Useful Lighting Techniques in 3D - C4D Redshift - Ross Mason

ross is going to you know he's uh recently became a freelancer i think he's got a background in graphic design he's based in england and his focus lies in creating unique work which helps to tell story and bring brands to life is there anything else you want to say and to introduce yourself ross i think you you hit it hit the nail on the head with that one yeah that sounds perfect okay great so today i think he's just going to be running us through everything about how he does 3d lighting am i right here this is c4d and are you working in uh redshift yeah that's correct yep right so so take it away cool all right well hi everyone thank you for tuning in um so today i'm gonna be running through um how to light a scene like this so i put a post up on instagram earlier uh we've got quite like a daylight feel here and then this darker moodier vibe so hopefully i'm gonna have enough time to run through both of these scenes but i thought it would be quite a valuable um talk to kind of go through my process of lighting so i'm gonna start this scene from scratch so i'm just gonna delete all the lights um so let's just scrap those and if i just come out the camera this is the setup i've got at the moment so we've got this shoe in the middle here and then we've got this curved uh backdrop here and i'll talk later more about why i decide to go for these curved ones as opposed to just a normal background but um yeah let's get let's get going with the lights so if i just get the render view going at the moment we shouldn't see anything too much and i'm just going to lock this to the camera um that way i can move around my viewport and the camera is still in place so i'm just going to drop in a hdr just to start off now i usually always do this when i'm starting a scene out just so that i can kind of get a base for the lighting and just look at how the textures are working so a common go-to for me is a good old hdri haven studio which i think is quite a popular one and the reason why i use a studio hdr in this situation is because i'm trying to recreate that studio environment so getting that base for the hdr lighting is um just helps you to get off to a good starting point just getting some nice reflections in there um some nice shadows and just nice details in general so if i rotate this hdr around um you can see if i just turn off the background real quick uh and let's see the background's enabled that's cool um it's basically going to use this texture as a light source so it's going to pick up on the bright values within that image and the dark values and use this to cast light and shadows so just spinning this around you can see we can get completely different looks based on the angle we put this hdr at um and yeah like i said i'll use this to kind of get like the basic look and feel that i want for this piece um so in this case we want to go for quite a bright daylit vibe so um i'm gonna light it from the right hand side here so we have this nice key light coming in on the right hand side and you can see we're starting to pick up some reflections in there as well which are already looking good and it gives us a nice starting point so i'm going to disable the background just so that we we can't see that because i don't want the hdr in the final render and i think it might be worth me just quickly running through the texture i'm not using anything too fancy in fact i could probably take all the texture out of this and it wouldn't make too much of a difference but it's um it's a few textures taken from mega scans um just to add a bit more detail in there but if i was to take them out i could probably just go with like a pretty simple clay render and just because i think the main focus here is the lighting not the texturing so if i was just to plug some similar kind of colors in and yeah we've just got like a simple diffuse um the reflection at the moment's being driven by this roughness map here but i'm going to take that out so let's um just put these back to the default settings so let's turn the roughness up on that um and then how i'm able to kind of get quite a rough look but also this like secondary shine down here is something called coating so it's basically adding like a second layer of reflection on top of your material so at the moment we've got this quite rough looking material not really any harsh reflections on there if i turn the coating on uh you can see now we get this secondary reflection on there so it allows you to stack a few different looks on there um and you can get some nice results out of it so yeah it's a pretty simple setup i can probably take the bump out of it that's not going to make too much of a difference and take the displacement out so now we're literally working with just a clay material recently pretty much um just with a bit of like an orange tint to it so i think that was just worth running through just so you know i'm not using anything too crazy um and i guess that kind of leads into my main point that i think lighting is like really really important like you can have perfect textures but if your lighting is not on point then it's um it's just not going to do the texturing justice so starting off with a simple material like this getting your lighting right and then working on the texturing um just allows you to know you're getting the best out of that texture so we started off with this hdr and i'm going to turn back on that background now usually starting out i will just leave the project setting at default but as we start to go into this project you'll see i'll start to exclude certain objects from the lights um just to allow us to get a bit more control so now we've got the basic hdr in there i'm going to grab an area light and a comment just to interject asking about the shoe model if you're able to let them know if you modeled it or where'd you get it from yeah sure um so i didn't actually model this shoe um one of my friends who's a footwear designer modeled it um i think he models them in vr which is uh quite interesting but i've actually got this model out on my gumroad page he was happy for me to share it so i can drop a link uh later for that if you wanted to download it and have a play with it yourself yeah that would be amazing thanks yeah no problem um so yeah we've got this area light which has come in and by default it's going to be pretty huge so we're going to want to scale that down straight away and the shortcut i use is t which will take you to your scale tool and one of the first things i'll do is right click on it and add a target tag now this essentially allows you to use an object that the light will always point towards so if i drag the shoe no into that light and start to move this around it's always going to be facing towards that shoe so this just allows you to get your lights in place and just move them around quicker without having to constantly rotate them and move them um another method you could do if i just delete that tag real quickly uh is come up to cameras use camera and set active object as camera and basically now we're going to be looking through the light so if i just turn this exposure all the way down so it's a lot more subtle you can see as i start to move this object around that's actually affecting the light because we're looking through the light itself so there's a couple of different methods you can do i usually use the target method just because i find it a bit easier um and then we can click at the top and go back to the default camera so i'm going to put that target back on there say it to the shoe and we've already got the kind of key light coming in from the top right and i want this area light to act as a rim because this is looking quite dark down here so we want to capture some more light information to help this jump off the background so i'm going to turn this area light back on and i'm going to scale it down as well because essentially if you have a smaller area light it's going to cast harsher shadows whereas if you want something like a fill light then you would scale it all the way up and i'll talk more about that as we get into this so i'm going to move this around and what i want this one to do like i said is to just capture the rim of the object so i'm going to just crank up the intensity i'm also just going to turn off the camera because it's a little bit distracting at the moment and let's just move this and place it a little bit behind and having the render view just going at the same time just helps us to get some uh nice updates and we can see what's going on so i'm just going to move this around till i get to a point i'm happy with it and yeah could i just like so you would definitely say that here you're using the principles of you know three-point lighting right so for everyone who doesn't quite know that do you think you could explain how you know that what that very basic process is and how it could apply across programs regardless so what you're teaching it yeah of course yeah so the principle of three-point lighting is something they use in photography um particularly with like product photography or like just studio photography in general it kind of does what it says so you usually have three lights you have something called a key light which is uh what i was talking about with the hdr so say we use this area light as the key light instead your key light is basically the main light source for the object so if i was to move this around here um this is the main light that is lighting the object so that's your key light um so that usually is kind of off to the side typically you don't want to light your objects front on because it gives you quite like a flat image and like you've taken it with the flash on your camera so by having the lights over to the side like this you can get a lot more dramatic and interesting lighting so that would be your first light your key light and then you'd have something called a fill light so this is going to be used to basically fill any dark areas of the object so you can see i've scaled this one up and that's like i said earlier just to diffuse it a bit more so it's not as harsh um and this just kind of fills in any shadows hence why it's called a a fill light so this would go off to the side again and then you can have a third one which could go down here and this could be something like a a rim light typically so if i just scale that back down um let's actually have this coming from the bottom here and let's move it a little bit closer just crank it up a little bit so that's just going to help to kind of light up the edges of your shape so yeah it's called the three-point set because you typically have three lights so we've got our key light our fill light and then our rim light coming in from behind which helps you just give you kind of that overall um lighting for an object so hopefully that helps to explain it a little bit um okay cool so we've got those lights up and that didn't take too long at all i think obviously we can tweak these a little bit but first i want to add the um light in for the background so i'm going to create a new area light again i'm going to add a target tag to this and i'm going to drop the background into the target and i'm actually going to start naming these otherwise i'll start to forget what they are so that's the background light and usually i'll go through them one by one so this is a rim light here then we have the fill light so you can see because we've gone for a much larger light there it's a lot more diffused and just helping us to fill those shadows in we've got our hdr which is acting as a key light so i'll usually put like hdr key or we can have our area light which is doing the same thing so i'm going to use the hdr just because i feel like it's getting us some nicer uh reflections and also just filling this side as well so we don't actually need to feel light as much okay cool so we've got our background light and the first thing i'll do is come into the project tab now i think you have these in most softwares i know you've definitely got it in octane um and if you're using something like blender for example um i think you have these settings as well but it allows you basically to exclude uh different objects from the light so in this case i only want this light to affect the background so if i exclude the shoe that means if i was to turn off all these lights here it's only going to light this background so that way you have a lot more control over your lighting and you don't have to worry about positioning as much because you can just affect the objects you want to affect so with this one i'm trying to put it into an into an environment and that matches the brightness of the lighting of the shoe so far to turn on all these do they feel like they belong in the same world uh if i was to dim this background down really low um it starts to look peculiar that the background is really dark but the lighting on the shoe is really bright so you kind of want to make them blend together a little bit obviously you want the product to jump off the background a little bit so if you even just make it a tiny bit darker or take some of the vibrance out of the background just something to make that product uh pop off the page a little bit but also just make it feel like it's in the same environment so that's the kind of aim we're going for so i usually put this from above um but obviously this changes depending on your scene and this is just kind of like a simple setup that i'll usually do if i'm just trying to get a render out quickly but by putting it above we're getting this nice gradient from top to bottom and you can do the same from the bottom facing up and by just having this subtle gradient it just helps add a bit more depth to the piece than having just a flat background for example so that's pretty much the the simple setup for that background and then what i'll start to do is now i've got kind of the base for the lighting i can start to go in and just finesse all these lights and what i usually like to do is turn them all off and just go one by one so straight off the bat i know this rim light isn't quite looking how i'd like it to so i'll go into this and at the moment it's spilling too much light out i really want this just to kind of capture the edge here um because i feel like it's already adding quite a lot quite a lot of light to this one side and we just really want to emphasize the light along the edge here of the shape so i'm going to go to the rim light here question ross yep is there a particular reason you prefer area lights compared to all the other light options um i feel like area lights in this situation uh they kind of reflect soft boxes which is what you would use in photography um if you don't know what a soft box is it's kind of those those are lights that you'd see on like massive stands they're like square and they have like a white sheet of paper over them um and they just help to give you more realistic reflections so using area lights are probably the closest lights to soft boxes and something which you can do um which will help to add that extra level of detail is you see here we have this texture option here and we can actually go in and you can grab like a like a soft box texture like this um so this is actually going to use this image as the light now so you can start to see we've got these like blue tints in there which are coming from this image and that's just helping to furthermore add a bit more detail and really use kind of real-life lighting situations so that's probably the reason i'd use area lights obviously there's a range of different options here ies lights i'd use for if i was creating like a light bulb or something so like a ceiling light something like that uh spotlights point lights they're all much harsher and i think area lights are probably the ones which are going to give you the most realistic results for studio lighting like this all right thanks dr thanks ross sorry um so yeah i'm going to tweak this this rim light and sometimes it'll get to a point where the target uh the target tag is actually hindering you more than it's helping you so at this point as i'm starting to bring it in it's rotating it and i don't really want that to happen so i'm going to get into a good position and delete that and then start to play with the size here and just cut down the width of it so that way we're getting that rim light without too much light spilling uh into the rest of the shoe so i'm just gonna play with this quickly and just get into a good position but i um i think it's looking it's looking pretty good and i'm just gonna turn on the hdr and just see how this this uh rim light is affecting the shoe it might be that we want to bring this down because it's quite harsh at the moment to something like this and at the moment we're picking up we're picking up on a lot of the reflections so another great thing about redshift um and i think other render engines have these features as well but i'm not 100 sure is you're able to actually go into all these different parts of the light and affect it so if i wanted to take out all the reflections being casted by this light i can go to glossy for example and turn that down to zero and that's just going to help reduce the reflections and i can do the same with diffuse turn that all the way down uh turn the glossy back up and now we're just getting the reflection so this will come in handy later um but i'm going to leave that rim light as it is for now um let's turn on this fill and i think that's doing quite a good job of just filling the lighting there but again i'm just going to bring that down a little bit just because i want to create a bit more shape on this and i want it to start to kind of fade out here so i'm just going to bring that down and maybe just scale it down as well a little bit ross we got another question it's from adriana she's asking is it correct if you use hdr eye light as a key light and add fill light and rim light as cg aero lights or should i stick with using area lights only in this setup um i think i think you can do whatever you think works best i like to use the hdr to it really depends on your scene like the hdr you could use as a rim light as a fill light or as a key light and i think in this case the reason why i've used it as a key light is because it's giving us some really nice reflections here which um i think i deleted my area light but oh wait hold on i might have it here um when using the same area light like it's it's doing the same job but from the hdr we're just getting a little bit more information you can see it's it's helping to fill some of these shadows which um is just nice to have and we're actually getting some color data so you can use it um you can use all area lights and but i think just having a hdr even if you've got it really low so say i turn on all my area lights here and let's turn on the background one and then i could turn this hdr on here which you can see isn't making too much of a difference but it's just adding a little bit of detail in these shadows so i think it's always worth having a hdr in there even if you're just using it just to feel some shadows and just add a tiny bit more detail you could turn the exposure all the way down so if i was to turn this down to like minus two um it's literally not doing much but when you combine that with all the other lights it just helps to add that extra level of detail because you're creating an actual studio environment around your product so it's adding those extra details in the reflections the shadows um etc so yeah hopefully that helps thanks ross okay cool so we've got the kind of basic lighting for here um but there's a few extra details on this shoe model which would be really nice to pick up on so for example we have this adidas logo here um which obviously if this was a product and you're trying to showcase the brand um you really want to be able to pull out those details so this is where using the project tab in your light is going to come in really handy so i'm going to create a new area light again scale this all the way down and because this adidas logo is so small we only need a really small area light so i'm just going to scale that down still if i can press the right button and i'm actually going to add the target tag to this as well so i'm just going to drag this in and i'll call this adidas light and i'm just going to turn everything else off and then if i go to project and i can actually swap this from exclude to include so now anything i drag into here that's what it's going to include in the light so i'm going to drag the adidas in here and you can see it starts to light this up so if i was to turn everything back on now you can see it's lit that logo up much more and it just stands out a lot more but what we could do is actually just come in here uh let's see if i can move around properly and we probably just want it to light the one side so if i actually put the adidas logo into the target now it's facing that logo and we can just maneuver this around so we just get the light coming in from the one hand side so when i turn on all our lights now let's turn on the area light and i'm just going to crank that down a little bit actually maybe like -2 we now have this nice light on the logo so if we turn that off you can see you can't even really see it on the model and we turn it on and it just adds that extra level of detail so when you've got a really complex model being able to use kind of this project tab and include and exclude certain objects uh really helps to just add that extra level of detail when trying to pick up on these little objects so i'm going to turn that hdr back on and i'm actually going to crank it back up because we have some dark areas with a shadow here so if i just put this back to zero you can start to see how it fills those shadows in so that's just like one of the benefits of using a hdr and sometimes what i'll do as well if i'm just trying to use it to add more detail but i don't want to get too much heavy lighting from it is i can actually come into the gamma settings override this and then say drop it down to like 0.5 and you can see that gives it a much flatter look so now when i turn everything else back on now that's just helping to fill the shadows in you can really see the difference when i turn that on and off and that's just helping to brighten up the entire image uh if i was to go the other way for example uh turn the gamma up to something like 1.5 and then we get a super high contrast hdr so that's essentially what the gamma setting is doing it's just increasing the contrast of that image and so sometimes yeah like i said drop that down to 0.5 i could even actually go in and take the glossiness out of it so now we're not getting that shine there and that's basically just acting as like a bass light for the whole whole scene so i could turn all these back on now and yeah like i said turn it off and turn it back on and you can really see the difference where it fills in those shadows so i still want to tweak this rim light i don't think it's completely perfect just yet we're getting there for sure um but it just looks a little bit strange i think now it doesn't actually need to be as much of a rim rim light i think i can spill out a bit of light here just to help shape that a little bit so i'm going to bring it out like this maybe scale it up a little bit and tilt it towards that object just help to bring that down a little bit and then let's uh drop the exposure on this so maybe like 0.2 something like that or just zero that would work cool so that's pretty much the the setup for that one so it's a pretty simple setup if i just go through the lights one by one i'm just going to call this the key light so we've got a few more than three lights in there um but they're really just kind of little details so we've got our background light so this is lighting the object from above um we could tweak with this we could actually even include the shoe in there and that's going to actually kind of help blend that into the background so that just kind of depends on the look you're going for but i'm going to leave it excluded for now then we've got our hdr which is acting as kind of like a base layer of lighting for the shoe we then have our rim light which is just kind of not really a rim light now probably more of a feel just helping to light this left hand side of the shoe we then have another feel which is more diffused uh because it's scaled up so if we look there it's uh scaled up so it's not as it's not casting as harsh a shadow so it's helping just to fill this left hand side and there we have the key light which is our main light source from the top right you can see we're picking up some really nice reflections on the shoe here and then we have the adidas light which is helping just to really make that adidas logo pop off the shoe so it's a pretty simple setup and i think the more you start to focus on lighting the easier your eye will kind of adapt to what looks good and what doesn't um i feel like it's taking a long point a long time just to get to this point um but the more you do it the more you practice the easier you'll get so i'm going to move on to kind of lighting lighting the same scene but giving it a much darker feel so playing more with room lights and a darker environment uh is there any questions yeah i was about to say have you got any questions yeah so uh he's we got a question from hatfied he's asking what are your computer specs for us because your redshift is running pretty fast uh yeah so i recently made the switch from imac to pc because i knew i wanted to dive into redshift and it just wasn't possible on my mac but so yeah i got it pretty recently i've got a amd ryzen 3 900 i believe which is like a 12 core cpu um 32 gigs of ram and a nvidia geforce 2070 super and then i think maybe like a terabyte ssd um no 500 gigabyte ssd terabyte 2 terabyte hdd something like that so yeah i never knew you could combine md and video yeah yeah it's really cool i mean i'd love to say that i'm like know loads about pc and i built it myself but i am i use like pc specialist which is kind of like you tell them what parts you want to use and they they build it for you so um they tell you what parts are compatible not compatible so these are specialists are great i've used them before as well yeah they're really good yeah um so yeah shout out to them uh okay cool is there any other questions before i move on to ross i was just wondering um you know like have you run through any of the redshift settings just in um c4d i was wondering if like you know you've got global illumination turned on yeah yeah sure yeah yeah i can do that quick um so i actually have kind of a startup scene that i've made so if i went file new uh you can see i've already got scene lights and archive in here um and also i've got redshift set up by default with brute force turned on for the primary and secondary which is going to be your global illumination um and i think that's it so what i'll usually do if i'm just doing like a daily render which i know it's probably not the best thing to do but i go into system and they've got this experimental options section and they've got something called automatic sampling so this is great for if you've just started out in redshift and you haven't quite learned everything to do with sampling overrides um you can turn this and redshift is actually pretty good at detecting what needs to be adjusted and it'll give you renders that look kind of pretty much have got no noise in them that's what i'll use for most of my daily renders just so i haven't got a tweak for them but definitely when you're working on bigger projects um it's worth knowing about the sampling overrides and playing with all these different settings but apart from that i've got brute force turned on all these kind of different settings here are left at the default for now um if you're working with something like glass you'll want to turn the refraction levels up just so you can get a bit more detail in there same with reflection if you've got any heavy reflection but since this is a pretty simple scene we don't need to tweak with these too much um it's just going to end up increasing render times so everything's pretty much default turn on the automatic sampling turn on brute force which if i turn those off you can see we're not getting as much detail in the shadows um turn them back on again you can start to see it brightens up because it's basically bouncing the light off um surfaces so when the light hits the inside of the shoe it's bouncing off and it's filling that area uh with that light so it just helps to give you more realistic lighting but it does add to the render times a little bit okay cool any more questions are we good to keep going how long have i been talking for i think we've been talking for about half an hour let's keep going okay cool all right so i'm going to turn off all these lights uh i'm actually going to duplicate that null just so i've got them all and let's just delete them so for this darker scene uh i wanted to give it a much more kind of moodier feel you can see the example here and we've got this kind of darker background and the lighting is mostly rim lighting which should be a much simpler setup so let's start with the background and what i'm actually going to do is bring it to the bottom let me just turn off those there we go and i'm just going to rotate this 180 i'm going to turn the target off so now we have this lighting coming from the bottom here so if i was to turn down the exposure you can start to see that it's getting a lot darker now um but it's not giving us that nice fade that we want so a few ways we can uh work with this is we can either like bring it closer to the wall which is going to give us a much harsher shadow or another way you can do it is actually face it the wall like this um and then it's gonna kind of hit here and just fade out as it goes above so you can do like a kind of in-between like this and then you get um that nice gradient so we're going to start off with that so we've got a much darker feel to it and we could probably just maybe crank it down like a tiny bit more like this and i'm just going to move it away from the wall just a little bit so that it doesn't fade to complete black in those corners okay so let's start off with an area light good old area light and let's add a target to it and put the shoe in that target tag and this is mostly going to be rim lighting so we're going to put it behind the shoe there let me just zoom in so we can actually see what's going on and you can see straight off the bat um it's spilling a lot of light onto these sides here and onto the top and that again is due to the scale of this area light so there's a couple ways we can tweak with this so we can scale it down which straight away you can see it's going to reduce the amount of light that's spilling out because it's not wrapping around the edge of these around the edge of the shoe as much another thing you can do is also just bring it further away so i could bring it further away and then scale it back up and what that's going to do is like i said earlier if a light is larger it's going to make the shadows less less harsh um if i was to scale it down and bring it closer you can see how much harsher that is so it's kind of finding a middle point of how diffuse do you want the lighting to be um and then figuring out how far away it needs to be so that it's not spilling too much light so it's looking pretty good already um but it is pretty intense that is like a full-on white so we need to just bring that back so it's not too blown out uh maybe something like minus four um and let's bring it back a little bit and i'm just going to drag it down just a tiny bit so that it's starting to spill light uh along the bottom there and then i'll probably scale that up and then this is where you need to kind of tweak it so we have something like this so we've got a little light coming around here a bit of light showing at the bottom and then we're just going to play with these settings till to get a nice exposure that isn't too bright so that looks okay as it is um and then i'm gonna start using some smaller area lights which are just gonna creep some lighting the top here and on the side but so that we still kind of have this black section in the middle here so i'm actually going to duplicate this area light just because we've already got the target tag on it and just move this around and because this is going to be a much more higher contrast we're going to scale these lights down and play with these and bring them down below so that they're not spilling as much light so let's just try play with that and one thing you can do is you have this spread option here this essentially is going to help to direct where the light is going so if i was to turn down the spread it's going to become a lot more intense but it's going to focus the light kind of in a straight line coming off this light here so a good example would be if i took this background light here i'm just going to hide it for for a quick second and let's uh focus it towards the [Music] wall so zero out crank it up and let's scale it down to make sure we're looking through it properly so if i was to just turn off that shoe quickly and if i turn the spread all the way down you can start to see if i'm at like zero or like near zero it's literally going to cast a really tight shape which is based off the actual shape of the light and you can use this to direct lights um in smaller spaces or in harsher ways uh you can see even with like an exposure of minus 1.5 we're getting a really bright light because of the spread that's been closed down and as we open that up it becomes less intense and a higher spread of that light so you can use that to direct light in more precise ways which is a really handy for when you're trying to pick up on small little details okay so coming back to this so this is our rim light here and this is going to be kind of bottom fill i suppose and we can actually use that spread setting so if we just crank that down you can start to see it's not spilling as much light over here we're getting a much more high contrast feel to it and we probably want to scale it down even more now maybe increase the the length of it a little bit until we have something going on like this cool and we can bring that exposure down a little bit so let me put that to like 50. um and i feel like this rim behind it we can probably spill a bit more light so i'm going to bring it a little bit closer to the shoe just so that it's spinning some light over the top here and this can be a really uh a really good example of where we can use that light to shine the adidas logo so i'm going to duplicate the one we had before uh just because it's already set up in a good position if i turn that on and then now we start to see that adidas logo now because we're getting the light from this top right hand corner it doesn't really make sense that it's being lit from this left hand side so we're just going to move this light over here just so that it's lighting it from this direction and now you can see just how we're able to kind of make that pop off a little bit so without it you can't even really see it and then just adding it in there just adds like another detail so using a bunch of different lights and using these project tabs you can start to really dial in the lighting and kind of create a look that you want to go for so that's added a really nice detail there so i'm just going to add another area light and kind of like what i did with the last one i'm just going to use this as a base just to kind of help fill some shadows in there so let's grab that again really quickly and you can download these hdrs for free on hdri haven uh it's a really great resource um i've got a bunch of hdr's on there which are all really good and let's turn the let's uh tweak with this a little bit so in this case we might actually be able to use this as the rim light so let's uh tweak for this and see what we can get out of it so if i crank this up to something like minus one start to see it's picking up on those reflections and we just want to get a nice angle so it's kind of just playing with it at this point till we get a look that we like the look of so maybe something like that if i turn all the others back on and i can drop this down and i'm going to exclude the background from it just because it's kind of filling that in a little bit i don't really want that drop this all the way down to maybe something like minus two minus one maybe just so it's filling the shoe a little bit um but we're still getting this quite high contrast look just helps to add a bit more detail so that the shadows aren't completely black um and i think what we could do is we could add just a tiny bit of color to these area lights because they feel quite white at the moment um but the shoe has this warm texture to it so it'd be nice to kind of add that warm tint to them so i'm going to grab the let's see this rim light here and we can come into the color just add a little bit of warmth so maybe literally like 10 percent doesn't have to be much just to help add that warm tint and then we could probably do the same for the other rim here so come to like 10 nice like orange tone and just helps to tie it all together a little bit more so there are a few settings you can play with in the redshift effect so i have this photographic exposure turned on which i didn't realize i probably should have mentioned that but um that's basically going to use uh the camera settings so you can come in here and play with stuff like shutter speed so i could put that to 200 which is going to make it darker um but then use like a lower f-stop so if you have like um some knowledge of photography this is going to be really handy but um shutter speed essentially is how fast a camera would take a photo so if you've got a moving object the faster the shutter speed the less motion blur there's going to be and then things like f-stop is going to affect the bokeh so having a lower f-stop is going to create more of depth of field so like your foreground will be really in focus but then the background be like super blurry but that also affects how much light comes into the camera so having a lower f-stop will brighten it up and you can see it fills those shadows as well so you can tweak for these photographic exposure settings and that just helps to kind of add that extra level of detail you've also got settings in here such as the vanetting i think that's how you pronounce it um and then how much you want it to allow over exposure so if you've got a really bright light you can actually use this photographic exposure just to kind of turn down how much overexposure it's going to allow so you can start to dim some of these bright blown out areas with that as well as crushing the blacks to kind of add some more contrast so there's a bunch of settings in there usually i'll turn it on even if it's just to kind of brighten up the the shadows a little bit so i think that hdr is maybe being a bit too powerful at the moment so we could drop that down to something like minus three um and ross just for anyone who hasn't got registered i'm sure you can do the same thing same editing within photoshop right yeah you can um if i don't do it in here i'll take it into camera raw which is in photoshop um and do some tweaking in there you've got like all the exposure controls contrast curves um you can lift the levels of the shadows and the highlights and everything so if you if you can't do it within your software or your render engine uh photoshop's just as powerful probably if not more powerful um so yeah you don't need to worry about that too much um so i think this is looking pretty good i think you could obviously uh tweak with this until your heart's content um usually that's where i spend the majority of my time is uh just tweaking things until until i think they look right and like i said the more you the more you play with lighting the more your eyes are kind of going to adjust to what looks good and what doesn't um but the main thing we're trying to do here is like even though it's quite a dark moody feel is just help to identify the shape of the object through using like rim lighting um and just high contrast lighting really so i think that's pretty much it if we if i've got a little bit of time i can run through the photoshop stuff as well um but it's pretty straightforward it's just kind of doing final tweaks to curves and stuff um yeah i think uh we'll be up for that would that be helpful okay cool um let me find the render i did earlier so 3d raw renders okay cool so here's just looking at these two images do you think you could just talk a little bit about you know what's the difference between the two you know so when people are starting out with their scenes like and they're trying to think of what kind of lighting and what kind of mood they want to give their work like you know how would they decide so you know from a client perspective there's product lighting so if they needed to show their product you couldn't go dark and moody with it but that'd be very different if you were trying to show you know just something that was like more of a suggestion like they're trying to like get make it mysterious right so how would you how would you choose what kind of lighting setup you use for what scenario yeah so yes yeah i guess that depends on the brief that the client gives you um and also what the the product is if it has like a very mysterious uh feel around the product itself then dark like high contrast lighting uh probably the way to go if it's something like more playful um tends to be much brighter colorful visuals but yeah that depends on like what the client is telling you um i suppose you kind of want to do some sort of like usually what happen if i'm working on a client project for example is i'll kind of give them like a mood board of different imagery of what i think will work and then they'll kind of bounce off that um and give me feedback like if they think that's gonna work or not um but yeah i'd say it definitely comes down to what it's gonna be used for if it's kind of like a uh a teaser for a new product coming out then people will use a lot darker more mysterious um lighting where it's only highlighting certain areas of the product um if it's like a product has just been launched and they're doing like beauty imagery for it then you want to show it off in all its glory so you probably have a lot brighter visuals but yeah like i said it depends on what the product and the brand is hopefully that's helpful okay okay so yeah this is the render from earlier it's pretty much the setup that i've just run through and what i'll usually do is i'll duplicate it and turn it into a smart object and what a smart object allows you to do is say if i added a hue and saturation so i go to image uh did it adjustment hue and saturation for example and just completely change this to like i don't know like a purpley color because it's a smart object it then comes under here as a smart filter so i could turn this on and off at any point and adjust this uh however i like whereas say i duplicated it and it's not a smart object if i do the same thing if i come in hue and saturation adjust it i don't have the setting to go back in and change that at any point if i need to it's always going to be stuck at purple so just using a smart object just allows you to have more control so if i just delete that quickly and i'm going to come up to filter camera raw filter and this has a bunch of settings in here and also i think it's useful for me to mention that when i export when i'm doing just like a daily render like this i'll export a png and i'll export the 16 bit now the 16 bit is probably the most important part um it's basically going to capture more color data in your render so that if i was to start pushing and pulling all the highlights in the shadows it's not going to completely blow out the highlights i'm going to be able to push it a lot more before it gets to breaking point whereas at 8-bit if i crank it up a little bit it's going to start pixelating it's going to start blowing out the colors and i'm just not able to get the amount of post-production control in there that i'd like to so make sure you're rendering out a 16-bit i think if you render out as an exr open exr you actually have the ability to go up to 32-bit i think that's i think that's correct um but yes even 16-bit gives you a lot of control so usually when i come in the images can look quite flat because i'm not doing all the like color controls in here i'm not adding curves and stuff within redshift um i think i just prefer to work that way i prefer to have a more raw flat image and then do the work in post-production but that just depends on how you like to work so straight off the bat we have the histogram at the top here which is basically going to tell you how intense your shadows are how intense the lights are and the colors so you can kind of go off this in terms of if you know if it's too over overexposed so for example as i crank the exposure up the histogram is moving to this right hand side which means it's starting to overexpose so you can kind of use that as a guide to know if you're pushing it too much or not uh just kind of as a i don't know like a backup for what your eyes are seeing so i'm gonna bump the exposure up a little bit just because i feel like it's quite dark at the moment um probably being a bring a bit more contrast back in because we have this daylight scene set up um it's quite flat and we've got like the key light here and we've kind of got like an edge light here uh with some shadows but like i said because it's daylight it feels quite flat so i'll bring a bit of contrast in there uh you can tweak these highlights which is going to affect obviously the highlights here um they're quite bright already so i don't want to over expose them so maybe i'll just boost them a little bit then you have the shadows so i could bring the shadows actually back down to help bring some more contrast in or i could bring them up and then tweak them using the whites and black so if i bring the whites down that's just going to affect all the whites in the image same with the blacks i can bring the shadows back down or i can bring them back up so i could bring them down just a little bit uh and then you have texture clarity dehaze so clarity it's kind of the same thing as contrast but if you crank it all the way up you get quite a hdr feel so everything's like super contrasty so you can use this to kind of add a bit more sharpness to your images so maybe i'll put in like 20 or something uh dehaze it's kind of like as if you're putting like mist in front of the image it's gonna flatten everything out make it feel a bit foggy um so you can use this to kind of brighten up any dark shadows uh and then bring in a little bit of vibrance a bit of saturation there's like a subtle difference between vibrance and saturation um trying to think the best way to explain it i guess like vibrance is um [Music] i don't really know i don't really know the best way to explain it i think like just playing with the sliders you'll kind of get a feel like you can really push vibrance and it's not going to be too crazy but if you get saturation and crank that up like that it's super super warm now so i think vibrance is a bit more like affecting the subtle shades of color whereas saturation is just like the overall image um and you have this great feature in camera raw where you have kind of like you can turn on and off so you can see what we've done so even just like for a couple of minutes of me just like tweaking these settings you can see i've already boosted the exposure quite a lot uh brought a bit contrast back into the image which just really helps to kind of take it to that next level then of course you've got the curves so you can start to darken those shadows increase the contrast a bit more and you can do that for the red green and blue channel detail you can add a bit of sharpening but i prefer to do this in another effect which i'll talk about in a second and you can tweak the color grading of like the shadows for example so you can start to add some like blue tones in there maybe then add some like warmer highlights optics you can distort this because when you actually take a photo with a camera lens it always has a little bit of distortion so sometimes i'll just put something like -1 just to add like a tiny bit of curve in there it's all just like little details that kind of help to add up and make it feel a bit more photorealistic and then finally i'll usually just put a bit of green on there something like 10 um 10 for like a daylight and then you don't need as much for a darker um scene because the grain shows up a lot more on like a darker background but if i leave that 10 sorry hit enter and then i can just turn on and off this camera raw filter and you can see the difference we've made so we've just helped to like boost everything um add a little bit more contrast and then to add the sharpening i'll actually go to filter sharpen and unsharp mask and this is a really great tool for adding sharpness now if you see if i crank it all the way up to 500 it's like super super sharp um usually i'll leave it like a hundred and you can play with the radius uh of like the areas which it will sharpen usually i kind of just leave it all at default um 0.7 that might help and just leave it like a hundred because even if it looks a little bit too sharp by the time if you're uploading this to instagram the compression gets to it it's probably just gonna put it back down to what the quality should have been in the first place so um yeah just add a bit of sharpness there and then usually the way off yep sorry that actually leads us to our next question from hafid he's asking um what format and image and video video do you use to post on instagram because sometimes there's color changes or like you said the resolution might not be 100 yeah would you recommend um so for instagram i usually just do 1080 by 1080 now i know you can do some people would do 2048 by 2048 the reason why i go 1080 by 1080 especially if i'm doing animations is literally just to cut down render times if i'm trying to get a render out every day um sometimes i don't have the time to wait around for an animation to render out at higher res so i'll do 1080 by 1080 [Music] i'll do a png which is gonna just render out every single frame as a still image which is great because then if you want to take stills from that animation you've already got the png ready um but also it means if your render for some reason crashes halfway through if you were to render out as like an mp4 it's just going to corrupt the whole file if you do a png it's still going to have all those images up to the point it crashed so you can pick it up in the morning or whatever and just render out that final half or however many frames it is uh just protects you a bit more if for some reason anything goes wrong but yeah png 16 bit so that if i want to do any color correction in post i've got that extra color data and then output 1080 by 1080 or if i'm doing like a slightly vertical one i can do 1080 by 1350 which is the other format that instagram supports it's just a little bit taller sometimes i'll use that for compositions where the object is quite tall and it doesn't quite look right in a square frame but usually it's just those two um those two layouts and then yeah the same with images just render out png 16 bit render out the current frame and yeah do a bit of work in photoshop so hopefully that answers that question thanks ross um okay yeah and then sometimes to wrap it up and just add like another layer of color correction you have these things in photoshop called color lookups it's basically like a load of built-in presets of color corrections um some of them are pretty cool some of them work for certain renders some of them don't uh but you can see scrolling through them you're able to completely like change the look of a render and what you can do is say i like this one for example but it's a little bit too strong i can just come in and maybe turn the opacity down to like 50 and you can stack these all on top of each other so usually i'll like scroll through them one by one just stacking them up until i get a look that i like this one's quite nice it just helps to take out some of the harsh shadows just flattens it a little bit um but yeah apart from that that is that's all i really do for post production um for just like a simple render like this where there's not too much crazy going on um if you're doing like a really complex scene you can start to go into like the multi-passes of redshift which i think would be a whole different topic where you could render out like a mask for this shoe or render out a mask for like the background that way you could like cut the shoe out the background et cetera and just gives you a lot more control but for something simple like this when i'm trying to get it out quickly going into camera raw and kind of doing the final color correction settings and tweaks and then putting some color lookups on there maybe i'll add like a final curves in there just to help punch a bit of the shadows back in a bit of the highlights and pretty much done so i think that's everything hopefully that's covered a good range of topics and hopefully it's been helpful um is there any other questions that people want to ask well so i've got a question um so when it comes to lighting this really this works for stills for animation would you approach the lighting techniques in a similar way like for example if we go back to this darker image here if the shoe is moving forward or you know really fast um how would you would you approach it the same way like the lighting would the lights follow the shoe or yeah so what i would do i think it depends on what you're doing for the for the animation if we're doing something simple like just zooming in the camera for example um instead of moving the lights i would let the camera do the work um so if i come into the camera for example and i'll just let the preview run out um and i zoom in and out you can see it's not going to make too much of a difference so you don't have to tweak for those lights too much uh if you're doing something like you're literally animating the shoes um then you're probably going to want to move the lights with it and depending on the look you're going for i think something moodier like this where if i start moving the shoe around no it might help if i just move the shoe um it's gonna kind of completely like change the look like you can see this is a lot brighter on this side now so i think there would be certain cases where you have to start animating the position of the lights as well um so yeah it really depends on the complexity of the of the scene what you could do is get the lights maybe make them like a child of the shoe and then when you move that shoe around all the lights are going to move kind of like with the shoe but um i think yeah that becomes like a whole different ball game of having to animate lights here and there i think for something like i mentioned where it's much more of a daylight scene if i just hide those there yeah turn these back on it doesn't matter as much because you're not getting like a really high contrast lighting so it's probably going to look okay from most angles um but yeah really it really depends on the scene but there's definitely thank you that's okay is there any other questions yeah there was one question right at the beginning um it's quite broad but it's from tabs he asks what is the best setup for lighting exterior scenes such as buildings or landscapes yeah sure um so outdoor scenes exterior scenes um it's kind of like taking the same principle with hdr but your hdr is gonna be literally like the main light that you use um because you're trying to whatever scene you use you're trying to recreate real life lighting setups so that's the reason why we've used area lights in this situation because they're what best represents like a soft box for example and if you're shooting like a landscape scene you want to use outdoor hdr because that's the environment it's going to be in um redshift octane pretty much all the standard renderers um come with like a sky and sun setup which is going to already put you in like a great spot but you want to use i would say you want to use outdoor hdrs and then in certain situations where you need to add more detail you can do the techniques we've talked about where you could get an area light and shine it on certain part of an object and exclude it from others if it isn't looking the way you want or you can do that to create more kind of surreal renders but i would go for like an outdoor hdr as like a base point um there's loads on hdi hdri haven like i mentioned um hdri skies is another good one as well loads on there um but start over outdoor hdri and then use area lights where you need them to kind of fill in uh areas which aren't looking as you'd hoped and just help to add more detail and uh ross we got an interesting question actually if you can go to the audio chat because you need to see this picture someone has sent in they would like to know if you have any idea how this lighting effect is achieved uh yeah sure did it okay so let me create a new project so if i create a plane um and i'm going to grab an area light and we're going to be using the two methods we talked about so adding a texture and then playing with the spread now i need to find something like a like leaves silhouette something like this uh probably like tree silhouette maybe basically we want to kind of find the shapes like this is probably a good example so if i save this image it's pretty low res but i think it will it will do the job um and we plug this texture into this so where is it this one here and let's set the target to the plane now it's going to take the black and white values from that texture and if we crank all if we crank the spread completely down and we crank the shape down let me just quickly add a dome light in there you can start to see it's casting that shape of that area light onto the wall so you can do something like this um because like i said it's going to take the the black and white values of um of that texture that we've plugged in and by turning the spread all the way down to zero it's literally only casting the white parts of that image which means we're getting those black cutouts um so you can use that technique or you can literally put real geometry into your scene so you could put something like a tree which depending on what version of cinema you're using you should have like a bunch of objects in your content browser so if i grab something like a maple tree and just move this in front of the wall let's just scale that up a little bit and let's take the texture of that light you can start to see it's casting um the shadows of that tree onto the plane um so those are two methods i would go about doing it the geometry is probably going to give you more realistic results because it's obviously based on geometry um but it will be slower because it has to calculate the geometry um whereas the texture is more of like a quick win and also with the texture you have the ability to animate it so say you animated the texture in after effects you can import that as a png sequence and then you can have some nice like leaves blowing in the wind and casting those shadows so hopefully that's that's helpful thanks for that it's okay uh says rad he says thanks yeah no worries you're welcome um well i've got a question myself it's more so for people who are complete beginners to lighting because it seems like you have a good depth of what different lighting techniques and what these all these different lights what they mean so how would you if you're a beginner how do you start practicing lighting should you look at photography should you look at film or look at the real world what do you i yeah i would 100 start with looking at photography just look watch videos of how people set up product shoots um that's what when i used to render a lot of glass bottles that's all i was doing i was just watching videos of photographers set up their photo shoots for glass bottles um and it's pretty much the same principles like you can recreate the same setup and you're gonna get something that looks close um but just yeah i would research lighting theory so like the three-point light system uh if you haven't heard of things like that before i would definitely start researching into lighting because whenever you're lighting something you do kind of want to base it on how it would be set up in real life obviously we have the luxury of working in this 3d space where we haven't got a set set up soft boxes and stuff and we can put them at whatever angle we like but if you can get it as close to how someone would set it up in real life and that's gonna already put you um in a really good position so i would study how photography set up but also just look at product shots as well because that's going to help to train your eye what shots look good what shots don't look good what lighting looks interesting and what doesn't and then when you are able to take the principles of how to actually use the lighting and you also understand good lighting um like good lighting and photography then you can pair those two skills up and create some really cool results that's usually where i get most of my inspiration from is photography i used to be massive into it before i kind of dived into more of like the 3d digital stuff so having like a background in photography will will help a lot even if you just go out with your phone just taking photos and um kind of like identifying what the lighting situation is like at that time and then you can transfer those across to to 3d awesome thanks so much uh we've got one more question from and they say ross awesome stuff i missed the beginning but just wanted to ask what inspires you to work in 3d oh deep question um what inspires me to work in 3d well i used to work in well i still do but i came from like a motion background so i only worked in 2d i only worked in after effects and i was always really fascinated at like vfx when i was younger like i wanted to i wanted to work in vfx like doing special effects for like transformers and stuff like that um but i kind of that didn't interest me as much as i grew up and i became more interested in creating really interesting and like surreal imagery which obviously you can only create in 3d like you can do so much with photography but obviously free just lets you do whatever you like which is why a lot of my work is kind of abstract just because you can push it in any direction you want i think the beauty of 3d and just like cgi in general is that there's literally endless possibilities that you're only limited by your mind and obviously the software so i think that's what i find great about it is that you can literally create anything as long as you can figure out how to do it awesome thanks so much thank you yes i think i think hopefully that covered like a good range of uh techniques and some theory a little bit as well and um yeah if anyone has any more questions at any point uh feel free to message me on instagram that's probably the best place to get hold of me and i'm usually on there probably a bit too much so yeah feel free to message me and uh i can help out the best i can we got one last question yeah quite a fun one actually habit has asked can you share your music playlist for working on 3d yeah sure um i usually yeah i kind of just depends on the day like i'll sometimes i'll just bounce through my light songs sometimes i have like i've been going through a phase of listening to like lo-fi music at the moment because when i'm listening to stuff with lyrics and i get too much into the music and then i just can't concentrate on work uh well that's not the same as me ex i i i listen to all five what if i as well because yeah i just get too much i'm just in my own world just singing along so yeah distractions yeah but yeah i'm happy to i'm happy to share some playlists just uh yeah add me on here or hit me up on instagram i'll ping some links over and also i just want to mention again uh if you wanted to play with a shoe model it's on my gumroad so go ahead download it it's free might be useful maybe for you guys to have a play with it and then i can help out with any lighting situations okay great thank you so much ross for this talk it was brilliant it was amazing you covered everything and i think it explained everything really well i know that maybe for some of you it was a bit hard to see exactly what was going on because the screen quality on discord isn't exactly amazing but you've recorded it on your computer so um any of you can rewatch later and hopefully it'll be clear what he's doing but of course you can always hit him up on instagram or on here as well to ask him for the questions or any of us um the grand magus council are always here for you in case you need to ask any more questions about particularly in particular doing lighting in cinema 4d and redshift although of course of course everything he taught you you know the basic principles applies in different programs as well so we're going to post um ross's socials in the audio chat so you can follow him um but otherwise uh this video will be uploaded onto youtube later so you guys can all see it and i think that's that's it thank you very much for it thank you for joining us we're going to be doing um one talk every month so i think next month i'm going to do one so if anyone has any suggestions of what they want to learn let me know and uh thank you everyone yeah thank you for having me

Channel: 3D Wizards

Views: 13,896

Keywords: lighting, 3d, 3d animation, c4d, redshift

Id: vp_cMou78lM

Length: 74min 22sec (4462 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021