Rendering out of C4d Lite (5/5)

hello everyone I'm Evan Abrams and welcome to the fifth and final video in this intro to Cinema 4D light Series where in the final steps after we've modeled animated textured and lit all of our lovely 3D scenes so we need to turn those into video by rendering them we're going to have a look at the important settings and unique rendering challenges that come with using the light version of Cinema 4D and don't worry if you don't have anything to render there are project files you can access in the links below also there are chapter markers in the description if you need to jump around and if you've missed the other videos in the series links to those will be in the description as well and because rendering can be Hardware intensive I want to say a big thank you to MSI for providing their lovely hardware for this series you've seen me working on this Creator z17 throughout all the videos and if you're interested in picking up one of your own please use the link in the description and see what they have to offer now let's get into Cinema 4D so you can get your animations rendered out foreign General in Cinema 4D to produce a video file or an image sequence or just an image we would render to the picture viewer in Cinema 4D Lite that will create a cached image but we cannot access it as a file we need to actually take the cinema 4dc and that dot c4d file and open it back up in After Effects where our whole journey began in video one so here in After Effects I will import that Cinema 4D file just like we would with any kind of footage either going through the menus or just double clicking in the project window after import you can see this file has a frame size a frame rate a bit depth color profile information so in this way it's just like importing something that you would have rendered out except this file is dynamic if you updated and saved any aspect of your Cinema 4D file this footage this scene would update as well we're going to be interacting with this file a lot more using the cineware plugin which is applied to this footage when you bring it out onto a composition as a layer but first before we do that we need to make sure that we're getting all of the pixel and resolution and color depth that we want out of this original file to start with so the way this scene is going to be treated or understood as footage will be determined by the render settings you can access those through the menus or from this little gear icon in the upper right looking at the render settings we won't talk about them all but if you're curious about any setting you see simply right click on it and choose show help to get the details about it in output we can change those frame size and frame rate numbers that we saw earlier when the file was brought into After Effects so if you wanted this to be rendered fully in HD we need to bump up these numbers to 1920 by 1080. we can do that manually or just choose a preset remember this affects the actual number of pixels that will be visible so if you set this as a smaller number and then scale up the footage later it's not going to be as crisp this is also the place to set our frame rate how many frames per second we want to render out and it's where we'll set the render duration but curiously when we set those and save and go back to After Effects only the frame rate has been updated there's no change in the actual duration of this clip there's another place where we must go to update that true duration let's have a look at the project settings back in Cinema 4D by pressing Ctrl D it is these project settings the project duration that will affect the length of that clip on our After Effects timeline to avoid confusion it helps to harmonize our frame rates between the project settings and the render settings as these can hold totally different numbers and when working in the full version of Cinema 4D being able to have a longer project than we might render it's really helpful because 704d would be doing all those render functions but since after effects is taking over those functions we would want to limit those frames how many of them we're actually seeing in the after effects timeline using the trim functions there we're going to skip over multipass for now and get into anti-aliasing this is another setting that's going to increase or decrease the quality and therefore the complexity and therefore the render time of your pieces setting this To None will give you really Jagged edges between objects geometry is going to be pretty clean and is likely good enough but you can always bump this up too as the name implies the best version of the settings you'll have access to even more settings to get precisely how you want those edges to be cleaned up but generally it will be on Geometry just know that if you see little nasty edges come up here and fix up your anti-aliasing we do have a category of things for Save but because remember we're not actually saving an image out of here these are not going to be particularly applicable to what we're doing but the areas we did Cover should give you the control you need over how many pixels are going out how many frames and at what frame rate and the quality of those frames the way we View and interact with our Cinema 4D files and access all that beautiful quality that we just put into them when we're in After Effects is through the cinewear plug-in this is an effect that will let us dynamically view our Cinema 4D scenes as an After Effects layer and then extract data from them so I'll take this Cinema 4D file add to a composition so that we have a comp that is the same size and frame rate of that file and then we can start to manipulate it right now that scene doesn't look so good in fact it looks exactly like it would if we were viewing it through the Cinema 4D viewport this drop down right here is going to change all of that I could change it to a draft version that's going to be a faster rendering but less accurate version of the viewport render but we could also see what the current renderer would look like and that will show you the final look of the thing this can take a little bit of time to process because it has to render that final look of the frame so we have a draft version of that as well and if that's all you want we can render out of After Effects right now just add this composition to your render queue add it to the media encoder and away it goes you can learn about those processes and other videos on this channel but here for the rest of you who want to look in more detail we're going to get into these settings and see what we can modify about this everything here in the render settings group is about stripping away levels of detail and quality so that we can work up motion and do our After Effects work with the least friction so you could disable textures if you want you could work with just a wireframe or just a box most commonly you're going to be toggling between the current look your final look and the viewport look or the draft looks that's going to allow you to work up your motion have a look at the final back and forth toggle between those where things are going to get a little bit more interesting is in the project settings imagine what we have here on our timeline is like a window into the world we created in Cinema 4D or maybe think of this like a live feed from a camera that is hanging out in that world we made we can choose if we had other cameras in there which of those cameras we wanted to look through this is great if you want to set up multiple angles and render those out separately or cut between them this setting doesn't hold keyframes but we can split our clip with Ctrl shift d when you make a split or duplicate location of a Cinema 4D layer you will see this little box asking if you want to sync those clips to get each of them displaying different camera angles you're going to need to uncheck that box we can then choose a unique camera angle for each clip and just like that we have a cut between angles just as if we were cutting between footage from two synced cameras but we can also ask cinewear to use a camera that lives right here in After Effects I'm going to make a new two node camera just for ease of navigation and then I'm going to select comp camera from the cinewear options now we are viewing the Cinema 4D scene through this after effects camera but everything is a little bit offset from where we might expect it that is because the coordinate system of Cinema 4D assumes that position zero zero zero the origin is the middle center of the universe but in After Effects zero zero zero is up in the top corner of our frame for that reason we would want to use the centered comp camera as the desired option whether you use one or the other is all going to depend on how you want to assume everything should line up I'm going to make a new null that will show up in the middle center of our world when I make it 3D here it is living at 960 540 and 0. and you can see that that location is aligned at where the origin of the synonym 4D scene is which is where the middle of the chess board is if I remember correctly so we've bumped our assumptions about the world to line up with this composition not to be in line with the Cinema 4D Universe relativity is a head scratcher sometimes and having things be where we expect them is a big part of compositing in 3D so always check which options you have turned on and which assumptions we're making about the world and how these worlds line up now maybe you're asking Evan why would I ever want to do that well this helps us get elements in After Effects to combine with elements from Cinema 4D a lot easier since I'm seeing my composition and my 704d scene through the after effects camera if I do a little move with the camera maybe keyframe that moving around in here and then I'm going to add some text and animate that a little bit just speeding up this part quite a lot so that now you can see I'm starting to leverage the text animation tools from after effects with the scene I made in Cinema 4D so I'm able to get kind of The Best of Both Worlds in here we might even add an entire background or a Skyline back there or in this case just a gradient under everything so it looks interesting and Vapor wavy and I've explored other ideas about combining 2D and 3D elements on this channel and more will be added all the time so please check them out if you're interested so why do we have to render the set of After Effects well the reason is that Cinema 4D light has headed to renderer mostly disabled the natural follow-up to that question is what is a renderer let's go back into Cinema 4D real quick and have a look up here in the render settings in the top left corner you're going to see renderer we can twirl that down and see which renders are installed and in this case we have two that we can use one governs how things are calculated in the viewport and the other one shows how things will be calculated using the standard renderer really quickly though I want to show you what a full version of Cinema 4D would look like so you can see what's different in here the biggest difference is that under the save category I can specify where I would want a file to be actually saved to that's why Cinema 4D light cannot send out an image without After Effects doing the work and you can see up here that I can select other renderers that I have installed so we have the physical renderer which would try to simulate physical properties of lights and materials it uses a fundamentally different way of understanding those lights and materials than the standard renderer would I also have redshift installed this is yet another totally different system for understanding materials understanding lights understanding cameras it's also trying to simulate the properties of light and materials it renders off the GPU and it excels at fast previews and even has kind of a real-time mode so here for example we're looking at the same little chess scene but rendered in redshift using redshift materials redshift lights these renderers are all referencing that same base geometry all the vertexes and the shapes and the groups those are all the same but we can only see these things through a render of some kind it's like they are some theoretical platonic objective ideal of what these things are and the renderer is the subjective way of perceiving them I'm sure mixing in philosophy metaphors is going to really help this out but all renderers see things differently they use different methods for calculating how things are seen and they use the hardware of your machine differently back into after effects to wrap up this little segment on renders After Effects actually has two it has classic renderer and what's this the Cinema 4D renderer fancy that so the real thing here is that any graphical software must have some kind of render engine some kind of renderer to turn the vectors and the math into pixels some apps will give you a choice of renderers some will not but they all need to render somehow let's explore some of the more advanced settings in cineware with the multi-pass when I set this to current you're going to see the final rendered version of the scene but that final image is actually made up of many passes that have been layered over top of each other if we wanted to extract those layers individually we would use the multi-pass feature which is going to give us granular control over each aspect or pass of that image I'll come on down to multipass and turn on the feature and then select which pass I'm interested in seeing how about Shadows now this is rendering only the shadow information from that file I'm going to duplicate the layer and set this one to render only the diffuse Channel you can see here it's the same scene but it's missing shadows and other aspects of the image so let me just put these in the right order and I'll set that shadow layer to multiply over top of the diffuse and now we can manually adjust this pass here to tint the Shadows or adjust their contrast or their opacity or whatever this is giving us incredibly granular control over that final image when we break it up into its component passes one more thing one little Teensy thing here while we're on the multi-pass this is a more advanced way of compositing images and if you see next to the multi-pass it says linear workflow that is referencing linear light so if you are going to make use of this feature please check your color management settings for your project to make sure that you are linearizing your color space I have another tutorial on this channel about color spaces so if you want to explore that more please check that out but for now just note that this is going to impact how colors blend with each other so a layer set to multiply for example is blending with the layer below it in a linear light working space that's going to blend a little bit differently than the rec 709 color space that you might be used to dealing with however it should at least look normal because this option assumes linear light is being used so everything should look as expected now pixels and passes aren't the only thing that we can get from a Cinema 4D file so first up we can extract some scene data from the Cinema 4D project and move it into After Effects here I'll hit that extract button and you can see what it'll pull out for us a camera and some lights for me this camera is going to have the exact same movement and attributes as the camera in the Cinema 4D scene already the lights here can help us to light elements that we might drop in like text or solids we can set those items to accept lights if they are 3D layers and it can help to match the lighting situation between different elements merging the after effects camera data with that merge function is generally used for visual effects work when we already have camera data in After Effects that we want to then match with camera movement in Cinema 4D this process will merge the so-called comp camera into the Cinema 4D file that means that whatever camera you're currently looking through to observe the scene is going to have its data merged in you may need to select the Cinema 4D layer and hit Ctrl e which stands for edit original and that will take you to the version of the Cinema 4D file that will have the merged camera data in it now all these Dynamic instances and color space Transformations and pixels and passes they can all be pretty taxing on a machine that's why I'm so happy that MSI has provided me with this Creator z17 laptop it has been a treat to get Hands-On with this thing during the series the key hardware considerations for me when working in 3D are GPU acceleration which this has in abundance with an Nvidia RTX card and RAM which this is stuffed with it's also very fun to use this touch display with pen pressure it's a far more gestural way to interact with a lot of my work it's great to have that tactile response of moving things around and speaking of the display it is really critical to have confidence that the monitor is displaying the color space accurately we touched a little bit on transforming to and from linear light in that last section and anytime you're doing doing that you really want to know that what you're seeing on the screen is accurately displaying what the pixels are as intended so a big thanks to MSI for making this happen and if you would like an MSI machine of your own please use the link in the description and see what they have to offer and a big thank you to you for watching that's the end of this part part 5 of our series on Cinema 4D Lite I hope you've enjoyed it and that you feel confident creating things with this slimmed down version of pretty large program if you have any questions at all please do let me know in the comments and I'll try to help you out and if you have suggestions for more complicated or Advanced 3D topics you want to know about please let me know that as well there will be more videos on this channel integrating 3D now that we have this Foundation to reference so I hope that you enjoy following along you subscribe and that you come with us on this journey so until next time stay creative be kind to each other and I'll see you all around the internet foreign

Channel: ECAbrams

Views: 11,640

Keywords: adobe after effects, after effects, adobe, after, effects, fx, mograph, motion graphics, motion, graphics, vfx, visual effects, instruction, tutorial, tut, how to, how, to, help, tips, tricks, after effects tutorial, motion graphics tutorial, vfx tutorial, c4d, cinema 4d, lite, c4d lite, cinema 4d lite, material, light, lights, materials, glass, metal, gold, plastic, basic, beginner, 101, chess

Id: 8JH3W7GqOCQ

Length: 16min 56sec (1016 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022