Professional Lighting Techniques in Cinema 4D

1. Welcome: hi and welcome to this course on professional lighting techniques in cinema 40 if you want to learn how to create eye catching and realistic looking renders, whether in this course is for you. I've mastered these lighting techniques over the last 10 years, and now I'm sharing them with you so it can start creating amazing renders right away, packed with countless tips and tricks on how to light your scenes in cinema 40. This course will enable you to tackle any lighting task. We start the course by covering some core concepts of lighting. We then we want to some more advanced topics, such as shallow quality and optimization, global illumination, ambient occlusion, HDR highlighting techniques, some important render settings, volumetric lights using Goebbels and working with co sticks. I want this course to be as hands on as possible, so I provided all the scene and exercise files for you to download and use as you watch the lessons. So if you're ready to learn how to light up your scenes like a pro, let's get started 2. Lesson 1: Comparing Real Lights and C4D Lights: lights and cinnamon, 40 behave differently than lights in real life. In this video, I'd like to talk to you about three particular differences that I think are quite fundamental when it comes to understanding how lights work instead of my 40. The main reason for these differences is that the more realistic you want your renders toe look, the longer it takes for your computer to process them. That's why, by default, most of these realistic features are turned off for the lights. You can, of course, turned them on, but that will come at the cost of longer render times. With that in mind, let's now have a look at those differences. The first difference I want to mention is that a real life light do not go through solid objects. There is in cinema they do, which means lights in cinema. 40 do not cast any shadows by default. This render here off. The two cute owls is created with a single light source near the top left corner on. As soon as I render it, it takes one second for the render to finish, so it's pretty quick what you see, the house, The characters here look like they're just floating around. There's no kind of definition of space. That's mostly because there's no shadow on the floor. There is if I turn to show those on, which is what I did for the second round there, it now makes it look a lot more realistic, but that comes at the cost of an additional 16 seconds off Render time. So this was before with nausea. Those this is after with the shadows. The shadows are on the floor as well as these detailed areas where the feathers are. So this was before again, and this is after. The second difference I want to talk about is that in real life, lights bounce around and inside of my 40 they don't. What that means is that a real life that would be a light source against some right here and would shine into these characters and would bounce off the surface off the second hour here, this one and China on to these areas here off the first cell. Similarly, the light would also bounced off the floor onto these objects again so that these really dark areas would be lit up a little bit so they'll be filled in again. It's a future that's not enabled by default. You have to do it manually. But that added an extra 40 seconds to my render. So this is with no bouncing light. And this is with the bouncing lights, the bouncing off the light. By the way, in cinema 40 it's called the Global Illumination. That's something we'll talk about in detail down the line. So if you want to create quick renders than this is what you're gonna get, But if you can afford to wait, then you can create much more realistic renders like this one. The third and the final difference that I want to talk about is something called Fall Off to explain what full off is. Let me come out of this picture viewer. The term full off refers to her bright or dark delight is based on how far it is from the object. In real life, the closer a light source is to an object, the brighter that object appears on the further away. The light is from the object, the darker the object appears in cinema 40. The distance between the light and object has no effect on its brightness. So if I go to the slide here, pushed us in the objects Don't get any brighter. If I pull it out, the objects don't get any darker. This isn't a realistic behavior. Now I have another lights here just set up in a realistic way. This has the full off, which means if I not drag this light enclosure to these objects, the objects are gonna get brighter. And as I put the light out, the objects are getting darker. This is a lot more realistic now than how it was before again. The full of feature is turned off by default. We will have a look at how to turn this on in one of the lessons later. So just to recap nights in cinema four d do not create any shadows by default, they do not bounce around. Nor does the intensity of the light change depending on the distance between it and the objects 3. Lesson 2: Creating a Seamless Backdrop: before we do anything else. That's grand critics seamless backdrop that we could use for the rest of this course. For that, I'm gonna start with a cube and then I'm gonna set the size of the cube to be, let's say, three meters by two meters by three meters. I'll also increase my segments on in order to see how many segments I'm adding, I can quickly press end on the keyboard, followed by the letter B. That's N B. Or you could go to display and choose girl shading. That's the shortcut and be. And now I can see these lines here. Not that these lines are visible. I'm gonna three segments toe the X to to the why and three segments to the said With those segments in place, I'm just gonna go and make my creditable by pressing the letters c on the keyboard or this button here. And now that I made that edit herbal, I have access to the individual polygons by going to the polygon more here with a polygon mode selected, I can go to my selection tool and select all of these polygons except the ones that are at the back on while I'm doing this, I'm of course gonna have to make sure that this option here, where it says only select visible elements is turned on. Otherwise, this would selected things in the back as well. Like it was told of these as well. We don't want these to be selected on. I'm gonna select all of these and then just hit delete on the keyboard and they're gone. I'm also gonna delete this wall here like that's and now have this cube. I can now go and turn it into an infinite seamless backdrop To do that first, I'm going to select the Cube and then get my model to here and then lifted Cuba up by 100 units. It's 100 because the overall height was 200 so half off that is 100. So I was gonna go to the position and then lifted up by 100. And now that sitting exactly on the floor, not turn it into a similar shape, What I'm gonna have to do is to create a subdivision surface and then add this kube is a child off that subdivision surface a short cut off. Doing that by the way. Let me press commands at a couple of times is by selecting the cube first, and then you can hold on bolt and then create a subdivision surface year. And that makes the new object that you're creating the parents off the object you had selected. That's old clicking on the object as you created. I'm gonna select my subdivision surface. I'm gonna increase the subdivisions off the editor and then I'll make it match the subdivisions off the renderers so that this is my smoother. Now, I don't want to see these subdivisions, so I'm gonna press the letter end followed by a so that removes all the lines there that was display girl shading or n than a. What I'm gonna do now is to go on at the material to this. So I'm just gonna go change my angle first, like that's and I'm gonna go and creating material and then call this material backdrop and then apply it to the backdrop and I'm gonna go double click on this material. One thing I used to do with this is I change the color model from lamb bash in tow or in Eire, and it doesn't seem like it's doing anything at this stage. But let me do a couple of renders here so we can compare what this looks like to what it was like before. So first, let me just go to compassion. I'm just gonna go press, shift our to create a render in the picture Viewer, this is the one with the default lumber. Ashen. I was gonna go back and then change The model to are in Eire, which is gonna make a textural rougher, which means, if I know, render this, that's gonna have more of a smooth transition going from there. So there. So this was before this is after, So it kind of lightens up the floor here. I'm not gonna come out of this on go to color on exhibit Brighter. So instead of 80% let's say I said this to 95%. It's closer to whites, and next I'm gonna go close this and then call the subdivision surface seamless backdrop. So from now on, I'll be using this seamless backdrop, but I want to create an infinite background 4. Lesson 3: Preparing the Scene for Lighting: we have our seamless backdrop on. In order to show you some lighting tricks, I'm gonna have to create some objects first. So I'm gonna go and start with a sit in there that I could turn into a platform on which I can put some objects. So let me just go double click on the ceiling there, and re name is to be platform, and I'll change the size of this as well. So I'm gonna go to object on, maybe make the radius 40 and then the heights. I'm gonna set that to 10 and that if we need any rotation segments as well, So let me zoom in first. It looks like these ugly edges could do with a bit more rotational segments on the still in there. So I'm gonna go to the platform, go to rotation segments, increased this. Let's say you may be reset. This two of 75 that looks much smoother now. Much nicer. All then zoom back out. I also need to lift the entire platform up. Otherwise you'll see half of it is sitting below the floor there because the platform site is 10. I'll need to lift this up by five. So it's sitting exactly on top of the seamless backdrop. So I'm gonna go to coordinates increased the Y 25 There you go. That's sitting right on top of the scene. The spectrum. Now, with the platform in place, I'm also gonna quit a couple of spheres I condemn. Put those fears on top of the platform. I'm gonna go to here and quite a sphere. I'll make this feel a little bit smaller, so I'm gonna go to object. Let's say maybe we set the radius to 10 then lift this up by 10 units exactly. Holding down the shift key. So this is now sitting exactly on top of the seamless backdrop. But I want this fear to sit on top of the platform, not the seamless backdrop. So for that, I'm gonna click and drag the Y up again and then hold the shift key down so it gets lifted up by another 10 units. I'm gonna go out, fly around, and our critic upload copies off this. So I'm gonna go to the top view here, and then I'll zoom in. That's my first sphere. I'm gonna command drag it. So I have one more copy there and then maybe select the 1st 1 again and then command drugs . So I have the second copy there as well. You could make these a bit random. So I'm gonna go select this 1st 1 maybe and then drag this to be in front. Something like that, maybe. And then, to make things easier, I'm gonna go select older objects, except it seems backdrop. And I'll put them inside the null by pressing all 10 g on the keyboard. So they get grouped together, and then I'll call it no objects. Let's also create a couple of materials we can apply to these objects. So I'm gonna go down here, double click to create a new material, and the three name is to be read and then double click on that red material to open it up. I'm gonna go to color and then make it a shade of Fred. Maybe something like this, and then I'll apply that to one of the spheres. Now, I also want this to be a little bit reflective, so I'm gonna go to the red material, go to reflect INTs. I'm gonna add a Beckman reflection. And when I do. This speculator remains underneath of reflections. I'm gonna have to lift this above the reflection layer, but this is gonna be a perfect mirror now, So I don't want this. If I were a render this, you'll see that turns this fear into a perfect mirror. I don't want that. So I'm gonna go and add a friend l reflection to this. I'm gonna go down. So it's his layer for now. And then I'll scroll down a bit more and I'm gonna make this instead of month. I'm gonna change that to die electric. So if something is supposed to be a metal, you change it to conductor. If it's not metal but still reflective like a plastic board or something, then that could be a die electric. For now. If I click on this, it now makes it reflective. But I have some of the color back. What friend l does is it creates a reflection based on the angle your viewing things from You'll understand this of it better when we had different l to the platform here. So for now it's going close. This and I'm gonna duplicate this material. I'll just command drag this towards right? So that creates a copy off that. And then that new copy, I'm gonna go double click on call That green, and then I'll just go select that new copy and then make it green, and then I'll apply it to one of the other spheres, and then I'll duplicate the green one and then double click on the name and change it to blue, and then I'll make that one blue, and then I'm gonna apply this blue one to the other sphere. And finally, I'm gonna create one more material by creating a copy again by command, dragging this and then I'll call this one platform and I'll score and make this white. So I'm gonna go the saturated sold way and then maybe increased the value from 80 to 90 and then only applied this platform material to the platform. Now, going back to the reflections. Let me explain how for NL works properly. So I'm gonna go maximize this. You could do this. By the way, if you have a three button mouse, you could meet a click. That's a click on the scroll wheel on the mouse. Now, the reflection is only visible. If I'm seeing this at an extreme angle like this, if I render this You see, this is almost like a perfect mirror here. But as soon as I changed my angle like that, the reflection diminishes on the platform. So the higher your angle, the less off a reflection you see on the platform. The more extreme dangle, the more obvious that infection becomes. This makes it look a lot more realistic. And this is true for the spheres as well. If you're looking at this fears head on, you're not really gonna see too much reflection. So if I render this, there isn't that much of what perfection here. But if you look at the edges of the spheres, you get more reflection as they curve away from you. The angle it which you really sections, is increasing. That's why you have more of a reflection there. And that's what for Melville's. In most cases, it makes the reflective objects look much more realistic. 5. Lesson 4: Working with the Default Light: There's something in cinema 40 called the default lights. The reason when you render something you can actually see the result is because the default , like my default, is turned on. Now, if you go through around their settings, which is command be or you could click on this little gear, I come here. If you go to options. This is the default light here. If I go and turn this off and find now, render you see everything is dark because the default light the only light source in the scene is turned off. Let me turn this back on and let me show. You know how you can control the default lights? I'm gonna go to options and right towards the bottom you'll see the option for the default lights. And when this pops up that we just move this to the side, I can click anywhere on this sphere and then dragged us around, and this changes the direction of the light that illuminates to see I can move this left right down, up. Now, the result that you're gonna get eventually is gonna be a little bit different than what you're seeing here. So let me just go and move this towards left These strange looking shadows you indicate where the light is gonna cut off. So if I know, go and render this that's ready, like cuts off. If I click and drag us towards right, It now shows me that the light is going to be cut off on these surfaces on the left hand side. So if I now go Orender this Now you see there's no light on the left hand side. You could reset the position off this by right, clicking anywhere on the default lights That takes it back to where it was initially, which is just off centre towards the left inside. Although the default likes is great when it comes to modeling something, it's got quite a few limitations. Firstly, the default light intensity can be adjusted. I comment gets brighter. I can't make it darker. It just can't be adjusted. Secondly, the default lights will not cost in the shadows. So if I know when drag this up, render this. Yes, these areas are in the dark, but I see no shadows on the floor. So that's another limitation of the default lights. Let me go in recent US again. The other limitation off the default light is that the fact that it doesn't let you control the temperature For these reasons? We only use the default lights when the models something apart from that, use actual light objects instead of my 40 and that's what we're going to talk about in the next lesson. 6. Lesson 5: Understanding the Different Types of Lights in Cinema 4D: as soon as we create an actual light object in cinema 40 the default light gets disabled. Let me show you what I'm right now is I moved a default light around. I can see the results, but if I go and create any kind of light source, that could be, let's say, this light bulb. Now the default light is disabled. This has no effect on the scene anymore at all. So with that in mind, let's go and get it off the default lights, and it's also getting off the lights. And now we can have a look at what the different kinds of flights doing Cinema 40 that's going click and hold it down in this light bulb. I come and we have eight different light options. The 1st 1 light is also called on only light because it shoots light in all directions. Equally, you can think of this almost like a sphere that emits light in all directions. Next, we have spotlights spotlight that you control the direction of the light. Then we had the target lights. Target light is essentially the same thing as the spotlight, with only one difference, and that difference is that it's got a target. What that means is that the light is always going to be looking at the specific object. If you move the object around, the light is going to follow it. Think off this like a spotlight in a concert hall. The light always follows artist. In that case, the artist is the target. Next we have the area lights. Area light is very similar to a soft box in the studio. This created diffused light source, which in many cases end up looking quite realistic. Then we have the I. Yes, lights are yes, like simulates different kinds of specific full offs on different lights. If there's a spotlight around you, take a look. You see when the light hits the surface, let's say the wall or the ceiling or wherever it's hitting, there's going be a specific shape around it that shaped him controlled by an I. E. S profile. These profiles are created by the light manufacturers and that can be provided to as an I. E. S file. Next, we had the infinite lights. Infinite light is a light source that's infinitely far away. What that means is that the position off the light in this scene makes no difference. The only thing that does make a difference is the angle of the light. You can think off this almost like the sunlight. For all practical purposes, you can consider the sun to be infinitely far away from us, which means the only important thing there, as far as the lightest concerned is dangle. The infinite light works great if you want to simulate something like light coming from Marine, though next we have the sunlight. The sunlight is very much like the infinite lights, with one difference. It's got a tag called the Sound Tag. The San tag allows you to specify things like the date location, time off the day, and based on these properties, the sun is positioned properly. The sunlight is grateful. Architectural renders. The final light we have here is the PBR or to physically based render lights. The PBR light is very similar to an area lights, but it's a lot more realistic, and it's realistic because it's got the shadows on the full off enabled. We'll talk about both of these options later on. These are the eight available lights in Cinema 40. In the next lessons, we will have a look at how to create and modify some of these lights 7. Lesson 6: Lighting a Scene With a Single Light: Let's now have a look at how we can light this scene up using only a single lights. I'll be using different lights so that we can compare the results to each other. I'll start with an only or point lights. I'm just gonna go and create one here from the front view. I'm gonna go and lift this up. And in order to see the results properly, I'm gonna go to my perspective, you and activate my interactive render region by pressing Ault are on the keyboard and then I'll make it says, because this screen, I'll also increase the quality off this by dragging the slider up. If you're getting some gizmos here like these gizmos appear here, you could actually right click on this little triangle and then go to interact, to run the region, sittings and then turn off gadgets overlay. That's going to turn off old extra information that we don't need for now. So I'm going to come out of this. The light I just created is the point lights. One thing in Lotus in the perspective you here is that we don't have any shadows. We have some reflections because of this texture but there are no shadows. So that's going activate the shadows. First, I'm gonna go to Lights General. And then we had the shadow option here. You can also turn the shadows on by going to the shuttle tap. We'll talk more about this type in detail in one of the later lessons. So for now, I'm gonna go to general and then go to Shadow. I'll change it from them. One of these other options. The 1st 1 here, where it says shadow maps Soft is the one that's going to render the quickest. If I turn this on, you see, I know have some soft shadows here. The second option, Ray traced heart is the one that's going to take a little longer to render. And you have some harsh shadows now, in the last one area is the one that will look the most realistic. But it will take the longest to render as well, so I'm gonna turn the area shadows on. This is what that's going to look like. Plus the area shadows, by default, create lots of grain. There is a way to fix this. Like I said, we will get to all of those later on. The main reason why we have lots of grain is because the shadows are diffused a lot. In order to make the shadows harder, you need to make the light source smaller. That's something to keep in mind. The smaller delight source, the harder your shadows are gonna get the larger delight source, the more diffused or softer your shadows would be. So, you know, to change the size of this light, I'm gonna go to details here and then down here we have this size X and size Y. I'm gonna make this more or less the same size as a light bulb. Let's say it will be eight centimeters by eight centimeters. You see now that the shadows are much harder. Also, turn a mom or feature called Fall Off. Fall Off will control the intensity or the brightness of the light based on the distance off it from the objects. So if I go to details again and then scroll down, here's my full of option. By default, it's set to Mom. I'm gonna change it from them in most square, which is physically accurate. I'm gonna turn this on and you notice the centers. I do this. The whole scene is overexposed. That's because this option here, where's his radius? Decay is too high. Let me zoom out from the front view so we can see what's happening. This white circle here shows you how far the light reaches. I'm gonna make this smaller by clicking on one of these yellow boats, and I'm going to make it small enough so it just touches the top off these spheres here. So I'm gonna go a little more like that that affected the radius decay here. If you want. You can also dial a number in manually. So if I go and type in 100 it then makes his radio sounded centimeters. I can then pull this down just a tiny bit more. Let's go and name this light's point lights. I'm not gonna go and duplicate this light by command dragging this up and you see right away that this scene is now over exposed. That's because we have two lights occupying the same space. I'm gonna go and turn my 1st 1 off and then I select the 2nd 1 the new one I'll go to General and I'll change its type from only to this time and area lights. The area light is a more diffuse light source. But the problem we're having now is that the area light is actually pointing towards the back wall. So we need to rotate the lights. I'm gonna go to my coordinates and then go to the pitch and then decreased iss down to negative 90. So it's facing right down. I'm gonna go and rename this to be area lights and I'll make a couple of more changes to this. First I'm going to select it and then come down towards his details and then I'll scroll down and there's an option here. Where's his show? In reflection, These objects it remember, have some materials applied and those materials had the final reflections turned on. So I'm gonna make use off that now. My turning this shoring reflection option on that should make the light appear in their affection. Not because the light is of it. Two of them. I can't see that in the reflections. That's what this visibility multiplier is for increased. This makes the lights more and more visible. You cannot start seeing the speculum off this light here let me just going exaggerate this . I'm gonna set this to, let's say 5000 on that's gonna make the lights even more obvious here. An alternative to this would be to bring the light closer to the object so that this little dots here that we're seeing would get larger. So let me show you what I mean. I just push this down off course. Now, this is overexposing the image, so I'm gonna go and decrease the radius. You can now see that this square here or direct anger rather is much larger. I'm gonna undo that a couple of times. I'm gonna go Command said once, twice so that we're back to square one. And I'm actually gonna go in lower down my visibly to multiplier to, let's say 1000. So that's just a tiny don't you? I'm not gonna go and turn my area lights off and then duplicate this one more time and then rename this to be spotlights and only enable it. And then I'll just go to the lights general sittings and then change its type from Area two spot. Now you'll see that the spotlight is pointing right down because we've rotated area light, but it doesn't cover a large enough area. So what I'll do for that is to go to spotlight again on details. And then I'll go to Rita's outer angle and then increase this so it covers a large aerator . You know, it is well marked from the Senate of it, and you notice when I zoom out, the backdrop actually gets cut off. So if I just press fault are again, you see the infinite backdrop doesn't cover these areas, so that's an easy fix. I can select the scene this backdrop, get my scale tool and then just scale it sideways and then go back to my spotlight. And then I select my move tool and then on the spotlight will come down to outer angle and then adjust it like that. I'll now press old Oregon in the perspective, you so we can see the shuttle's as well. I can also change the reach off the spotlight by changing its radius. So this is the radius or the spotlights reach so I can click here, push this down. You see that starts over exposing the image, or I can pull this back up to make it similar to what we had before. You notice that the shape of the spotlight by default is round. We can change that as well. Let me just go and duplicate this lights once more and then turn his 1st 1 off. And then on the new light, I'm gonna go to general and then come down towards this type and change it from spots to square spots. You'll notice the difference right away. I can go to my new spotlights, rename that to be square spots and another one to be around spot now, the square sports. I could go to details changed outer angle. So it's my smaller like that not to compare these one by one. I'm gonna do a couple of renders. First, I'm gonna go and maximize my perspective. You come out of my interactive, ran the region by pressing old are Then I'm going turn of my square spots and right now you're not is because we have no light in the scene. The default light kicked in. I was gonna go and turn my point light and then I'll press shift our to go around there to the picture viewer So shift our. That's my first rounder. That's the point. Might that's going rename this three point light. Then I'll just come down here, turn my point. Lights both turn my area light on, and then do another shift. Our on this one. Uncle area. Then do the same again. Turn this off. Turn this one on shift. Our This is the spot round, and then I'm just going Turn this off. Turn this last one home shift, Oregon. And then this last one is spot square. Now we can compare them. This was the point lights. This is area lights. This is the round spotlight, and this is the square spotlight. 8. Lesson 7: 3-Point Light Setup: a common lighting set up is something called a three point lighting in that we have one light source coming from one side of the screen and then another light source filling in dark areas caused by the first light and then usually a rim or backlight. That's a look at how that works. I'm gonna start with the point light again. I'll go to my four of you, increase the height of this light from the top. You I'll actually pull the lights back towards here, toe one direction. So I'm not gonna create ahead on lighting. I'm gonna create a lighting effect from one angle. Let's say about 45 degrees here. I'm gonna swim in it a bit, just like we did in the previous lesson. Let's go to the lights, go to general, turn each other option to area and then also ill, go to details and then make light smaller. So let's say we said is to 10 by 10. So the shadows are more defined. Also grand turn on the full off in most square, physically accurate. This over exposes the image. By the way, if you don't want this to over exposed the image. You can clamp it at one on the percent. So if I go to immerse Square clamped, that's going to ensure that the image never goes beyond the 100% brightness. But I'm gonna go back to my inverse square physically accurate because this gives me more control. Well, then make this decay or the radius smaller. So I'm just close amounts make this small enough so it touches just the top of the spheres . Maybe there I can see it from the front view on this light is usually called the key light . So let's go and rename this. This is the main light source in the scene. It's usually located at about 45 degrees from the main object. You notice that the key light is creating these dark shadows. Let me make the light go. It's a bit lower so I can extend the shadows length. I'm just gonna go lower this down through it and then maybe lower down the radius as well. So I now have a little longer shadows. I'm gonna exaggerates a bit more. Maybe here and then I'll just make this a little bit smaller. Maybe not a small maybe just slightly larger here, medical. Now we can clearly see the shadows. But the problem with this is that the shutter areas are just black. So let me zoom in, especially when the surface is in reflective. Unlike this platform, the floor isn't reflective who it's fully black and even on the platform. It's really dark on these sides off the objects. It's really dark. So there's another type of light that we use on that's called the fill lights that's usually located on the exact opposite side off key lights. So I'm gonna duplicate this key light, my command, dragging it towards right. And this new light is going to be called fill, light and feel like is usually about 1/3 off the intensity of the key lights. You could achieve this result in one a few ways. You could either make the feel like go further away from the object so I can just go and pull this further out because we have the full off enabled. The further the object is from the light, the darker it gets or if I Press command said final option would be to select the field lights, then go to General and then down here, where it's his intensity. I can lower this down to be about 30 to 35%. If I now turn to feel lights wolf, that was before anomie. The fill light on this is after you can see that the dark areas on as dark anymore so that they're being filled in with this feel like you might notice that the feel like especially from the top view, seems to have disappeared. It didn't actually disappear. It just got dark. If I now go and increase the intensity, if you check this outline here that gets brighter and brighter. As I increase the intensity the Lord is down to again about 35%. We said this was called the three point light set up, so the third light usually goes behind the object. So let me just go take the key light on command. Drag this behind object up here and I can maybe lower this down from the front of you a little bit. And I'm gonna go and call this one rim or backlight. And usually the backlight is used to separate the object from its background. Them just go to my perspective, you and reframe this like so if I know grand turned down the backlight, it is a bit Just go select the backlight. Lower this down to let's say about 45 to 50%. You could be quite creative with this. You could increase or decrease this. That's completely up to you. We leave this somewhere around here about 50%. Maybe. Let me show you what this was like before and what it's like. Now you notice that the backlight makes the object stand out a lot more just to compare 23 views again. What I'm gonna do is to turn off my feel light on the back light with the key light enabled . I'm just going to impress shift our So this is just one light. I'm gonna come out of this will enable the second light they feel lights. Although shift our again and then I'll come out of this once this is finished and then I'll go to my backlight enable that as well and then shift or again, you noticed the more lights we introduced to the scene, the longer it takes surrender. So with a single light it took three seconds to render with the two lights, so the feel, like added, it took five seconds to render with the addition off the backlight. It took seven seconds to render. So we went from this to this. A great way of comparing different images, by the way, is by selecting one image here and setting that as a and then you said it. Let's say the third image and then said that one is B and that enables the comparison view . I now have this slider jack and click on on drug up or down to see the before and after versions. So this one is a This one is B. You can also changes to be vertical rather than horizontal by clicking on this button here . So you now have a vertical bar, and there's a couple of other options as well, so I can click on this. This shows me just the difference between the two. This one swaps the A and B images. We already looked at these two buttons. This one enables the labels so you can see that this is the image. This is the B image. This one here gets it off this line, but it's still enabled, and this one turns off the A B comparison altogether. 9. Lesson 8: Shadow Quality: in this lesson, we'll have a look at how the quality of the shadows can be adjusted. First, let's go on like this scene up properly. I'm gonna create a soft light box here. So I'm gonna go and use an area like for that and then I'll just go to my four of you. I'll pull area like back and then I'll lift it up so it's in front of the objects. If I render this now, this is the result I'm getting. So it's quite a soft, really diffused light. So what I'm gonna do is to go to light well to details, come down to size and then lowered us down to, let's say, 20 by 20. Then if I hold on hold on our on the keyboard to activate my interactive around the region , I should be able to see this much better now. So the light isn't as diffused, and that's going activate the shadows as well. So I'm just gonna go to general shadow area and we should know have some shadows on the floor. But you'll notice that the shuttles are too grainy. Then just put this to one side so we can see the shadows of it better. I'm just gonna go push this towards left and also rotated towards the objects I was gonna press are rotated towards the objects like this about maybe 4 to 5 degrees. You can now see how grainy the shadows are. It means women to one of these areas, so we can see this clearly. And I'm gonna go full screen here and now you can see how grain in the shadows are. You can actually see how long it's taking to run there as well. Now, in order to control the grain amounts, you either have to create a less diffused shadow, which means you need to make your light smaller. So you go to the light details and know these numbers down even further. So let's say if I said this to five and five will have harder shadows, which means you'll end up with less grain. But let's say that's not what you wanted. You wanted diffuse shadows, but you didn't want that much grain. So let me go back to 20 and 20 and in order to avoid these grains, you had to go to the shadow settings here off the light. So I'm gonna go to the shallow tab and then our shadow is set to area already. That's good. One option you have here is the density. I can lower this down to, let's say, 75%. So the shadows aren't as dark, meaning that the grains are going to be as visible. So this is the new result now. But let's say again, you didn't want to change the density either. You want density to be on the percent. You just want the quality of the shadows. To be better not to do that, you're gonna have to tweak these three settings here, which is accuracy, minimum samples and the maximum samples. The samples refer to the quality of the shadow maximum samples, controlled areas that need the most attention. There is minimum samples related areas that not at least grain areas. Accuracy is how well the shadows are located. So this is the accuracy or the optimization. If you like off the shadows, you should be aware. Don't the higher you go with any of these numbers, the longer, much longer you're renders are gonna take Let's do a couple of test renders, so he's gonna come out of my interact to render region by pressing old are Van Gogh and render this with the default settings. So I'll just go and press shift our and this one is taking about nine seconds to complete. There you go. And you can see this is the amount of grain we have. It's quite a grainy image. Let's come out of this. I'm gonna come down to here where it is. Minimum samples on the maximum samples. Let's see what each one does. I'm gonna go to minimum samples and increase it from eight to let's say 60. Well, then do another render shift. Our you see, this is taking much longer to render. So this one took 17 seconds to complete. But the shadow quality is much better, especially on the edges off these harsh shadows. So let me zoom in. This was before this is off There. You see that the minimum samples control mostly these areas here, but there is still a lot of grain on the larger areas. These areas here where we need more samples. Let me come out of this and also increase the maximum samples instead of 100 attack Goto 300 and then rendered us again. I'll wait for this one to finish rendering. You can see this is taking much longer, so it's much slower now. What if I try and go to the same area where the shuttles were? This was before. You can see how grainy these are. This is after before and after. So the higher those numbers, the better the quality off the shadows. But that comes like I said at an expense off longer. Render times Let me go and increase these numbers quite high so that we can get it off most of these grains. So I'm gonna come out of this once more. I'll go to minimum samples. Said this to, let's say, 200 and the maximum samples, Let's say to 600 on the new one more render shift. Our this render took just over a minute. So let me just go and see if the shadows are being improved. And indeed they have bean. This was before. It's quite grainy. This is after not to compare this last version with the very first version. You can again go and set the N B. I can say this first version to be my A image. And then the second version to be my be image Let me know. Zoom out. I'm gonna enable the bar. I cannot click on Drug on. Let me zoom in here. You can see that the first version on the left was the initial view. And this version on the right is the final view. This was before this is Officer. But they came at an expense off almost an extra minute off. Render time. 10. Lesson 9: Area Lights vs PBR Lights: If you are using an area like in your scene, you should keep a couple of things in mind. Let me show you the 1st 1 That means a month from here first. As you can see, there's only one area lighting the scene. I haven't changed anything here apart from the size of the lights. But if I go and render this, you see that the shadows are cast. But also, there's this weird looking shadow here on the floor that should I was gonna appear right under your area lights. The reason for this is because if I select area light here, the light is being emitted in that direction as well as that direction. So there is no light going up, down left. All right. That's why you get this black line on the floor. In order to avoid this, you'd have to select the light, then come down to details and school old way down. This is perhaps the most obscure button in all of cinema on this tiny button here that says zed direction on Lee. If I turn this on, the light is now on. Lee emitted in the positives that direction, which means if I ran this, I'm not gonna see anything behind this light, which means that line there is going to disappear. The other thing with area lights is that by default there fall off is also turned off. Which means if I go to the light, bring it closer to the objects the objects on getting in a brighter If I take a light photo away, objects aren't getting in a doctor. This is because of the full off doesn't exist for the area like by default. I can go and turn it on if I got to fall off in more square, Physically accurate. This is way over exposed now. So I'm going to lower down the radius decay to, let's say, 25 centimeters. And now if I push the light closer to the objects you see the objects are getting brighter . As I pull the light away from them, objects are getting darker. Now, instead of using the area light and changing these settings, you could in fact use the PBR lights. Let me go and delete this area lights. And instead I'm gonna go and creative PBR lights physically based render lights. I'm gonna go to my four views and then lift this light up and then put it back. The PBR light is like an area lights, but by default, it's got the shadows turned on the full off turned on and it's only emitting light in the right direction right now, the images also overexposed. So what I'm gonna do for that used to go to my lights, come down to details and you see, in my full of options, the inverse square, physically accurate is turned on, but the radius decay is turned off. I can't control this. So this is a physically based around the lights, which means I can only control the fall of off this by adjusting either its intensity down here or its distance from the objects. I can lift this up and then maybe pull it back. That's how I can adjust the full of off this lights. But if I ran there, let me just go pull this may be near here and then rotated towards the objects you see automatically that this that direction on these turned on. If I'm not going, maximize this and then we're under here. This is what it's gonna look like now again, the shadows are too diffused. So I'm gonna go to my light Details will make my lights smaller so that the shadows are more defined. So I'm gonna go and set these two. Let's say seven by seven and render again. Now you see that the shadows are a lot more defined. 11. Lesson 10: Creating Visible and Volumetric Lights: in cinema 40. You only see the light when it hits something. When the light hits the surface, you see a reflection of that light just like in real life. But you don't actually see the light source. Let me show you what I mean. If I go and create a point lights and then let's say we pulled this point nights away from these objects. Now lift this up. I now see the lights on Lee because it's hitting the surface here. So if I not gonna render this, that's it. That's the only thing I'm seeing when the light hits the surface. Now, if I actually want to see the light itself, let me press a on the keyboard to redraw the scene If I want to see this actual light source itself, what I could do is to turn this light into what's called the visible light. I'm gonna go to here, that's a general and then come down to visible light. Change it from mum too visible. What this does is that it creates this huge dome around the light, and this is the area in which the light is visible. So the light is going to start emitting from here, and it's gonna extend the reach old way out to the edges off the storm. If I know but rendered this, that's what I'm getting. Invisible lights. If I want to extend the reach off the slight, all I have to do is to click on these yellow dots and then drag this out. If I just click and drag now, the light is gonna cover a much larger area. If I ran this now, you can see that the light is covering much of the screen. If I make this small again now it's just gonna appear is a single small dots. There's a difference between a visible light on what's called a volumetric lights. Visible lights do not interact with other objects. What that means is that the visible light here will not be blocked by these objects. If I ran this, you see that the light doesn't get blocked by these objects. However, if I change it from visible toe volumetric and then ran their exactly the same scene again this time you see that the light is going to be blocked by these objects. Now it may be a bit difficult to see this from this perspective. So what I'll do is to put the light inside of these objects. So let me just go to my four of you and then from the top you just place this right in the middle and then from the front or the rights views, I'm gonna place this in the middle as well. Well, then will maximize this. Well, then do another render. This is what it's looking like. So the objects are blocking the light. If I turn us back to a visible light, you see that doesn't happen. Rising the volumetric lights, the objects are in the way so that light can't quite reach out. The other option that says in verse volumetric isn't quite physically accurate, but it could be useful for creative purposes. What this does is that it reverses what you're seeing here. So everything that's in the bark is going to be lit up, and everything that's currently lit up is going to be left in the dark. If I'm not going to select this and then render again. Areas which were dark before are now lights and then the light areas are dark. But you'll also notice these strange art effects. These were actually visible in the volumetric option as well, but it was just more difficult to see them. Let me show you what I mean. If I got a visible light, change it back to volumetric and they're rather again. You can kind of see these strange artifacts kind of extending here and here. And also quite a few of these are here as well. It just makes things easier to see when I changes to inverse volumetric. The reason why these artifacts appear is because of something called the sample distance, which you can control from the visibility tab off the light under the visibility tab. This option here, called sample distance controls, have frequently cinema for the checks to create these samples. The lower this number, the better the quality or the higher the resolution of lights. If I know going decrease this, let's say 25 on their render again. You're gonna see fear off those artefacts. If you're still getting these art effects, you could decrease this even more. But it's gonna take much longer to render five in this case seems to have done the trick. I'm gonna go back to my general tab and then go to visible light and change it to volumetric again. And then I'll do one more render. One more trick with divisible or volumetric lights is to create a Grady INTs on the visible areas. I can do that by going to visibility and then all the way at the bottom. There's an option which says Used radiance. Let me go and turn this on by default. It's just gonna go from white to white, which is basically gonna be the same thing. But if I changed it so it goes from that, say, a pink color, let's say something like that to an orange color. I can double click here, and then that's it goes toe orange. It's a bit more yellow here. If I know. Render this you see that the center of the light is gonna be more pink, and then the outside part is gonna be more orange on. That's exactly what I'm getting here. It's a pretty cool effect, but you'll also notice that the object that are being met by the slight aren't actually changing color because the lights color is still white. If I go to general. You see, the color of the light is still white. This one here, the visibility Grady in is only changing the color off the visible lights. It doesn't necessarily change the color off the light itself. So in order to make the objects receive that pink lights, I would need to go to the color of the light and make that pink as well. So I'm gonna go to pink here and maybe saturate this a little bit, then rendered this. The objects are gonna appear pink as well. 12. Lesson 11: Using Volumetric Lights on Text: Let's use volumetric likes to light up something a bit more practical and useful. I'm gonna go to my McGrath menu and then create some more text. I'll just go and type in digital me and then I'll come down here, change the lineman's to middle. I'll also go and change the font to something thicker. So I'm gonna go maybe pick this broke semen over on. Maybe I'll make this black. There you go. That's looking much better. And I also went at some fillets cap cities. So I'm gonna go to caps, start fillets, cap and feel it cap. No. Increase my steps to, let's say, three and my radius down to one. And then the same thing for the end. Feel it captures. Well, go two steps. Three radius one that Christie's nice Kwan tortilla, which are going appear quite nice when we create light in the sea. Then just add a bit more variation two days. So I'm going to select the text Baltimore graph, defector and then random. And right now, the Texas being randomized. I don't want that to be that much randomized. I'm gonna go to my parameter dropped on my X and y and Zed to, let's say, 15 by 15 by 15. And then I'll go to rotation, turn this on and then increased use to, let's say, 15 by 15 my 15 as well. That's looking more like it. I just don't like the fact that the M and the EU are going through each other. I'm gonna go to my zed position increases a little more until they're separated away from each other. That's looking better now. Now I can see that this I ngr touching each other. I was gonna go to my X and decreased ist just a tiny bit. They go, that's looking better. Now let's not go and create a point light. I'm gonna position the point light behind the text and I'll make the point light volumetric . And I'm gonna extend its reach by clicking on these yellow bots on increasing this. Why not just go and render this? This is what I'm gonna get. So we just get the sealer ends. If I changed my angle so far to go to somewhere here and there render gonna get a slightly different results. I can see these shows much more clearly now what? I'll do is to bring the light closer to the text and then maybe lift it further up and then I'll make this quite intense. So I'm gonna go to general intensity, increase it or change it from 100 to, let's say 1 80 Then if I render, this is the result I'm getting now. This light actually is way to a bright now. So I'm just going Lord is down to, let's say 1 40 Then I'll render it. That's looking better. But the problem with this is because we're just getting silhouette is that I don't get any detail here whatsoever. So what I could do to compensate for that is to create a feel night. So for that, I'm gonna go to the top view and there's amounts. Take my current lights and then command or control dragged down. So it's in front off the text. I'm gonna angle this a little bit as well towards here. I've been so that this new lights call it front. And then I called old one back Gonna make the front light, not overly. Metric lights? No, make it much less intense. So something like maybe 25% this is almost like I feel like that's feeling in these dark areas caused by the first light in the background. I'm gonna go and render this again. That's looking a little better now. One other thing that you'll notice is that this backlight isn't actually casting any shadows to show you that I'm just going credit floor. It's going to drop the floor down on my what's going around there, You see, there's gonna be no shit on the floor whatsoever, so things are still kind of floating around. Instead, if I go to my backlight and then go to General Shadow, if I said this to area again, if I now render, I'm gonna get some shadows on the floor and that's looking much nicer. That's going at the texture to the floor. I'm gonna go create a new texture, call that floor and then apply it to the floor. And I won't go into that material go to reflect INTs. I'll add a Beckman reflection to it. Lower down the reflection, brightness all the way down to, let's say, seven or eight. Let's see what this looks like. Now this is still a bit too much, so I'm gonna go to that Same, maybe 1%. That's looking a bit better now, and I'm gonna change the color off the floor as well. So we'll go to color and then make it. Let's say green something like that, and you'll notice that the shadows are really diffused. So all I'm getting is just some grain. If you remember from the previous lessons, you could control the hardness of the shadows by increasing or decreasing the size of the lights. If I go to my back light, which is casting these shuttles, and if I go to details, I cannot make that light much smaller. So if I go and set this to, let's say, 15 by 15 and if I render this, the shadows are much more defined now. Now that I'm looking at this, I think that the shadows are a bit too harsh. So I'm just gonna go on increased this. That's a tow 40 by 40 and I think that's looking much better. We're still getting some grain here, and we already looked at how to control their months of grain or how to remove them by going to the shadow tab and then increasing the sample counter. So I'm gonna go to my minimum samples, increase this to, let's say, 60 and my maximum samples to, let's say to 60. If I render again already, that's looking much cleaner. Another thing I want to do to this is to go to my backlight and then go to my visibility tub and add a Grady in tweets. I'll make this girl from Let's Say, this time blue So green so kind of fades into the floors color for no. Render this on second thoughts. I think that the backlight is a bit too bright. So I'm gonna go to my backlight general and drop this down to 100 again. And one final thing we'll need to do is to create an applying material to the text. I'm just gonna go and double click to continue material and then open that material up. I'm going to reflect its ad. Beckman. Also add some for now. I'm gonna make it die electric. I'll go to color and then that's how you make this quite right. Let's say 95% and then I'll apply this toe The text. I change my uncle. It's a here and then if I render again off course, If you don't like the floor, you can go and delete the floor or disable it for the time being. And then do another test render like that. And you might like this version better. Now that I'm looking at these characters, I think that the reflection is a bit too harsh. So I'm gonna go to my text material, go to reflect INTs, will increase the roughness, so that's gonna kind of blur out the reflection. I know. Render this. The reflection is much blue. You know, Just remember, this is gonna look different depending on your perspective. So if I change my perspective from here, So let's say here, I'm gonna get a completely different results if I go to a lower angle like that on the render and that's looking much nicer as well. Now it's looking as if the light is gonna coming through the text 13. Lesson 12: Lighting with Global Illumination: The main difference between lights and cinema 40 and liked in real life is that in real life, lights bounce around. What that means is that if I shine a torch onto a wall, and if that world is, that's a red. Whatever is in front, off that wall is also gonna take some of that red bleed. The light coming off that torch is going to bounce off the wall, and then it will shine on to whatever is in front of the world. In Cinema 40 that behavior is turned off by default. That's because that simulation takes quite some time to calculate that simulation, by the way, is called the global illumination. We use globally the nation to simulate bouncing lights. This feature alone creates a tremendous amount of realism in your scenes. Let's have a look at an example. Here I have a model of hand, and then I put this inside a cube, and then I colored the walls of the cube and then I put the cube inside the subdivision surface. So without the subdivision surface, this was my scene. And now with the subdivision surface, this is what I have. I'm gonna go and swim into this a bit and I'll create a lights. I want a soft light source, so I'm gonna go and create an area light that gets created in the center. So I'm gonna go and lift this up and then pull it towards us and then maybe higher up on the one side a little bit, so the lighting isn't quite flat on. I'm not gonna rotate this. Let me do this properly. By going to the four of you, I'll go to my top view and then position the light so that these that direction is pointing towards down there something like that. I'm not gonna check the height off this from the front view. What is going to increase the height of the light a little bit And then, from the perspective, you I'll rotate it towards the hand like that. All those American When I render this, you notice a couple of issues. The 1st 1 is this ugly black line. That's first grand. Pull the slide back a little bit. I'm gonna have to be. And now, because I've rotated the light, none of these arrows are pointing backwards anymore. I can change that by clicking on this button here or W on the keyboard. This changes the coordinate system to what's called the World Coordinate system, as opposed to object coordinate system. If its object, that means you'll be taking into account the rotation off the object. If it's world is going to be basing these arrows on the world's axes, I'm not gonna go and pull this back. And in order to kill that black line if you remember from the previous lessons, we have to go to light details and scroll all the way down and click on this zed direction on Lee that makes sure that the light is only being emitted in the positives that direction which I can reveal again my pressing W or this button here. So the light is now only shining towards here. I know render you know, notice that there's no black line. In fact, whatever is behind the light is black towns Let me go and zoom back in. The other issue, of course, is that this light has no shadows Never gonna turn the show goes on I'm gonna go and create area shadows When Orender Now you see the shadows but because the light is so massive the area should those are so diffused. I'm gonna make light smaller. So go to details. Well, to size extent, size way. And I'm gonna sit both of these two, let's say 25 by 25 when the light is much smaller, the shadows are gonna be more defined like so let me now lower the light a little bit so that we have some longer shadows. So I'm gonna go to the light it w to reset these arrows and then pull the light home. And in fact, I'm gonna pull the light towards right a little bit so that from the front view, the light is closer to the subject. When I render now, we should have someone with shadows extending towards the back wall. The other thing I'll do with the light is to turn on the full off. I'm go to details again. Scroll down. Are going to fall off. Change this inverse square physically accurate this immediately over exposes the image because the radius of the light is so large when compared to the rest of the scene. If I got to my top, you I can show you this, you can see that the radius of the light is so large. So I'm gonna go click on one of these yellow bullets and make it smaller. And in fact, I'll push the light closer to the objects from top view. Relative it like that. Hello? Maximize this. If I now rendered this, I should get a slightly better results. The problem with this door is that the light that we've created doesn't bounce around different surfaces. What that means is that if I go and scroll towards here and those women, this side of the object is left in complete darkness, just women, so we can see what I'm talking about. When I render this, there's just no detail here at all. It's just black. So to compensate this in earlier lessons, we use the three point light set up. You could use that you could create another light on the other side and then make it slightly dimmer and they shine it on the same object, and that would work. But to make things look even more realistic or you can do is to turn on this future called the Global illumination. That's in the render settings. If I go to my render settings here, come down to effect and then we'll see global illumination here. If I turn this on, I won't bother with settings off this for the time being. I'm just gonna go and close this if I know. Render this you see, now that the light is gonna bounce off the right wall and it's gonna light up this side of the object and already this is looking much more realistic. Let me not put the light right in front off the object. So I'm gonna go to my top view and then move the light towards here and then rotated like that's and then I'll go to the other side here and you'll see now if I rendered from this view, this side is gonna be lit up by the left for as well as the floor on the back wall. Let me bring the walls closer to the object. So I'm gonna go and make my studio bit smaller. I'm gonna go back house. I was going in the studio to be smaller. I'm gonna scale this down. When the walls are closer to the object, they're gonna have more often effect in terms off the bounce light on the object. If I render this now, you see this side of the object is gonna be a lot more red on that side is gonna be a lot more green. There you go. That's already making a huge amount of difference. And one other thing you notice is that the shadows are no longer so that if I actually fly behind this object normally without the global elimination, this area would be left in pitch black because we had the G I turned on. If I render this, the lights gonna bounce off the back wall as well as the sidewalls, and it's gonna shine onto this object that's gonna create a much more realistic and smoother results. So with a single light source on the G, I turned on and it's so little effort, you can create some amazing renders 14. Lesson 13: Global Illumination Settings: Now let's have a look at settings off the global in nation under a couple of test renders so we can compare the results. First, I'm gonna go and turn my scene back to its default. I'll start with the light, go to details and turn it size back to its default 200 by 200. Then I'll go to my general tab and turn my shadows off and then also go and turn off my global domination and instead of pressing command are I'm gonna press shift are so we create a render in the picture viewer Later on, we will use the picture of you were to compare two different results. So this is my first rounder. I'm gonna come out of this and then I go to my lights internal my shadows. I'll just go into one more render here, shift our This is the default settings off the light size, so it's quite defused. You can see it's quite grainy and not quite defined. I'm gonna wait for this to finish, and once this is done, I'll come back out and then go to my lights, details and then change its size from 200 to 25. Well, then the Roma render shift our So this should give us much more defined heart shudders. Now we will go ahead and turn the global elimination. I'm gonna come out of this, then go to my render sittings and then turn on my global domination and then the one more rendered by pressing shift. Our this now takes into account the global illumination. So the bouncing light. So you went from this to this? Let me go through in steps so we can compare them. So this was the 1st 1 with no effects, no shadows, no global domination. This is the one with the diffuse shadows. This is the one with the hard shadows. So the light sizes smaller and this is the one with the global nation turned on. You can already see how red this side looks. Let me zoom in. You can see how red this side looks, and then how green the other side looks. If I go back and forth, this is before this is after. You'll also notice that the shadow here is much lighter than it was before. So the light bouncing off the back wall is lighting up this area. Let's now have a look at the settings off the G I I'm gonna go to my render settings by pressing command be. And then in the global animation tab, I have some settings. Firstly, we have this thing called the primary method. Primary method controls what happens to the lights the first time it hits the surface. It bounces off by using this method called the radiance cash. The second method is called crazy Montecarlo or the Q M C for short, and this is very useful when you do animations. Otherwise, the global nation tends to create flickers if you use it with Iranians cash. But just be aware if you use the Q m. C, you're gonna get flicker free animations, Yes, but it's gonna take much longer to Rendah. So for now, I'm gonna stick to your radiance Cash. The second method controls what happens to the light the second time it hits the surface. What that means is that when the light comes in, let's say, from the left hand side here bounces off the Redwall want to the hand, Does it bounce off again by default? It doesn't. But if you go to your second your method and said this to be radiance cash as well. The light is not gonna bounce off hand onto the floor, creating a slightly lighter results. So let me just go in, render this one more time. With my second dramatic turned on, I'm gonna press shift our you notice this render is gonna be a little brighter than the one before I go back. This is before and this is after. When the second method is turned on, the colors blend into each other much better. I'm gonna come out of this and then go to my render settings again. Now, under the second method, there's an option called Diffuse Death. This is how many times you want the light to bounce around by default. The light will bounce twice. It will start from the light source. You will then hit the right wall and bounce off the right, will hit the hand and then bounced off the hand on Hit the floor again. That's two bounces. So if the diffused up, he said, too true, That means it's only gonna bounce twice. If I increase this, let's say 26 It will bounce six times. So it bounced off the ball onto the hand, back to the floor from there, back to the wall and from the wall, back to the hand and so on. So it's gonna bounce six times. This is gonna end up looking much brighter than it was before. So if I go around in this so it's gonna bounce off the Red Bull onto the hand, back to the floor, from the floor to the red ball, from the red ball, back to the hand and then from the hand it back to the floor again. Now, this create a brighter results. As you see now, if I go back, this was before this is after you see, every time I increase the bounce amounts, it's going to blend the colors more and more. I'm gonna come back out. The other option here gamma is the overall brightness off the scene. If you're familiar with photo shop, Gamma is the middle slider off the levels that just went in for a shock. So I'm gonna go and increase this. Let's say to 1.3 that's going to make the overall image brighter, so I'm just gonna go hit 1.3 and they render one more time. This is going to make the whole image a bit more washed out a bit brighter. This was before. This is after Let me come out of this again. And then down here you have the samples option. Sometimes when you use the global elimination, you end up with some strange looking art effects to remove or reduce those art effects. You go to samples and increase it from medium to high. Most of the times this fixes your issues. Sometimes when it doesn't, you might need to go here and changes to customs sample counts and then click on this time to triangle on increased this number. I'm gonna go and sit is too high again, and then I'll do one more in there. You see, when you increase the sample count, the render time is gonna take much longer as well. This last one doesn't seem to create that much of a difference because we didn't really have any of those art effects. So there's no point wasting two extra seconds there, so I'm gonna go back and then sit this one back to medium. Let me now go to my picture. Viewer. We can now do a couple of comparisons. So this was the 1st 1 And this is what we ended up with. We can clearly see the difference. The global elimination lets us create amazingly realistic looking renders with very little effort. 15. Lesson 14: Ambient Occlusion: another effect, we can apply in the render settings to make this look even better and more realistic is called ambient occlusion. Ambient occlusion looks at areas ready, light can't quite get in, and it makes those areas darker. This feature helps create depth in this scene, and it makes things look much more realistic. Let's see how it works. I'm gonna go to my render settings again, and then it's an effect will go to the effect tab and then add the ambient occlusion. I won't bother with settings for the time being. I'm just gonna go close this and then render again. You notice that ambient occlusion is adding a great deal to render times. But personally, I love this effect. Let me show you what this looks like. This was without them in seclusion, and this is with them in seclusion. If you look at these areas where the walls meat, I mean, seclusion adds a lot more depth there. It looks like the life can't quite reach this corner, so it's a bit darker. Same thing happens here as well and along this side of the world as well. But it's not just the walls. If you look at natural object, you created these additional shadows here, especially here. It's more obvious if I go back and then if I switch back again to my means. Occlusion version. This is before, and this is after. It makes all these shadows more prominent, so it feels like it's got some more depth by my I'll go back and forth can compare them. Now let's look at the settings off the ambient occlusion. I'll go back house and then go to my render sittings in ambient seclusion. You can control the length off dark areas. If I go and lowered is down, let's say 10 instead of 100. And if I rendered us again, what short to ray lengths to is that if I go back to my previous version, you can see that these areas start getting darker and that kind of diminish towards the top , and the same thing happens here as well. They start getting darker where the connection point is, and they start diminishing towards the top and also towards here. What if I go to my current version? Those are much Tidier now on. Those rays aren't as long, and this results in a cleaner images. Well, because we don't have that much grain there in the background. In the previous version, we had some grain here, and in this version you reduce the grain by reducing the length of the race. Two more settings. Our mission here, the 1st 1 is the quality off them in seclusion. If you're getting grainy results because off your means, occlusion, you can go to here where it is minimum samples and maximum samples, just like we did for the area shadows and increase these numbers. And this will give you better results. But it will take longer surrender. The second future is the contrast. If you think that your ambient occlusion areas are a little bit too dark, it can lower down your contrast. Let me know when lower this down to negative 25. No wonder again this should make those ambient occlusion areas lighter. And indeed, if I go back to my previous version, this is before this is after. So these areas are much lighter. Now let's go and compare the very first version to what we have now. I'm gonna go all the way back to the beginning and then I'll set this as a and then come right to the bottom set. This one has be, and here's before, here's after. 16. Lesson 15: Using Objects as Light Sources: The other cool thing about the global elimination is that its use objects as light sources . Let me show you what I mean In this scene I've created to troops and I sliced them. So I have 2/2 truths essentially, and I applied the same material as I did to the walls to the troops. Now what I'll do is to go and turn the lights off. And one thing you should know is that the global elimination is turned on. And if you have no light sources in the scene, you're going to run there. Absolutely nothing. If I go around this, you see just black. So the global nation relies on you having some sort of a light source in the sea. That light source can be a light object. Or like in this case, it can actually be an object that's luminous, an object that emits lights. So let's have a look at how we can make an object emit lights. I'm gonna go to my front light object and then go to my polygon tool here. And I already have the top part of these selected, all dangling, pretty new material. I'll call this front light are then applied this material to those polygons a van? Double click on this and go to my luminous channel. The Luminess general is used to make an object emit light. I'm gonna go and turn us on. And now you can see that the top part of this front light is white. I'm going to go and come out of this and then duplicate this material. Call this one back light and then I'll go and select my other light in the back. I'll go to my polygon tool. Select all of these. Go and hide the hand for a second. I'm going to select these politicos. Then I'll apply the backlight to those polygons. Well, then make the invisible again. Right now, these two light sources are the only light sources in this. See, if I turn off the globe elimination, these objects are gonna run. They're just as white objects. If I now go and turn this off and then do Orender, you'll see those objects are gonna render as plain white objects instead. If you turn on the G, I and then do another render to the picture of your you notice. Now, while it's rendering that the lights from underneath object are lighting up the bottom off the object. So they're acting as the only light sources in the scene now because we turned off our main light here, these two lights are the only light sources in the scene because we had the global elimination turn. Now, now check this out. So now the object is lit from underneath. One thing you'll notice is that in the background we have some weird blotches. This is because of the quality off the global domination. If you remember from the previous listen, we looked at how the quality can be improved. So that's going open that up again. I'll go to my globalism Nation settings and then here where two samples. I'll try first, setting this the high and see if that fixes it. Well, then come out of this. And then the one more render. This seems to have improved the quality. Let me go to the previous one. This is before where we have lots of blotches on the walls and this is after it is still not quite perfect. If you want this to look even better, we could go and improve the quality a little more. We're going to our render settings again, and then the global nation settings. And instead of high, I can set this to accustom sample counts and then click on this triangle and then increased this number manually. So let's say in this case, I'm gonna go to 2000. The higher the number, the better the results are gonna be. But the longer it will take to render. So let me just do another render here and most of the times you need to go into four digit numbers in order to get some good looking results. So be prepared for long render times if you're using global elimination. This is looking much better now, so I have none of those blotches on the wall. But it took almost three minutes to render. So instead of half a minute's, you're now having to wait three minutes. But the result is much better. This is before this is off there. Let's go and change the colors off these lights. Come out of this, go to my front like material and then double click to open it up. I'll then go to eliminates and let's say the front lights. I want that to be read and then I'm gonna make the back lights blue, something like that. I also want to increase the intensity of these. So I'm gonna go and open these up. Go to Eminence. I'll dance at my brightness to, let's say, 200%. So it's gonna be quite strong for the front light and then I'll go to my back light. I'll sit this one to be under 50%. Then I'll come out of this and then I lower down. My sample counts. I'll go to 500 this time, so it's not gonna look as nice, especially on the back wall and sidewall. But it's not gonna take as long to render. So I'm going. Rendered is again with shift our and here's the results. Now our model is only being lit by the polygons in the scene and not the main light 17. Lesson 16: Adding Glow to Lights: One thing you may have noticed is that these light sources appear to be too flat there, almost like solid objects on the floor that have no detail at all. In order to make them look more like light objects, you could actually add the glow channel to those materials. Let me show you how that would work. I'm gonna go to my front light material and I'm going to glow turn this on and I'll do the same for the backlight turning home. And as soon as I turned us on, you see, this is way over exposed. So what I'll do now is that lower down my inner strength to, let's say, 75 and then my daughter strength to 1 50 and then the radius toe to So that's a lot more subtle. Now, I'm not gonna go to my front light material. And though the same inner strength 75 outer strength 1 50 radius. True, These numbers are of course, going to depend on the size of the objects that you are working with. But in this case, I think these numbers will be fine. Let me just go and close this and then do one more render shift our Now that the render is finished, we can see the effect the glow has on these materials. It makes them look a lot more realistic. This is before this is off there. 18. Lesson 17: Lighting with HDRIs: one more thing that the global illumination that you do is to light up your seen by using HDR eyes or high dynamic range images. And Haiti are I is a high quality image that's used to illuminate the scene rather than using light objects. Let me show you how it works in this scene. We have four cups sitting on top of our seamless backdrop, and first I'm gonna go and crazy material for or Go and double click here and then I'll call this cup and then I'll apply this material to the know that includes all the cups. I'll then go in the book, click on the cup material and then go to reflect INTs. God Beckman. So they become reflective. But I don't want them to turn into perfect mirrors. So I'm gonna go and turn on for now. So the reflection is gonna be based on the angle at which we're viewing. These I'll make Is that electric? And I put my speculator above my layer one. I'll dangle to my color channel and then make this quite bright. I'll set this toe almost white. 95%. Well, then come out of this and I'm going to rent it is by pressing shift our right now. This is looking quite weird because we have motion those or central space. So let me first go and close this. Instead of using an actual light object, I'm going to use an HDR image. And cinema 40 comes with lots off hdr I presets in here. I'll go to presets, then prime and then presets and then light set ups. I'm then hdr I These are old age. There are images that I can use. You may be wondering. Wretch applied these materials now. Well, we apply them to an object called Sky Sky is in here and you can think off the sky as an infinitely large sphere, it encircles the entire scene. I'm not gonna go and drag one of these Haiti awry materials onto my material manager. So let's say we use this Studio one and then I'll go to my objects manager and applied is hated you right to my sky before we do anything else. Let's have a look at how this hasty arise actually created. I'm gonna go in, double click on the material and you can see that the HDR image on Lee has illuminates and the effective channels turned on. In fact, I can go and get it off this reflecting channel and then only be left with the luminous General. If you are applying the HDR image to a sky object, the luminous channel is going to be sufficient. And you can see that there's a photograph loaded up inside the texture panel here. I'm gonna come out of this. And if I just go and do another render now shift our I'm only going to see the HDR image now inside their affection. Charles, if you look at these cups here, this was before and this is after. So I can now see the studio umbrellas here, there and here is well but still you're missing the shadows in order to enable the shadows . I'm gonna come out of this and then I'll go to my render sittings an alternative my global elimination. I'll need the default settings as they are. Well, then come out and then do another render shift. Our my a Z that the skies lighting up the entire see the floor is a little bit patchy here . We can fix that by increasing example, counts on the global nation settings. If I go to my settings again, go to my samples said that too high and then do one more test render shift our and you see this eliminates most of the pattern is off the floor. Still, it's not perfect. So if I go back here, this was before this is after So it's still not perfect. But I can make this even better by going to my sample count again. And then this time I change it from high toe custom sample counts. And then they say we increased this to 1000 and then I'll render again. No, this is looking much better. This was before this is off there. You can see that these areas are much smoother now as well as the floor. You notice that this side of this cup is a bit too dark. That's probably because the reflection is coming from the dark side of the photo studio image. Let's now have a look at how we can fix that. I'm gonna go and close this. I'll set up my sky, and I can actually rotate this guy. I'm gonna go to my coordinates and I'll increase the heading. Let me first going expand this and then we're in. Click then dragged us around and you see that this is rotating the sky in order to see this a bit better than just zoom all the way out and then look around. This is our photo studio here that we're seeing inside the reflections. And if I rotate this you see, those reflections are updating. Let me not go back to my cups and then you don't take this a bit more. So we get the umbrella infections here as well. And it's trying to the render. And you see now this site is no longer is Doc. This was before. This is after One more thing I want to do to this, and that is to enable the second rebounds. So I'm gonna go to my globally the nation settings again and then go to globally nation. Second, your method turn is also to radiance cash, and then a diffuse depth is gonna be set to to, and that's going to create a more even and realistic renders. Let's have a look compared to the previous renders. I think this is the best one because the light is bouncing more than once this was before. It's quite dark. You'll see inside the cups, and this is after because the HDR image that we use doesn't really have much color information. You're not getting any color cast here, so let's go and make a couple of changes to our material to make the image look either cooler or warmer. So I'm gonna go to my photo studio material again and then go to the luminous channel. I'll go to Texture, and I'll add a filter. Now when I do this, it created Filter tab here. If I click, I now have the image as the texture on on top off that I can apply hue, saturation, brightness, contrast and saw. So I'm just gonna and change the hell this and you see Not much is happening because really , there is no color information. It's just mostly black and white. So in order to have some more color on this, I'll try the saturation first. That's looking more like it. This is a bit too much now, so I'm gonna go back, so I'm kind of introducing some color day. Then I can change the hue to make this a little cooler if I come out of this now, if I now render it, we will see. Now there's gonna be a color cost on the image because of the filter of your just updated. There we go. Now the image has this color cost. By the way, if you want to make some small changes to your images after you've rendered them, you could use this filter option here. And if you're going enable this, this will allow you to make some changes after the fact I could de saturate. It's a little bit. I could increase the contrast, the creases. I'm gonna increase it just a tiny bit. I can go and take some of this Scient color. If I scroll down. There's this red curve I can command click anywhere on this graph that adds a new control point. I can an increased threat, which in turn is going to decrease the science. Let me go a little bit more than this. There you go. I can come down and there's the green that I could tweak and there's the blue them. Just add a bit more blue to this as well. Now so I'm gonna come on, click and then click and drag this up. Something like that may be I'm gonna go old. Well, now, if you think of color changes are a bit too much, you can come down here towards his grading intensity. And no, it is, though. So this slider is going to kill some of the color changes we've just created. Looking at this again, I think I'm gonna de saturate this even more. I think that's looking much better now. If you want to change the entire color scheme, you might need to update your sky material. So let me just come out of this and then go to my content browser again. And instead of using the photo studio, let's say I want to use a warmer image. Let's say maybe this one here, I'm gonna go click and drag this a nickel and then I'll go to my objects and an update my sky material with this new one. And now I'll create one more in. Now. The reason why this is a commitment to read is because of this filter. Let me go and disabled this filter and then go to history. This was the previous render I'm skipping the one that we made to blue. And this is the current one. You can see now that actual reflections have changed as well. So if you look at the reflections here and also here, I'm here. In the previous example, you are seeing the umbrellas from the studio, and in this one we're seeing the new image. One thing you might notice. Depending on the HDR image that you're using, the scene might end up looking a bit to a dark instead of fixing it using the filter. Here. An alternative method would be to go to the material itself and then go to the eliminations , have and then go to the strength and increased the strength off the global elimination. If I'm not going to sit this to, let's say 1 50 and they render one last time so we can see the difference as it's rendering , we can already see it's much brighter than it was before, and this is the result off increasing strength off the global in nation in the elimination tab off the material. Now it's looking a little too overexposed, but it's a simple fix. You can go to the material, open up the elimination tab and nowhere down the strength back to something like 120%. As you can see, using high dynamic range images is an amazingly effective way off, creating realism in your scenes. 19. Lesson 18: Using Gobos for Dramatic Effect: in this lesson, we'll have a look at how to light a scene through a set of polygons, also known as Goebbels. Using this method to like the person is gonna create quite a dramatic effect. Let's see how it works. First, I'm gonna go and create a lights. Let's say we create a spotlight and I'm gonna pulled lights back outs and then lifted up and I'm gonna extend lights outer angle from here and I'll turn to show those on. I got the general shadow Turn it on to area. And if I'm not just going to a quick Renda, you see, this is what it looks like. The shadows are very diffused. So I'll go to details set my light size to, let's say, 15 by 15 and horrendous again. That's gonna be much better now, so the shadows are well defined. I will then go and put the life back. And in fact, I'm gonna go and turn my full loaf to inverse square. Physically accurate. Now this is overexposed. If I go to a side angle like this, I can make my lights each up. Not as far Seiken. Drop down the radius decay off the light here. We're also I could scroll down and then used this option here. The radius decay that's gonna kill the intensity of the lights on them called light photo back, and then maybe lift it up. I also in the shape of the lights, to be a square rather than rounds. I'm gonna go to light general type, changing from a spot to square spots. Then if I run there, this is what I'm getting them now, In order to draw the attention of the view to these objects, you could use some lines or shadows leading to these objects. Let's go and create those. So I'm gonna go and start with the Cube. And for the time being, I'll turn my lights off. I'm gonna make my cube smaller. So I'm just gonna press t to get my scale tool. We can drive this left. That's actually be precise. With these numbers, I'm gonna go to the cube object. Let's say we set the size x 2 25 and size y 2 50 and size it to 50 as well on them. Put this cube inside a Moore graph corner. So if I create the cloner with the old key held down the corner becomes the parents. Well, then select the cloner, change its mode from the near to grid, and then I'll go to Count X increased that to 35 count. Why, let's say four and said to one Nominees amounts. What I want to do now is to create a plane so I could subtract these cubes from the plane to make them look like they're the openings off. I mean, though. So I'm gonna go and create a plane first changes orientation to said, And then I'll leave this up and I could no manually tweet the size of this, maybe about there, and then about there, I'll live the cloner up first, and in fact, I lifted Plane Oppa's well and I'm gonna slightly Kloner and change its Y size like that and then maybe have one more counts twice there. In order to subtract these cubes from the plane, I'm gonna use a bull object which is here, and the way the bulwarks is that you put the first object in this case, the plane inside the ball first, and then the second object, which is the cloner, which includes the cubes because that's what I'm gonna take out from the plane under the plane. The default operation for the Boolean is to subtract the second object from the 1st 1 And that's what I'm getting here. The cubes have been subtracted from the plane. Now I'm gonna go to my bull and then Presti to make it smaller. That makes everything inside the bull smaller. Don't go in. I can now tweet the sizes off these holes. So I'm gonna go to my cube and increased excise like that on may be the same for the UAE size as well. And I'm gonna more the plane towards right, it of it. I'm gonna take a plane, get my mortal pushes towards right on also move it up a little bit like that. And what I'll do now is to put the bull further back and then turn my lights home. Then I'll go around there. So this is the result I'm getting. Let's go and tidy this up. I'm gonna go to my bull and then put that inside my lights so that if I more delight, the ball moves with it like that. I don't leave the lights up and then rotated down so that the bull rotates as well. And I'll increase the radius decay off the light. So it's it's a brighter, and I'm gonna put the bulls at a slightly different angle. So I'm gonna take the ball here, rotate it may be like that. So when I shine the light through these holes, that will look a little more interesting. Let me exaggerate this. And I was like, My lights pull this towards rights like that. And if I know they're run there, that's what I'm getting now. So that's a little more interesting. But you see, the shadows here are really diffused. So what I'll do for that is to separate the bull from the light. So I'm gonna go to my bull Zuma. In fact, I'm gonna select my light and then pull the light back. Instead of pushing the ball in, I'll pull the light back. But the problem with this is because the bull is the child of the light. If I pull this back, it moves with it. So instead of what I could do, is either to take the ball out and then more delight further back and then put the ball back in. Or I could use this really random but very useful shortcuts, which is the press number seven on the keyboard. And what $7 is to disable the link between the parents and the child As long as you hold it down and you move the parents, If I hold on number seven and then move this life further back, you see the child object, which is the bull isn't being affected anymore. As soon as I let go of seven. If I continue to move it the bull most, then I'll just fly around. If I know rendered iss the shadows should be a little more defined. And indeed they are. I don't quite like this harsh. Elevate the bottom, though. So what I'll do for that is to lower down the board a little bit. I'm gonna zoom out, get my bull. Andi just lowered down. The boys are makin on Brenda. This is what I'm getting, though. Now, in order to make this look a little nicer, I'm gonna go and turn my subdivision surface off for the backdrop. So I had some harsh edges here. If I know, render this that's looking much better now. When is one back out on a couple of other things? I'll push the light further back by holding down number seven again. No extended lights reach, so it's not two of them. And if I zoom in should make the shadows little more prominence. Indeed they are now. One other thing I could do is to make the light even smaller. So that's gonna make the shadows even less defused. If I go to my light details size. If I said this to, let's say, seven by seven, then if I run there this, then the shadows are gonna be even more defined when I go here. Maybe to render from this angle, I can not see that the shadows are much more defined. I don't quite like the way the shadows are cutting off here, but that's an easy fix. Was amount. I could just go to my bull, open it up, go to my plane, extended size, then go to my Kloner, increase the exercise like that and add maybe a couple more cubes there and then maybe pull the excise further out like that. On that, I'll change my view again and then do one more Rendah on that should extend the reach of those lines as well. One final thing I'll go to this is to turn my global elimination on my present command be I just go to effect global elimination. Also, turn on my second your method to radiance cash. I'm gonna sit my samples toe high and then come out of this and then find myself a nice Rangel. Maybe something like that. And I'll do one more, Rendon because we turn the global elimination on the show. Those are gonna be is dark and the colors are gonna blend much better. Let's also went to an ambient occlusion and see what difference that makes. I'm gonna go press command, be go to my effects and then turn on. That means occlusion. Well, then make my raise shorter So I'll go to my maximum ray length that's every sentence to 15 and then come out of this and then the one more Rendah I'm intervention at so much death to the scene. So if I zoom in especially these areas, if I go back to the previous one, this was before this is off there 20. Lesson 19: Caustics: well night's heat reflective or transparent surfaces. They create this cool effect called co sticks. Next time you stand by a swimming pool or a pond, pay attention to the shimmering lights that light is called core sticks or, if you have a glass of water in front of you and a strong light sources going through it on the other side, you see these cool reflections called co sticks or think of a diamond. If a strong light source like a spotlight, teach the diamond, you see all sorts of cool effects and colors around it. Let's see how we can simulate that In cinema 40. I have a simple senior without a seamless backdrop and some cloned objects. These objects are just tubes, and what I'm gonna do is to create a spotlight first. In fact, instead of creating a spotlight, I'll create a target light, which happens to be a spotlight with the tag called Target attached to it. This is gonna make things easier. Let me want to move the light around, so I'll start with the target light. You can see the target tag here, and that also created no called light targets, one so as I'm moving all around the light is gonna follow it because the target is in the central of the world. I don't need to change that now, so I'll just leave it as is. I'll zoom out. You can see my life is far, far away. I'll just select my lights and push that closer to the scene. So it's going to bring it down like that and maybe towards here and now it's gonna be above the scenes or them just pushed us here and then lifted up. So now the light is right on top of those objects. I can see the light is extending way too far. So I'm just gonna bring this full off in right now. This is gonna have no effect. But as soon as I go to my details and turn my full off onto inverse square Now that but that I was cooking on, you're gonna change the intensity of the light. As you can see, if I zoom in, that's gonna be easier to see. The longer the reach of the lights, the brighter it gets. I'm gonna go and put this somewhere around here, and in fact I'll just go and move my life down. So I find this Zoom out quick and move my light down here. So it sits there at an angle. I'll also change its shape twist square. So if I go to type, change it to a square, spots my nose. Women also when turned the shadows on to area shadows. And before I do a test run there, I'm gonna extend this square shapes. One's gonna zoom out and then extend this square shape like that. And then I'll go to a different angle like that again, and I'll just do a test. Run them by pressing commander. And the first thing I notice is that objects are burnt out. So I'm gonna zoom out and decrease my fall off. I could it from the start here, or I could go to details and then scroll down to it says radius decay and his Lord is down somewhere there may be, and then I'll zoom back in and then do one more test render, and this is looking much better now. But the other issue that I'm having here is that the shadows are very diffused. If I want those shows to be more defined. I need to make the light size smaller. So if I go to details size, X and Y, let's say we set this to be about 15 centimeters each. And if I run there, you see that the shadows are much more defined now. Now on to cost ICS co sticks work best if you're transparent or reflective surfaces. So let's go and create a material and make these rings reflect. So I'm gonna go double click here, call this rings, and then apply it to that Kloner, which is what the rings are, and then open that material up untangled reflect ins. Turn on my Beckman reflection and I'll make it not so reflective. So I'm just gonna go to my global infection brightness lower that down to, let's say, about 75% or so. I'll also go to my color and then make this look more like a golden color. Maybe somewhere here and a bit more saturated there. And I think these are still a little too reflective. So I'm gonna go to my reflecting channel lower this down even more to about 50% and I'll put my speculator above my layer one here goes a reflective surface now, which is Layer One is covering this speculator. So I'm gonna go push the speculum up So that creates this reflection here as well. Off. Then come out of this. And then the one more render controller. I think the material looks fine. So let's not go and set the coast. Except so for that I had to go to the light first and then come down to what's his co sticks. And he had two options surface co sticks and volume Cost IX. If you are using volumetric lights, you can add some co sticks to the volumes as well. Right now, we don't have a volumetric light, So let's go out to surface co sticks, which is going to basically let the light bounce off objects and then create the coast X effects. I'm gonna go and turn it on. Turning this option on by itself is actually not going to do anything. We also have to go to the render sittings by pressing command be and then we have to enable the co sticks by going to effect and then turn on co sticks here. Now, when we do a render you might see a different results. I'm gonna try by pressing commander again. And I get these strange looking shapes on the back wall. I don't if you can notice, but there's a brighter area now on the floor as well. Now that's going to find these anymore. The reason why we have all these tiny dots is because on the course takes effect here. The amount of photons which are basically how many of these dots that you get is too low. So if I go on increases from 10,000 to, let's say 100,000 by putting a zero there, attend and if I not go into Orender, you see those dots are gonna be much more dense now. So if I now go impress Commander because I have too many photos now, it's quite hard to make out individual ones. Let me go and lower this down to about 100 so you can see what's happening. We'll just go and sit this to 100 then rendered this, you see, because I only have a few photons and 100 is a very little number. As far as the photos here are concerned, I'm only getting a few dots here. So the higher the photons amount, the more off those don't you gets. And the more natural and realistic renders are gonna look. And the energy up here is the brightness off these photons. So if these are too bright and I think they are too right now, we could go to energy. Let's say we load is down to 50. And if I rented this those dots on his bright let me exaggerate this. Just go to 10 and they're render again. You see, it's a lot less intense now. Usually, when you're working on something for riel, you increase these numbers rather than decreased. Um, but I just wanted to decrease them now to show you what the effects are like. So I'm not gonna go set these back to their defaults, which were 100 by 10,000. And let me show you what happens when we change the angle of the light. I'm gonna go back on a low, dislike them, no, zoom back in. And if I know render this you see more off those now here on a few on the back wall again. So I'm not gonna go an increase. My foot on count, Let's say this time to a 1,000,000. And if I render this, this is gonna take a little longer to rent there. Now, the result is much more prominence. You can see the nice reflections here, let me know, change the lights ankle again, and then the one more render and that's the result I'm getting now it's a little too dark around here, so let me just go in and they feel light as well. So I'm just gonna go duplicate this light by a command, that dragging it. So I'm gonna hold on command lifted up, maybe push it back, and then lower down the intensity of this new lights to about 50% or so. And it's going to rename these. So this is our field lights on. This is the key lights, a knife. I zoom in. And although one more render on the backside is still looking a bit too dark, let's find out why someone is Walmart. I can see already why I must have pushed a light all the way back. So it's not behind the seamless background, actually. So I'm gonna go and bring this feel light in. It's in front of it now, and in fact I lifted up. And if I zoom in and then the one more quick run there, the shuttle issue to me is dark anymore. And now, because I have two lights casting photons, this is taking a little longer to render. But I can see much better now what those photos look like. Now let's talk about a couple of more options here. If I go to my render settings control, be command to be on the Mac down here, it's a strength. Instead of using the strength off both of these lights, I could increase the strength off the coast X effect here, and that's going to increase both of those lights. Or, if you're more than true, it's going to increase the strength off all of the light on your scene at same time. So if I like the results here, but I want everything to be much more prominent, much more visible, I can win increases from 100 Let's say under 50. And if I ran there one more time now, the co sticks are much more prominence. I can still see some dots on the back wall. That's probably because I don't have enough photos on the lights, So I'm gonna come out, select both lights well, to my core sticks. And this time I'll set this up. Let's get about five million. Why? Now, render this. That's gonna take much longer to render and you can see a progress bar here at the bottom. But once this is done, I'm going to have much cleaner results. Now, these on the back wall are looking much nicer now, so they don't just with black dots actually looked like some proper reflections. Let me just going change my uncle on. I'll just go somewhere here and I'll do Orender from this angle. In order to change the color of thes reflections, we've had to go and tweak the material. So I'm gonna go to my rings material well to my perfect since channel melted later color Now make a later color Also yellow and as I change is, the color of perfection is gonna change as well. So that come out and they render again. And this is looking much nicer. No, and one final texture. This would be to add the global elimination so Let me just go to my render settings again, go to effect global illumination. I'll change my second method also to radiance cash. And then I'll increase my diffused up so that it does that say four or £5 is or increase my samples too high. This is going to take a little longer to render, but we should get some pretty good results. There we go. A beautiful looking render using co sticks and the global elimination. 21. Conclusion: you made it. Congratulations on completing this course. I hope you had fun and gain new skills that you can put to use right away. As with any learning experience, unless you put your new skills into practice, they'll soon start to fade away. So go ahead and create some cool looking renders by using. The files have provided or maybe even your own files, their share them with me and the other students here so we can all learn from each other. And finally, if you enjoy the course, I'd really appreciate your feedback. So please do leave a review for the course once again. Thanks for watching my course, and I'll see you on the next one.