Redshift / Cinema 4D Compositing Tutorial

today I'm going to teach you how to light composite 3d objects into a image or a video file using cinema 4d and redshift let's get started okay let's show you how to composite something in cinema 4d using the redshift render engine so let's set up a little scene and all we did is set up a sphere and a plane just right here and the next thing we need is a background a background in order to see where we want to position these objects so let's do that next and the way I like to do it is create a new standard cinema 4d material and I'm gonna uncheck reflectance and color and leave luminance because that's the only thing we need then I'm going to find a backplate that we can use and so now we have a a background for the illuminance Channel we're gonna create a background object now if we put this material on the background object we can see we have our image right there and the reason why this is helpful in our viewer is because now we can move our camera to match the correct perspective so that's the first thing you want to do it's also very important to make sure you understand your footage so that the lines are all straight in your image or footage this will make it so you can easily match the same distortion later in compositing so now what we need to do is light this object with the same scene but we're gonna need a couple of things to do that and the first thing we need is what's called a dome light so here is my dome light for redshift I'm just going to click on this and now if you click right here on path we can find a reflective environment that matches this so I have this HDR spherical map that looks like one of these and I'm going to hit yes and now let's take a look and see what's happening in our render so now we can see we have this object here but if we're comparing we can see that we can't quite see our background yet so we need to make sure that we add that in and over here on our dome light there is a backplate check so we're going to check that and now we need to specify the same image that we used before now we have that same image that we had in our viewer so the next problem is how do we eliminate this ground but keep these shadows so we can use it and here's what we got to do we need to click on our plane object the one that's capturing our shadows right click go down to redshift tags and then add a redshift object tag over invisibility I always check this on and then in matte we're gonna hit check this on as well and we're gonna need to turn the matte on so now it's cutting it's making that plane completely disappear but we still don't have those shadows and if you look below there is in fact a shadow enable so if I click that we now can see the shadows being shone from our sphere so if I move my sphere off the ground you'll see that there is now contact shadows in actual shadows that are being cast from the HDR but we want to match the same light direction we can see from this tree the light is really strong coming from behind so we're gonna use this as a source so if I rotate my HDR light we can see the shadow move and we want to position this in a direction that would match the same as the street or at least coming from the same source and I feel like that's looking pretty good so there's a couple more things I want to do to make this look a little bit more realistic and one of those things is how this object affects the ground plane or this environment and how the environment affects our object so right now this plane is transparent but we still can give it a tributo will affect the sphere let me demonstrate that for you so let's create a material and we're going to put this redshift material on this plane so let's just drag this on here and the what this is gonna allow us to do is have reflections and actually bounce the same color onto this object so if we look at render right now we don't have any reflections but if I increase the reflection scale you now see that we have this nice reflection from our object and what you can do is now you can start messing with the reflection properties in order to get what you need so if I increase the roughness you'll see that now it's affecting the roughness in here which is super helpful and definitely can add a lot more photo realism we can add some texture in here or whatever you want just to make this feel a lot more realistic another thing we can do is add a color on this plane that will bounce up and hit our object to demonstrate this I'm just gonna throw a really bright red and what's happening is this plane is invisible but its properties are red so it's bouncing this red color up and hitting our object now you wouldn't want to do a color like that but you may want to do something that's closer to the ground or actually project the ground texture onto the object which will also give you that more realistic look so if I turn the weight of this down you'll see that it's it's really dark but if I want to fill in some of those shadows with that same kind of warm light I can do so by emulating this by just adding something in the diffuse and it will help us do that now I want to show you how this object can affect the ground right now we're capturing shadows and reflection but you can also catch the diffuse or the color to bounce onto the floor and I'm going to create a new red shift material but this one's going to be for the sphere let me just drop this on the sphere and there we go so have this reflective object but if I make the fear green we can see there we go and what we can do on this plane object tag that we have is increase the diffuse scale and if you look it's really subtle but it makes a big difference is it's going to fill in some of the color from this object because the light hits an object and will reflect the color so if I increase that you'll now see that there's this green color being bounced onto the floor which definitely helps for that photo realism now in this case if I wanted to make this look a little bit more real there's a couple of really cool things you can do and one simple trick is just adding some bump in since this is a bumpy road so let's do that really quick and I'm going to use the shader graph editor so in this shader graph what we first need to add is a bump map and again this is going on our plane so let's just plug this bump map into overall bump input and we're just going to do noise I'm going to plug this in like so so now you can see we're getting a little bit of that bump texture in here and that can also help us sell it this is a real street and that this thing's interacting with our environment a little bit more realistically now if you want to get a little more advanced what you can do is we can take this background image and project it but into the bump map so if you type in camera map and here in the node graph editor and you plug this into the input of the bump map and let's just paste that same texture in the path and now we need to specify the camera we want to use so we would want to use the camera from this perspective so they have this little camera picker and we're just going to click on the camera that we want and the cool thing is now you can see how our bump is being affected by this same perspective so you can see it's going to get hit by certain things certain cracks in the same place which can be very very helpful when trying to composite something like this and another thing that I want to show you is creating some type of fall-off in your reflections so what we can do is add let's go back to our shader graph and you can type in for now and we would want to plug this into the reflection and the weight and this is just going to pretty much create a gradient for where how far your your reflections go down so we can slowly like mask it out if you will to a certain place so if I toggle this you'll start seeing that it'll start getting cut off at a certain point it's just a really helpful way to make your reflections fall-off a little bit nicer and I probably would also increase the roughness of these reflections okay so we're starting to get something that's looking pretty good and starting to feel like it's interacting with this environment a little bit more another really cool thing is you can keep adding lights in here to help emulate the realism if you want and you can use any of these lights in redshift so let me just bring this in here and you'll see that now we have these lights that we can just add in if we feel like we're not quite getting the HDR maybe isn't quite getting the look we want or getting all the detail that we need so this is super helpful when doing stuff like this and so you can just customize a lot of this stuff the way you feel looks best in your composite once we're really happy with maybe the look of this the next thing you want to do is set it up so that you can actually bring this in with an alpha and recompose at this over that same image now if you click on this tab right here this is our alpha and it's all white right now which means it's gonna render out this background and we don't want that the things we want are the sphere and the reflections and diffusion and all the stuff that's spilling out onto the ground so I'm going to click on the alpha mode so we can kind of see what we're doing and I know we need to remove that background so let's click on the dome light and you can see they have this alpha channel replace if I click on this and you bring it down to zero you'll see that now our backplate has completely disappeared but if I look at it in the RGB you'll see it's still there and that's super helpful so you know that it will be gone in your render if I crank this up to one it's going to bring back full opacity so you won't be able to use that so make sure that's a zero and then we can re put in that back plate now the plane is still there so that's another thing we need to look at so let's click on that red shift tag and you can see they have the same thing here so we can actually turn on the effect alpha and now you can see we have these are some shadows and different reflections as well and if I turn this on and off you'll see that now it's capturing that stuff and if you turn this alpha all the way down it's actually going to hide all of the properties that we just put in so you don't want to do that so make sure when you're right you're setting this up to render that your background is transparent but your reflections and everything else remain at this point you'd be ready to render out your scene and bring it into your favorite compositing software or Photoshop now I want to talk to you about render settings and optimizing your render settings so that you are well prepared for compositing so let's click up here in the render settings for red shift and we're going to talk about some of these things in some ways that can help you guys get cleaner renders so if I do a pre you ready right now just by clicking this we'll be able to see how this thing's looking now if I just did it this way it does take a little bit longer and that's because it's having to calculate all the space outside but if you're wanting to check certain areas it's smart to use the render region and this is a great way to just check certain areas especially if you're looking for noise and just check those areas to see how they're looking so we're just gonna select this area and hit render and now this thing goes a million times faster because we're only rendering a certain area but we still can check and see if this is looking good the next thing you can do is click on this take a snapshot so what this is gonna do is snapshot just this render really quick so we can update and then compare so right now we have 4 min sample so I can turn this up to 16 and this one up to 32 and I'm gonna hit render again now I'm gonna take another snapshot and now I have something to compare it so here's one and there's two so this is our new one and this is our our first one and you'll see also the time difference so you'll know how long your renders taking this one took just hardly any more time and you can see that it was cleaning it up quite a bit more this one did it looks good and now it's looking a little bit better so let's optimize this and/or make this look even better so I'm gonna do 32 and it's 64 and let's go back to our render and let's hit render again and let's see if we can clean up even more of this noise okay let's take another snapshot so now we have this one this one and this one so you can see the more samples you give it the better it get so here's the first one the second and the third so it's starting to get better over time and if you see this line right here that's actually not from the render that's from the render region so it's it's rendering that whole image and this new area so you'll have to really focus in on what we're hangin right here but you definitely can see a increase in quality as we increase these samples and our time difference is going up not too much not enough for me to feel like it's making a really big difference so I'm a crank this one up to 64 and 128 so let's try this again and see how this one looks and let's add another snapshot so let's compare our newest one this one to our last one you're starting to see it clean up more and more and let's compare this newest one to the first one so you can see a very large difference between the two and the time difference you know it's it's about double so it's a little bit more but for quality it definitely looks much much better so I feel like that's gonna be enough sample since we're gonna be pretty far away from this object but that's just a really great way when you guys are increasing your samples and stuff make sure you do it you can do it that way another thing you can do to increase your render speed and your quality is going to the override samples so this allows you to just increase samples in certain areas so for example let's go back to let's reset this to default and maybe we can see let's just go let's click here and we're just going to override the samples in the reflection and instead of replacing them we're gonna scale them by 4 and I'm going to hit render so now we're not doing all the samples but we are doing reflections and we'll take another snapshot so let's compare this snapshot to the first one so you can see in the reflections at least it did clean up a lot of those fireflies and we could keep increasing this or or you could replace the samples but this is just a scaling it so if I did eight and we go back in here I'm gonna take another snapshot let's take a look at this one versus our first one definitely an increase in getting rid of some of those fireflies and we still didn't increase the samples overall but there's so many different things in here so you could go through and increase the samples for each of these and then just test out certain areas if you're having problems with reflections or or your lights or anything like that you can do that right here so we could even increase the light samples so let's do that and I'm going to hit render so we're scaling them by four and we'll take another snapshot so let's take a look at this one versus that it's definitely better but and we're starting to see some better quality stuff overall but not too much not enough for me to care so what I'm gonna do and again this is just so you guys can know how to optimize your renders and clean these things up but I'm gonna go back to what I had originally which was 64 by 128 I felt like that was my best looking one and at this time I'm gonna turn off the render region and I'm gonna render this entire image out and kind of see what this is looking like okay you can see our render is over and it did take 21 seconds to render but we can see the result is really good it's nice and clean I'm not seeing any fireflies or anything that I'm too concerned about and our alpha looks nice and clean as well so that's how you kind of set up some of your render stuff and making sure that it looks nice so next thing is we just have to set up the file path and make sure that that's looking good all right so if you go to output and the first thing I need to do is I'm just gonna do this current frame so I'm just gonna set up as current frame so it doesn't do it animation here's your resolution and all that fun stuff so you can set up that right here your frame rate again I'm just doing an image right now so I'm okay with this then you want to go into the save and you want to do a regular image if you are doing multi passes yes you would have to set up the multi pass setup but in this case we are not and you need to make sure that alpha channel is selected that way we do get that alpha Channel so make sure that is selected you could get a straight alpha or a separate alpha anything like that I'm just gonna check the Alpha Channel right there another file format that I like to use is the open EXR it will give us the best resolution at 32-bit that way we don't we can retain a lot of the dynamic range and information that we need so from there you just want to set up your file path and hit the render button and you should be ready to go okay I hit render and here's our rendered image and if I go over into the layer you can actually see the Alpha made it as well so we can see that this is our our beauty or our image and we have this nice alpha so this is going to help us be able to composite this over our background image so let's jump over into compositing software and show you how that's done alright so here we are nuke and I'm gonna show you how to composite this thing together this is just gonna be something really really simple nothing too crazy but I want to show you kind of the workflow so right here we've imported the the rendered out image and this is what it will look like and over here is our backplate and what we need to do is we need to first check that we have our alpha so I'm going to a and you can see we have all of that our shadows and reflections and all that good stuff and you can see right there but right now if I let's say do to transform and start moving this thing around you can see it's moving the entire background with it so that's not gonna work so what you have to do is what's called a pre molt in right here in nuke and this basically cuts out that background for us or it it basically applies the alpha to the RGB and then we have this background and we're going to reformat it so it's the 1920 by 1080 same resolution so now this and this should line up correctly and I will simply merge these together and emerge is basically a composite mode so think of these each that's a layer this is a layer and this is where they meet so as you go down a nuke you start adding more layers so anything in between your pre molt and you are merged you could add in your grade nodes so we could just if this to bright me but bring it down or maybe we want to push a little bit more yellow in this and in our gamma as well maybe we want to push a little bit more you know warmth there as well and lift it up and then you could add a transform now the transform is going to do some weird stuff because if I look at this alone you can see those shadows actually picked up part of the background so in this compositing case you can't do that you would have to make sure that in cinema 4d it is exactly where you want now if you want to learn more about multi passes and setting up different layers you can go check out my VFX crash course at the effects crash course calm to learn how to create an entire scene using multi passes properly so with that we can just see that you know I'm adding some simple grades and one thing that a lot of people do with CG is blur it because there's off you know there's something with CG being too sharp so I always like to add in a blur so we could just slightly soften this thing up so it doesn't feel as crisp because cameras don't shoot nearly as sharp as our CG renders so it's always good to kind of soften things up a little bit you could do a glow if you wanted you don't have to you know just fun things like this but this is where you're able to kind of add in your your own creativity and always at the very end once these are merged together this is just kind of a good process or a good thing to have is when you do CG or anything integrating integrating stuff is you need to match grain so this plate I don't know if I maybe all the grain got removed it looks like it's pretty clean so what you want to do at the end of all of your comps is match your grain or add grain back in so this is just this should become a very common thing when doing CG I do need to add one more thing to make sure this thing is merging properly okay so now if I turn the grain on and off you can see we're getting grain in there this is obviously a little too intense I would probably never go this intense but when you add grain back in if you do this to your mat paintings or anything like that this is definitely going to help things feel a lot more real so that's just a little trick when you're compositing your CG elements add grain back in first remove it remove distortion and then add grain and all the dirty stuff back in it'll just make your thing feel more alive well that's it guys I hope this tutorial is super helpful hopefully you guys can composite some really cool things go out shoot something with your phone track it in cinema 4d added some cool stuff with using c40 and redshift and I'd love to see what you guys create so share with me I am VFX under - central on my Instagram so go ahead and give that a follow and over to subscribe hit that notification bell I do live streams every week or maybe every other week so we'll just see how it goes and thank you for watching

Channel: VFX Central

Views: 37,060

Rating: 4.9596329 out of 5

Keywords: c4d, redshift compositing, c4d redshift compositing, Redshift for cinema 4d, cinema 4d redshift, c4d red shift, redshift tutorial cinema 4d, redshiftc4d, redshift settings, Redshift c4d, c4d redshift, how to use redshift, redshift tutorial c4d, intro to redshift, redshift tutorial, redshift render, beginner redshift, redshift renderer, cinema4d, vfx, visualeffects, redshift, composting, vfxcentral, lighting, motion graphics, Cinema 4D, Redshift, redshift3d, redshift quickstart, gpu

Id: 7WW0fk6rGfQ

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019