Tutorial: ProRender in Release 20 in depth | Maxon Cinema 4D

welcome in this tutorial I talk about the new pro render features in max on cinema 4d release 20 as a great example we will use this scene by the talented artist Yankee Angie is using cinema 4d since his college time in 2004 he owns a production company and the only Chinese Maxon authorized training center you find more informations about him and his work on his website before we dive now into this tutorial I want to make a brief introduction of myself my name is Helga Maus and I'm a maxim certified lead instructor but now since 18 years in the industry as a 3d and VFX trainer for my company pixel trained you'll find more information about me and my trainings on pixel trained da-te so let's get started with our scene so we are back in the original scene by the artist and in the first step we want to analyze this scene really briefly I go out of the camera here and if you look around here you see this is a typical studio setup which you use for product shots let's stop here the pro runner for a moment you see here our product in the middle of the scene on this wooden plate and around this you see different kind of light sources some of them are direct like this back light here all the light sources which are placed here inside of these cylinders to direct them more to the product themself but you also find here these big planes here which are used as reflectors in front of these planes they are placed light sources and these light sources here I try to grab one okay there it is they are not directed in direction here of the product but they are directed here to this planes and only the reflected lights of these light sources illuminates here the middle part of the product the last light source we have in this setup here is an hgri which is placed on a sky object around this scene so you see it's really typical studio setup and this is the first step we want to go in this tutorial so I switch over to our two purl stat scene I use for this the B key on my keyboard to open a radial menu and because I've opened both files I can go here to projects tutorial program the test so this is the scene we want to work now with and you see here are some preset materials from the artist and also a part of his product and we want first to start with Pro runner let's go into the render settings and to activate program you can go here to the renderer and switch the engine to pro-rata Pro render itself is a ray tracer an unbiased uni-directional ray tracer what this means is that there are no caching principles going on everything is ray traced and through this ray tracing process which is really easy on one side you have the big advantage that you don't get artifacts in any kind of way the only thing you have to keep in mind is that the ray tracing process takes time and so the big advantage of pro runner is that it calculates on the GPU for this it uses OpenGL or metal here on my Mac and so it's a little bit independent from the manufacturer of the hardware sure if you have an AMD card it's more optimized because Pro renderer is made by AMD but in other cases it will also run if you now think about a ray tracing process normally you have to set up how many bounces or how many depth passes you want to have PT array that means if you want to have a reflection for example this is named amounts and you see here under the preview tab that we have three bounces in the moment inside of this preview if you want to have more depth we will see some of the problems you have with these lower values here later you have to increase them and we will come back to this value later I said that you don't get artifacts the only artifact you ever get in an unbiased renderer is nice because it normally starts with a really cause result I can demonstrate this here I go back to my viewport here and say I want to start my Pro render now here from this view and you see it takes a while and then it starts and you see it starts really noisy and then more and more iterations are calculated and the result gets better and better to get rid of the noise we need iterations and these settings we have here under iteration count and we will talk about these settings a little bit later so everything is set up now and you see we don't have any light sources going on in the moment but we still see light the reason for this is that Pro render gives you you see it here under general a default light if no light source is present in your scene if you really want to make sure that you never get a default light switch this off and this is my safety tick so I do this in the moment and then everything is black here I stop my Pro render for now the first step we want now to go is we need a sky object within hgri around this so we go into the cinema for the sky here a little side note here cinema 4d r20 is also now able to work with the physical sky it bakes in the background the texture of the physical sky as an HDR eye and so we can use many features of the physical sky not all but many of them we go to the standard sky here which is only a infinite sphere around or a scene and then we have to add a material with the HDR eye so I go here to create select a new PBR material and we name it sky and we can place it directly here on the sky and then we dive into the material and we can deactivate the reflectance for a moment go to luminance and now we load here our HDR eye which I want to use this one here and now you see that the a CRI is now placed around the scene here and can be used if you want to have more resolution here you can go here to the editor settings inside of the material and you can change it the texture preview size if you like for example to something like 512 pixel so that you see a little bit how this room is lit and if you now activate the pro renderer Pro run resist this sky with the luminance material now as a light source and now you see your first lighting if you come from other render engines you maybe think now about what about global illumination have you activated global illumination in the moment for this we go back here into the render settings at a preview and you will see that the random mode in Pro renders always set here to global elimination you can deactivate this and say I only want to have the direct illumination without any shadows or you also can go here and say I only want to have an ambient occlusion solution but per default we have global illumination going on it's a brute-force approach and that's the reason why we have a Rea depth over one here so we have some mounts as Ian if you open this up you see you have three bounces diffuse depth which means three bounces of light for diffuse and this is the global illumination okay if you now want to place the sky little bit different you can select this and take your rotation tool and you can rotate this around and the nice thing in working here with pro Runner is that you have instant feedback any of you port so you can directly see what's going on if you want to get rid of the image in the background you can add here a cinema 4d Tech compositing and I drag it here to the right and then you can deactivate scene by camera so only the light is calculating all the Rays but not for the camera later we'll see that this guy is also useful for reflections on our glass material so that's a good start the next thing we want now to place our light sources and because of the nature of Pro render as a physical accurate render you can't use all the cinema 4d lights here for pro era we use here the PBR light if you add one here it comes as an area light and I deactivate the sky for a moment so that you only see the result here of this light source and like in cinema 4d you have now light settings and if you take a closer look here to this PBR light you see it's a cinema 4d Lite but many options are grayed out and some of the presets are made here automatically which you normally do if you want to make a physical accurate rendering for example you have here an area light so that's the first decision the BB a light has done shadows always on because every light cast shadow under details you will see that the fall off which is inverse-square physical accurate is always on so it's always correct and here you can change how the shape is looking other things are deactivated because they are not physical accurate if you want to work now with the slide you have to be aware that this light source has also a physical appearance that means if you look straight to the light source you have this illuminated plane here but you can deactivate here on the details with showing runner but it's still a light source here and if you look to the back of a light you see this black plane here because the light is only z direction only that means it only illuminates in Z direction you can change that but in some cases you want to remove this black plane here because you want to place your camera behind this so you also can go here to shone renderer and deactivate this but in my case I'll leave it on because it's an interesting approach here if you now want to make a physical light from this you can now go to general and say okay I want to change the intensity here you can overdrive the values because you have a fall-off so sometimes you need really strong values here for your light source and what you also can do is you change your color you can change the color here by a color chooser or you can switch here to the temperature you can do it here in the color chooser if you go here to Kelvin or you can open here on the left side beside the color here this little triangle tick here use temperature and now you have here a temperature slider where you can make your light a little bit warmer or less warmer this is the way many architects or product designers work because they want to have an exact value for the color temperature so these are the light sources or the direct light sources you have in programmer but there are some other light sources inside of Pro Runner for this I deactivate this light here and I add a so named mesh light the mesh LED is for example a plane and I stop the Pro render for a moment I place my plain here and I make sure that my plane looks into Z direction okay and if I now go here and add a PBR material onto this plane and I named it much light can now go into the material I start pro rendre again nothing happens because the material in the moment has only reflectance I deactivate the reflectance and then I go into the luminance channel and in the moment I take this you now see light in the scene so this is a mesh light the big advantage of a mesh light like this here is that you can use for example textures inside of that for example you have an HDR which you want to use for example of a studio light or you can add a feature like this also in cinema 4d you can go here to this little triangle and add for example a gradient and I make this preview also huge and to a plane and if you go into the gradient now you see our new cinema 4d our 20 gradient Richard and this Richard is really really useful if you work with lights like that so I open here this little triangle and here you can now select here color pickers like before you can add them you can drag them out so nothing fancy about this but what I wanted to do is I wanted to have a circular light so first I go here to the type of the gradient and I switch here to circular and now the circle is in the wrong direction so you can make a right mouse button click here over the gradient and say I want to invert the gradient then I bring this here a little bit in so that we have full circle and now you see this circle is still lighting our scene but yeah the values are not high enough and in older versions of cinema 4d we had the problem that we can't make this white here whiter than white you see this year is a complete white but in this new version of cinema of dr 20 we can now select this white here and go here to the brightness value which is 100% and now we can increase this brightness for example to 150 percent that means the color is still white so it hasn't changed here but it illuminates like an HDR eye it is now 150 percent in luminance and we can overdrive this tool for example 500% and now you see you have a really nice match light and you also can start changing here the fall offs with this full of interpolations here which we have now in our 24 every of these points and so on so sometimes this is also a useful way of lighting a scene and if you want to have some turbulence you see exactly what happens here so these are two ways of lighting the third way of lighting is the way which the artist in this rendering has used he wants to use a plane but he wants to use the plane as a reflector like in the photo studio for this we take our area light which we had before here and place it under the plane in the next step I Serie out the coordinates so that I'm exactly at the same position here like the plane and I move it a little bit out and rotate it 180 degree so now my light source is pointing into the direction of this plane here and this plane reflects through the pro runner global illumination it slide into the scene get rid of the old material and start pro Runner and you see it works the question arises now what's the advantage about this hmm that Vantage is that we now can configure how this reflection plane looks and if you take a look here into my materials which I've copied there's a light step and you have here a yellow and a blue light background and if I place now on the plane this yellow one you see this really really nice gradient going on on the plane and you get a really nice lead scene here if you need more light you can go onto the light source and increase here the light if you like and you get more reflections in your scene if you change mind and you want to have a cooler light you take the blue and place it here over the plane and you get a blue reflector in your seat now you have seen the different kind of light sources we can use inside of Pro rammer and I've prepared here this scene a little bit for you you have your light setup going on so I make it visible we can remove our sky and I also prepared that and if you now look into this here's the sky I place my sky material onto this this guy is a little bit rotated here that's the reason why I prepared this and so I also wanted to have my compositing tag back where I deactivate scene by camera and then we have here backlight going on behind the scene that's this year then we have here the shade on the right side the shade on the left side and we have a specialty here which the artists have given us we have here this little cylinder going on and this cylinder has deactivated caps you see if you go here you see the cylinder has no caps and what you can do now for yourself is you place here a light source inside a PB a light inside of this top light Sira out here the coordinates and also here the angles then we change this here to a disk we can make it small now and place it here of this cylinder now we have a light source which comes directly over our desert here and to make this object invisible because our camera will normally see this here we can give this top light also here a compositing tag we are seen by cameras deactivated and yeah that's it if we now start pro renderer again now see that our scene islets after we've done now our lighting setup we can talk about materials and as Pro Andrew likes physical values we also use inside of Pro render only physical based materials for this we go here to the create menu of the materials manager and we select new physical based rendering material I add one of these materials here to this wood surface here so that we can see what's going on and instantly we get feedback nice thing in pro renault if we now go into this PBR material you will see that the diffusion is gone and the environment and also the glow because they are not physical you still can use color which normally simulates diffuse reflections on surfaces but the normal rule is that we want to have all the reflectance going on on the surface built here in the reflectance Channel and this is the preset which the new PBR macule also does if you go now here to the reflectance you see that we have two layers to make it more easier switch here to the tab layers you see here is a default diffuse layer and a default reflection layer both working at the same time that means we have a diffuse reflection going on and over that is a layer of normal reflections which we say this is specular or reflections to make it more easy I deactivate or I delete this default reflection for a moment and we select now the only layer which we have which is a diffuse layer if we now go to the diffuse layer you see the type of the layer is conversion this is diffuse shader and there's also another one which is named or Ania so you can select which kind of diffuse reflection you want to have depending on your project underneath that here is the layer color and this is exactly the place where you normally change the color appearance of your object if you have an earlier versions changed here the color channel so this year is now in exchange you color settings so you can go here to the color and say I want to have something brownish here for example and you directly see this is a diffuse reflection of the surface or you can tell the system okay I don't want to use color at all I go back here to white instead of that I want to use a texture and we load now a texture and we have here wood texture in the files and if you now load this here you see now the wood texture on the surface but what you also see is that the projection here doesn't look right right let's get out of this and change the projection for a moment for this I select here the surface and also here my texture tag and you see in the moment the UV map is used so we don't have a clear UV map here on the surface so you can go in here and say I want for example to use a cubic projection and you see it looks much better if you want to change now the projections we have some new features inside of cinema 4d or 20 we have now a nice projection display and if you go here to the texture mode you will see that we now have I if the camera for a moment and stop the bro render you have here this helper widget going on which is really nice the old XC mode is gone you see you don't have it anymore so it's really easy you can now move this boxy because we have selected cubic year round you also can use a scale tool to scale this and place your texture like you want also you can rotate this if you say okay the wood looks better if I look in this direction or if the texture isn't such nice pattern so that you can really see what's going on you also can select this year now and we have a projection display here where you can see I want to see a grid or a solid going on so this is a really great helper if you want to place something here if we have now the right projection found for example I say I want to have it flat you see flat isn't right we can rotate it 90 degree and now if you want you can make a right mouse button click here on the texture tag and say fit to object so that we have it exactly fitted here on this part of the surface the reason why it's here only on one side is that we have a symmetry object going on here over the wooden surface so it starts again and then we can leave here our texture mode again and you see that's now the result we get if we now go back here to our PBR material and start Pro runner again to see that something is missing in the moment we only get the diffuse reflection here of this wooden surface but what is missing are all the other reflections like for example specular or real reflections and for this we need a second layer you can stack here many layers of reflectance in this reflectance channel if you need another layer you go here to the add menu and decide what kind of reflection you need we talked about the diffuse reflection and in our case we really want to have speculaas and real reflection and for this I normally use background or ggx I take the G GX model here and if you like you can name it so that you later understand which setup you have done and if you add a layer here you get a new tap and if you select the tap you only see the values for this ggx layer TJX helps you to work with real reflections on the surface and the big advantage with ggx is if you increase roughness really really strong you see that ggx has this wonderful fall off here and first you decide how rough the reflection has to be but now the reflection is everywhere and everywhere with the same amount and this is not correct normally reflectance is dependent on your angle of view and for this we need the fernell here you can go to the frontal of this layer and it's working like a mask but this mask is made by the direction of the Ray of sight so you can decide which kind of reflection you need is the dielectric or conductor contactors are metals and all other materials are dielectrics so wood is a dielectric and if you now select here dielectrics you see that an IRR of 1.35 is used which I like here you see it looks better and you see the more flat you look onto the surface the more reflection you get and if you look at perpendicular to surface you see less reflections this fall of snow correct and the last thing we want to do is we want to decide how much reflection we want to have all in all for this we can go here to the layers and change here this slider here and say we only want her for example 30% or you can go into the reflection layer gjx directly and here under masks we have exactly the same amount slider here but the big advantage here in this area is that we also can use a texture for that so if it's not the same all over the surface now our wood is done the next thing is normally we need to bump up for this that's a bump here we go back here into our textures and I load my wood texture again and now you see that Pro render and now uses the luminances of this year also for the bumps we can change it here a little bit for example like that and so now we also have bumps here on the surface if you like the next material we need is glass and if you want to do that we do the same again we go here to the PBR materials and place this PBR material here on this cup and to search this we can press the S key see here is and then we can go here back into the system and think about how glass is working normally glass has no diffuse reflection so we go here to the layers and remove this time this diffuse layer and in the next step you have to go here to the transparency and activate this now we have transparency going on and a little bit of reflectance and we also can deactivate this for a moment so that we only see the transparency going on and you see that you normally doesn't see the glass anymore the reason for this is that we need a refraction value here we can use 1.53 for example for a glass material and the moment you do that you see you get not only the refraction but also reflection the reason for this is that transparency always delivers a reflection you see this in the reflectance channel here it's added automatically and you don't have to activate these values here if you don't want to change this normally it fits perfectly because of this Iowa now okay so everything is done here but our glass looks a little bit strange it's really black here what's going on you remember that ass at that we have a ray tracer and we have to decide how deep this ray is calculating we have here a refractive surface that means it hits you on the front of the for example glass ball and it has leave on the other side so you have two bounces going on but this glass here is really nice modeled by the artist so you have a outside and inside and on the other side another inside and then the outside here the Ray is not calculated completely through the glass and this is something you have to change in your pro render settings so if you go here to pro render we are still in the preview yes you see that our maximum rate is still three bounces so it's not enough we need four bounces here to go through the glass but instead of changing these values here I open here this triangle and this is a new feature inside of cinema 4d r20 that we have now a branched approach instead of increasing only this value here to ridiculous high value we now can go in here and decide which kind of process gets how many bounces you see I've increased now the maximum rate up to 14 but nothing has changed yet because we limit for example the diffuse depth to 3 the glassy depth to 3 and our refractive depth here to 3 and that's not enough if we increase this now to 4 suddenly our glass gets transparent later we have maybe some areas in our image where we have a deeper refractive value because we have two glasses behind each other or something like that so we can also increase this to a higher value for example let's play safe with ade for example to class behind each other and you have to check this later don't forget that these values are only for the preview around room for the offline ranra you also have to set them otherwise this year here's the final image and you don't get the values here so you see here in the offline Runner we have a maximum rate depth of 12 and the refractive depth of 12 so that's good but you have to check this place now we have done two materials the third one here is the gold so another PBR place it here on the spoon and if you want to make gold you have to think about okay how does gold or metal work you will see that the diffuse value of gold is extremely low normally most of the things which are going on on the surface is refraction so we go to the reflection here I take Beckman I go to the frontal and due to the cool programmers of Maxon we have here a nice preset we go under for now to contact her because this is a metal and then we have here preset for gold I think here it is and now you have your gold going on you see it's really rough here so we can change this a little bit here and change now the appearance of our gold and now you see that this gray is really yeah strange and that's the reason why I normally go in here and remove all the diffuse inside of metals because the diffuse reflection inside of metals is really really low so remove it or make them black and now you see this year looks really like gold this is okay and you see how fast this system now works so we have set up our materials now I will take now a little bit of time and add the original materials back to the scene and then we want to look into this chocolate here in the next step I'm back the last thing we want to do now inside of our to turtle scene is now we want to talk about the chocolate and the cream inside of the glass first let's make this glass here and visible so that we see a little bit better we make this for the viewport and also for the rendering and to see the chocolate I over right now these red dots with green dots here and so we have now here our chocolate now we can start our program again if we want to do things like chocolate milk butter and so on we need an effect which is named subsurface scattering because light ray can penetrate into a volume like this and it bounces around inside of this volume so a part of the rays are blocked and a part of the race will penetrate the volume and come out at other points so you can't make the chocolate only brown like I've said for this we need subsurface scattering and a new feature inside of cinema 4d r20 pro renderer is now that we have a raytrace subsurface scattering effect subsurface scattering itself is not new for some of be and I have to show you a little gotcha I switch back here to this standard runner for a moment and I add here a cinema 4d or PBR material doesn't matter and the normal place where subsurface scattering lives is in the luminance channel so we can activate this we go here to the texture effects and here's the subsurface scattering shader and if you dive into this it looks like that this is exactly this subsurface scattering shader which we had in the version before but if you now switch over to pro renderer you will see now in new subsurface scattering shader so keep this in mind these two subsurface scattering shaders are different there is the difference between the standard and physical and the pro render version the reason for this is that the pro render version is fully ray traced and this is also a little bit easier to understand so for this I have made here the chocolate here and if you now want to work the subsurface scattering normally you don't need any diffuse reflection so I deleted this layer here the only thing we need here is reflection ggx I have a little roughness on to this and also under friend L I used an ir r here of 2.4 so yeah this is made by experiment it's not accurate for chocolate but it looks good now we go here to the luminance channel and like I said we added here the subsurface scattering shader instead of this shader now we have really few parameters and they are really easy to understand the first parameter we have here is the scatter color and because you don't have any diffuse reflection in the moment this is also the surface color this is the color you see directly on the surface then we have a depth color and this is the color inside of the volume and the depth how deep ray can penetrate into this volume is the scatter depth and so it's dependent on your physical size here of the object so you have to play with this some times this value are the same so you can drag this value here by dragging the color over and then you change it in most cases a little bit here it's a little bit brighter so that's it here then you have the face the face means in which direction the scatter effect takes place you can read about this in the help file of cinema 4d or you can test it and if you have something for example like the cream here you sometimes want to overdo the reflection a little bit and for this we have an emissive amount if you have a mission here it's really like a light source you get more energy out of that so keep this in mind that this year is also light in your scene but for this cream year it looks good back to the chocolate now we have added here the subsurface scattering shader and now we can use it here on our chocolate and if we start now Pro render you really can see now how the light rays will penetrate into the volume and you see here where the surface is thin you see the light rays going through and we get this light brown color and where the volume is thicker it blocks and you get this really nice chocolate effect the same for the cream the cream is placed here we can also override this here and show it okay and both our subsurface scattering effects and the artists has made really nice use of the subsurface scattering shader also here with the raspberries if you wanted to see them here on top of the chocolate you can activate them here we are finished now with the scene so I bring everything back to render and we have now to check our render settings and you will see in our preview that the cream which was white before is now really really black what's going on you remember when we started we had this Rea depth subsurface scattering year is also something which has to do with volume and refractive death and here you have to increase now this value also I go here to for example 12 and now you see the light rays are now able to come into this volume and go through don't forget that if you change values here you have to change them also here later for the final image in the offline otherwise you get a different result and we want to have a little bit of depth of field here also in the preview here for the offline I have activated it here so thick depth of field here and took place now the focal point go to your short camera here is the focal distance under the object app you can click here for example to this part of the glass here so sinfully measures now the distance to this point here and to change the aperture you can change here on the physical the f-stop and the rule is the lower the f-stop the more the blur effect appears that's exactly going on here that's it for this tutorial I hope it helps you to start with this great new inclination of pro render inside of cinema 4d r20 my name is Helga mouse from pixel train have fun

Channel: Maxon

Views: 78,071

Keywords: c4d, cinema 4d, r20, release 20, sculpting, bodypaint 3d, maxon, modeling, modelling, 3d, animation, rendering

Id: eMXE3Rj8y_k

Length: 42min 36sec (2556 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 01 2018