[TUT] 3Delight Renderer - The Basics

what if i told you that there's a brand new render engine in town what if i told you that it's fully compatible with cinema 4d maya houdini katana and even das studio what if i told you that it was fully compatible with usd and solaris what if i told you that you can run it on windows on linux or in mac os 10 okay not sold yet what if i told you that it was free hi my name is case and welcome to another right brain tutorial in this tutorial i want to give you a brief introduction to this new render engine called 3d lights you probably heard me talk about it if you've seen some of my other tutorials because i've been using 3d light since the beginning of the year and i like it a lot why because it's fast even though it's cpu based it's a really really fast render engine in some cases it's actually faster than gpu render engines like octane and redshift so for this tutorial i thought i would just give you a basic introduction to 3d light and cover like some of the very very basic kind of things i will do some more advanced functions of 3d light in some future tutorials but for this one i just wanted to give you an overview and a basic introduction so first things first we're going to go to 3dlite.com where you're going to create a free user account so that you can access the download section of their page in the download section you'll pick your platform linux mac os or windows and then you have like two options for 3d light one is the free version that i mentioned which is limited to 12 cores or more accurately 12 threads so if you have a 6 core cpu that is running in a multi-threaded mode then 3d light will take full advantage of your 12 threads on that 6 core cpu however if you're like me and you have like an 8 core or larger cpu then you have like access to more threads and unfortunately the free version will limit itself to just 12 threads no matter how many threads your machine can actually run now of course there is the unlimited version of 3d light which costs money but if you want to check out how fast the unlimited version can run on your machine especially if you have say a thread ripper with like i don't know like 32 cores or 64 multi threads you can still download the unlimited multi-core version it's just that you will have a watermark on your renders however before we hit the download button i am going to click on the console to change log because i want to show you something that's really really important when it comes to 3d lights which is that there is a very specific build of houdini that you can use this latest version of 3d light with in this particular case at the time of this recording uh the supported houdini builds are 17.5.460 and 18.0.532 so basically the most recent production builds of houdini in either 17.5 or 18. so if you have a different version of houdini this particular version of 3d light is not going to run properly and you're probably going to want to download an older version that matches your houdini build okay so here we are we've downloaded the 3d light installer i'm going to double click on it and i want to show something just for mac users windows users probably don't have to worry about this so mac users will see that this is like your basic install icon but if we double click it you might get an error because 3d light is not yet signing with the appropriate kind of security apple measures so because of that like the operating system is not allowing us to install 3d light on the system just like that so what we want to do is we want to right click and actually select open in our finder and now it still gives us the same error message but now we can actually kind of click on the open so we have that option to open and basically force our operating system to install 3d light okay so our installation is done and was successful and first thing that you'll notice is that in our application folders or wherever the equivalent is for windows users 3d light has installed itself into a 3d light folder with like some kind of whatever files it needs to run most importantly if we go into our houdini folder where we have our houdini.emv you'll remember that you know if you install redshift or arnold or renderman and so on and so forth you typically need to do one of two things either you need to change the houdini.env file or you need to create a json file that you can kind of put into the packages folder if you go into the packages folder however you will see that 3d lite has already installed a json file that's already configured perfectly for your operating system it is beyond me why other developers don't do this but when i saw this i was like oh my god this is such a breath of fresh air because you really don't have to worry about messing with json files or houdini.env files or having to like kind of figure out like what directory your files live on and so on and so forth it's all done for you this is a really really smart way of installation on the part of 3d lite all right so here we are in houdini and probably the first thing that we want to do is go over to our shelves hit the plus button and make sure that the 3d light shelf is enabled as this is going to give you access to some of the most basic functions in 3d light you'll see in the 3d light shelf we have like a render section we have like some lights and then we have a vdb button that i'm going to cover a little bit later in this tutorial so let's get started let's render something so we need some geometry so i'm just going to create a grid and i'm going to double click in it and i'm just going to give it some normals and i'm going to give it some uvs i'm gonna use a uv project for this and just to be a little bit nice and clean i'm gonna put a null at the very end which i'm gonna call out okay and make sure that the display flag is on that last null okay great so we have some geometry and now what we need to do is uh let's create some lights so i'm just gonna go and click on the environment light on 3d light and this is going to create a basic environment light this is great for if you want to use say like an hdri which is exactly what i want to do for this example so i'm just going to click on this guy and i'm going to go under the light tab and where it says environment map navigate to my handy handy-dandy hdri haven i'm just going to pick a basic cloudy day hdri that i like for this kind of stuff okay uh if you don't want to see the hdri in the background you can simply uncheck this button and it will go away so that makes the viewport a little bit cleaner looking okay so we have a grid we have an environment light what else do we need uh we need a camera so let's just go here and click and select new camera just gonna click the lock key here so we can kind of reframe and uh you know just kind of like set our camera where we want it now what we need is a basic material so we're gonna go to our material context and i'm just going to right click and you'll see right here at the very top that there is a 3d light section so let's create a material builder this is going to allow us to keep everything nice and tidy inside the sub network and we can call this uh let's call it uh ground for now and i'm gonna dive right into it and you'll see right away that there is a node that was already created inside our material builder which is called a d l terminal uh this is the equivalent of an output node and that's where you should kind of consider it like so everything is going to eventually plug into this guy right here so the next node that we're going to create is called a principled node okay basically has like all of the you know standard pbr principled sort of functions and inputs and selections that you would expect in most renders so we have a base with a color a roughness value a specular level value a metallic anisotropy direction of the anisotropy and an opacity selection then we have a coating so that let's say if you have like a car paint and then you have like a clear coat this is where this would come in handy we have some subsurface scattering values right now the weight is set to zero which means zero sub surface scattering we have an incandescence setting with an intensity and a color and we have a bump normal displacement map which we'll cover in just a little bit and last but not least we do have an opengl that can help with setting at least like some of the basic color emission metallic and so on and so forth to match in the houdini viewport however i typically tend not to worry about this last tab at all so uh first thing we want to do is plug our out color to the surface input of our terminal so the first thing that i like to do is to select some really obnoxious colors say like something like lime green just to know that my color is being correctly applied to my geometry and it's an easy way to kind of find out when you launch the render view so i'm going to click onto my grid and i want to make sure that in the render tab here i have my ground material assigned so now that we've done that we can click on the render button and the render button is going to launch this viewer 3d light refers to it as the 3d light display or eye display in some cases and you have some interesting kind of things going on here so actually let me open it to its full glory so what you have is um a series of thumbnails so every time that you hit render let's change the camera angle a little bit here in my viewport uh say like something like this and i'm gonna hit render again it's going to generate a brand new thumbnail okay this is really really useful when you want to contrast and compare different settings and and even like camera angles we have a drop down menu which right now is not really enabled and this is where you would go to see all of the different aovs that you might be rendering so right now since we only have our beauty pass being rendered only rgba is selected and there's no drop down uh functionality however if i was rendering multiple aovs like say like the z channel or kryptomat or my reflection or diffuse pass and so on and so forth i would be able to select it with this drop down menu so i can kind of look exactly at the aov that i'm interested in checking out we have some information here such as like the estimated rendering time uh how many uh cores it's using in this case it's using like 16 cores how much memory it's using uh how much the texture cache is taking up and then there's some additional stats here if you're really curious to know how much time is being spent on sampling rate race and so on and so forth as well as how many rays your scene is taking up to render okay so we probably want to do something a little more fun than just the lime green grid so let's put this guy out of the way for right now and let's dive back into our material builder node that we created and uh what we probably want to do is maybe bring in some textures so the way you do that in 3d light i'm just going to right click and type texture and this gives me a texture node so the texture node in 3d light is exactly how you would bring in outside textures all right so let's bring in some textures i have this destructed floor material let's start with the color i'm just going to bring in this color or albedo texture as the first thing that we do so i'm just going to click open i'm just going to call this albedo and i'm going to plug this out color into our color inputs of our principal nodes okay so now if i hit render again and i bring our ipr you'll see that we have our texture correctly mapped to the surface of our grid all right let's keep going what else do we have i'm just going to create another texture node and let's navigate here and what we have here is we have some ao ambien occlusion we have like a bump we have a depth map which is the same as a displacement or height map we have some glossiness we have high glossiness we have a normal map and we have a roughness let's bring in the roughness next so i'm just going to click open on this guy and i'm going to call this roughness and we have like a couple of options but what i like to do is i don't know if you can kind of see but like you know the color has this green you know color to to the input and the roughness and other ones have a little bit of a slightly different color which is a little bit more teal hopefully you can kind of see it on youtube what this means is that it's actually not getting any rgb information but it's actually getting some float values which are typically grayscale so what we can do in our roughness uh you can kind of see that the roughness also has this out color which is this green little circle and then it has this more teal circles for the individual channels so in this particular case we're dealing with a grayscale image so it doesn't really matter if it's red green or blue but what i prefer to do is just go from my red color r output into the roughness input and if i hit my render now we can see that we have some roughness so this is the before with just the albedo and this is after with some roughness applied all right let's keep going so what else do we have let's bring in another texture node and let's navigate and find what else this gives us so we have a gloss channel and a high gloss channel i'm not really going to worry about it right now also because i don't think i need them but we do have a normal map or a bump map so i'll show you like how to use the normal maps or the bump maps uh basically what you do is let's start with the bump map i'm just going to click open here i'm just going to call this bump and basically what we want to do is we want to like open this arrow right here that says bump normal displacement because this guy has our different inputs and don't let this confuse you normally you're just going to want to use this displacement normal bump value so i'm just going to go from the out color into here and that should be all that i really need except there's another step that i need to do i need to navigate in my principled node i need to navigate to the bump normal displacement map and make sure that this is set to whatever type of displacement but or normal map that i'm using so in this case i'm using a bump map so it's set for bump and i'm just going to pump up like the intensity value here to about like 10 i'm going to exaggerate a little bit just because the fact that i've used this texture before and i know that the bump map is a little too soft to kind of see it so i'm just going to click render one more time so that we can kind of see the effect of our bump map and once again i don't know if you can really see it on youtube uh but um but you know it just gives us a little bit more kind of depth detail i guess um and we could be using like a normal map and for the normal map you would do exactly the same thing you would like use the normal map right here which is what this looks like and we would just kind of need to change this to normal and it gives you two options directx or opengl let's try like opengl and i'm just going to actually put the intensity fairly low on this one because once again i know that for this particular material uh the normal doesn't really need to be that crazy so so we have like some normals once again it's a little hard to see because it's pretty subtle where 3d light however really really shines is with displacement maps and the reason why is because the displacement is happening at render time uh all the extra tessellation that's needed for displacement it's happening in render time and it's really really fast you don't have to like select any extra checkboxes or anything like that in your geometry you don't have to have a crazy amount of polygons 3d light will do all the hard work for you in the background and it will do it really quickly so let me show you how a displacement map would work i'm just gonna once again create a brand new texture i'm gonna call this displacement and i'm going to this time navigate over to what this particular uh creator this texture is calling a depth map and as i said some other people might call a height map or some people might refer to as a displacement map all right so with the displacement map open we can just plug the out color to the displacement normal input bump value right here and once again we need to go into our principled node and make sure that this guy is actually matching whatever type of map we're using and in this particular case we have two options for displacement one is with 0.0 centered and one is 0.5 centered i typically choose 0.5 which will try to displace up and down while leaving the original geometry pretty much in the same position where like the zero centered tends to push everything outward if that makes any sense i'm also going to bring back the intensity back to one and now that i have my displacement enabled if i hit render we'll see exactly what that does to our grid so now we actually have real geometry and this is really the methodology that you want to use with a render like 3d light you typically want to avoid what are kind of known as cheats such as bump maps or normal maps and you want to go for like the one that is really going to alter your geometry which is the displacement or height or in this particular case depth map now the way that you would increase or decrease the amount of displacement is by changing this intensity value right now it's set to 1 which is the default however if we say set to 10 and hit render you'll see that now we're gonna get like some pretty crazy kind of amount of displacement so you're gonna have to adjust this depending on your geometry and depending on the material that you're using so that it looks fairly normal in my particular case i think i'm going to go with the 0.8 which is a little bit lower than the default but feels like fairly natural for this particular texture set okay so what we haven't really talked about yet is how do you render to disk with 3d light right because uh you know by hitting this button we can render into this display app and of course uh the display app does give you an option to export as jpeg if you want to or you can kind of save the image as and then kind of pick really any type of image extension that you want however we want to be able to render properly and save to disk and not necessarily have to deal with having to save images from here so how do we do that in 3d light let's move over to our outs context in houdini and we're going to highlight the 3d light rob that was created automatically when we hit this button if this guy is not here let me delete it for right now just hitting this drop with the plus button will bring it up so this is where we have all of our quality settings and this is where we can tell 3d light where to save to disk so let's take a quick look at what we're dealing with here like we have a render button we have like a render mode that we can pick between render or ipr render we do have some other export to file export standing and so on and so forth i'm not going to really touch on these as they tend to be a little bit more advanced uh so for the sake of this basics tutorial i'm just going to stick to these two options render is what you would have for your proper render so when we're rendering even to the uh display app we would just kind of put it into this render mode however if you want to have an interactive display if you want to have an ipr that reacts to how you move the camera then we would change this to ipr render which is roughly the same as hitting this button here on our display so now if i hit render highlighting like the right most thumbnail so that we know that this is where we are now you'll notice that if i move my camera around our ipr will react properly so so this is how you enable the interactive ipr portion of 3d light i'm just going to put this back to proper render and we have like some tabs here at the bottom and one of the things where 3d light really shines is how simple it is to set it up because it really doesn't have that many settings at all it primarily really has these three settings which is the shading samples the pixel samples and the volume samples volume samples obviously is something that you would adjust if we're dealing with volumes which right now we're not and that leaves really like only two settings to worry about the shading samples and the pixel samples so let me explain to you when you would want to increase these values because obviously a larger value is going to give you more rays and ultimately a better quality so if you're making a render and you're noticing that you're getting like some noise particularly in the shadows and you know some portions of your image are kind of a little too noisy for your liking then you can go ahead and increase the shading samples now where the pixel samples comes in handy is if you have motion blur if you have shallow depth of field in your image or if you have really really teeny tiny details in that case you might want to increase the pixel samples once again just take a look at the amount of noise and if you find it acceptable then you're fine with the default settings however if you want to have a little bit more resolution a little less noise in your blurriness or if you have some teeny tiny details in your sync that are like barely like one pixel wide then you might want to increase this pixel samples uh we also have a motion blur check box here so if you have this enabled if you have motion in your scene it will result in motion blur if you have this disabled it will actually disable the motion blur in your render and then you have like some additional kind of fine-tuning options here honestly i tend to leave this at default then we have another tab with scene elements this is where you'll find the camera and if you want to add fog to your scene you can add an atmosphere nodes once again probably something i'm going to touch upon in a future tutorial on 3d light moving right on down we have the image layers so this is really where most of the magic happens when it comes to rendering in 3d light what we have here first of all i'm going to start at the bottom and kind of work my way up to the top actually so this is basically telling you this is the current passes that you're gonna get in your render and um right now it says i don't know if you can read it says ci which uh i guess means like color uh it's basically your basic beauty pass okay so if you want to add some additional aovs here uh you will click on this add button and now you have access to a whole bunch of aovs as i said ci is your basic beauty pass then you have a diffuse pass both direct and indirect so you have subsurface scattering you have reflection you have refraction volume scattering incandescence z depth uh blah blah blah blah and on and on these are pretty standard aovs so if you want to enable say you want to have a separate pass for your diffuse you would enable this guy if you want to have a separate pass for your z depth you would enable this guy and click ok and you can see that now these are displayed in the various layers that are going to be exported with the render now you might notice that we have a d and f and a g and what are these and what do they mean well d simply means display the 3d light display so if you have this enabled that means that this particular pass is going to be enabled into our 3d light display app so if you have this unchecked then it's actually not going to render in the 3d light display so if you want to see what you're doing make sure that this d is checked f simply means file so do we want this to be saved to a file or not once again if it's checked that means that it's actually saving it to the file and if it's unchecked it's not going to save it to the file even if you have everything else set up to render properly and save to disk so make sure that you remember these settings because they're pretty important in 3d light and surprisingly a little bit less intuitive than one would expect from you know considering how intuitive the rest of 3d light is last but not least you have j and j stands for jpeg and what that means is that say you're rendering an exr maybe you want to have a jpeg version as well so if you enable j it's also going to export a jpeg image as well for you if you check this multi-lite checkbox then on top of the aovs that you have selected 3d light is actually going to output an aov for every of the lights that are present in your scene which can be incredibly powerful both for compositing but also for changing the look of your scene after the facts unfortunately it does give you like a lot of layers especially if you have a lot of light so thread lightly with this guy because you know if you really want multi-light enabled and you have say like 10 or 15 lights you're going to have that many different layers in your final render so uh what we have here is the image file name this is pretty standard houdini lingo dollar hip typically means save this wherever our hip file is saved in the same directory forward slash render simply means create a folder called render if no folder exist if there's already a render folder that's where you want to save it and then the rest is basically kind of call this file whatever like the name of the hip file is called dollar os i think refers to the version number and then dollar f4 is our frame number in this particular case we don't have any motion to our scene so i'm just going to render frame one so this is going to say zero zero zero one and you notice here that we have like a few options we can save as exr we can save as tiff we can save as png or even deep exr if you're doing deep compositing saying something like nuke however saving to disk at first kind of stumped me simply because i didn't know that i had to move this from disable file output to enable file output as selected which simply means whatever the settings here enable this file output so pay attention to these settings and now you'll be able to save files to disk having said that uh assuming that our quality settings are as good as we wanted all we have to do is just click render and let 3d light do its thing and it's going to render to the display app because remember we do have the d enabled for these layers as a matter of fact now in the display app if i click on this guy we have the drop down menu where i can just kind of look at my diffuse or i can look at my z-pass which doesn't look like much right now but i assure you all the information is in there most importantly if i click away from houdini and go into my desktop where i save my file now i have a render folder that was created for me and inside this render folder folder i have an exr file and this exr file has the proper alpha so that's why it displays with the transparency in the background okay so this covers pretty much all of the basics of 3d light there's one more thing that i was going to cover which is vdbs because i'm sure a lot of you guys are probably curious how to use vdbs in 3d light and vdbs is really one of those things where 3d light really shines over other renderers including speed so let's put this guy out of the way right now and let me show you how to use vdbs in 3d light now at the moment 3d light is not compatible with native houdini volumes okay so you do have to use vdbs and you have to kind of use them a little bit in a in a bit of a special manner that i'm going to show you so um i have like some vdb files that i'm going to bring in here and uh the easiest way to deal with vdb is here i'm just going to uncheck the grid because we don't really need it right now um is to click this vdb button in our 3d light shelf so if i click on this guy it opens up a finder window that allows me to navigate to whatever vdb file i want to bring into my project uh right now i just have like this uh collection of clouds from mitch meyer so i'm just gonna select the first one just to give you guys an example so this is just like a basic vdb cloud file i'm just going to click open so the first thing that 3d lite did is create a geometry node that it called vdb and if we dive inside that we can see that we have a file node that is bringing in our vdb file and very importantly on this file node if we highlight it you'll see that there's some very very specific settings that 3d light likes to see in order to be able to render vdbs correctly uh the most important one is to load as a packed disk primitive okay not some of these other options but a packed disk primitive this is what 3d light really needs in order to be able to render vdbs properly now the reason why this looks like an ugly box is because it's defaulting as display as bounding box but if we want to see our vdb in its full glory all we have to do is just change this to full geometry and 3d light will still be able to render this just fine other than that 3d light added a transform node if we want to transform our geometry and this is 3d lights way of saying don't add anything more than this okay so if you want your vdbs to work properly uh even a null is probably going to mess up 3d light in some ways so what else did 3d light do if we go to our material context we'll see that 3d light actually created a volume material for us automatically so once again like it did a lot of the heavy lifting in the background and if we go back to our obj context we'll see that it automatically already assigned our vdb volume material to our vdb geometry node so once again like you don't really have to do a whole lot to you know to set up your vdbs but 3d lite wants you to set them up in this very specific way so now if we hit render we should be able to see our cloud being rendered by 3d lights so the first thing you might notice is that it's going a little bit slower and the reason for that is primarily that 3d light uses this really really powerful multi-scattering function where the light is entering the clouds and it's bouncing inside i guess like the cloud gases and reflecting light all over the place to give you like a very very accurate depiction of what a volume would do in this particular situation and you'll see here we have a multiple scattering setting and it defaults to one and maybe it shouldn't because as i said you can make the rendering take a little bit longer than necessary but if i cut this down even down to 0.5 as opposed to one and hit render again you'll see just how faster our cloud renders now obviously our cloud has gotten darker because we don't have as much light bouncing around internally so right now it's it's a really really thick cloud i mean it looks almost like it's made out of cotton candy so one of the things that we can do is lower the density right now it's set to one once again it's the default value but in this particular case i can probably go to point zero one very easily and kind of get a little bit more uh realistic uh kind of gassy looking clouds so you can kind of see right away that we're coming from this that looks very very solid to something like this that looks a little bit more fluffy and a little bit more gaseous so the other thing that we can do to kind of brighten up her cloud a little bit is to change the transparency so right now the transparency even though it's set to one the transparency color is black what that means is that it's really not letting a whole lot of light penetrate especially on the edges of our cloud so if we change this color to white and now hit render again you will see that now the edges of our cloud get considerably more transparent and the cloud gets brighter because once again the light from the outside is out to penetrate a little bit more deeply into the cloud so we come from this to this and now we are rendering this and honestly i would say that our density is probably still a little bit too thick for my taste so maybe i'm going to go back to the scattering tab and maybe add another zero five so point zero zero five i think this is probably going to give me uh a look that i want in addition to the scattering which we as i said we have the density we even have a density curve if you want to like really fine tune the density of your vdb we have the transparency and it doesn't have to be set to white i mean you can set this to any color that you want and it's going to affect uh how the color of the light is penetrating inside your vdb volume then we have emission and this is what you would use if you have fire say like an explosion or something like that and so we have all of our fairly traditional fairly standard emission type of settings including the global intensity and black body emission and black body temperature as well as an emission color curve and emission intensity so that you can kind of fine tune how your explosion looks and you know how orange the fire is versus a little more red and so on and so forth and last but not least we have one final tab that has grids this is the data that comes into your vdb file so generally you will have at least density present in your vdb file however you might have color you can have temperature you can have heat and you can have velocity as well as a velocity scale set up okay i think this is how i'm going to cover for this particular tutorial as i said all i wanted to do is give you a very very basic introduction to 3d light i would recommend that you guys check it out like download it download the free version run it on your system see if you like it because you know there's definitely some benefits to cpu rendering that gpu rendering cannot match now as i said like you know in some cases you know your gpu render is going to be faster but 3d light is going to be able to keep up pretty pretty well as a matter of fact in the test that i ran it was remarkably close in rendering time i'm going to do some additional tutorials in the near future where i'm going to show you some of the more advanced features of 3d light including some notes that are really really powerful that i haven't seen in any other render except for 3d light so uh you know keep an eye out for those and in the meantime thank you so much for watching uh subscribe if you haven't done so like somewhere somewhere around here there's like there's like a there's like a circle somewhere somewhere around here where is it right here there's a circle right here subscribe click on this anyways thank you for watching and see you next time

Channel: Right-Brained Tutorials

Views: 4,867

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: adobe, aftereffects, houdini, vfx, video, post, production, after, effects, CGI, tutorials, premiere, null, objects, camera, 3d, C4D, maxon, studio, redshift, render, exr, cinema4d, maya, translation, psr, c4d, Maxon, alien, scene, sunset, planet, distant, sun, moon, 3delight

Id: IC9Gt6TG0ws

Length: 36min 11sec (2171 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020