Redshift Studio Lighting 01 - Product Shot Tutorial with Vincent Schwenk

hello everyone really excited this tutorial is a collaboration between myself and very talented and very inspiring vincent schwenk i've got his website pulled up here if you're not familiar with vincent's work definitely go check out his website and go check him out on instagram and more relevantly go check him out on patreon so little about me i'm zach or i go by zach on instagram and youtube and if you're interested you can check out some of my work and my reel on my website in addition to 3d work i've also been a professional photographer for a little over 10 years now i have some sample work up here my work has ranged from portraits to product shots weddings interiors art installation travel fine art and while that may seem like a wide range it really all comes down to working with light and it's no different in 3d so i'm sure you've seen vincent's tutorials on setting up a beauty product shot and his last video ended with the image here on the left he set up a really beautiful bright airy scene the products stand out nicely from the background the lighting is bright and soft you can really see all the materials of the products like the foil the paint or ink on the label and the plastic and wood supports so i thought it'd be interesting to take a different approach and do a more low-key darker image so i'll walk through how i would set up all the lights as though we were actually on a photography set and then i'll go through my thought process on placement and scale and brightness and go over some of the things to look out for when dealing with lights in redshift all right let's head into cinema 4d this is going to take a while okay here we are in cinema 4d and here is vincent's scene he sent over let's hit render here in our render view and take a look and there we go okay so what i'd like to do is just really start from scratch with lighting so i'm going to take all of instance lights and turn them off i'm going to be left with this generic front lighting from cinema so i'm going to turn off the render view and i want to come out and take a look at our setup take this to hidden line okay so we've got just a floor and a background plane and now no lights let me just hide these okay the first thing i'm thinking it might be nice to bring in some shadows on our background to sort of break up this flat area so we can tackle this a couple ways we can build out some walls and make some windows and add some tree elements or leaf elements to sort of cast shadows on our scene but what i've been experimenting with recently has been filming my own shadows on the walls here at my house so i've got an example here of something that i filmed just with my phone of the light coming in through the windows and getting some nice shadows and some motion of the the trees in the yard sort of flowing in the wind for this scene we don't really need the animation but if you were doing an animated shot the option is there you can actually pipe this texture in as an animated png sequence and use your area light as a projector so what we're going to do is add a new area light to our scene and immediately i'm going to go and scale this down and what i want to do is pull this over to the side and sort of rotate it and the idea is that i want this light sort of oops just raking across the background so i want it pretty close and i want it at kind of an angle here and let's see so this is sort of we've got so far let's turn on our render view and see this just regular light area light so it's really powerful right now let's bring this down okay so under the area light i'm going to go into the path this over a little bit so i've just selected that same sequence i end up playing on the screen and under animation we can go mode and you can do simple loop or ping-pong back and forth um for instance i can just go to simple and then you can go to detect frames and it'll automatically detect the start and end frame you can actually set the frame rate here but under the general tab what we need to do in order to see this is set our spread down very low so as you can see if we set our spread to zero we're sharpening up this this image we can use this light as a projector so right now i want to take a look at how this light is being projected so let's move it down here we go so i kind of want to have a little closer to the wall and have this stretched a little bit and sort of frame this up so right now i'm just looking at how these shapes play with the shapes of our light play with the shapes of our products we're going to put some rim lights on these so really what i'd like to do is set this up so we have some nice contrast between our foreground and our background and i'm going to pull this over and maybe to bring it up a little bit and maybe angle this down just a little bit more of an angle i'm really looking at the way these products are placed so it would be kind of nice to bring in some of the same angle so this light is sort of giving us this diagonal background element so before i go any further i take this down ah there we go all right let's name this background projector okay we might need to tweak this a little bit more as we go forward but yeah like maybe we do want a little bit more [Music] angled okay yeah something like that you know i think this is nice and looking at vincent's original render the set design and art direction this rustic wood along with the products themselves uh being these sort of natural creams or lotions and the color palette as well this sort of topes and all give this sense of of nature so i think this works and i think having the shadows of these plants in the background echo the same sort of concept you know if this was a a product shot with uh something more techy like a phone or a laptop this might not necessarily work and maybe something more geometric would be a better fit but i think this works nicely with this with this setup so what i'm going to do is just pull this down just a little bit take the exposure down a little bit i just want it to be kind of subtle the next thing i'm going to do is just copy this same light i'm just going to hold down control and move this over and oops i'm going to rotate it and another trick here is to go up to cameras and then use camera set active object as camera and now we can see through it so what i want to do is just come over here and center and give and give my objects the sort of same dappled light as a starting point so you can see here i'm kind of getting some nice some nice lighting on my on my main products i'm gonna go ahead and try to find a pretty good angle and what i'm doing is focusing on the products themselves i'm not so interested in getting a lot of light on these uh wooden wooden posts right now just kind of want to pull this in and this is especially important if you were going to turn this into an animation i think it's nice to have this sort of light flowing from the background and also have this sort of um fluttering or flowing light on the products themselves i think it um i think it can kind of look a little bit jarring if only in the background has this element although it could work as well but i think this is sort of nice to just pull it in and keep it feeling part of the same scene yeah okay so i'm gonna call this projector products okay first thing before i forget come back and just do default camera again before i end up moving these lights all right so what i want to do now is set up a rim light to separate these from the background everything's sort of getting lost right here so i'm going to pull a new area light in scale it way down pull it up like this i'm looking at the size of this as well this scene if we were in a studio we were lighting this with actual lights a strip light or strip softbox would most commonly be used for something like this and i think it's important to remember the scale of your scene you know if we were going to bring in a light and it was going to be like this big this soft box i mean you know that's like a i don't know ten thousand dollar softbox that's gigantic who has that it's not really something you know the outside of like automobile photography uh something that would be used especially on something this this small so i think it's important to keep in mind the scale of things in your scene the scale of your lights the placement of lights um would it be that way in the real world try to keep things as close to real-world scale as possible i think that helps with the with the realism so right now this light is you know way too bright but it's also i think kind of kind of close let's see here so another thing i want to prevent is i don't want this light falling on to the background so under the area light i'm going to come down and take the spread down and this would be the equivalent of like putting a grid on your soft box let me pull that up actually when you have a soft box generally the light is just going in all different directions but putting this grid over it sort of channels the light directly at your subject so you can see here like using grids sort of almost like barn doors you would sort of limit the amount of spread the light would have and that's sort of the same thing we're doing here is by limiting the spread although it is a little bit different inside of redshift um we're getting closer and closer to like a spotlight where this this light is going to produce even though it's like a big rectangle i found that the the shadows tend to be sharper as well so hopefully eventually redshift will sort of come into line with more of like what arnold does with their lights where it's sort of like these barn doors built in but for right now we can work around that so i'm just going to lower this intensity a lot because what i want to do is just sort of hit the sides of some of these and you can see how bright this is i'm gonna pull down the exposure and i just want to get a nice little rim light on here to separate these products and the wood from the background i think this maybe we can pull this up a little bit i might want to make it a little taller okay yeah you can see this how much this does to separate the products and these foreground elements from the background this nice separation here so we're going to want to do the same thing on the other side this is sort of blending into the background we want to separate like this area in here any place that you know if you squint you're starting to see like a blending like in this area we're seeing like this is all sort of blending together into darkness this is sort of blending together here with this lighter area of the background there's no definition down in here so let's hold down control and copy this light over so what i'm looking at here let's make this a little bigger okay here let me reorganize this okay okay so what i'm looking at here is the way this highlight hits this lid and what i'd like to do is move this even further back so we're right on the edge and it falls off going forward let's move this closer and angle it a little bit more i'm going to make this a little bit wider so it's more of a square than the other one let's see here okay so that's nice okay so for this light this rim light here that's providing this edge and this edge just rename this okay so for this left rim light what i'd like to do is ease this fall off so it's not so harsh actually we can maybe even bring this a little bit wider and maybe increase the spread slightly so what i like to do is just soften this this fall off you can see here along this edge so i take this spread down it's becoming a very hard line but the spread also affects not only the how wide the the beam of light is but also the softness of the reflection i just want to take the yeah be up a little bit okay it's going to be like little tweaks here and there but i just wanted to move the background a little bit just the way it interacted with these the highlights here so i kind of want to play off this sort of dark and light so this edge here this highlighted edge is a little bit more uh contrasted with the dark of the projection behind it so i wanted this to fall more in the shadow same with this so bringing up this darks in the background so there's more contrast here on the edge now one thing i'm noticing is that there's the spoil on vincent's package design you know a lot of effort went into these elements this print package design is is really key so we want to highlight these things so all these debossed foil [Music] the different materials and you know can show on vincent's original rendering like this is super nice we've got this glossy material contrasted against this more matte blob and this reflection here highlights the difference between these materials perfectly so we can see that this is different than this material so these little elements here they really go to show the high-end package design of these products so any element like that should be highlighted and really show the care that went into making and producing these objects so this area right in here we want to make sure that this reads as this green foil and right now we're not really seeing any difference between the left and the right side so this could just be you know a bright green spot you know not necessarily foil so what i'd like to do is block some of this light that's hitting this foil and if you're on set on a photography set what you do is set up a flag you'd have probably a c-stand with a piece of cinefoil or something on it or some sort of foam board in front of this to block the light from from this soft box so what we can do is just kind of do the same thing set up a plane i'm going to set this to z plus and scale it way down i want to put it right under the left rim light and reset the psr so we can see it pop right into the center of this light so if i move this over and sort of scale this up we can see what this does it's sort of blocking the reflection but if you notice that's happening here in the in the lid and also in the foil but if we bring this down we should start to see it scale it down right so i've got this little flag here that causes this little break in the reflection so now we get that sense that there's a different material here than just straight on bright green we can move this a little bit and get this right where we want it we may come back and tweak this a little bit make it thinner not that then and we can get this really close and if this was right in the scene like let's say we wanted it and the only way to really get it to be hitting this foil and not the lid yeah i'll show you because we go up a little bit we're gonna get it in the in the lid and i don't really care about that i want this only on the foil but uh you know if it's in the scene we can just add a redshift tag to it or shift object tag go to visibility override and primary array visible just check it off and that way we're able to place these things wherever we need them so we can see now that this has that look the gradients in the foil sort of tell the viewer oh okay this is this is sort of a reflective surface and sort of that shorthand that happens you know over here we can see that this is nice like these gradients in here let us know that this is the silver material tricks like this are used all the time even in like product shots like you know iphones or things where we have this these gradients from our light sources to let us know that the the surface is highly reflective so that i think is looking pretty good right there for now so i'm just going to sort of scan over the scene here and i think uh you know one thing we need to focus on here is getting some light onto these these posts um you know these were chosen for this scene we need to maybe not make them the star of the image but we need to know what they're made out of and we need to know that they're there so right now this is very confusing we're not sure like what these what these objects are so i'm gonna pull in another light and what i'd like to do is set the light up at an angle so i want this pretty harsh so if you come over here i want this coming from this direction like raking across the surface because this is such a rough surface here i'll show you right so if i move this area light back and scale it down a little bit we're basically putting this kind of right in front of the camera and turn on the render view and turn on the light right just need to [Music] take the intensity down but you can see if this light is directly in front of the camera we get this sort of um like direct flash photography look but it really flattens this out never really getting a sense of how rough this this texture is this has got a lot of displacement on it and you know even the model itself has these sort of uh like holes and chunks you're not really getting a sense of of that if the light is directly in front of the camera so what you want to do is move this light over to the side i'm just going to rotate it around and move it all the way over so what we want to do is get the light raking across the surface so you can see how much rougher this looks you're really bringing out the details if you're lighting something from a very harsh angle let's go back into the camera and use active object as camera you can see here how we can just see the face of these and that's showing in here we're just getting the light coming across the front of each of these wood planks but what i don't really care for is how this is lighting our scene pretty evenly and lighting these wood planks from top to bottom so let's hop out of this go back to our regular perspective view and i'm going to make this light kind of a long soft box and let's kind of rotate it up at an angle and come back in and make this more like a spotlight i'm going to take the spread down so we're just going to hit the tops of these wood planks let's take this spread down even more see we kind of get this stripe of light across the surface now it's getting to be way too bright so we're going to take this and decrease the exposure i'm just going to adjust the angle of this a little bit and let's bring it up and angle it down what i'm looking at here and what i'm liking about the placement of this light right now is the shadow that it's um it's casting from this little jar we're getting some of the separation between this wood plank and the product so that's kind of nice um i think this may i think we can make this just a little bit bigger so we kind of get more light up here and some light a little bit lower but i kind of like this fall off because really we kind of want to center our focus around the center of this image and really we want to want our eye to focus on these products so if it gets darker towards the bottom that's fine we want the most contrast in our scene to be up here with sort of this triangle you know we're going to focus on the text on this tube and um the text here vincent's name and here so we want these to be focal points with i think this one the main focal point so we want to focus our attention here but if this gets to be too bright or these areas here because there's so much contrast you know we've got this white wood with a black background and all these shapes that are forming in here and between these sort of negative shapes in between the the products and these wood planks that's going to draw our eye down into this area so we want to kind of even this out so right now i'm just going to take the level down even more just want to get a sense of the material what this is made out of but we don't want it to dominate the image okay what i do want to look at let's turn off all the other lights except for [Music] this fill light i think i want to get a little bit more light on this front this front plank and let's maybe try to increase the spread just a little bit okay kind of liking that all right let's turn another lights back on so i think now would be a good time to take a look at this material so this worked really well in vincent's high key shot to have these wood planks be pretty light you know almost a white but i think in this scene we want to bring these back down to kind of match our background color which uh kind of want to darken that up as well so we can either take the light intensity down in the background we can try that or we could bring the material color down but let's start with the light intensity maybe something like that and then for the wood looks like this is a mega skins asset with the diffuse color piped into a color correct and vincent has increased the gamma and lower the contrast and the saturation on this to get this white look if we pipe this directly into the diffuse color we can see the original which is way too saturated for what we want way too red so we're going to keep this color correct in place but tweak it a little bit so i'm just going to take the gamma down and i'm going to take the saturation down as well and what i'm looking at here is just something to kind of match this background color because what i'd like to happen is these we sort of get a sense of what these are but i'd like it you know if you squint your eyes these kind of blend in with the background we want our main products to stand out so if these planks in the background are around the same tones that'll allow the tubes and the jar to be the main focus i'm going to bring the saturation down uh maybe can come up just a little bit but maybe the gamma comes down a little bit more yeah maybe something like that now these are starting to blend together okay yeah i think that helps a lot okay so looking over this image we need a light to brighten this area up we need a light on the brand name of our product here we need some more rim light for our lid here and maybe some more rim light on our foil label and we also need to differentiate this aluminum tube from the background right now you know if you squint it almost looks like the tube here is floating above the cap so we want to bring in some highlights along these edges and just let the viewer know that this is a shiny aluminum material okay so let's first of all let's name this light before we get confused and this plane we will label left jar foil flag so that's this area here all right so let's make a new area light and scale it down and we'll move it back in space we want this to stand out and this let's zoom in on it this tube is kind of twisted in a way where maybe we want our light coming from this angle right here so what i'm going to do is go back to cameras and use camera set active object as camera and now i'm going to rotate around and get we'll get this lined up where we want it so maybe something like like this and all i'm focusing on here is just this area so we can turn this area light into a disk and we can immediately go to the spread and take it way down because really i kind of just want a little spotlight on this area we need to bring the level down and we'll turn on our redshift renderview and it is way too bright and also way too big so let's go to our default camera here and scale this down we can bring our exposure way down on this light okay i still think it's too big i just want to focus on this light let's go back and use it as a camera again so i want to focus the light on this text but i don't want to lose the sort of waviness of the tube if i have the light kind of straight on where like in this viewport right now i can't tell that there are waves in this it doesn't cast any shadows on these waves so it flattens this out so i kind of want to get an angle where you can see here the the wire frame i can tell that there are waves in this and it's the same thing with the light the light is casting shadows on these um sort of over the undulating surface so that's kind of nice i don't want to lose that detail but i do want this text to be legible so something like this is looking pretty good i do want to maybe feather it out a little bit maybe it's a little bit too harsh right here and let's turn off every other light just to see this go back to our default camera and i think we can get away with scaling this down a little bit and then making it a little bit softer yeah maybe something like that okay let's turn on the lights yeah okay we'll leave that for now turn this off and name it okay so what we want to do is the pretty much the same thing but over here on the main logo for our jar so let's i'm just going to control drag and make a new light and immediately go over and make that our active camera and let's swing around and i just want to kind of focus this right on the center of this jar maybe maybe raise it up a little bit because i wouldn't mind to have some shadow underneath this jar okay let's take a look let's label this okay that's not bad let's tweak this a little bit though i kind of want this to be a little bit more focused on just the type i'm going to rotate this a little bit up i'm just gonna make it a little bit brighter a little bit sharper whoops i also like that this is catching this highlight on this debossed foil section and then really drawing our eye to the typography here in the center of this logo area so let's see what it looks like with all the other lights on i think we can come a little bit further around the center let's go back here maybe if we yeah i think that's looking pretty good one thing i'm noticing here while i'm looking at this jar i'm not liking how harsh this light is falling off here on this on the lid um so there's a couple things we can do we can either go back and make that light uh give it more of a spread so that is the left rim light i believe let's turn it off yes so we can either increase the spread but it's pretty high already so i think a better option would be to go up and add a shader graph and here we go okay and under the color i want to add a ramp general color so the ramp i want set to alt sorry i want that set to uv map and i believe we want horizontal and i want white in the center but i want it to fade to black on both sides so that's going to be the left side this is the right side so you can see this as i drag this slider over we're getting this further and further kind of sort of eating away at the light but that allows us to let this fade a little bit nicer so here's the before we had the reflection going here but it's sort of a harsh cut off and here's after yeah and that's feeling a little bit better for me and actually we don't even need this one in this case i can keep this rim light on the edge as bright as possible so yeah okay great all right getting there okay so what i'd like to do now is add a backlight slash rim light for the edge of this jar here and the edges of the aluminum parts of these tubes and i think we can do that with one light but uh yeah let's see i'm gonna turn this off and go back to our default camera in our perspective view and let's make a new area light and scale it way down i'm gonna rotate this until it's almost facing the camera and what i want to do is push this back behind all these elements i'm going to kind of rotate it towards this the edge of this jar let's make it a little smaller let's see yeah maybe somewhere around there so let's see what that looks like okay not bad very bright let's knock down the intensity a little bit bring it way down we need to move this over because i want to get this section in there as well looks like we need to extend this make it a little bit wider maybe bring it back so i think we can have this do all of this at once lower it lower it down looking at how far down on the edge of this jar it's hitting and i also don't need so much light coming in on the tops of the wood planks maybe just a little but this is still way too bright so let's knock down the exposure a bit okay that's not bad but what i'm seeing here is how uniform this is so this is like pure white and then black and then pure white the same thing here we're getting this fall off to be pretty abrupt so i kind of want to do the same thing i did in the last light so i'm going to stop this and let's name this center backlight and let's go to add shader graph for the ramp i'll select uv map and connect this to the general color and i believe we want this to be horizontal and let's take a look i'm gonna adjust the light position a little bit and bring it over and maybe extend it so another thing we can look at here is the spread as well so we're making this light a little bit sharper but it still has this gradient on it so we should be able to pull pull these in i think i'm going to move this down a little bit and maybe angle it up i think it's still way too bright just gonna drop the exposure even more i'm going to turn off the other lights while i adjust this just to see exactly what this is doing so i'm liking that a little bit better i've got some variation here between this side and this side and even within this shape here we've got a nice little gradient happening in here and it's not so harsh on the side of this jar and we're also picking up a little bit more of the shape of this wooden plank here we've got a little bit of a shadow coming in and it's also not getting as much of a glare off of the edges of these wood pieces in the center and on the right so that is feeling a little bit better to me because if even just with this one light on if i squint this area here here and here what stands out the most and that's what we want we want the brightest parts to be on our product so i'm going to turn the rest of these lights back on and see how this fits in looks pretty good i think this is a little bit too bright still let's take the intensity multiplier down a little bit i'm going to bring this edge back using the ramp a little bit more okay good while we're working on this area in here another thing i'd like to do is brighten up the area just above the cap i feel like this area in here could use a little bit of something to reflect we can either do that by another area light but i think in this case it doesn't need to be very strong it can be pretty subtle so what i think we can do is use a plane and i'm just going to scale this way down and kind of make this like a long rectangle i'm going to drop this right below the cap i'm going to move it forward and kind of angle it up a little bit kind of like this i'm just going to ctrl drag to copy our redshift object tag onto the plane but as you can see already this gives this aluminum texture something to reflect and now it's this sort of gray here but let's make a new material for it okay i'm going to drag a ramp in and i'm going to do the same thing i've done for the area lights so let's just actually just send this straight over to the output and take a look i'm going to disable the primary ray invisibility and drag our material onto the plane so we can see it so we want to change this to horizontal and do the same thing i want some fall off on both sides you know something like this and i will put this right into the diffuse color and that's going to make it pretty subtle if um let's go back and turn off primary ray visible you can see here we're giving that something to reflect we can make this even more narrow we also don't want this plane to cast shadows there we go it's a little better and let's just center it over the cap maybe angle it a little bit because what i'm looking for is more of these gradients in here we see this we get some sort of brighter areas and some lighter areas of reflection we can see the reflection of the cap just to give the sense that this is a shiny almost mirror-like surface we can take the strength of this down by just taking our brightest part of the ramp and knocking it down yeah and i think that's a little bit better and let's name this reflector tube right and hold down control and copy this over to the middle i'm just adjusting this i can see the areas right next to the reflection of the cap fill in and turn it off it's very subtle just name this middle it's looking okay but i do want to go back into the main light we have on our products we have this projector products light we turn off everything except that one and that's where we're using our image to project sort of a gobo on top of our products and i think this could be a little bit let's try this a little bit sharper and let's set our camera as the active object let's try to adjust this a little bit because i would like to get a little bit more light onto these [Music] yeah something like that and maybe that could be a little bit brighter yeah i think that's going to do a better job for us now i am noticing that on this foil these are giving some kind of some blown out highlights so what we can do is go into the array tab of the light and turn down the glossy contribution and that will kill off some of those a little bit so it's not so harsh if i pull this down [Music] you can see the difference maybe something like in there 0.3 okay let's turn everything back on and take a look yeah that's feeling a little bit better for me and i think our background light is still a little bit too bright so i'm going to come in and knock this down a little bit yeah okay it's feeling a little bit better all right next i want to focus on this right tube which really hasn't gotten much attention yet uh one of the things right now that needs some help is this shadow area here what i'd like to do is get a little bit of light in there because we do have some more text in here and some a nice foil detail that i'd like to highlight so let's i'll turn this off oops this i always do this i'm going to make a new area light and scale it way down maybe something like like this kind of make it wide i'm going to pull it back a little bit and bring it up maybe like there and let's go in and use this as our active camera and i think what we want to do is kind of come in and i want to project the light right in here right in this shadow area no we need to lower our intensity let's turn this on right so as you can see this is lighting up everything in our scene so let's come back down here and take our spread way down so this is more like a little spotlight and let's move this so we can get some light in there it's still too bright so let's take this down a little bit we don't need much doesn't need to be that bright because i still think this should be i don't want well i don't want to kill all the shadow in this area i just want to bring in some highlights and highlight some of these higher waves of this tube where the text is so this is kind of nice right here we might be able to go up a little bit higher to keep some more of the shadow from this part of the tube that's bent over itself that's kind of nice so let's pull this up a little bit okay and really since i'm only focused on this right tube let's limit this light to only this tube so under the project tab of the light i want to change the mode from exclude to include and come down and find what is this object this is cream01 so we'll just drag the geometry for this tube into the include tab and now only this tube is being affected so if we come back up and turn off all the lights except for this one we can see we're just getting this area here i think that's pretty good although i think maybe we can kind of let's try to rotate this a little bit let's come out of our light camera a little bit of glare here on the edge is okay but before when this light was so wide it's really blowing out and that's just going to be added on top of all the other lights in our scene so i don't really think we need that so let's pull this in a little bit and we can get just a little bit on there try to rotate this a little bit maybe move it over whoops yeah i think that's looking pretty good so we still have the shadow where this is folded over and we had some really nice highlights here and the way this falls off and in these wrinkles is nice we can look at that i just had this light kind of floating right above this tube okay let's turn all the other lights back on and take a look yeah so that's looking good so another area here i want to add some more detail is in this foil right in here i think we can add another little light in here just to reflect so we can either go a light or another one of these sort of reflection cards but i think we could stand to use the light because maybe a little bit more in this area here would help so let's do that let's name this light right tube fill light okay and really since we're really just focused on this tube here let's just copy this light i'm just going to control drag and rename this right to foil fill light and we'll bring it down and over and rotate it around and we'll just aim it sort of right at this area here so what i'm looking at here if i look kind of where the camera is looking i'm going to bring this light down and i want this to be where this if this was since this is like a mirror we need to place this light where the camera is going to see it so let's just turn this on and we just need to find the right angle where this is going to be reflected where we want it yeah so like right in here okay so i'm liking the reflection here but this i don't like so let's try to get rid of this let's switch over and make this light the active camera see if i can't get what i'd like to do is get yeah sort of this happening and maybe not so much this down here let's move this around okay that's not bad i you know there's a lot of playing around with this because really what i'm looking at is i would like the reflections in the foil to be much more prominent than the reflections on the sort of warm gray part of the tube you know these little uh reflections here aren't bad but i don't want them to overtake the foil so just trying to move this light around in order to get some really nice shapes in the reflection of the foil and just sort of played with that until i like the way this this looks so this isn't bad one thing i am noticing now is this reflection from our rim light seems a little strong this is sort of getting lost in here so i can select this right rim light and add another plane select the plane and change it to z plus and drop it under the right rim light and reset the psr we can scale this way down and move it kind of close to this right tube and we can watch over here and see if we're getting this close to where we need it so as i move this further away you can see if i'm getting really close to the close of the tube it's blocking it completely as i move this further away you can see it kind of helps with that reflection in this area and it's just a matter of getting this placement where we need it okay so let's make a new material and let's call this scrim okay and under the material let's go over into overall and for opacity let's bring this to like 80 and let's apply that to the plane so this is before and after we can make this maybe a little bit bigger yeah i think that's a little bit better there so here's before and after the foil reflection is much brighter than the reflection from the regular tube painted material okay let's pull this out and name that okay so right now i think this right tube is looking pretty good one thing on the center tube i'm noticing is that if i pull up the other if i pull up the original render and see vincent did a great job here of highlighting the difference between these two materials he's got this sort of blobby matte shape that's overlaid on top of this much shinier surface and the reflection of the softbox above highlights the difference between these two materials so i want to do the same thing um here so like i've done in this area i want to replicate that so let's go over and tackle that so i'm going to do that with another softbox or area light right up above uh so let's turn this off and add a new area light scale it down and immediately i'm going to turn this into a disk and let's rotate it almost 90 degrees and lift it up whoops and we're going to want to focus on this area right in here so this we want the reflection to be right in here which is right here on the middle tube so let's move this light over and go back in and use this as a camera and we want it to be right in here let's go to our area light and take the spread way down and take our intensity multiplier way down we know it's going to be too bright so let's hit render okay pretty close i think we can scale this light up let's make it bigger and maybe take the spread up there we go let me get this shape right in here let's maybe make it a little smaller and take the spread back up just to soften a little bit i think maybe i can make it even smaller let's go back to the default camera and take a look so we can raise it up or scale it down or both so i think something like maybe a little bigger scale it down a little bit okay that's not too bad let's try to move it over scale it i'm just sort of rotating this around i get it at a interesting angle here to sort of highlight some of the shape of this bent tube and the difference between these two materials so we're getting close so you can see what a big difference the spread makes on this i mean obviously the intensity of the light gets to be much greater but also the way the reflections work with the spread this almost becomes like a point light so the reflection gets to be very small even though it's still a big seemingly like a big area light that's something i don't really like i don't think that should happen i feel like the reflection if there was really if this was a soft box let's say this the area of the soft box would stay the same so the reflections should stay the same so there is this sort of push and pull with the spread to get the reflections to mimic the actual shape of the area light in the viewport so it's a little bit i think sort of counter-intuitive um i don't really think that should be the case i don't think the reflection should get smaller because i've made the area light this big so it should stay the reflection should stay that big so what i want to do is i don't need to light the whole scene with this huge soft box so i do want to limit it to just the middle tube so i'll set the mode to include under the project tab and drag in just this tube here which is cream 2. so if i disable this see the before and after and what i don't really care for is how much light is hitting the top of this so maybe we can add another scrim or flag to the top to limit this so i feel like this is kind of getting blown out so let's add another plane and drag it under our light and hit reset psr and change it to z plus so that way it's in in line with our area light and let's see how well this works so we need to include this plane in the area light i believe that is going to make a difference whoops so this is kind of tricky in this situation because what i'm getting i'm getting kind of what i want on the top but it is affecting the the reflection that i do like down here so in this case what i want to do is just turn this off and try something else i'm not sure if this is going to work any better because it may get the same thing here um but all right let's turn this off i want to label this and under the light i want to add a shader graph for this and try a ramp so this is doing the same thing here and i think it's just because of the shape the way i have this light placed and it's just the shape of this this tube because this part of the tube is pushed out zoom in here so because this part of the tube is pushed out so the reflection the top of our light that i'm blocking is being reflected here so that's sort of eating away at this area so because this shape is so wavy it's going to be difficult for me to get a light block in here to block out the top while keeping this completely clean so i'm going to just delete this ramp so this i like this i don't but if i flag this out that eats into this reflection so really what i want to do let's try this instead of doing it that way let's go over to our tube and under ray let's take our diffuse down and now i'm limiting the amount of light that's just illuminating our diffuse material here but keeping the reflection so this is really what i want here just to find a balance because this is just getting a little bit blown out and too hot but i do like this here so that's a better solution in this case but i do think overall this could come down a little bit and let's come to the middle fill light for the text and maybe bump this up just slightly so i'm just going to play with the spread of this middle tube reflection light and see if i like it a little bit more extreme not so soft okay we'll say that is good enough for now i may come back and tweak that a little bit but it is just sort of a push and pull with the size of the light the distance from the object which is pretty much the same thing in size so obviously as i move this light further away its relative size gets smaller so you can see it's like the reflection is getting smaller and smaller but if i move this closer the relative size of the light gets bigger and so that sort of that concept is used all the time in traditional photography as you move a soft box much closer to your subject the size of the light source gets bigger and so the light seems much softer the shadows become softer so a big soft box put up right close next to a person's face is going to provide light that wraps almost all the way around the face so you get very little shadows the whole you know the soft box is lighting so much of the the subject it's the same thing here so thinking about what kind of reflections you want in the surface the size of the light is going to determine that now that's true especially with area lights where they are basically mimicking soft boxes you know a point light or a spotlight these are going to be just tiny little points or like an infinite light the reflection is going to be just a small point so looking at this now i i do want to go back in and find what is causing these small little reflections so let's turn our lights off and go one by one okay ah okay our middle tube fill light for our text let's take a look at the spread for this it's very small so if we open this up let's take that back to one so let's take it back let's undo i think a better way would be to just reduce the glossy contribution let's use our camera as the active light maybe come up a little bit i just don't want i just didn't want that harsh reflection right on this the arrow just thought it was kind of distracting that that light that reflection landed right on that but i still want that light to be raking across these folds or these ripples in the tube go back to our default camera and maybe make this a little bit bigger okay let's solo this light and see what we've got okay i think that's a little bit better so what i've done is just taken the spread up a little bit so the reflections weren't so harsh and moved it to a little bit better location so the reflections weren't interfering with the type and this arrow here so i think that works a little bit better okay so let's go back to this jar over here so what i think needs to happen there's this sort of this dead space here where we have no information so what i'd like to do is make a kind of a soft reflection that fades out on both sides right in the middle of the lid to do that let's make a new area light and scale it down and move it back here and i kind of want it just right in the front of this jar now that should be good and we'll call this left jar lid fill light and we'll take the intensity down and immediately add a shader graph because i want to add a ramp to fade out both sides so we'll drag a ramp in well let's turn it on and take a look first so we can see the difference so yeah that's pretty good i think actually let's we can go even wider yeah that's kind of nice and maybe a little brighter i'm just focusing on the lid right now i know all this is getting blown out but just looking at the lid so let's connect our ramp to the general color of the light and change it to horizontal and we're going to center this make another knot over on the right side and kind of pinch this in so we have kind of a nice fall off on both sides i think it's kind of nice if this is a little bit more centered over the type so i think like right here i think that's pretty good right in there so what we want to do is just limit this light to the lid only so let's find that let's see cream moisturizer here we go okay so it's one object no problem so let's go in it looks like there's a tag here for [Music] the label base and black base so get black bass make that double click it to make the selection okay so what i want to do is hit u p for split now i have a second one and on the first one i'm gonna go back and hit delete yeah hit delete on this first one so now i don't have the selection or this material i don't need it and i only need this material for this here and we can rename this lid i'm going to go back up to our light go to the project tab set to include the lid oh and under our material for lid we need to delete the selection it's no longer needed so that should pop right back up yeah so now that light is only affecting the lid we can turn it on and off there and that just helps give that a little bit more information so we can see that this isn't just dead black space and this method is used actually if this was going to be a real photo shoot you know they've got like you know 20 lights here but in a real set potentially what you do is set up as many lights as you had and then shoot tethered to a laptop or some sort of computer monitor and then take a look and then say oh okay like we're missing some information here let's move a soft box over or like a scrim and shoot through it and get a reflection in this area even though it's blowing out the whole image you know your digitech or whoever is editing on site would then only comp in that exposure only on the lid so even though we're kind of cheating here it's still i think within the realm of uh the way you'd cheat for an actual photo shoot so i think that's looking better but i think we still need a little bit more over in this area here so what i want to do is just bring in maybe like a bounce card and we can let's make a new material let's make a new one of these let's make this a little bit brighter so we're going to copy this over we're going to call this first one gray bounce and this one's going to be called white bounce and for the white one we just want to increase this middle knot so let's add a plane right in here to add a little bit of light and fall off onto the lid and onto the label we'll go up and add a plane and let's move it like right in here and apply this material to it and let's take a look okay let's add a redshift tag redshift object and under visibility i don't want primary array visible and i don't want it to cast shadows so right now i'm just looking at the foil here and that's doing a good job of adding some detail into that foil but i'm a little concerned this my ramp is going the wrong way let's see here let's turn on primary array visible yeah so let's just rotate this around so i want it this way and we'll make that taller great now we can turn off primary array visible and scrunch this down a little bit and that helps that redus foil that nice gradient in there and now it's doing a little bit less on the lid than i'd like so i think we'll come in and add another light there but i do want to duplicate this and do the same thing over on this foil so i'm just gonna control drag over here and move this okay let's make this a little bit more [Music] narrow okay i think that's looking pretty good here on the foil but i do want to add another light over on this side just for this lid so i think i will let's name these here first you can see before and after i think what i want to do is get this to be a little bit brighter so i'm going to copy this material and i'm going to call this bright bounce and i want to add this ramp into the overall emission color and let's take the emission weight up and add this to the silver foil so we're getting a little bit bigger reflection in that yeah i think that looks better okay let's go and add another light over here now i already have this fill light restricted only to the lid so i'm just going to copy that and call it left jar lid rim light okay i'm just gonna move this over and try to position it kind of behind into the side of our lid i think what we need to do is just take the intensity down ah see that's the problem so this i hate so even though i've copied this the fact that it has the same shader graph the intensity multiplier affects both lights our lid fill light and the rim light i don't know why i don't think that should happen i think we should be able to adjust the intensity multiplier separate from the shader graph so i'm going to go to our i'm going to undo this and go to our fill light no i'm sorry we're going to go to the lid rim light select the light and say remove shader graph now i'm not i'm just going to go up and delete this there we go now the shader graph stays on the original light and is no longer on the rim light okay so i need to make a new shader graph for this rim light not ideal if i'm missing something there somebody please let me know in the comments that seems nuts i'm going to change this to horizontal and let's see which side is which okay so this we don't need and this yes okay so now on the rim light whoops rim light we can take the intensity way down and this here i think i just want to move this light up yeah there we go and i want to try to add let's see if we can add this light into the base of this as well so i'm going to light to project and add the base as well and see how that looks and i think that's that's not bad so when i kind of fill that in so if i turn that off and on i think that's better right so that's really just all reflection let's take this down even more i'm going to go back to our fill light here in the middle and i want to take this up a little bit maybe not that much okay and one thing i'm noticing when i'm looking at this i feel like the top of this lid is reflecting the background and if i squint it's almost getting lost there so what i want to do is pull another light and just do a really subtle kind of fill light on the top so i'm going to copy let's see if i can do this hold down control make sure i'm copying this there we go and we're going to call this lid back reflection and i'm just going to delete the shader graph off of it and add a new one and in this case i think we do want it to be vertical okay yeah something like that but i think that's still too strong so i'm going to take this to 0.5 maybe bring it out nope okay i think that's looking pretty good i think i want let's see this rim light to be a little bit a little bit more prominent on the lid so i'm just going to undo that and i'm going to copy this and in the project i'm going to remove this base and only focus on the lid okay i'm just yeah trying to balance between the two i do want a rim light here but i think i wanted a little bit more on the lid and i think that's looking better so that sort of fills in that lid so before see if i can go back even before the bounce cards so we had this sort of dead black space here so that's before and then here's after i really think that helps to define the materials that are used here so you're just giving a lot more information on how the light is reflected off of all these pieces so we now know that this is foil this is inset in a little bit from this sort of overall label and we have a shiny lid we don't have any dead areas with no light in it so i think that looks nice okay so as i'm just sort of looking over at the overall scene what i am noticing is that we sort of have light up here in this area that isn't so important i want to focus the eye more in the center so what i want to do is add some scrims over on the side to get some nice shadows so i'm going to go over to our scene here and go to the i think it's our light over here that is our background projector i'm going to add a plane set it to z plus and pull it under our bg projector and reset psr and i'm going to scale it down and move it over to the side and move it in front a little bit and sort of make this a little bigger so what i want to do is pull this over until it starts to create a shadow on our background so something like that but i want to rotate it so it's straight in our scene oh did i get it oh that looks pretty good yeah okay great so something like that but i want to apply the scrim material to it so i don't want it to be so opaque and what i'll do is i'll move this over a little bit you know maybe like here and i'm going to hold down ctrl and copy it and move another version over slightly and move it in front to kind of give me like a window shade or some other interest here but it also you know focuses our attention more in the center we don't need all this bright area over on the left where you know our our products are not let's go back to our original plan i want to move it over just a little bit more whoops yeah maybe something like that because i feel like that feels much better so now we're sort of something blocking our eye from just traveling right off the frame and that helps focus our attention right here in the middle so another thing i think let's try here so i don't know if it really matters but there's this bottom plane here that let's see if it's contributing anything to our scene if we turn that off and see the difference like so here's with this on this plane here has the background color on it and all of our lights are bouncing off of this card we have gi turned on you can see how much light it's contributing to the scene so i feel like we can leave it on it's not bad but i think there might be a better way to i don't really have much control over how much is contributing like how much fill light is bouncing up into the scene so i think it might be better to turn this off and that way we have a little bit more control over how much fill light we introduce and we can do that by creating a new dome light and just calling this dome light fill and just taking the exposure way down so now we have a little bit more control over how much fill light is in our scene and it's not coming from the ground plane which also has a material applied to it we can control the color of this much much easier so for instance if we did want sort of a blue tint which i don't really think we need in this scene but if you wanted to sort of fill in the shadows with a little bit cooler you could but i don't like i feel like in this situation what we're seeing would be more like an interior scene and because of this these sort of natural elements i think uh sort of a warmer tone works better so we'll leave this just plain white and use the just the color of the background plane as our main color so another thing i am noticing that i think would be nice this area is feeling a little bit just maybe a little bit flat i feel like maybe we can add another little light over here just to add some reflection over on the edge so let's do that real quick and i also think maybe there's just too much fill light in this area this is kind of getting washed out i think we can up the contrast in this area so let's do that real quick all right i'm just going to add a new area light scale it way down stretch it out make it kind of skinny and move it over and i'm going to make it my active camera and same thing just going to go over to the side and sort of focus it right in here and we'll get out of this and go back to our default camera and i think scale this way down and we turn this on we're probably going to have to lower the intensity quite a bit yes so i think we need to move this even further back more like a rim light we'll just rotate it around a little bit and for this let's try the spread okay let's see how much that's contributing yeah i think i like that i think that just adds a little bit more to this area just to i don't know but without it it seems like this material kind of gets lost and it seems really flat so i think that adds something there so back to the middle fill for this text let's make it the camera and see where it's pointing it's right in here all right let's solo this hmm let's try to make this let's see this may introduce a little bit more of those reflections that i didn't like but let's see i'm just kind of adjusting the spread here and i kind of want to make it more of a spotlight because i felt like it was adding too much light to the top and the bottom and kind of washing it out so i think now it's a little bit more focused only on this area here but the intensity needs to be brought down let's go over to the right and here and yeah i think adjusting some of these because i don't want to blow out the the green in this area yeah i think that's that's a little bit better it's looking okay to me and i think for the fill light or dome light fill this can come up just a little bit too much so i think it's kind of nice to have a little bit more fill than you think you'd need here and that way in post you can go back in and add contrast where you need it you know like a vignette in this situation would help out to just draw your eye into the center here and you could also do like a fall off from the bottom up sort of like lower the exposure from the bottom here we don't need these bright areas going all the way to the bottom so this can kind of be you know dark and maybe with the curves layer and with the layer mask and then coming back in and just making you know these three areas here the most contrast but having the information here we want to make sure we're we're not like crushing any crushing any blacks or losing out on any of any information but i think we're in a pretty good spot i'm gonna look it over here and see it's looking pretty good so one thing i will mention so in areas like this with this foil highly reflective areas can get overexposed very quickly there's a couple of things if you wanted to get close to your final render just within redshift uh there's some things you can do here right in the with the color controls and photographic exposure you can take this on and use the allowed overexposure you can see this will automatically bring down these highest highlights right in here and that's you know one way to take care of that but this does clamp everything so if you're going to render out an exr for instance to do comping later on this probably isn't the best way to go so in that case what i would do is probably set up a custom aov for these foil areas and i can show you that real quick uh if we find i believe it is this material here let's make this a little bit bigger so this here if i put this directly to the output this is the layer mask that's being used for a material blender and the material blender is blending between the normal material and this material here with the foil so this is all foil so what we want to do is this back to output let's go over and search for aov and store colored aov pull that out and we want to put this in between our final material blender and the output so this goes into the beauty input if i can do this yeah beauty input and this goes back into the surface um before i go any further i want to come up to redshift and enable our aovs and go into the aov manager and pull in a custom aov and we're going to call this foil now that that's made i can come down here and store color to aov and i want to take let's see here do we want this i think we want this here this inverted that's being used as the layer mask over to alv input zero and on the store colored aov tab we want to connect the output to the surface but under alv0 under the store color to aov tab we want to select foil and now if we do a render a bucket render and we go down to foil we should have that selected so now we have that as a layer mask to go in and add another like exposure layer in photoshop or you know wherever you're comping you can bring down the areas just in that foil and of course that can be done for you know every one of these you can do a custom aov for all of it if you want that fine control uh you know for like this shape for instance we can do one for that just to lower the exposure on this green so we're not blowing it out but i think it's just as easy to paint over that in photoshop and lower the exposure so i'll just let that render for a little bit but i think that is it i think that is looking pretty good if there are any questions on this any questions about product lighting or why i chose to do one thing over the other or why i didn't do something be sure to ask in the comments i'll be checking those and answering questions frequently so thank you so much again to vincent for getting in touch and passing along this scene and allowing me to play with some different lighting techniques if you like this keep an eye on my youtube page where i'll be adding some more lighting tutorials along with some general cinema 4d and redshift workflows so thanks again to vincent and thank you so much everybody be well take care

Channel: i_go_by_zak

Views: 38,005

Rating: 4.9895902 out of 5

Keywords: Cinema 4d Tutorial, Redshift Tutorial, Lighting Tutorial, Product Lighting Tutorial, 3D, Cinema 4d, c4d lighting tutorial, Redshift lighting tutorial, c4d redshift, 3d Studio Lighting

Id: bfXCkoj-dwU

Length: 102min 53sec (6173 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020