring light that i could move and light with so understanding that the shapes of lights and not just a big square or even a little uh circle was enough to really make beautiful lighting was a really big unlock for me trey says size of light size is huge how many times have we talked about scale now on these live shows chat a few times yeah definitely a few times for sure so one more little housekeeping note before we get started here answering some questions um you know we've been doing these live shows i think every other week now for a few weeks and um you know our goal with these is to help you guys understand some of this stuff that isn't really talked enough about in the 3d world so there's obviously a ton of tutorials we have a ton of them too about the tools about cinema 4d and about how to click the right buttons to make all this stuff on the screen and make a bunch of things go dynamic and explode and all that stuff but the things that really made my work better and many other artists out there are going through the same thing the thing that really helped me make better renders is learning the fundamentals of lighting and materials and cameras and design and composition and lenses and all the things we're trying to talk about in these live shows so um stay tuned for more of these live shows we're here to help the artist um make more beautiful stuff and uh lighting was always one of the most important things to me and it was a struggle early on and so that's why we're here to try to answer some of your questions about this stuff and uh and get it going uh light mike adds uh reassembling lights to specific objects and hiding them for other other objects huge in my rendering not sure how to do it in cinema 4d oh oh we could help you with that we could help you with that now can you do that in all the renders chad what mike's talking about is the ability to take a light and say hey softbox hey light only light specific objects in the scene in other words instead of in the real world where you'd have to flag off a light or try to block it in some way or try to position it in a way to only light certain things in 3d we have more control and in many renderers you have the ability to say hey don't include this light when you're calculating your brightness do all renderers support that at this point chad or is it dependent on some of the third-party renders i mean uh yeah that's called light linking in um and that's yeah that's a huge huge huge huge part of lighting 3d is is light linking uh and the fact that we can do it so painlessly mostly painlessly uh is great so we don't have to use flags although we do sometimes um but yeah it's definitely a huge part of it and to answer your question yes but some of them do it better than others i would say that octane's workflow is actually a little bit janky compared to redshift and arnold so i'm hoping like that becomes easier in fact i think they only support up to eight different links if i'm not mistaken somebody can correct me if i'm wrong but yeah it's a little bit weird in octane but in redshift and arnold it's actually it works just like regular cinema you know good to know i know octane was like a little different than the other ones for a while but it it seems like that's all possible now yeah they have it now it's just not quite as seamless i guess is the best way to put it yeah that's great people are asking uh let me see if i can pull this one up here um crap i invested in octane that's okay that's great we like octane um i but i'm using it now uh how to get a straight here's a question um uh so let's yeah let's go ahead and start throwing up some questions here i see the cues thank you guys for for doing that we're just going to get right to answering some questions and like i said we're going to jump into cinema in a little bit as well um so a box of chocolates says um how to get a straight on camera flash that's a really easy one um take a light uh parent it to your camera make sure it's aiming at your uh kind of out with the lens and and then just pairing it right to your camera just make it a child of your camera now no matter where your camera goes there will always be a big old light right on it in fact cinema 4d by default has a default light that you can go in and turn off uh many of our older tutorials when it didn't turn off automatically you'd have to go turn off the default light many of you might remember that that was a basically an on camera flash look that made sure whatever you're aiming your camera at uh was lit now it's not a very flattering look um it makes things very flat it makes things look like they're you know lit with a flash on a camera in fact even just bringing that light up and to the right just a little bit the same that it would be on like a point and shoot camera like up until the left or up into the right a little will give you a little bit of sense of shadow in the background that up that a um like a polaroid flash would give that alone will make it more dynamic than just literally right on the lens which is never a light source you'll ever see you you could never in real life have a light source basically right where the lens is because your head's there the camera's there so try to move it a little bit but that that will give you that really flat flashy uh light yeah i would also use a probably a spotlight or an ies light so that you get a little bit more control over the throw of the light and then make sure that you're using a pretty intense inverse falloff from the source of the light so that it falls off to to shadow very quickly the way that a real flash does because if you're allowed to flash and you notice like somebody's 10 feet away then they don't really get the light as much so just try to use like a nice steep falloff on that light yeah that's that's a good point the falloff will actually make it give it that polaroid look where everything up front is almost blown out part of that i keep going to polaroid because i studied how to make polaroids for a long time but that is a part of that look to me is very very flat light with a lot of fall off because film is also very um uh it's very contrasty so you get these really dynamic shifts from what is being lit really close to the background so that that fall off is everything dial that fall off um to make sure it's not too bright yeah don't use an area light for that because it's the shadows are going to be way too soft because the source is like a source of a flash is like super tiny so you want to make sure that you're using like a spot or something like that travis has a good question here um says uh what what makes good lighting versus bad flat it's easy to see but hard to dial in um travis i think you're on onto something already with this with this flat lighting in fact we just said it it's very tricky to get really beautiful lighting with with a light that is flat and that is from the front um it is a very specific look again polaroid has that look um other flash photography um you know some even studio uh you know like sears photography kind of thing has a very frontly flat look for a reason but unless you're going for for that look in particular what you want to make sure is that you have lights off to the side and off to the back um just really easy first thing to do is just is always experiment with moving your light to the side to the back of objects before you commit to something too bright in the front and that will keep you from uh having flat or overly bad lighting in fact i think we talked a lot about this maybe two live shows ago and the thumbnail of it is a bunch of area light maps of like soft boxes and stuff if you want to go back and revisit that one we actually dive in a little bit more on some of the ways that we set up light like that we talk it talk about it through hdris and where to set up light but we talk a lot about that one but not having a front light is is really one of the best things you could do chad you have a tip for travis yeah so the way that we interpret scale as humans is through light and shadow so we can tell how big things are we talked a bit about this in the last lighting show that we did but really uh lighting is just about informing people what the shape is of what you're lighting through shadow so it's not super interesting like nick was saying if you lit something like straight on it's not very interesting unless you're doing maybe like cosmetic work or beauty work where that sort of lighting is preferred but it's usually more interesting to show some give some shadows give some definition of what you're looking at rake the light across the side try it backlit and just just look at it and if it's interesting to you it's going to be most likely to be interesting to the viewer awesome man we got a lot of good questions here we're going to try to get to as many of these as we can um oh goodness this one's already from five minutes ago we gotta go let's go um let's go with uh best let's try this one andrew uh we'll try to answer these pretty quickly guys so we can try to get to as many as we can thank you by the way for bringing all these awesome questions best volumetric lighting options in octane i'm actually interested in this one how do you set that up uh in octane chad i haven't done it in a long time i just recently kind of got back into octane i took a break from it for a long time and i just kind of came back to it in 2020.2 i believe um but we have a couple different tutorials i think on our youtube to talk about this and then of course we've got the amazing course by david aria that's in plus right now but if i remember correctly you're setting up a atmospheric uh object i believe and then making sure the light is in there and i'm i might be butchering that so if somebody's in the comments that knows exactly it feel free to to hit that hit that answer um but yeah i really i haven't i haven't i'm just now kind of getting my feet back into octane um but yeah it's a good question we have plenty of stuff on plus about that i know that for sure yeah that's true i know david so um if you're familiar with david arya he's a great octane artist we had him do a kind of a getting started with octane series and grayscale gorilla plus i know many of you here are plus members so you guys have access to that go check it out if even if you're not brand new to octane watch uh some of the end of that first video because he dives into some of the lighting settings um and i know he talks specifically about foggy lighting and volumetric and all that kind of stuff so make sure you check that one out um all right let's see here thank you guys by the way um uh like i said a lot of a lot of uh you guys out there are from plus we sent this email out this morning make sure you guys are here to ask questions uh we're gonna answer questions from anybody but we also know many of you are here from plus and asking specific questions so like i said thank you guys we're gonna get to as many as we can um all right we got octane x question let's take a one millisecond talk about octane x um because with all of these new macs coming out i'm interested to see how these new chips work with octanex i don't even know if the m1 stuff's compatible so nick this is not really an answer other than i'm interested too in figuring this out and as we learn more about octanex compatibility and what machines it's running on and also the speed we're going to try to get the word out to you guys so that's all i had to say about that one anything else for octanex chad i mean i'm i'm i'm only a uh an apple user in like what would you call it like a casual apple user recently got back into the uh the iphone and i got an ipad pro and i even got myself an apple watch but yeah i mean i look at what they're doing in the apple silicon and i'm excited to see where it goes i know that um i i think i read i think jules from toy posted that uh it was like a number one app or something like octane x like like somehow like they're featuring it somehow on the apple site which i think was really cool but if you're out there if you're listening and you are using octane x on a mac let us know because i'm curious what that's like too and like if you can compare it to a pc like what's that like i'd be interested to know awesome um let's see here we got um let's go let me answer the there's a question i i think i want to make sure that that we don't go down this rabbit hole of octane versus redshift versus you know whatever because they're all very very similar and they all do great stuff so i don't think you know we probably aren't going to get into the the this over that or this is better than this in that way because at the end of the day we're all just like here trying to make the best images we can and obviously these are like really good renders each one of them has their strengths so yeah i don't worry if we start talking about octane it doesn't mean that arnold isn't good or doesn't mean redshift isn't good don't don't take it the wrong way like it's all lighting they all kind of do similar stuff just wanted to get that out there uh creed uh let me let me address this question real quick because i this is something not lighting related but is also something that's happening here at grayscale gorilla i just wanted to clear up something andrew's asking why don't you support uh perpetual user licenses and updates if they're practically the same plug-in as grayscale gorillaplus so what andrew is talking about thank you for the question by the way what andrew's talking about is we just put out an announcement uh last week actually on our website about perpetual licensing and how we've uh stopped selling single licenses for any of our plugins or material collections uh or anything else uh so starting i think it was monday uh plus will be is the only way to to join grayscale gorilla and get everything we have so now that everything is inside a plus um all the hdris all of our plug-ins all the training plus is the only way to really come join grayscale gorilla so many uh perpetual user uh uh mater perpetual plugin users are asking hey if you're gonna keep everything updated for plus why not uh extend that to all perpetual uh license holders and that way it's all the same right it's all the same code guys why don't you just make it really easy the answer is is it's not so we actually forked our code a few years ago now and specifically built plus versions of our plugins that are optimized always up to date working with the latest renderers working with the latest chips things like m1 compatibility are already all set to go for plus members and it actually uh you know not to get too behind the scenes is a huge amount of work to keep two code bases running so i won't go too in the weeds with this but for many years we've actually kept perpetual running exactly because we didn't we wanted both to run and we ran two completely separate code bases to make sure that perpetual users could stay up to date well now that everything is inside a plus and now that we wanted to make uh much cleaner versions of our plugins that are always up to date and really let us focus our time on our frankly what is most of our customers we needed to make a decision to make sure that our perpetual customers uh are up to date all the way through whatever the next version of cinema 4d is and then after that plus will be the only way to stay up to date with new versions of cinema so happy to answer any other questions around that but i just wanted to clarify for you guys if you just one last thing about this if you are using our plugins and you're using them on an older version of cinema 40 or even a current version if you're using it on 23 and you bought a perpetual license that that plug-in will work on 23 for a long time the only time you're going to want to make sure you upgrade to plus is if you want everything of course you want everything we have plus is the way to get it but also if you upgrade your version of cinema 4d to and want to stay up to date with the latest versions of cinema 4d then you're going to want to make sure you have a plus license so hopefully i answered some of those questions there and if there's any other questions please feel free to hit up support and you know ask any questions you got there so if you haven't read that uh article as well we have it on our blog and we always want to make sure you guys are taken care of so make sure you go read that and understand where we're headed with this we wanted to make it easy for you guys to just get everything and stay up to date with the latest version just like chad said there's new renders coming out all the time and we want to make sure our plugins are like up to date and ready to rock um for everybody okay so let's get back to some lighting questions um let's see here i see that one i'm gonna try to look for this one from uh let's see here shoot on the dark side for more contrast i agree uh steven let's go this one catch volumetric light png alpha actually i don't know that one do you know that one um i believe it just happens naturally i don't think there's anything special you need to do at least in redshift and arnold let's see here uh let's try the is this the one trey no it was by uh terry roof ra i can't rafalla i think i can just say it too that's fine i've got it copied here yeah let's jump into that let me just mention trey's thing here currently have an nvidia gtx 970 what's recommended gpu to go with that doesn't break the bank so there are so many different gpu options um i feel like this might not be the best uh place to ask those questions there are so many great forums happening out there and slack channels and people talking about hardware and actually if you're um in our gsg connect slack channel there's a specific channel just for hardware and they talk software a little bit too but they really talk about these things and also figure out what graphics cards are even available right now so um if you're interested in that stuff come join the gsg connect it's in your account just click the slack join slack button and you're in by the way many of you clicked the join slack button in the last week and there was an issue like on the website something was happening and you guys let us know it is all fixed and ready to go so you can get back there uh chad why don't you read this question and i'll try to find it put it up on the screen but yeah don't you update it do it there so uh terry uh rafalla i believe says uh chad i don't know if my question is relevant why octane render look like miniature sometimes and that is actually a really great question because i see it too and it's not just i don't i don't think it's necessarily fair to just like say it's like octane's problem it's not really octane's problem and it all comes down to what we talked about last week in cameras if you don't understand aperture size and you don't understand scene scale it's really easy to fall into the trappings of having like really crazy depth of field on a shot that it feels unnatural and why it feels miniature is because that's what happens when you're shooting a macro shot of something if you have a macro lens and you're you know pointing it at a little figure on your desk and you take your shot it's like this really shallow depth of field right so your brain knows what miniature photography looks like because you've seen it your whole life so when you see a render of something that has very unnatural depth of field it can feel miniature and that's because the artist is probably using too much depth of field but anyway no that's a quick answer that's a good point and um if you want to dive deeper into lenses depth of field and why all this stuff matters um i'll refer you to last actually it's two weeks ago's um live show where we just talked about exactly these types of things how to pick the right lens how to pick the right camera and why that matters so much and you're actually asking the perfect question on why that matters so much i'm guilty of this i love depth of field uh you know it used to cost thousands of dollars to get a lens to do this stuff and as soon as i could do it in octane or redshift i cranked up the depth of field as high as i could because it looks so damn cool but that's the downside of having a control that isn't built in the physical world where you can fake it if you push it too far it looks fake or it looks the wrong scale and in fact what i'd recommend you do is go check out the coffee bean scene from last uh live show we did the camera one chad shows you like how he chooses the right lens for the right scale of scene and instantly as soon as he clicks the right lens type i think you pick like a f10 or an f8 lens it all snaps into focus in a good way and has less depth of field and um and it looks more realistic because it fits the scale of the scene so i'd recommend you go check that out too yeah a few people are talking in the chat about tilt shift and and tilt shift is a look you know like that's a that's a look that you can achieve in 3d but i think it if you don't use it carefully in 3d it just looks like you have incorrect uh depth of field going on like incorrect aperture size um happening but yeah i mean you can definitely do a tilt shift look i think tilt shift was like super popular in the 90s in like music videos and stuff so if you don't know what that is go ahead and google it it's it's a it's a cool effect um jeremy has a question he says do you have any standards or rules for lighting that you follow 99 of the time if so what's the good reason you would break from your conventional strategies chad what's what's your standards of of lighting what do you almost always do in every scene i try to light with as few lights as humanly possible that's my number one rule and then my second one is i try to i set my camera up i i get i i set my shot up i should say before i put any lights in i set up the shot that i want and the framing and the lens all that stuff i set it all up the way i want and then i start to craft the lighting after that because if you start to craft lighting and you're not really sure where the camera is going to be you're going to be lost you're not going to be you're not lighting for the shot and you got a light for the shot so set up the shot pick your lens if it's moving figure out where that's going to be and what your end frame looks like what your start frame looks like where are you going to need to worry about you know any issues that might come up and then start to light your scene and just do it one light at a time and build and build and build and then just don't forget that you can just like take away just take away and i mean honestly for me like nine times out of ten i set my shot pick my lens i determine okay is this is this like natural lighting or is this going to be like helped with uh studio lighting or is it completely studio lit or does it need to feel natural or whatever those questions are and then i choose a strategy based on that obviously if it's natural lit i'm probably going to go with an hdri maybe with a couple of area lights to fill stuff in and if it's like full studio i still have an hdri just kind of this fill kind of like barely there and then i'm just like crafting it with with area lights and sometimes spotlights actually if i'm using gobos or stuff like that but yeah that's kind of a lot of a lot of strategies that's a good point it's it's something to realize is that you picking that camera angle first like you mentioned um is so important because it might look like crap from a different angle oh yeah but that but that's okay you're not like you're not seeing it from that angle and a lot of the studio and movie magic of making something look like that is really making these sides that people don't see ugly just you can't light for every angle it's just not possible yeah yeah um it it it's important to realize that exactly what chad said finding your angle first and in fact you'll find so many cheats when it comes to commercial work you know this is why separating out your scenes this is slightly related to lighting but separating out your scenes as an animator is so important because if you do a close-up uh i think we're talking about a cool car render in a bit so i'll use that analogy if you're doing a close-up of the tire and then a close-up of the front grille and then you do a wide shot of the whole car the lighting setups for all three of those could be totally drastically different completely different scenes completely different light and it's it's important to understand um it's important to understand that that's how it is obviously in the real world when they try to just make the badge of the car gleam in a perfect way that's a completely different lighting setup than when they do the wide shot than when they do for the interior for example so if you start thinking in that way your your it's going to look more natural and it's also going to allow you to um light for the camera and not light for the model if that makes sense always light for the camera and that you know that that's something that i think isn't like talked about enough like if you have if let's say you're doing like a multi-shot sequence don't expect that your lighting setup for the first shot is just going to automatically work for the second and third shot you might need to completely re-light and and you might have like a few of the same key but you need to might need to move it a little bit so i think that you know you have to really you have to like approach every shot uniquely unless the camera angle is like super similar it's just like a punch in or something but yeah you have to write light for every shot light for every shot and and i think you'll you'll have better results matt novak good to see you buddy say creamy orange just spitting that knowledge matt i hope you're well man it's been a while good to see you uh creamy orange got a throwback baby all right let's get through some more questions here uh short uh depth of field we got tilt shift got oh i got i'm scrolling way back let's get into the future here um let's see here eliminate a scene where you're showing particles or textures this might be interesting uh camilo camille is asking uh what is the best way to illuminate a scene where you're showing particles or textures um man those are like two kind of different things but do you let's talk about particles is what is what is the best way to to light for particles i mean that could mean so many things like i i need i would need more information like are we talking about like particle like bugs are we talking about like abstract shapes like i mean it really i never approach anything like oh this is how i light a particle like i always kind of approach it like what am i making what what's the response i'm trying to get where am i trying to lead the viewer's eye how can i approach this to give it visual interest is it moody is it bright is it fun is it you know i just try to like figure out what the mood is that i want to achieve and then i use lighting to help me kind of get there but it's funny like um i wouldn't necessarily don't think of it like i'm i'm doing some some category of 3d is there a strategy for lighting for that not really not really yeah i would say there it's good to have tricks in your pocket of things to try um i would say when it comes to particles if they're not if they're not self-illuminated you know if they're not like pixie dust magical particles then i would um start with a backlight like a big big backlight if you imagine uh like a dusty if you're going to shoot something practically and you have some fog in the scene or some dust and you really want to show that like dusty library look a really strong backlight from the back corner of the library aiming at the lens will pick up all that dust and dirt and stuff so if that that's kind of the vibe i'm getting from this question but if not ignore me but i would experiment with some backlighting off to the side really bright just to like outline every little particle and piece of dust if that is something in fact with the dust that we have we gotta do another video with the dust i feel like we made all those videos and then now this awesome alembic dust stuff is just sitting there but if you're a plus member we have this alembic dust pack and i use it all the time where you get that exact look when you need those just like little micro floaty particle dusty library um westworld kind of like dusty skeleton look i don't know it's hard to it's hard i don't know where the skeleton came from this is the west world thing right like okay got the west world titles okay i don't know i don't know how this bridge i could shake my pillow off in the camera and we would see it in real life because pillow dust i mean look i call it skeleton dust chat calls us pillow dust we all have our dust you know we have a dust in the closet all right angel dust whatever you're into um anyway try back light let's get some more questions thank you for the question so much guys um let's get to a few more and then we'll jump into cinema we'll do some more practical lighting and i know chad's got a really cool scene file to show you guys uh yeah sean's asking the right question thanks for joining sean good to see you buddy uh let's see here we got some specific ones about specific renderers and i i think it's important just to remind everybody that uh chad already said it the a lot these third-party renderers use the same um techniques to do what they do now they call it different things and you know the brightness on the lighting is different in all of the renderers and it's important to know those details but what's important to know is what we're talking about today are the fundamentals of how light works how it bounces and how it tells a story in your 3d render those things are cross-platform those things work in physical render those things work with a camera and a light in your studio so the more that you try to learn those techniques um that just work no matter what the less it really matters what renderer you use other than the technicals of like where do you get a soft box how do you dial up the settings how to do volume metrics that's obviously important but when it comes to something like this like light outdoor lighting scenes and redshift to use the physical sun sky and hdri are both i think whatever the answer is is really gonna go across the board which is um i've i mostly use hdris as my general lighting and then use area lights and other light practical lights to dial up and and really give the scene some shape um i have had some good use with the physical sun and sky and many renderers have that kind of type of thing where they have a a sky color and then an actual sun with a shadow what i would say is if you want that hard shadow look like like it's overhead sun you know at midday or something like that i would recommend using the um either a physical sun sky setup or an hdri and then a parallel light or a point light or something like an infinite light with a a a hard shadow turned on um so i would just say like no matter what render you use that's a pretty good setup um any other notes for that one chad i pretty much do the same thing i try to see like okay what time of day are we talking about here if i can find um if one of our sky hdris that we have the ultimate skies works i try to use that and if it doesn't work then i do what you said infinite light and then h derived for the sky and then um beard dust beard dust is real dude um anyway and it shows up on the sweatshirt a lot uh but yeah i would do the same approach awesome all right we're scrolling through here we got some more questions here's an interesting one effect effect tron asks do you guys ever make any concepts practically physically in the real world before making it in 3d um i i feel like i did this a lot more when rendering was more expensive and by expensive i mean slow um it was it was actually the fastest way that i learned how good lighting worked was in the real world and i and even with um even with how fast the the new renderers are i think you can learn a lot even with your iphone and um you know take a take a cool thing off your shelf or a little vinyl toy sit it on a table grab your camera grab an iphone uh zoom in if possible if you got the 2x lens you know like we talked about lenses last week pick a lens that's practical for a studio type of stuff zoom in a little bit uh and then grab uh maybe an old phone actually or some sort of small light source an ipad make it white and darken all the lights in the room and move it around and you'll see very very quickly what light does in different places you could do the same thing in your third-party render if you have a fast enough machine set it all up pick one soft box and pick one area light and move it around your object and find the different shapes you can make i think it's a hugely helpful thing to see it practically and to see what one light does in different places and then learn how to combine two and then three and that's how you'll find some more of these details uh chad have you ever you ever dial stuff up physic physically practically like that anymore not in a long time um back in the day we did a yogurt commercial and in the commercial we needed cherries to fall into yogurt and chocolate little you know shavings to fall into yogurt so in our little shooting stage that we had at dk i think it was on i forget which floor it was on but um yeah we went we bought a bunch of yogurt and we shot a bunch of practical cherries and chocolate falling into this yogurt just so we could see for reference like what does it look like where should we what should we worry about what should our 3d look like when we recreate this how does it move how does it how does the light penetrate into the yogurt all that sort of thing so it's really really useful if you're doing something like that and you need to shoot a reference so that you can recreate it in 3d don't be afraid to like even if it's just with your phone if you're trying to make something look real a lot of times i think people just go right to google and looking for reference but you have a great camera chances are you have a great camera like right here in your pocket and you can shoot your own reference and really play around with it uh yeah agreed all right we got a few more questions here and then um and then we'll transition into some cinema stuff maybe even talk about some how to how to bring some of these practical lighting techniques into cinema um we got a somewhat lighting related one here from davian says uh seeing a lot of renters using the bloom post effect often from octane i think a lot of that a lot of the renders have that as well what do you guys think about such effects um uh i'll go real quick i i enjoy having those settings dialed up uh pretty subtly but i do enjoy that look um i i think it can be overdone um i think it's one of those things like like anything like when record scratching was invented it was everywhere it was too much depth of field depth of field yeah another good example um depth of field with like a canon 5d you know like like way too much and then we dial it back so i i think uh you could be subtle with it but i enjoy those effects i think they're pretty when done well i think it's a good algorithm like i think they have pretty good uh like uh settings in there so i would dial it back um i think the defaults are actually pretty decent and subtle uh just turning on the the post effects they don't overdo it which is nice but i enjoy it i think it gives it a little bit of that randomness a little bit of that blooming uh letting light light wrap around things and bleed a little bit i think it helps add to that realism um quite a lot and then of course the downside is it's baked in uh i we used to do fake all this stuff in after effects and compositing and glows and overlays and light leaks and lens flares and all the little tricks that we've had over the years to fake this stuff um but i'm i'm enjoying i'm enjoying it built right in um what do you think chad yeah i think when it's done tastefully it's totally fine i i do think you have to be careful if you're baking it into your render and the client or whoever you're making it for is like hey listen i like it but you you know what's with all this glow and then you might have to re-render which would be tricky but i think when it's done tastefully it's totally fine and it can actually the way i like to use it is to fake atmosphere because that's really what blooming is it's light being scattered into water or dust or whatever is the atmosphere in the room so it can be kind of a cheap wave of like getting a little bit of that atmospheric look without having to pay for it in the render so it can be beneficial i used to just be like this like total like do it in post you know don't what are you doing like stop putting it in your render and then i sort of like realized like well you know i with i'm working in aces a lot i'm not comping as much as i used to i'm not like trying to sweeten everything as much in the comp because everything's looking so good out of the renderer these days that i think if you can do it and it makes sense then go for it but um i mean yeah if you can separate it out somebody was just mentioning separated out that's obviously the best way to do it um but yeah it i don't think it's a bad thing i think when it's overused like when depth of field became easy or cheap to achieve everybody was like you know shallow shallow shallow all the time and i think what we're seeing is a little bit of that one that become it kind of became the thing in octane and now redshift has it and arnold has it i think you'll see it sort of start to slow down a little bit and get a little bit more natural but yeah with like everything that's like a new thing i think it's just your instinct is just oh that new thing i want to try it but yeah tasteful just always be tasteful keep it tasteful keep it tasteful hey look at this a twitch comment we see you out there twitch uh twitch commenters uh thank you guys for watching from twitch and facebook as well we see those come through that's really cool this uh thing allows us to stream out to all you guys thank you for joining uh ed eduardo it i'm gonna mess this up edwardo that's not right ed hope you're doing well yeah there you go i got a question can you give us advice about composition any book or website um so i'd just refer you back to our last live show um uh chad pulled up an excellent uh website called film what was that film website frame grab frame grab um so i would i would start there check out last week's uh or two weeks ago's live stream all about cameras um we talk a little bit about composition and about studying filmmaking um even if you're not going to make films or even pull out a practical camera ever in your career um learn how how film and commercials and beauty and photography and studio photography and all learn the techniques that have been used for hundreds of years over 100 years now um that has helped me and many other people learn what composition is filmic get a book about filmmaking learn about the close-up and the wide shot and the over-the-shoulder shot and why choose different camera um angles why choose differences yep rule of thirds ratio all that stuff golden ratio these are perfect things to go look up and learn from um and so that there's really not a a a tip or a technique i think there are maybe two tips to to bring out of how to start to make a beautiful composition that doesn't look like everything else one is don't center everything just a good rule of thumb unless you're going for a very specific look try not to just like center everything now that is also a trend right now we have these animated gif type things and white frames with something beautiful in the middle that's okay to center but when you're trying to kind of my favorite that is kind of my favorite tool now you got to know when to break it right however learn uh if you're trying to expand your compositional uh you know like language try to force yourself to uh crop your subject that you're trying to frame in some corner just say like i'm not going to show the whole thing in this scene i'm going to crop in i'm going to only show what's important i'm going to make it mysterious by only showing half of the face or something like that so that's that's all i would say to start is to take the beautiful model that you're trying to show off or do something with and force yourself to not show all of it how can you tell a story by showing a part of a model or looking up at it from a weird angle or down or all that stuff but um also check out la uh two weeks ago uh live show as well give things room to breathe i think that's what that's a thing that i like to do is like i like to give some room to the stuff in in my shots to breathe and also another tip that um that i learned in terms of like cinematography is if you have a character i'm going to move myself to the side here right if you have a character sitting on this side of the frame and there let's say they're looking this way that's not super interesting right because there's just no room there we don't know where they're looking we don't know what's happening but all of a sudden if i'm looking up into this space where there's actual space in the frame it's more interesting so if you have a character or something that's looking in a direction give room on that side that they're looking to breathe a little tip i like that i like that um all right oh we got all these great examples of overdoing it like synthesizers in the 80s okay i like synthesizers from the 80s so that's okay there was that period like you know i'm a big rush fan but you hit those 80s rush albums they're like they discovered the synthesizer you know it's like uh and then you know what they did they dialed it in overdid it for two records and then they dialed it in and this happened over and over again you know what i mean it'll correct itself it's you just correct itself it's just great give it time give it time film grab thank you rachel appreciate you rachel for rachel's hanging out throwing up some uh links here rachel helped us get the word out about the show and set all this stuff up appreciate you she's also got the band hammer okay so you know watch it out there she's itching to use it too uh uh effect detron says ash thorpe's a great example of composition and framing i think he he he has very cinematic work i think that's a great place to start ash is great artist go check him out he is he is cinematic and knows the rules of film and uses it to his advantage that's a great great person to go look and and check out their art uh awesome stuff um let's see here all right i think we're winding down on the questions uh so why don't we um jump into cinema 4d and um i'm gonna keep an eye out just for a couple more questions here but chad why don't you get uh something ready and cinema we'll try to approach some of these questions that we had even in cinema and i know you have some stuff to show and let's see here um in the meantime i'll just double check for other questions [Laughter] uh rachel has watch out rachel has the power thank you uh rachel pesh mode see depression you know when you're all synthesizers you just got to go all in depeche modes i think i think they stood the test of time that doesn't sound dated to me that sounds like the future still for stuff kenny rogers who says kenny rogers that's amazing that's good that's good and effective he needs to do a synth album i think that's what we've learned [Applause] well now that daft punk broke up i mean i think somebody needs to take their place i can't think of many more people than kenny rogers to really step up the game there's room there's room there for sure all right let me answer this one quick question here before we jump into cinema and let chad drive um as a gsg plus member thank you benny by the way as a gsg plus bammer member and new to cinema 4d where to start to learn more deep stuff than the fundamentals but more than the guided path um a few things uh rachel i'm going to ask for your help on this one we just put out a a guide to beginners that are using uh cinema 4d uh and this is for grayscale gorilla plus members who are ready to like learn as much as they can about cinema 4d we have a ton of uh getting started stuff obviously in at grayscale gorilla plus we built a guide exactly for this question which is where do i start and then once i know the basics where do i go next and this guide is a great place to start because something on this guide after you watch our intro to cinema 4d um and are also our guide to cinema 4d which which dives into some of the newer tools once you're familiar with that stuff a lot of people are asking where do i go next um so first of all hopefully rachel's uh got this linked together if not just go to our um website go to our articles or our blog section look for one of the most recent uh blog posts we put out uh all about the beginner's guide to grayscale gorilla plus tons of awesome links thank you rachel for linking that it's right here in um i'll just click it too so so you guys could see it down the road on a recording go here and check this out find something in that list that speaks to you and go down that rabbit hole the last thing i'll say about this is no matter where you are in your career there's always going to be parts of the software parts of the types of renderer that you want to make that will pull you in a different direction so what i would say is once you understand the really basic fundamentals of cinema 4d and you followed along on some of our training start to listen to what you want to learn next because 3d is huge you can go be an expert modeler you could go and just study lighting you can just go and study just liquid simulations you can go and be a part of this 3d world almost however you want to um but think about how you want to use these tools and what your outcome is because that's going to that's going to steer how you learn your next stuff so if these things are interesting how to use cameras and lighting and materials to create something beautiful uh this is interesting to you start to look into studio lighting start to watch some of the um uh training that we have about studio lighting we have this great one nick v made one all about the this pair of headphones he shows you is that one in octane yeah yeah so nick uh nick v excellent trainer it's got some good stuff we have a new one coming from him uh very soon by the way he shows you how to light uh some headphones and uses a lot of these techniques we've talked about today if you're using octane even if you're not using octane you'll learn a lot about how to light like a studio uh lighter in that one as well but that should get you started there rachel thank you for um linking to that and for those of you who are in plus um we know that so many of you are not beginners you're actually joining because we have redshift and other third-party render training and all of our plugins and all that stuff we're actually building more of these guides just for you guys if so if you're an octane user we're going to have a similar guide that's like guide to what what to learn next in octane so stay tuned for that stuff and we're going to do it for arnold redshift octane uh and some other stuff we have planned so stay tuned awesome thank you so much ben appreciate that gsg is the best for learning cool tricks features you wouldn't think of that's why we're here all right let's um let's go let's let's jump into cinema 4d chad are you ready buddy yeah all right we're ready we're gonna we're gonna throw it your way let's zoom into this thing i'm gonna get rid of the logo so it's not covering anything up goodbye logo for now okay here here we are chad where should we get started when it comes to lighting techniques and um uh this beautiful car model here yeah so i figured a car is probably a good thing to try to light up because i feel like it kind of trips people up and they they uh it's it can be overwhelming it can be a little daunting but i'm going to light this car with just four lights and maybe even less depending on what i want to do with it uh and we're gonna kind of dissect this a little bit and then talk a little bit about mood and things like that so if we um kind of look through our camera here you can see i've got my camera set up already i've got a fairly long lens on here i think i'm rocking like a yeah like a hundred mil i've got the car on a little bit of a platform because i just think it looks cooler to have it in that platform and i've got some lights already kind of set up here and i'm just going to hit go i'm in octane but of course you know a lot of the stuff that we're going to talk about can be done anywhere and i'm just going to start turning these lights on one by one so if i turn this first light on which is just this backlight that's just shining onto the uh onto the the psych wall you can see it's already looking good because it's like wow it has a direction it my eyes pulling to the center of the frame it's it's silhouetted people are drawn to contrast so it immediately has a vibe to it which i really dig if i turn on the next one you're gonna see this is more of like a front light to kind of like light the path that's this light right here it's a very skinny kind of area light sitting in between the car and the camera with the cameras like back here somewhere and this light can come down to maybe focus that light a little bit further onto the ground to really make the eye go to the center of the frame but i'm actually going to put it back up because i just kind of want this to be a little bit of a fill and if we keep going down the line if i turn on this next light this light here is impossible to do this in real life so in real life if you wanted to get a reflection going on the front of this car like this you would have to hang a very long piece of fabric behind the camera and light that up and it would have to be pretty large and that would be hard to do because the camera as you can see this light is in between the camera and uh the car and if i go into the light settings here and i actually turn it on camera visibility you're going to notice if i refresh the the live viewer here it's going to show up in my shot actually it's not right now because i think i turned it off um see i think i turned the opacity off i don't know why it's not showing up but yeah it's sitting right there in between the camera and our car and that's no good so having you know 3d lights are awesome because you can basically break reality uh but okay so we've got three lights in here and it's looking pretty damn good but right now i think it needs maybe just one more so i'm gonna go ahead and turn on the rim light which is this light that hap that happens to be just sitting above the car let me dial it in here right here this light right here is kind of just sitting above the car and it's it's also extremely long and this is typical of what you would light on set for a car so if we just turn off all the lights but that one this is pretty typical on set you would have a very large piece of fabric with light shining into it and it would be hanging over the car and it's a pain in the ass to like move it around but of course in 3d we have like we can put it anywhere we want so i'm going to actually just turn off all these lights and we're just going to build this up from scratch so i'm just going to hide these all in the viewport so we don't see them anymore and we're going to light it up one by one and i'm not going to like go through maybe all the lights but we'll just do a little bit of it here so i'll grab an octane area light we're going to put push that up into the air i'm going to rotate it i have a nifty little rotation script that i wrote that's just going to rotate my light 90 degrees there we go you can see if you just throw like an area light over this car and and just like obviously dial the the exposure way down it already looks pretty good that's because this is how they do it in like catalogs for real so you're used to kind of seeing it like this now we don't want to see it in our shot in fact if i might wanna if i wanted to have like a really kind of interesting look i might pull it into the shot who knows maybe we'll throw some area light maps on here to get some textures going or whatever but for right now i'll kind of leave it as is now we can come in here into the visibility and turn off the camera visibility so we don't see it in the shot and i'm sure every dp and gaffer in real life would love to be able to do that we can do that it's just it's 3d it's magic so um i don't like it sitting that high off the car i want to create a little bit more of a silhouette so i'm going to pull that light back just a little bit i'm just trying to show off the curve of this corvette because it's such a cool model i just want to kind of feel it right there i might even make it a little bit further and now i think you know that light is pretty harsh i want to come into that light setting and maybe dial it down maybe drop it down to like a power five that's feeling pretty good now uh what else can we do let's let's just go ahead and right away i'm gonna throw that light that we had up on our psych wall and i'm just holding down control and dragging that light let's make it pretty small something like this make sure it's pretty close to our wall and we'll raise that one up to maybe like 12 something like that and what this is going to do is it's going to give us that vignetting that we want we want the eye to kind of draw to the center of the frame and sort of follow the line of the car like that's what makes it interesting that's what makes it looks cool like makes it look cool and i might rotate this light just a little bit towards that wall not a lot though and again if you want to widen out that that uh that vignette you just pull that light off the wall and it's going to widen out that vignette a little bit yeah earlier so that's looking early on we had a question about uh flat lighting and you showed exactly how not to get flat lighting it's using lights that produce a gradient across your screen rather than a light like you had when it was large it was just like it made the whole background just one color but just by shrinking that light and moving it in the right way you have this this little gradient that that vignette your map you're mentioning that is how you can light something still from the front but without having it feel um so flat so just want to point that out exactly question earlier yeah you know what interrupt me anytime because i i can't see obviously i've just got my screen share going on so yeah just stop me if there's like a question or something uh okay so we've got a pretty decent look going for sort of the rim light of the car and our background and now we want to dial in the reflection that's going to maybe happen on this front fender and really what you want to do is you want to show off the curves of the car so let's just go ahead and duplicate this light out and immediately it doesn't look bad it doesn't look really like what i want yet but it doesn't look too bad i am going to rotate this light and we're going to rotate this light a little bit not much if i can grab the right handle that would be helpful all right i can't just use those scripts chad yeah i don't want to go 90 degrees though i guess i could you start there that's fine all right thanks nick for reminding me of the scripts that i made to save myself from having to do exactly that and while we're talking about the scripts real quick uh because i've already seen people asking uh you guys are asking about those camera scripts from last live show and those are actually up in chad's uh interface i can see them up there um and we mentioned uh we were going to look for a way to share those uh lens scripts with you guys and uh it looks like we're we're pretty close to figuring that out so stay tuned um plus members there'll be a really easy way to get those camera scripts and now that we see these rotate scripts chad it sounds like we may have to we may have to bug you for these too um all right no problem just wanted to mention that i've been seeing it in the comments from last week and this week but we're looking at easier ways to get you guys these um these smaller little scripts and ideas that just speed up your workflow so okay i'll show you yeah no good man thanks for reminding me uh all right so we we now are kind of have our our front light going and i know a lot of people's instinct i think is to try to keep the lights sort of like in a manageable size to where they think well you know this is about as big as the light should be well we're in 3d we can break rules we can go crazy so if we want a reflection that's going to stretch across this entire car we can just like widen out that light like crazy and maybe bring it down so it's a little skinnier and now we have this beautiful light that's cutting down the fenders and showing off the curves of the car and of course if you raise that light up it's going to crawl across the surface of the car and get get a little bit higher now for me like i try to keep i try to just like show off what the car has to offer here in terms of the the curve and the shapes and whatnot so i might put a light here and then what i'll do is i'll duplicate that light again and this one i want to show off maybe the top of this fender this one's going to be trickier because that fender is a little bit weird so i'm just going to kind of eyeball it here and this is where having a good ipr real-time view is very very helpful so i'm just rotating that light again a little bit and sometimes i'll isolate so i'll just turn off all the lights but the one i'm working on uh and by the way i i prefer simple straps like this like this is even interesting to me because it's a little bit different it's a little bit more moody i like moody so okay this is what i was trying to do i was trying to get that light to just cut down this roof line right here okay so let's go ahead and throw up all the other throw up let's go and turn on all the other lights we don't want to throw up that's not a good thing to do okay so now we are ready for our foot light which i'm just kind of like making that term up it's not really a term a real term but i'm going to duplicate this light out here and we are going to shrink this guy way way way down whoops let me just grab that handle shrink it way down and make it pretty long and skinny like that and then we're just going to rotate it something like well let's just use the scripts here boom boom i think i gotta go one more there we go oh hello yeah that's it i know because i find myself like having to just rotate area lights 90 degrees like all the time so it's just like i just made a script that would just do it because why why why redo things all the time all the time all right so now you gotta let us know in the chat if you want these scripts too guys good yeah they they're definitely uh they're definitely useful at least i i find to be useful but okay so now what i'm doing right now is just trying to uh get rid of this line this line is created by this light right here shining on our psych wall right and and it's very close to the side wall so in fact like let's just let's just make sure it's not going to show up at all in that cycle i'm going to go down to my geo here and under background i'm going to find my psych wall i have a an octane tag on there and i believe that i'm just looking for the number on it and because what i'm gonna do is actually try to make it not show up this is where you know i'm not super versed in light linking in this program but you have to use these light pass masks which is a little bit weird i prefer how arnold and redshift handles it but whatever um okay so i have two turned off here so i think i need to make that light number two so let's just jump back up there to that light and there we go and i'm gonna make this light past two and there we go so that turned it off good so now we don't have to worry about that light showing up and i'm gonna do the same for this other light that i created that's up here i'm going to give that one a light of 2. so it doesn't show up either okay good all right so now uh i can bring this kind of like light that i brought in at the last second there bring it up in intensity just to kind of make that ground look a little bit more interesting cool so this is getting better for me i'm digging this i could go as far as like taking this light and like not having it show up in the psych wall but whatever it's fine for this um and i try to keep it as simple as possible and just kind of do stuff like this and then i'm usually like honestly i'm like moving these lights so much until i find what i like and then i just like try to force myself not to touch them anymore which is really hard sometimes but yeah so that that's that's kind of how i approach it but um since we're here and we have a little time i'm gonna like strike some of this down and show you a more moody approach which is kind of fun so i'll move this light into the shot actually and actually start to interrupt yeah go for it man just i'm just trying to connect the dots from some of the previous questions we got earlier in the stream um you know different compositing ideas different ways to light um and really that whole idea that you don't have to show everything um you know some of those moodier shots you had where it was kind of back lit or just rim lit or part of the car was visible in a lot of ways gives a sense of emotion that a fully lit rendered uh model will never give you so as always you know it's up to what you're trying to portray to the audience is this mysterious is it uh sexy you know is it um uh high is it high end is it um or or is it you know or is it inexpensive and budget and affordable these words that you choose are going to dictate how it's lit how your what materials you choose what camera angles you choose there is a language for all of this stuff and so for something like a expensive car here you know we're trying to make it a little bit more um you know like a like i said last week or two weeks ago like a piece of jewelry like something beautiful and attainable that is like in a glass case and so sometimes it's really that back lit look or some of these other looks chad's going going for here that make it look more mysterious than something that's just like fully flat lit that looks like uh it's in a jc penny flyer you know like think about where it's gonna end up and i think it'll help um i see you're you i see you're grabbing the area light maps volume two chad why don't you tell uh everybody about volume two here because i think we're i think we're a week early but i like where you're going with this yeah i mean i wasn't i wasn't gonna say it but since you said it i mean if you're gonna tease something that's not out yet you better tell them what's happening yeah um yeah so if you're a plus member i'll just say that you're going to be very happy very soon uh we have some incredible stuff coming and uh this is just a really small little little taste of it yeah if you guys haven't used area light maps um uh in the past it's one of our most used uh uh hdri collections that works awesome with um easter egg link there's basically a sequel coming out uh very in the very near future for plus members it'll just show up in your library but it'll be the area light maps too um which have some cool ones click on it real quick chat because i've been digging these like little those little like uh kind of offsets yeah squares and stuff like that some of these are really cool yeah this one is great it's basically uh uh it's basically like a bunch of like kino flows that just look like hanging light fixtures that are really cool this one's awesome too it's kind of like a more random assortment of like hanging fluorescent fixtures we're calling these arrays so these are arrays of lights that sit on a texture that go onto your area light to really kind of give it a really interesting vibe um in fact we should like with these on of course we gotta turn on some bloom right oh dude with the light visible with a little bloomy bloomy bloom action let me see if it'll actually kick in here hey what's up andy good to see you thanks for joining man all right i think i need to take the power up a little bit more michael thank you i appreciate it we're excited to get this stuff out um should be out soon we'll be we'll be announcing it relatively soon and uh when we do plus members you'll just have this in your library it'll just show up that and that's why we built all this stuff so that when it's when it's ready it's just instantly available for you guys uh travis asks how you get the bloom in arnold um that is actually um it's an outback steakhouse uh special at the bloom and arnold [Laughter] oh that's amazing dude wait no that's bloom and onion do they have the bloom stuff in in arnold chad yeah yeah it's a it's a post effect it's it's you have to have like the newer version but yeah okay yeah i'm actually gonna let's just make this like look even cooler let's turn off the psych wall the car in in space here yeah this and then we look at it with a little blue action yeah you need some stage lights look at that we got you maybe it's maybe there's a fight going on it's like a boxing ring who knows some ques whoa dude this blow this bloom just like went bonkers on my quasars you just got bloody quick eyes just got bloomed wow beautiful a little bit yeah let's do like five on that actually two might be good yeah and then we have quasar banks different different kinds like these are super bright so you gotta like bring them down a little bit aziz light uh this one's dope too thank you automatic that's my favorite movie ever appreciate that one oh those are dope yeah these are cool those yet yeah these are neat well good hey chad i appreciate you sneaking a a little uh plus step in here i might be fired after this guys so i apologize these aren't out until next at least next week i'm thinking it's next week guys did i break protocol by picking a week but um yeah we we we have uh brandon us nicely so i'll tell you look look for an announcement next week um and area light maps too and we have a ton of other stuff including maybe something else chad will show you here maybe at the end stick around we'll call a little teaser it is it is car based we'll show you something cool here at the end um we have a huge it's probably our biggest um uh edition for plus members coming out next week so stay tuned it's gonna be awesome um but we'll uh we'll get back to some lighting stuff here which i guess this is but uh yeah yeah go back to those go back to those crisscrossy quasars all right can you rename it to chris crossy crazy quasars oh my god look at this turn them way down dude they're like actually let's also like make them kind of blue oh yeah so this is actually something you said earlier too you know like one well-placed light source can go a long way now in this case i know this one light source is kind of faking 12 light sources or whatever but this is kind of what we were saying earlier is like less lights the better uh especially if you're new to lighting um i think one of the biggest things that that kind of over complicates lighting is just adding too many lights so start simple start with something like this you know a beautiful soft box texture on a on a light that's why we created these area light maps by the way just so it's you know one light to move around you get some different patterns oh that one looks cool yeah this is one of my favorites for sure but but to get back to you know the fundamentals of lighting which is you know why we why we build all this stuff to help you guys to start simple to make it easy to grab a light and say you know how can we do this with one light how can we do this with maybe two lights um and see this is looking the brightness is a little uh now when you're doing that with the keep keep power like surface brightness i know there's a check box in octane that actually dials up and down the scale but that has to do with scale not the brightness right yeah that's the scale but yeah i mean quasars are fairly bright so yeah these lights have a lot of dynamic range in them so you just gotta you know be careful they'll they're they are bright they will blind you um but yeah man these are dope these like arrays i think are super useful and a lot of fun to play with this one's like perfect for for cars this one here if you want to make it look like you know you're in the batman uh you're in the batman butler cave yeah the butler cave and you just like take this light and you just like duplicate it a few times you know and uh let's take that guy let's duplicate it this way and take all four of those lights and move them over like that now you're in now you're in uh bruce wayne's secret whatever secret secret cement palace and then you can take maybe this one is actually a bank of fluorescence who knows mix it up have fun that's what they're there for uh this is beautiful um let's uh we got a few questions here i think as we start to wrap up um chad thank you for the lighting demo um uh i love watching you light chad it's so much fun you do thanks you do such great stuff um let's also maybe we'll uh sneak a peek at the uh new material collection maybe while we're answering a couple questions i mean i figured you already showed them like area light maps too we might as well uh since there's a beautiful car on the screen maybe showing something else um yeah let me answer let me ask ask answer this question though too because um uh walter's asking about uh could it be a good idea to talk about aces in the next live and walter also what's coming out very soon is a new video from chad um i just saw it on the calendar it's coming out relatively soon about aces in octane and how much easier it is to set up so i know that that video is coming out it's on the it's on the the launch list so stay tuned for that one that'll be uh on youtube that'll be a public video uh easy to watch so stay tuned for that one um ooh we get in detail so let let let's answer that question chad so how do you we we all saw this wide angle shot of the car but how do you how do you light these close-ups because that that's something um i never know how to approach like look at that shot look at how beautiful that that one little corner is sticking out there in the rim how do you approach shooting these close-ups to show off the shape and and um uh you know the beauty of of uh of a studio shot like this i i do it very in a similar way i don't really um i don't know like i feel like i i want to like figure out what the goal is of the shot like if if we're doing like a macro shot or like a close-up of this fender of this bumper here then it's important for the viewer to understand the shape of it and get an idea of what that's like so usually i'll set up the shot like this and then i'll take that first light and try to like figure out like okay where how far back do i need to go to get that position the way i want how long does that light need to be to kind of give me that that effect and honestly like this light can be like way way way back here and it'll look fine and then we'll just throw in a nice like fill light to kind of kick off this rim and give us something there so then i'll just you know take this light duplicate it out rotate it like that bring the scale down somewhere in there probably move it pretty close and then just kind of walk it up and down until i find that spot and it's going to be very bright for at first but we're just going to knock it down it's more like in there that's cool and i'll do one more that will basically be a rim light so if i take this guy rotate it back rotate that light then this far and make it very large something like that will turn off that light's visibility in the camera and then i just sort of turn lights on and off to check out what they're doing for me and see and try to isolate like if a light is not contributing a lot to the look that i have in mind then i i get rid of it um lighting is is about calling out lights as much as it is about uh turning them on and figuring out what works and what doesn't work but yeah in fact i i think i might change up this shot a little bit and because i think it's probably gonna be cooler in a shot like that where you can see that light that i have over here like doing some pretty cool stuff on the front let's break brighten that up a little bit which is actually a good transition to talk about some new stuff that we're just going to touch on it barely i don't think we want to get too deep no no they uh they call this a teaser they call us a teaser in the in the um biz you know the uh stay tuned this is the cliffhanger before the end of the end of the um uh uh you know like who wants to be a millionaire or something you get really drawn out right commercial break that it's a commercial break with a commercial break here is that where we're going um no chad i think that's actually a great angle for for what you're about to show um so yeah i i think we'll do a light touch here and show a little behind the scenes for the the the friends that decided to show up on the live show and hey as we're showing off some new stuff too um if you have a friend uh that is you know learning cinema 4d the the industry right now is just of of course a buzz with cinema learning cinema 4d and all the craziness going on um if your uh friend or colleague or whatever is learning 3d um let them know we exist let them know uh we have all this stuff here on youtube uh here ready to help and we have our uh you know intro to cinema 4d training absolutely free that come get come get started help us get the word out about what we're up to um and we also see a couple questions here that we'll get to right at the end so chad why don't you show them what the heck you're uh you're uh doing here with this i mean how f i mean do we why don't you you say it oh are you anxious are you anxious chad i am now i don't want to like i don't want to like i don't know what you are comfortable talking about so i'll let you down look we'll just make it really simple guys um we built plus to deliver um to to deliver a ton of stuff into your library so no matter if you use arnold octane uh redshift we if you haven't noticed we've been adding a ton of new hdris aerial light maps we talked about earlier today we have some new training coming up that's actually around this automotive lighting from our buddy nick v but one of the most the things that i'm really excited about is this brand new material collection called car paints um and chad and sean and the team really spent a ton of time making what i think is the best car paint material shaders out there available period um i these things are gorgeous uh chad and sean and everybody worked so hard to get every little metal flake they placed it by hand folks no that's not true how's that true they wrote some incredible algorithms to make beautiful car paint that is realistic it looks good from far away and if you've tried to do car paint in the past you know that it's one of the most uh difficult materials to get exactly right and chad and sean put out this amazing pack it'll be in everyone's library next week um it's called car paints very simply and there's some beautiful stuff you can see some examples here on the screen maybe chad you could drag some of your favorites into this model here um and and maybe just tell us your favorite uh part about some of the details that you guys have added um i'll say one more thing and let you talk chad which is you know chad's uh been lighting beautiful and making beautiful materials for so long he has he knows what makes for great looking car paints and he and the team brought all of this knowledge and just put them right into these materials so you could drag and drop them and you get perfect car paint um so chad just tell us like your favorite part uh and we'll dive deeper in other videos that are coming up soon about this but just tell us your favorite part about these car paints and what they why they differ from just like a glossy you know material these things are and i'm not just blown smoke these are the best car paints i've ever used for cinema 4d by far and the reason is because uh the painstakingly you know crafted color selections and the way that uh sean and i put these together and then really the the biggest differentiating factor is our custom flake system for redshift and octane and it just it's completely procedural there's no you don't have to uv your car you don't have to worry about uh any of that so you can see i'm not like i don't i don't want to show off too much because the stuff that we're going to be releasing when these come out is going to explain it a lot better than a crappy live stream with bad resolution can really show but um yeah i'm getting really close here and this is flake detail this is like serious like metallic flakes in the paint looking completely realistic and it's all editable you can change it you can have it you know get ghost for some other worldly looks if you want you can really kind of go nuts but yeah it's it i'm not ashamed it's the best car paints for cinema 4d they're they're really good guys i've been uh testing them and and playing with them and i can't stop tracking these things on everything uh there's actually a quick question and and let's let's hold off on a lot of questions but um uh because i think we have a ton of videos coming out next week that'll show a lot of details how to dial in these details for your specific render if you want that much control um but there is a question about the the color shift there are actually um materials built right into this pack that do that color shift look that is very popular um built right in and it's no uh the only thing you need to know how to do is drag and drop and the materials do the rest uh there's a good one might need a little bit more light for that one but those like iridescent uh color shift materials we got a few uh that look really really good right from this pack i mean i know chad i know you want to show off all the little uh thumbnails down there but why don't you open up your ipr window a little bit yeah sorry i get a little uh a little in my own head i guess yeah let's make this a little bit bigger i forget too that i'm like operating on like a smaller resolution smaller screen are the card paint textures procedural yes yes yep scalable easily scalable don't have to worry about i mean obviously the the camo ones are not like the camouflage wraps that we have or not but the carplay the flakes are and sean um who is the mastermind behind a lot of these uh materials he's in the chat so if he's if he's answering he could answer a lot of these questions as well yeah shout out to uh sean as well amazing stuff you guys killed it with this oh give me that yellow all right gotta gotta have a bumblebee yellow right come on man it's a sports car let's do it awesome well um well there you go this uh thank you chad for the uh the little the little demo there um of what's coming up uh this is just not even all of what we're dropping next week inside a plus stay tuned we got all new um a bunch of new stuff including an update for the library that i'm really excited to get to you guys uh got a feature a lot of you guys have been asking about so stay tuned for that and somebody else was asking about other parts of the car uh and adding materials frankly i think with this car paint pack and the everyday material collection which is obviously all included with uh plus memberships it's right here installed in your library um every damn trail collection has a lot of that other stuff so great rubbers and and uh metal the whole thing was fabric this whole thing was actually textured with um tech products and emc oh and of course this entire scene and tech products which which uh came out last month i think if you guys haven't checked out tech products um it's just a little uh example of where we're headed with with plus it's why we're so excited that um so many of you have joined in the last couple months i wanted to welcome you guys thank you guys again for joining it's exactly why we built this stuff so that um our team can build these amazing materials lighting uh uh scripts now we got coming to you we got to figure that out but that's the goal now with what we're up to we not only do we want to share our tips on how we light and and make beautiful renders but also give you guys the tools to speed this whole thing up so uh oh i like that green that might be one yeah this is definitely one of my yeah this is definitely one of my favorites oh ooh hello all right i'll just let you like make a pretty looking car that's fine with me um let's uh take the last few minutes here and uh answer a couple more questions then we'll take off thank you guys so much um i appreciate you guys coming by on a thursday stay tuned for more of these live shows get a question ready we're gonna do a lightning round if you have any last minute questions about lighting about plus about i don't know this car scene whatever you guys whatever's on your mind happy to answer a few more questions and then we'll take off um and then stay tuned next week we have a whole series of announcements coming out we're really excited to show you guys um let's see here uh jacob hey guys how can i have those folders in the object manager chad you want to tell them about these folders yeah um these folders are nothing special they're not like uh a plug-in or anything like that um inside of cinema 4d every null can have a different icon so if i just create a null here and i grab that null and i go to the base tab in the object in the attribute panel and i twirl down icon settings i can actually hit load preset and scroll down to the folder closed choose that and then i can tell it to use the display color and then under the display color i tell it to use layer so if this is in a layer so if you look here i have a bunch of layers if we add this to let's say the geo layer the folder turns green and i like to set up my scene with some bass nulls that are look like folders and it's just a nice way of organizing my scene i've been doing this for a while and i have a default scene that has these already set up and all the layers kind of mirror what's happening with the organization but yeah you can do this yourself but we've thought about making a script but we haven't really had time the default scene i think is something underutilized and maybe it's just because you know it's it's hard to see how everyone else works in the for the last year you know right um but the default scene saves my butt so many times things that i use almost in every render rather than set it up and bring it into every scene you know set up these these default scenes and and and build a default scene for yourself um and uh highly recommended for you guys um if you haven't done that just think of the things you use in almost every render and make sure you set up a default scene a few more questions coming by actually here it is mo is asking about plus student pricing absolutely um in fact we just announced a change maybe it was like a month or two ago for our student pricing so now um anyone who is an active student um uh at basically any level of education we have a um a non-commercial license for grayscale gorilla plus that is 50 off so if you're learning uh and you're you're um in having educational uh either id um anything that you could show us that just shows that you're learning this stuff you get 50 off and it is a non-commercial license but it means you can start to watch all of our training start to use all of our tools and really use the same tools that professionals use to make beautiful renders like this and it's 50 off so just go to the site um you just type in educational discount grayscale gorilla you should pop up right on the page 50 off uh for a non-commercial license for a year so you basically you get a year for 199 i think it is something like that it's really affordable we wanted to make this affordable for you guys for students to just come learn and like i said have all the same tools no restrictions on tools or anything else it's identical it's just for non-commercial use so please go check that out um jacqueline thank you so much with the with the link from jacqueline jacqueline also uh as here at grace girl gorilla she's amazing give it up for jacqueline jacqueline's in the house we gotta give you the band hammer too jaclyn we gotta give jacqueline the band hammer and rachel's got good one andy's here oh andy good point thank you andy andy uh not only has uh some training in grayscale gorilla plus great teacher you haven't seen andy's work great artist um he's also bringing up something important there is training for setting up these icons inside a plus so whenever this feature was new which i think is maybe a few years old now right andy um there's training to show you a little bit more detail about how to set up those icons awesome thank you andy good to see you man hope you're doing well uh all right couple more questions here we'll wrap it up um let's see here here's uh here's a good one we may have a couple of these uh marios hopefully i said that right rios uh says hey guys i'm a product photographer and like to ask if you have specific tutorial for products and packages like beer wine bottle etc oh of course we got that we got that beer can that you did that's a great one um mario's if you're a plus member we have a uh piece of training where chad breaks down a beautiful uh beer can model he shows you how to light it how to set it up um and i think you show how to like wrap the label and everything as well right you actually set up the whole scene am i remembering that right yeah the whole like i think i it's been a while but yeah uh the materials the lighting how i um posted stuff for clients like all that the entire kind of workflow yeah so without what i'd recommend um is go check out plus if you're already a member go look at the headphone uh product rendering from our buddy nick v go check out the upcoming automotive car uh uh rendering which is very product heavy uh also by nick check out the beer can from chad and i feel like there's maybe one more that's really studio heavy that's inside a plus but there's a lot of product rendering stuff uh training for you guys um uh if you're a plus member thank you guys for the questions um travis i joined plus just for the training no regrets thanks buddy appreciate it you gotta download these materials man you're not using physical are you travis we need to we need to we need a intervention maybe and he's a jaclyn that's funny um yes rachel rachel said it perfect thank you rachel awesome good sean yeah hearts to sean for sure awesome awesome scribble uh let's do a couple more questions feeling good chad's just like making me smile yeah i'm in the zone now i got to stop or else i'm just going to keep going yeah just keep keep keep keep making stuff man scribble's asking been watching gst for years noticed some old tutorials that were free and no longer featured on uh youtube is there a reason um scribble uh the the short answer is we're actually remastering a lot of videos right now um that are coming back to grayscale gorilla so what you're probably mentioning were not videos that were on youtube that disappeared um it's probably more likely that these are vimeo videos from way back that when we uh shifted to our new website and everything else we just uh uh did not include any vimeo videos uh for many reasons vimeo uh playback issues are a part of that um but if you've been uh looking at our youtube channel lately you may be seeing some classics coming back so we're actually remastering some older uh videos that are still 100 watchable and usable in cinema 4d um and we're bringing those back to youtube so make sure you're subscribed on youtube and when we drop those you'll be seeing some classics uh in fact we just dropped one today rachel just put it out thank you rachel uh and we also put out another one earlier this week from chad might be chad's like first tutorial with grayscale gorilla where he did this awesome um animated gif looping uh fuzz fuzzy ball thing in cinema 4d um so check that out and you'll be you'll be seeing more videos soon in the classics uh uh collection coming out um and unlike disney we'll just leave them out and you can just watch your classics anytime we won't you know pull them after after christmas um all right back into the vault back in the mid can you imagine that'd be amazing hey everybody don't forget to watch this tutorial it's going back in the vault for another uh i hated when they did another three years like why did they do that i just want to watch sword in the stone [Laughter] the cherries oh see the oh man the cherries see that that's a tough one that some of those really early tutorials are mostly follow alongable but enough changes have happened in like the mograph um uh menu and how mograph works especially fields um and the way that effectors work that it is a little bit tough to follow along with some of those really old tutorials from early early early grayscale girls so maybe we need to like re-remaster them i gotta like do i dress up like it's the uh the late 20s 2000s i think 20s would be funny like i'm just in a zuma suit and um yeah no you're in a flapper dress i feel like that would be that would be funnier look guys i'll do it for you if you want we'll just do re really remaster the classics what do you think rachel i gotta get word we gotta get wardrobe on this one all right that'll be fun uh gonna regret this recording when disney buys grayscale gorilla you gotta really watch out yeah so disney's gonna own us all here really soon so we better we better play nice with the mousey play nice adam thank you guys chad thank you buddy um yeah dude thank you guys for all the questions thank you for joining us uh stay tuned we're gonna try to do this again in another couple weeks uh so if you're watching on youtube hit the uh subscribe you hit the notifications what that'll do is let you know not only when new videos are uh dropping we have all these new videos coming out next week all about the new stuff uh in plus cannot wait to show you guys that but also a week after that we'll have um another live show so if you want to make sure you don't miss this uh do the notifications thing that way you'll get notified that's what notifications are um other than that thank you guys for all the uh questions let me throw up the um i said throw up now too chad it's uh i know it's contagious throw out the chat here so we could all say goodbye uh thank you guys for all the good questions thank you for uh joining us and for the plus members as well i know we reached out to you guys specifically and had you guys uh join us in the show we appreciate you guys uh we built plus exactly for you guys to to help um speed all this stuff up and to uh have access to all these tools so uh we're gonna look into these scripts uh and hopefully we'll have an announcement probably not with next week's drop but maybe soon after we'll figure out a a date to get you guys those lens scripts uh maybe these rotation scripts too but um we'll uh we'll get that to you guys as well uh happy hour absolutely happy hour cheers chad i i have a a warm beer now but that's okay i'm gonna i'm gonna save that one for after water that's just straight vodka right yep keep rendering folks happy rendering guys uh we love all your questions thank you guys so much for joining us uh and um uh um um what else we will see you guys real soon stay tuned next week for some big announcements and if not we'll see you next week and all right two weeks from now on another live show thank you team uh for helping get this going i know many of you are in the um chat so thank you grace gorilla team for getting all this rocking and rolling and uh we will see you guys soon all right one of these days i'll i'll get the guitar out travis we'll i'll i'll play us off the live stream but not today not today my friend today it's all about singing here we go no no please just kidding okay get me out of here bye everybody thank you chad uh regardless you guys we'll see you in another show really soon bye everybody bye guys [Music] you

Channel: Greyscalegorilla

Views: 6,889

Rating: 4.9047618 out of 5

Keywords: Greyscalegorilla Live, Greyscalegorilla, Q&A, Chad Ashley, Nick Campbell, Greyscalegorilla Plus, c4d q&A, Lighting, 3d lighting, lighting tips in 3d, Cinema 4d, c4d, area light maps, gsg area light maps, greyscalegorilla area light maps, hdri link, gsg hdri link, greyscalegorilla hdri link, octane renderer, octane c4d, octane cinema 4d, octane otoy

Id: V7BS0DlAg6I

Length: 108min 54sec (6534 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021