Beginners Guide to Cinema 4D + Redshift in 2025

1. Becoming Comfortable and Confident in C4D and Redshift: In Chapter one, the intro to C 40 and redshift will cover exploring the UI, useful controls, basic navigation and workflow tips, as well as creating time saving setups and defaults to streamline your process. Basically, when you open up C 40, you can just get started going. We're also going to talk about the fun and middles of material creation, lighting, cameras, viewports, project settings, and render settings as well. We'll also create our first abstract render scene as well as a default setup. Basically, this is great for anyone who's new to C 40 and Redshift or anyone looking to streamline their workflow and process. 2. Prepping C4D: So first things first is you need to open up the Max on app, and just go ahead and make sure you're up to date. At the time of this filming, I'm running 23.1 0.3, and I'm also running red shift 3.5 0.12, okay? So as long as you're there, you'll be able to follow along exactly. If you're a little further ahead, that's great. If anything changes so that it's not going to line up, I will update and have a video on that, okay? But at the time of recording, this is where we're at. So just be sure to check the list of videos, and I'll have it in the description and stuff if there's one that's like, Oh, they've changed this completely because they do that. Okay? But let's go ahead and get into Cinema 40 and start learning. So if you have the rest of this stuff, if you bought the Max on one bundle, you can go ahead and keep all that up to date and install it. We won't be covering it in this course, because we're going to focus on Cinema 40 and redshift. And between those two things, there's a lot to focus on already. So we're just going to go ahead and get you started. We've opened up Cinema 40, and the first thing you're gonna notice is you have this quick start dialogue, pop up window here that a lot of people disable because it's like, one extra step to get into it. But I actually don't mind it because they have this inspiration here every day where it changes and right here, it's corn. We've got corn and other things. But what's cool is you'll have tutorials and stuff down here. They're from niversity or they're live streams and stuff like that. And if you're a new user, a lot of these are actually really good and really helpful. Of them are a little well, I don't know, they're helpful. If you want to check them out, it's really nice that you can check these out, as well as just getting some inspiration and stuff. It's pretty cool just to see what's being made in case you just want some ideas and stuff like that. But if you want to basically right here, there's an option to highlight new features, and you may notice that here in my Viewport or my UI here, we've got some yellow icons here. These words are yellow versus being white, and that's because they have new features in the new Cinema 40 23. Basically, this is going to say, Hey, what's different than the last version of Cinema 40 that I just had installed, and this will show you that. I think it's really helpful. Another option you have is show on Startup. So if you don't want this Window, obviously, you just uncheck that and it won't pop up on Startup. So that way, you can just Google straight into your viewport and start working. I don't mind having the recent options here to do this. You also have templates that you can use and try out, as well as this product template. So everything that's available to you is, you know, you can use it. It's pretty cool. There's a lot of really cool stuff. As you'll find out as we go further into this, there's actually a of assets and really cool things that are provided for you and available to you to use to get you started off making cool stuff really fast. You've got your list of your recent things in here. But what we're going to do is you can either click New or you can click Open, but we can just close this out. And that's the same as clicking New. You might notice that I have a psyche wall and a ball here and I can go ahead and I have red shifted up here and I have render view. And I can go ahead and render, right? And we'll cover all this in a bit, but you might be looking at your scene and realizing you don't have anything there. It's just blank in this, like, gray grid, and you don't have the red shift up there. And that's because there's actually a little bit of pre work we need to do to set this up because right now, what you have to do is you have a blank screen, right? Everything's blank. Let's go ahead and match up with you. And what we're going to do is we're going to walk you through in the next video how to set this up to have this custom layout like IH so that you don't have to go up here, go to render settings, choose your red shift as your renderer, and then get all your setting set up and how you want it. Every single time you open up Cinema four D because by default, it doesn't default to red shift. So what we're going to do is we're going to set it up in a way that it does, and so you can go ahead and get started making faster so you can skip all the prework after we have it set up. Okay, so we're going to get our workspace organized, how we like it. We're going to be able to have the layout of where everything is and all this stuff, and we'll talk about what these windows are, what all these buttons and icons are. But rather than me just sit here and say, Okay, this button is this, this option gives you these options, blah, blah, blah. This does this, blah, blah, blah. I'm gonna walk you through it in a way that's kind of like we're actually going to make something because it's more fun to make something and follow along and learn about it on the way. And then we'll go in depth more as we start discovering things because if I try to just throw everything at you, at once, it's not always the best way to learn. There's nothing wrong with just, like, a glossary of things that say, Hey, this is this, this is this, this is this. But for me personally, and my style of teaching and what I like to do and how I like to learn is to make something and follow along, and I do it through practice. And that's really the best thing you can do to get better at any skill is practice it. So rather than just watching somebody do it, you're going to follow along, do it with me, and we're actually going to make something. And that way, you'll have something that you're proud of, and you'll learn along the way, and it'll kind of stick your mind a little bit better, I think, because you'll be able to create something and you'll be able to see why it's useful and all this stuff as we go along. So you'll learn what all this stuff is without me just sitting here and saying, Okay, here's view part one, this here's your perspective view. Over here's the top view, and down here, you'll see, so's I'm not going to do that. I know that was exaggerated, obviously. But we're going to go through this and learn this and set it up in a way that works for your workflow because there's one way to do everything. That's a beauty of three D. There's not like follow these ten simple steps, and every render will be amazing, and your workflow will be flawless. Yeah, no. But there is some stuff we can do that is kind of the path of least resistance, and the smartest things you can do to speed up your workflow, get nice clean renders and save yourself some time and some headaches because 99% of three D is troubleshooting. So what we're gonna do is we're going to set you up in a way to get past all the BS, basically, and get straight into the creative. So let's go ahead and learn how to set up your workspace in c4d. And you're going to notice that there's a lot of stuff we have to do to actually get this to go. But once we have it set up, we're going to do it this one time and we'll be set. So let's go ahead and learn how to do that in the next video. 3. Creating our layout: Okay, in this video, we're going to learn how to set up our layout and make it the default so that every time we open up Cinema four D, we don't have to do anything to get started working. We're going to be able to use Redshift right off the bat. We're going to have some lights and stuff. We'll be ready for it'll be Look Dev ready. So we can start just creating and skip all the stuff that we normally have to do to get our scene ready. Okay. So this isn't going to be the most fun project T are going to do, but it is incredibly useful and it really is the foundation of this. And there's gonna be some settings and stuff we cover here that you may not know what they do. But I will explain them later. Right now, what we're doing is we're laying the groundwork for future work, ok? And this is really something that, you know, it's not intuitive. It's not you know, if you're just opening it up for the first time, you may not know that this is at all what you need to do. So we're going to go ahead and get set up. And if you notice up here at the top right, all of these things here, you may not have as many as me, because basically what we have here are different layouts. Now, what S 40 calls layouts is basically what I'm talking about with your scene and how it is laid out, obviously. So what we're going to do, if you have standard, which is basically what we have, you have model, which if you notice, it kind of changes a couple of the windows around. We have sculpt sculpt. We have sculpt, which actually changes some of the tools over here on the left, and also changes some of the windows over here on the right. U V edit completely different. Layout and stuff like this. So you can see, like groom, paint, all these things different tools are available. So they're kind of like these preset layouts for a specific task. So obviously, models for modeling, sculpting is for more hard surface modeling and stuff like that, which is where you kind of it's more of like a art style. Imagine playing with Plato with your tools and sculpting in that way versus typing in values and things like that, okay? UVEdit is more with the texture maps and stuff like that. Paint is for, like, man, I don't even I've never touched this one, okay? Let's be honest. Groom is for hair, okay? Track is for motion tracking, and scripting is one that that is far beyond me. Nodes is wild, okay? Nodes is this new thing that they have. We're not going to cover it that much in here because it is its own beast, okay? And so we're going to learn how to use C 40 the more common and practical way before we get into using scene nodes, which is kind of like this hybrid of scripting and artistry in its own weird way. But basically, you can see I have some custom ones that I've created here that have things that I have. So if I have one that's, like, startup, if I go to my startup one, well, I've deleted it. So if I hit new If I hit if I hit the plus sign, Okay. So you may notice, you know, I've deleted everything out of my scene. So what I want to do to go to my layout here is I'm just gonna hit this plus sign. Ah yeah. Okay, go back back, I can't undo. Okay. And whoo. Okay. So let's say so, for instance, I have deleted so let's say, for instance, I'm in my startup layout here. And what I want to do is I want to hit this plus sign up here, which is how you create a new project. Now, when you create a new project, it's going to start out in the startup layout because that's kind of how we have it set up. And you can see when I do that, I have a nice psyche wall with an infinite floor look, lighting, camera and an object here for reference all set up redshift ready to go. And the reason I have that is because I've created it that way. Super helpful, right? So, it's in the startup layout. So this is what we're going to create today. And in this video, we're going to focus on setting up the red shift render settings. So here we go. So now we've figured out the layouts. Let's go back. So let's go back to our blank slate here. We're going to figure out our layouts and how to say this and customize this. So there's one thing. Okay. Now that we've kind of covered the layouts and stuff, let's go ahead and just set up redshift for our scene here. Now, there's a couple of things we need to do. Firstly, we need to go to Edit up here, okay? Go to Edit, go to preferences. Okay? It's going to pop up this preference window. They're going to go down here to Renderbr, and this is where we're going to choose redshift. Okay. And then when you load up Redshift, by default, it has the CPU on as well. Now, if you only have the CPU version of Redshift, which is available to everyone included with Cinema 40, that's fine. If you are using the GPU version of Redshift, which means you pay for the Red Shift subscription, you want to disable the CPU one because even though you think having two devices working on your renter image at the same time sounds faster. The CPU is so much slower that it's better to not use it at all and just let your GPU handle the whole workload. So we're going to go ahead and uncheck that box to make sure we just have our GPU working, okay? And in order to, you know, double up on that, we want to make sure we have hybrid rendering unchecked, as well, which means we're going to use GPU only and non CPU, as well. Multi threading, totally fine. Make sure that's on scene upgrade compatibility warning. This basically means if you're working on an old scene and you bring it into a new version of Redshift, it's going to be like, Hey, this is new, and you're just going to click Okay. You know, there might be some issues, but it's probably going to be fine. This one is an interesting one. This one is node materials for presets. So we'll talk about this a lot more in the materials video. But basically what this is is there is a new node editor system inside of Cinema 40 for Redshift. It's basically a new way to create materials. And then there is the legacy way, which is the old way in the shader graph of Redshift. So if you don't have this checked, you're going to use the old way, which might seem more familiar in a lot of older tutorials and stuff. But if you have this checked when you create a material, it's going to use the new node editor system. A lot of people ask me, which is better the new one. Flat out. Almost always. Almost always. But if you learn one, the honest truth is, if you learn one, you'll learn the other. They're not that different. It's really just a different way of presenting the same information. Basically, there are a very few things that the old one can do that the new one can't then there are a lot of things that the new one can do that the old one can't far as creating materials goes, they're almost identical. The new node editor actually, for me, has a whole lot of user friendly upgrades that just make creating materials so much faster. So if you're going to learn one, learn the new one, one because they're going to update it and make it better and continue it, the old way, they're probably not going to update it anymore. It's legacy at this point, and it's just there so make sure your old scenes don't die. There are certain things like Quiksl and stuff like that that we'll talk about later that require the old way. But really, nothing is wrong. You can learn it whichever way you want. But I'm going to use the new way for the majority of this because it is so much faster. It's just better user friendly, okay? Dative camera for new scenes. Sure. Global attribute manager for Shader nodes. Nah, we'll just use this attributes panel over here. Up your star automatically. You want to make sure you have that off. This one here, this one here for this one Redshift main menu with a checkbox. Basically what this does, if you notice up here, you may not have Redshift available, right? But when I click this, oh, look, there's a Red Shift tab. Do this. Just even if you never click it, it's just helpful to have this dropdown for all your red shift needs. Almost everything that's accessible here is accessible elsewhere, but it is just really nice, and I use this a lot because this is kind of how Redshift was originally, and this is how I learned it. So this is a really handy drop down to have. Now, this next one is also very important for our scene. And I know we're covering a lot of stuff that's kind of just like, Okay, this is going to take forever, isn't it? Yeah, but it's going to be worth it because once you set it up, you're not going to have to do it again. And also, these are things that you may not know are affecting your performance, and they are, okay? So when I say that, what I'm talking about is saying, if your renders, your scene is just feeling kind of sluggish and slow, and you're like, Why are my renders taking so long? I feel like I've seen other people for faster. What's going on? I have a good graphics card. What's the deal? One of those factors may be this right here, material previews. So basically what this is is if you notice if I look at materials, which are what these circles these balls are here, this pair of balls that you're looking at here, right? These two are you can see them. They're white and blue, okay? Now, if I come in here and I create a new material, you'll notice it's black, and it's just a black square, and I don't know what this material looks like. It's kind of really annoying. And the reason I don't know what this looks like is because I don't have material previews on. So you might be thinking, Well, why would you ever do that? Because that seems really hard? Well, because once you get good enough at materials and once you actually get into the process of creating things, you might actually find out that you're not really referencing these icons themselves for what the material is going to look like. You're actually just going to look at it in the renerview and see it live versus looking at these icons. Okay? So as we're starting out, we are going to turn on material previews, and we're going to set it to on. Okay. And this is going to be basically, so now when I create an object, you're going to see, it's going to boom, it's going to have a little bit of loading time and then load in this gray default material. These two are exactly the same. This one is just black because we didn't have material previews on. This one is. So we can come in here, change the color of this, and it's going to update that and you can see it's kind of slow. And it's annoyingly slow. And we're still thinking about it. And it's partly slower because I'm using my GPU. But there it goes. Now it's updated, right? So that took a second. It updated. Yeah, we're gonna leave it on for right now, but because I think it's helpful for beginners to see this here, but we're going to turn it off. Actually, you know what? So that's so that's the difference. As a beginner user, I might turn that on so that I can see more of a live feedback in my material editor of what I'm doing to my materials in this little preview window. But as you notice and you get more comfortable, you might actually find yourself wanting to switch it off because one, it's going to be faster to render. And two, because you might actually find out that you're not actually using these this window to create your material that much, you're actually just going to be looking at it live in the renterview. So what I mean here is basically, let's open up a scene. So we can go to a So to illustrate what I mean, here we have the red shift IPR render view. So we've got this kind of live feedback of our object here with our lighting. We can look around and we can see the color and the material on our object live here. So what I can do is, you know, if I don't have the preview on, and I create a new material, let's go ahead and go to Edit preference turn this off, right? One thing you're going to notice is it speeds up the IPR a lot. It goes, boom, it gets faster, cleaner, much faster. Let's go back. And then it'll say on. And it's gonna say, Oh, thank, rotate. It's gonna take a little bit longer to get clean, just a little bit. But it's gonna be a little slower. And the more matatos you have, the longer it's gonna take and it's gonna take your scene longer to load and all this stuff, but it's still really fast. So you might not have an issue, but just so you're aware, this is kind of how we're going to do a lot of material building stuff. So think about that when you create this. Now there is an option that says, When render is idle, it will build previews. This sounds like the ideal option because it means, oh, basically, it's going to give priority to this. So if I'm using the IPR, it's not going to build the materials. So if I go in here and I'm like, Okay, I created a new material, it's not going to update it. You notice it just brought in this pink material, which is what we made last because that's just what was in the cache. And this isn't actually at all what this looks like, and it can be kind of confusing. Because sometimes you had material previews on, sometimes you had them off. When you swap around, it gets confusing. So what we want to do is we leave them off for now. And you'll notice we're clicking ne one, we get black. We can't see what this is, but you're going to find out that what we normally do is we throw this our object, and we just use the IPR to, you know, control our object here. So if you come in here and we wanted to tweak this material, we would be looking at live in our scene here like this. And we'd say, Oh, okay, let's change the color of this, and we'll go to that pink again, and we'll just see it update instantly there, which is actually faster than the material preview was when we did it. So it kind of makes sense to just let it be black. What I it's tough, right? So you can sit here and build all your materials out, right? So you can make, like, a bunch of them. Let's say you end up with a scene with 13 materials. And you like it, and you've made them all and everything's looking good, and you kind of want to save it out so that it makes more sense. Well, here's an easy trick for materials. We'll cover this again later. And I know this is a lot, but I just want you to understand what we're setting up and what you can change and some things like that, because this is a lot of weird information that doesn't seem relevant as a beginner, but it really is one of those things that can really trip you up because it doesn't make a lot of sense. Like honestly, you should just be able to make a material. It should just show you what it looks like here and render at the same speed without any issues. But really, it's a whole lot faster to have it off. And so then you're kind of like, Oh, what's it actually look like, blah, blah, blah. So we've turned off the material preview, and we've just added a bunch of materials. They're all black. And let's say, you know, you've worked on this, you've built a lot of materials, but you want to be able to see them so that you can, like, add them to your content browser or whatever, just so you can see them and see what they look like. An easy way to do that is just to click this top one and select them all. Shift click, you know, the bottom one. And it's going to say custom up here because for some reason, they're all different. But if you just pull this down, you'll see we have the option to change it to default, and all this is going to do is nothing. It's not going to actually change anything, but it is going to make them all look the same. And then we can come in here to edit preferences, turn on our material preview, and just click that again, default. And it's going to rebuild all of those material previews for you. So we're not going to change any values or click anything we shouldn't click. We're just going to tell it basically to re load them so that we can actually build those previews. So just a little trick in how to do that. But you can see how slow it is. And now, because those are loading, we have to wait. I can't actually, like, move around in my Viewport. So there's just some weird issues with it. I hope they fix it because building tiny little material previews shouldn't use up this much GPU, and it's frustrating. So to avoid that frustration and this weird lag, it seems like, Oh, my gosh, why is this running so chunky and slow? We are going to set this to off. Now, I know that was a lot, but it's one of those things that if you just started going and started making things and you had that on by default, you're going to notice that your red shift is running a little slower than mine or somebody else's or what you've seen, and that is a huge part of it right there. And it's a really hard thing to diagnose on your own. So I want you to do to know that's a real big part. So we're gonna make sure we have that off for now, okay? We also need to go down here to the material option inside of our edit preferences window, okay? We're going to change your material previews to small just because we don't need them to take up. They don't need to be big, and they don't need to take up any more time and energy than they already do. And secondly, we want to make sure our default material here is not on Auto, but actually make sure it is set to the RS shader graph, okay? Because a lot of times, if it's on Auto, it may not work, and when you hit this plus sign, it's going to create it might create the wrong thing. It might create what's called a standard material. So now when you double click that, it may be like, Oh, that's not a red shift material. So we just want to make sure that this is set to RS Shader Graph. So now we can double click in here or hit this plus sign, and we'll get an RS standard material inside of here. And we want to always open up the node editor, which is what we'll get when we open this up, and that's what we're going to be working in. Okay. So now that we have the renderer options set up, how we want them, as well as the material setup. Now we can actually get into our layout and worry about setting it up for red shift. So I know that's a lot, and there's a lot about materials and previews and stuff. But really, I think it's important because it's one of those things that can really trip you up, like I said. So hopefully that was helpful and speeds up your workflow a little bit. It is kind of annoying that you can't see these, but we can talk with them on, load them in, talk with them back off if you want. And also can try and see how yours works, and it may be fine on your system. It depends on your hardware and stuff like that, how much VRAM and all that jazz. So, you know, it's up to you, really. It's up to you. But I find the fastest is to have them off. So what we're going to do now is in the next video, we're actually going to look at all the Redshift render settings because it's just important to have them set up, and I want to have it be its own video rather than you having to skip through this because I really think it's going to be a good one for you to come back to. Okay, so it's not. Yep. Alright, so let's go ahead and go to the next video. 4. Redshift Render Settings (Be sure to watch next video on changes): So if you've been trying to follow along so far, you might have found it kind of difficult because you may not even see your red shift options. You're like, Wait, I don't even have a red shift icon. Up here, I don't have the same icons as you on the side. My these red shift materials aren't working. When I create a material, it's like this. Why can't I create red shift things? Nothing here looks like your stuff. Nothing says red shift. Where is it? Well, in order to actually toggle on red shift, you need to go to the render settings, which is Control B. Or this little icon up here that's a clapboard with a gear on it. That's Control B for I don't know, render settings, apparently. Alright, so what you may notice here is in the top left, there's the rendber option, okay? And so what I wanted you to do is watch one up here and watch over here for what changes, okay? When I go to click this and I switch it to Redshift. Everything actually changes. So basically the way it works now to elaborate on this is anything that is red shift related is going to be over here. And also, you've got red shift lights, red shift area lights, red shift objects, red shift cameras, and we still also have this red shift option for all of our other red shift stuff up here as well. And we don't have any of that other stuff like floor and stuff like that because it's not supported in red shift. So in the past, you used to kind of just have this hodgepodge of both things that worked with Redshift and things that didn't work with Redshift. And they were all on screen at the same time, and you just had to know what worked and what didn't now they've kind of simplified that for you. So everything that you see when you're in Redshift mode will work with Redshift. And you can't just, like, throw things in there that won't work. So you don't have to worry about knowing what not to push anymore. It's a lot better for new users. It's very much streamlined, and I like it a lot. Now, you may notice you don't have this camera icon here. We'll cover that in a little bit as well. Okay? So let's go ahead and go back into here. So if you were confused as to how come when you were togging that red shift thing on or whatever it wasn't showing up and all this stuff, you need to make sure that you were in the red shift render inside the render settings, and that will toggle everything on for you, okay? And the reason I went kind of in that order was one, I forgot that you had to do that because I never changed mine off of redshift. And two, now you know why you need red shift. You actually probably truly understand it a little bit better and might understand now why if you loaded something up and you didn't see red shift stuff where it's gone, and it's just because you don't have the red shift renderer option selected. Okay. Inside of the red shift options here, we have is we have a couple of things. We have basic mode and advanced mode. And you'll see no difference here in the output because it only affects it inside of the red shift option here. So when we go into the red shift option down here, now we have the option to choose basic and advanced, which advanced gives us more options. Let's talk about basic first. And just to start off, again, we are just setting up our generic Look Dev setup so that we open up Cinema 40, we'll be ready to go and start rendering. So what we want to do is we want to go to bucket quality. We want to choose low. We want to make sure that automatic sampling is on. You may not see that option here. Well, that's because it's in the Advanced tab. So we'll go to Advanced tab, and it should be on by default. Automatic sampling. Make sure that's toggled on. Interactive rendering, progressive final rendering bucket. The way this works is interactive rendering is progressive, which means you're going to get that kind that we were looking at earlier where it's kind of noisy and then it kind of cleans up over time. And bucket is going to actually be a lot more accurate and there's things that bucket renders that progressive doesn't, but bucket takes longer to get a preview, for it to render out. So it's not as good for Lodev, but it is better for final renders, okay? So that's why we want the final render to be Bucket. We don't need to show samples. We want to turn off random noise patterns. I'm not sure why this is even an option, really, because if you're using anything like deniser which we're going to use to preview stuff, it is going to be very helpful to turn this off to make sure that we're not freaking it out. Okay. So we want to make sure we have this off. Now we can twirl this down and we can go into denoising. And what we want to do is we want to enable this. Now we can also enable it back here at the beginning, and, you know, see that it's enabled, and we have a couple options here. We have optics, a stool, la single, la stool, and So basically, optics is like the good super fast GPU one. Altasingle is a good denoiser, but it's a little slower. Altastool is literally twice as good as Alta single because it does two passes of it, it is very, very good at cleaning up noise, but it takes a lot longer than optics. Euden is basically I don't know how we're supposed to say that, but it is the new CPU denoiser from Intel that allows you to if you're using the CPU version of red shift to actually still use a denoiser without having to have, like, an RTX card or whatever. So you don't have to have an NVDA GPU. To denoise your scenes now. So that's pretty cool. It seems pretty similar to optics, but a little slower, okay? So what we want to do is we want to use optics because that's the one I prefer. We'll cover that a lot more later on. But basically, this one's good for previews. This one's better for final renders. But sometimes you don't even need it. Sometimes this one's good enough, okay? That's the honest truth. It's just going to come down to your personal preference and your exact scene file. But one thing we can do with optics to make it even better is go in here to the Advanced tab and twirl this down. And you'll see down here we have this option of overhead, right? So that is basically this is going to be default set to ten. So what that means is when we hit render on our render for the final render, it's going to give 10% of the GPU power into denoising it as it renders. And what we want to do is we want it to actually do 0% while it's rendering, and that's going to allow it to render our scene faster. It's going to look noisy, but it's going to do all of the optics denoising at the very end of the render. So far as, like, previewing things, it's going to take longer. But we're not really using the bucket render to preview stuff, so we're only really using it for final render. And so it's actually I did a lot of test, and it's actually faster for you to leave the bucket at zero and let it render out noisy and then clean it up at the very end versus giving 10% of it to denoising it as it goes. It actually ends up taking a little bit longer to render out overall. So even though the image looks exactly the same at the end, it's actually slower to try to do them both at the same time. Okay? So it's better to let it render out noisy and then clean it up. So we're going to leave this at zero. Now we're going to go back to the basic tab, and we're going to make sure we have hardware array tracing on if available, obviously. So if you do not have an RTX card, if you are getting into three D and redshift and stuff like that, you need to, you know, know a little bit about your graphics card and the actual hardware that you have. And if you're serious about becoming a three D artist, you want to get an RTX card. You really do. And if you're on a Mac and stuff, I know that's hard to hear, and they're working and making MAC a better with metal and all that stuff, and Res Shift supports it. And I think it'll be fine. I don't know that it's ever going to be as good as RTX, but I don't know. You know, maybe it's fine. So just keep that in mind. But this really, really speeds up your renders if you have that RTX card. I used to have a GTX card, and now I have a 30 70 TI. The we'll talk about this more the rendering, basically, but what matters is the Cut Cor count, and when it comes to renter speeds. And the GTX card that I had had, you know, half the Cut de coors of my RTX card that I have, basically. So I thought when I bought this card, it was going to be twice as fast. It pretty much was until I toggled on hardware ray tracing, which made it even faster. So it's actually ended up being about six times faster than my old card is it had more RAM, VRAM, and it also had more just this RTX ray tracing speed. So it's actually even faster to use those coup de cores. So it's a lot. It's all techie and all this junk that I don't understand, you know, really. But I know what I need to know at least enough to say things wrong. But that is important to have this on. And then the very last thing we're going to do is we're going to go back into the Advanced tab and go over here to the global elimination. And what we want to do is we want to change this to Brute force and Brute force. And we'll cover what this is in detail later. But basically, this is what's going to make it look more photorealistic. Versus looking like a three D render, GI is that thing that like toy story and stuff like that didn't have, and they had to fake it with what's called an ambient occlusion map where they would kind of build in dark areas and light bouncing off of things. But basically, you don't have to now, and so now things going to look good. So if we shine a flashlight on a blue object and on a white flame, we're going to get some of that blue light bouncing off that blue object hitting the floor. That's what GI is. It's just light bounces and color information bouncing with that light, okay? But we want to use brute force and Brute force basically because it gives us faster previews and faster feedback. We have a radiance cache as an option. A lot of people say radiance cache is more accurate. It's a little bit, but most of the things you're going to make most of the things we're going to make aren't going to need that. And really, if you're towing a lot of interiors, it might be more important to you. But basically, what it does is it adds another step in between your bucket rendering and what you're going to see where it builds this, like, radiance light cache first, and then it starts rendering your scenes. So I'm not a big fan of adding another step in between seeing my product, my render. So that's why I use Bruforce Bruforce because it's still really good option. The cool thing is, since we're using Auto, it doesn't matter what we put here because it's going to just control that for us as well. Alright, caustics, we're not going to worry about, nothing here now. Now the very last thing we need to do is go to our system settings. In my system settings, I have it set up like this. You may have it set up by default to be like 128 and spiral. That's totally fine. We're going to leave it there for now because what we're going to cover in the rendering week is figuring out exactly what is best for your machine as far as coming down here is the memory management and all of these settings here. So don't get overwhelmed by all of that. Right now, just leave the system stuff as default. Just make sure auto memory management is checked on. Okay? Alright, so now we have all of those render settings set up how we want it. You may notice that we have another option up here called RT. That is for real time, not ray tracing, but real time. And the real time renter is kind of neat, and it's still kind of clearly under development, and we're not going to use it a whole lot in this. We'll look at it because it is cool, but it's just not quite there yet, in my opinion. And let's just focus on one render engine at a time. And with three D Cinema 40 and Rs being so much to learn from the get go, let's not muddle things up with a different type of rendering engine inside of our render engine. Okay? So now we've got all these things saved. We can, you know, have this little thing down here that says, My render settings. Now, if you want, you can double click this and call it, like, Look Dev, right? Because that's kind of what this is going to be. And then we could make a new one, change the settings to, like, hi, and then make one that's like final render, that kind of thing. So you can save these, but we're just going to do it at Look Dev here. And lastly, we want to go to our output, and we want to choose our output for our scene. So this is where you want to put some of your most common outputs and things like that. So if you're doing a lot of Instagram posts, you might want to do it, you know, 1080 by 1920 or something like that versus 1920 by 1080. Again, you can lock the ratio, change the pixel resolution. If you're doing a lot of stuff for print, you know, you can face this at 300, whatever you want to do. This is going to be where you put in what you're going to work on. There's not a universal thing. I do 1080 because I do a lot of stuff for YouTube, so that makes the most sense for me. There are options here, a lot of presets that you can do and so there you go. Pretty cool four case, and I'm going to fold all that stuff. So if you don't know what you need, maybe you can find it there. But we're going to set up in 1920 with 1080 of the square aspect ratio. And this is important, okay? When we change our scene FPS, it does not change our output FPS, which is our frame rate, right? Frames per second. So when we set our project settings up to 24, we need to make sure that our red shift output is at 24 as well. Otherwise, you're going to get this weird instance where things are quiet lining up and stuff like that. It's like dropping a 60 frame or it'd be like dropping a 24 frame video into a 60 frame timeline. Everything's going to seem kind of slow if you're trying to, like, stretch it out to that same amount of time you're skipping frames. That makes sense. I don't know how much into video you are, but just make sure that this frame rate matches the project frame rate, okay? Lastly, we have the ability to change the output range for all our stuff. Basically, we just want to make sure this is set to curve frame for our default setup here because that's just going to say whatever we see in our view port, right now, that's where we're going to render out. We can leave it like that, as well. You can make notes and stuff in here if you want, but that should be it. We can now move on to the save option here. Want to make sure that's toggled on. Otherwise, it's not going to save your vendors anywhere. And you can say to save a regular image or a multi pass image or a project file. And we're not going to worry about this stuff right now. We'll talk about it later. But what we want to do is just type in wherever you want to save your file too, you know, put it wherever you want. And you can even choose the current computer name. You have some things, some setous some layouts on how. You can tell it to save things, the date, the time, the frame range, wherever you want to. So you can have some setups, if you want. Formats, bitmaps, EXRs, JPEGs, PNGs, all of these things, again, different file types. Whatever you do, don't do these MP fours and stuff like that for the video. Always, always, always render out an image file. And then use something else to combine them to make them a video because the MP four just comes out super dark and stuff. So the AVI, as well, I don't recommend exporting straight into video format for that reason, but also for the reason that if you have a 300, let's say, short video, a 300 frame segment that you're rendering out and the power goes out or something and you had 299 frames of it done. If you're doing a video file, that file is now corrupted and you have to render it all out again. If you're doing frames, you have all those frames saved, you just need to do one more frame, and then you build it. So little bullproof protection there. But we're going to do JPEGs for most of this stuff just because it's small file size, and it looks good enough, right? And then you can choos your bit rate and all that stuff, your depth, and all that stuff, Alpha channel. All this stuff is fine. We're not going to worry about that for now because we're just setting up, again, our default stuff, and we're good to go. Now, you may not see this reship Post Effex here because we don't any yet, which is totally fine. But, you know, if you do see it, you can enable it there. If not, you can leave it off. It's totally fine for the default settings. I don't think it actually have any on, so we're going to turn that off. Actually, I didn't want that on. Yeah. Okay. And then if you have magic B Looks and stuff installed, you can actually set that up as well. Okay, so now we actually have our red shift settings set up. We have our project settings set up. We have our render edit preference settings setup in our render settings. All of our settings almost are setup. We actually need to talk about setting up these screens and where these windows go. And also, you may notice I have these nice black bars here, which you may or may not like, and I will show you how to set that up so that your viewport looks a little more like mine if you want in the next idea. 5. Changes from 2023 to 2024 versions of C4D.: This video is for a real quick update if you're using 2024. There's a video coming up right after this. I think I'm going to list these two together. But the Redshift render settings that are applicable in the 2023 video that you see here are all correct. The only difference is in 2023, as you notice in the first 1 minute of the other video, is that it doesn't default to Redshift as the render like it does now. So you used to have to change that. But if you need to change your render options, it is here in this little gear box here. It's called the render settings. And basically, it's like a gear in a clapboard. But it starts off as Redshift now, which is really nice. So now you don't have to switch it over. That used to be a big pain point. But now we can just go ahead and default with Redshift and set up all our settings, and we'll talk about setting all those up and saving them out so we don't have to tweak them every time in the next lesson. So if you see in the next video, that's included with this one, the first minute of it is switching that over. Just wanted to make sure that you knew that that was the difference 2024-2023. I know a lot of people are transitioning right now, so I didn't want to delete it. But if you're using 2024, it'll be totally fine. Just follow along. 6. Project Settings + Workspace Essentials: Okay, so we've got rider setting set up. We've got layouts kind of setup. We still haven't saved it or anything. And there's one more thing we need to do, and that is to go up here to the view port here and go to view and go down to configure, or we can hit Shift V. So go to configure. And what this is going to do is this opens up kind of the options for our view port here, which is basically our workspace where we can see our lines and everything like that. If you don't see these lines and things, it's because you have it displayed differently. There's the display option here, and we have a couple options here. Garage shading is going to show you kind of, you know, the most realistici ish version. Quick shading is going to be kind of the same thing, but without a lot of the reflections and stuff, content shading is pretty much just not going to work right unless you have material previews. On, okay? If you have those on, it will look better. But hidden lines is kind of like this gray wireframe mode, and then lines on its own is a wireframe mode. In general, we'll be able to see through everything and only see the geometry edges. Okay? So what I like to work in the most is garage shading lines or quick shading lines. This one's pretty nice, and all red **** and Cinema 40 and Redship run smooth here. But what you'll find out as we get further along is that the viewport and redshift aren't always the same, so we're going to pretty much use the IPR previnerVew for most of our stuff versus the viewport. There is an option to render Red shift in the viewport live. I don't like it, but you could try it out. We'll cover it later in the renter section as well. Basically, what we have here is just basically our workspace and what we can see. So what I like to do and why I told you to open up the viewport is because there's one thing I like to say, and I like to go over here to the safe frames option. And over here, we'll see we turn this off and we have our full window, right? So you can see everything. But then when you go to render, like, let's say, we'll pull this up here, so it's at the top of our frame, and we say, Okay, let's render this out. He's like, Alright. Oh, I'm cutting it off because it's out of my safe frame. So this is actually my 1920 by 1080 viewport, and this doesn't match my viewport, so I can actually frame up what I'm rendering really well, even though I am looking through my camera, which is 1920 by today. So that's kind of confusing as to why this isn't working right. And that's because this is outside of the safe frames. So what we need to do is go back Shift B, right? Shift B. And hit safe frames on. So now you can see, oh, that's exactly where that's cutting that off. Okay. Well, yours might look more like this where it's like, 20% on or 30% on. And it's kind of hard to tell. Like, you get you have a slight inkling of where it is. You can turn it up pretty high, and the benefit of having it up higher is that you can see things off screen so you can, click and drag them in. But I personally just crank it all the way up to 100 I don't want to see anything that I'm not seeing through my camera. It's like when I look through my camera to film, I want to be focused on everything that I can see and not be distracted by things that are right off screen. I want to be locked in. Now, obviously, there's a title safe and stuff with your camera, and, obviously, you can see a little bit more. But for me, just having it at 100% black allows me to just basically keep it at renders safe. This is what I want renders safe. This is the main thing we want to have checked on, okay? We have action safe and title safe, so you can turn those on, and those will you know, you can increase the size. If you know you have a certain size aspect ratio for title safe, like if you're making lower thirds for TV or something, and you know that those need to fit in, you have that option to pull these on. We're going to turn those off because we're not worried about it. But now we have our viewport locked in where we're only going to see what we render. And to me, that's very, very helpful. I All right. And that is pretty much it for what we wanted to have on Boo, I know. That was a lot. That was like over an hour of stuff that just tell you how to set it up to get Redshift actually going so you can actually start learning redshift. And that's kind of three D for you. There's a lot of foundation delay, but now that we have that laid out, you don't have to really go back and mess with it. You're gonna be ready to get going and load it up and set it up and save it. And I will show you exactly how to do that right now. Okay, so now that we have the renter settings, camera settings, ner material settings preferences, all that stuff, it's all set up. It was a lot. I understand. But because we've set it up now, we are going to save it so we don't have to ever set it up again, right now, if you opened up a new scene, you would have to do everything we just did again. And that sounds like pain, okay? That sounds awful. So that's why I'm going to show you in the next lesson, which is the project lesson on setting up our actual scene with this psyche wall, this ball, the light, everything, and saving everything. How we have it, okay? So right now, before you load up that next scene, if you've been following along if you haven't. If you're like, Oh, my God, now, I have to go through and do all this. Don't worry. I'm giving you this scene. I'm giving you my layout with all my renter settings and everything. So you don't have to follow along, but I wanted you to do it so that you understood why I was doing and why it's what it is, and what you can change. But if you've just been watching it and been like, I'll do it later, don't worry. I'll give you a shortcut. Okay? You can catch. So what we'll do in the next lesson is set up this scene for you and challenge you to create your own scene as well and then just how to actually save it and make it your default scene. So the next time you open up Sine 40, you don't have to do all that again. Okay? So in the next video, we're actually going to finally save this out. I set you up to get started. Alright, S there. 7. Finally Building our Scene: Okay, so we're finally ready to create this scene. If you don't want to follow along and figure out how to create this, you can download it. It's available for you, and I'll show you real quick how to save it as your default. Scene, firstly, and then we'll go back and we'll show you how to create all this, okay? So we're going to go to Window customization. Okay? Layouts. And we're going to say Save as start a layout, Window, customization. Save as default seen. Okay? These two things are very important. Default scene and layout, okay? That's going to save everything that's going to save your materials. That's going to save your objects. That's going to save the way you have this laid out. Okay? So that's everything. And then you're going to want to go in here and save it as something so that you can actually, load it back up, right? So you save as, and then name it whatever you want. Okay? There we go. And that'll be it. And that's it. That's how you do it once you get it all set up. So now we're going to talk about actually setting this up in a user friendly way that makes sense for you. So we're going to delete everything and talk about what we have here in our viewpoints. Okay? So we've got render settings, everything good to go from what we covered in the last videos. What we want is to just organize things in a way that makes sense for us. Now, by default, this is kind of the layout. We'll grab this and pull this down. So if you notice in between all of these options, we have this little arrow thing that can slide things around. And it's really nice so we can slide things over and move things around and do stuff like that. Okay. Pretty cool. Yeah, things are sliding around. You're like, Oh, this is kind of neat. If you ever want to move a window, you click this little icon here and you can undock things so you can make a little window here, and now it's not over here anymore, and you're like, Oh, shoot, I actually want that back over there, Control Z. Oof, that doesn't work. There's no undo for that. So what we want to do I want to grab this and put it back. Please, Oh, God, then you're like, Oh, my God, what have I done? How do I Oh, now it's on top, right? So it doesn't make the most sense because there's no icon that says, Okay, if I grab this line and put it right here to the left side of this takes icon, it's gonna put this here. You know, it lights up. It's like, Oh, I can put it here, here, doesn't do anything there. But it works. You just let go and put it back, and now you can slide this back over. And if you accidentally move things around and you've just jacked it up to the point where there's no return, and you're just like, Oh, God, I need to start over. Don't worry. You can start over. Go to Window customization, layouts and just pick the standard layout, okay? And it's going to start you up with the default settings, okay? Not a big deal or go back to the layout that we just saved as your startup one, okay? No, no problem. So now we're back to where we want to be. And so what I suggest is if you want to pop something out, rather than actually moving it, just click this little icon up here, which pops out the window, but it's a copy of it. So it's not the same. It has all the same controls as this window, but then we're not messing with the way we're actually laid out, so very nice. So what we have here is we have tools up here on the top, which are kind of more selection and editing tools kind of at the top, we've got points, line faces, object, and UVs, and then we have snapping, symmetry, and isolating view and stuff like that here. Okay? So kind of your basics, up here, you're mainly going to focus on this area here. Then we have tools over here on the left, which are common in the most common tools. We've got the move tool, the rotate tool, the scale tool, selection area tool here, pretty cool one. You can do a last selection, so you can actually, draw, you know, like photoshop and stuff. But rush tool. But, you know, the main thing is you're going to want to use this move tool, and then we have dynamic Place and place tool, and then some edited splines and polygon pins, paint tools, guide tools, doodle paint. Okay, we're not going to worry about too much of what's over here right now for the basics, but I just want you to be aware that this is where a lot of your most common move things around tools are going to be, right here? And then we have our option for creating and modifying tools are going to be over here. So these that are over here by the viewport are more for moving things around in the viewport, and things here are more for creating things that are going to be put in here into the objects. So if we wanted to create a cube or a sphere, we could click and hold this blue cube here and go to sphere. Okay? So now we have a nice sphere. Very cool. And you can see we have the geometry of it and you can see it doesn't look very around. So what we want to do is increase the segments, and we'll talk about all this more in modeling and things like that. Right now, I'm just setting you up with the scene so that it makes sense for you. And we're going to go to type, and we're going to change the hexahedron, and you're going to see that that changes the way that geometry is dispersed around the sphere, which is fine. We want to make sure render perfect is on, and that's fine. Now, you may want to know you kind of have these arrows and stuff available and you need to know how to move around your viewport. Well, the arrows are indicators of axises. So you have axis, you got Z, Y and X, right, because it's three D, three dimensions. So X is the red, Y is the green, and Z is the blue. Z is depth. X is the right and left, and Y is the up and down. You know, obviously, corresponding to the way you're looking at it. There are world axises and object axiss. So if I come in here and I rotate either by hitting R and bringing up the rotate tool. And now that I've rotated this around, you can see, if I switch back to the E, I've rotated around the axis axises there. But the world axis is still here, and I can still see this. So if I want to move this up directly in the world now, you might notice that when I click and drag, I'm moving it kind of freely around, and it's not locked into an axis or anything. And I'm like, Well, I just want to pull it straight up. But my Y isn't straight up anymore. It's at an angle, everything's kind of weird. If you need to hit W, and that's going to toggle this icon up here, which when it looks at this, you can see it puts a little world there, the little sphere, that is the world axis. So now, it's rotated all these things to match the world, no matter where I'm looking at or how my object is rotated, okay? Object rotation, world rotation, right? They're called coordinate systems. Okay, so a little insight into just kind of figuring out how this stuff works now Control Z and stuff does work on this stuff, obviously. So the next thing we need to do is just talk about moving around in our view port because we're going to need to. We have basically a few options that are going to be your go tos. You have these tools up here, grab, pay and tool, click and hold to zoom in and out, and click and hold to rotate. I never use these because they are a pain in the butt. Uh, I use the mouse and the keyboard. You can also get a three D mouse, which actually is phenomenal. I used to have one, don't anymore, but it is you can get around with the mouse, keyboard. So what you want to do is hold Alt and middle mouse click, and that is your pan left right up and down in your viewport, which is the same as this hand icon, the move camera tool, yeah. Click and hold Middle Mouse button and Alt. Click and Hold middle or just clicking the Middle Mouse button brings up your different views, and it clicks into whichever one you want, okay? So middle mouse button allows you to see four views, which is very helpful for having this one your camera and then being able to see your scene from a different angle and move things around in another view so that you can see how it looks still in your final render here. Okay? So very helpful to have these multiple views, which you can change what they look like here in the camera option here. Different so you could have different cameras. Different views, left, right, front, back, isometric, all that stuff here. We'll cover that more later in an isometric video. It's kind of the only one you'll probably use differently. So basically, what we have now is we have the scroll wheel, which is zooming in and zooming out. You also can hold Alt and right click and pull your mouse back and forward to zoom in and out kind of smoother and faster than scroll wheeling Oops. Especially when it comes to wanting to undo moves, this counts as one move versus every scroll wheel is a move. So very annoying. Org middle mouse click to look in here. So, so far, Alt, middle mouse, pan, Alt right, click and hold, move the mouse, zooming it out. Lastly, Alt click and hold the left mouse button, and this is how you're going to rotate. Now, you may notice there's a little plus sign there in the middle, and that is locked object. That's because we are rotating from where we click. Okay? So if I hold and click at the top of our object here, we're going to rotate from that point, right? And then I go on here at the bottom. We're going to rotate from that point. So it's kind of helpful that you can click and move. So if you have a ground plane in here, we'll add one really quick just for reference. If I click and hold way back here, it's going to rotate from back there, right? So it's very easy to oh, God, I'm accidentally upside down or something, and I'm lost and I can't figure out where I am. It's very easy. I do this a lot. It's very common for new users don't feel stupid or anything. You get lost a lot. If you get lost, hit F. Because you do, okay? It's not going to do anything because it doesn't do anything. No, so what you want to do when you get lost is hit will actually frame everything up in your scene. Will it orient your camera correctly for you? No, it's frustrating. But it at least will get you back to a point where you were. So always be mindful of your Z X and Y world coordinates here because it's very easy to get lost and just start making stuff. And then when you come to render it out, you realize everything's kind of facing the wrong way and stuff, and everything, again, it's in relationship to your perspective, so it may be totally fine, but it may end up that when you need to do something else, you actually needed it to face this other way, blah, blah, blah. So be mindful of it while you're creating, okay? So scroll will Alt is your best friend. Alt, left mouse, click, rotate, Alt, right mouse click, Zoom, Alt middle mouse click pan, okay? And then H, if you get lost to frame everything up. Okay. Pretty cool. So that's how you move around. Now, let's talk about adding in a really nice psyche wall behind us. So the best way to do this is actually to open up this little turn folder here, which looks like a little poop in a ziplock baggy, right here. This is called the Acid browser. I know it's a folder with a cloud, but I like to think of it as a bag of but it's just full of stuff. So inside of here, you have access to all kinds of things. You've got materials, you've got media. You've got objects, you've got scenes, characters, all kinds of stuff. And the best part about this is you can actually add your own stuff in there and customize it, and it's just this really amazing thing. That is just here for you to use full of cool stuff that most people don't use enough of. I don't think it's actually kind of awesome. If you ever have used C 40 in the past, you know about C 40 Lib C 40 libraries where you stat materials and stuff, all of that, to me, was always a pain. This is so much easier to you can literally just drag and drop stuff in there, and it's saved forever. So once you build a material or an object or anything, you can just drag and drop it in there and have it for reference whenever. But what we want to do is we were type in studio. And you'll see we have some options here. We've got a studio back light seen here. We've got an object, we've got some lights that are cool. We have some materials which we're not going to use. But what we do want is what is called the node operator backdrop, right? So what this is, we're going to double click that and you'll see it's going to bring in this what seems to be a primitive, actually. And so it's this unique primitive that exists in the node editor and not here, so it's a little confusing, but it's okay because we're only going to use it for a backdrop. And so the scene node editor, by the way. But what we want to do is just set this up because this Oops. What we want to do is set this up because it's actually going to be the easiest way to create this really nice, infinite floor studio look. And the reason we're going to do this is because I'd say 99% of the things I make I do in a studio setup. Um, so if that's something that you're interested in, you're going to definitely want it for this course. You're going to want to save that as your default, so it's one less thing you have to set up every time because it's not the easiest thing to set up. But we're actually going to set it up really quick. In. Um, because again, anytime you can just save yourself some time doing things that are very common, do that because it's going to take longer to set up a studio setup than it would be to just go over here and delete this backdrop when I don't need it in my scene, okay? So I'm just saving myself time. So in order to do this, let's go ahead and get these settings exactly how we want them. So, you notice when we click this icon, it turns yellow, which means we have it selected, and that changes our attributes panel. You may notice if I click the sphere, that changes the attributes panel as well. So whatever you have selected, you can either select it in the Viewport with your object model selection tool on, or you can click it over here in the Objects panel. These are the same. And you'll notice it updates the attributes. This attributes panel is going to show you the attributes to whatever we have selected. So if you're trying to tweak something and you realize it's not there anymore, it's because you don't have it selected. So what we want to do is we're going to grab this and pull this up a little bit, because this attributes panel is very important, and we're not going to have a ton of stuff in our scene. So I like to have my attributes panel a little larger because that's going to help with material creation later as well. And when we save our layout, this will save. So what we need to do is go to our backdrop. We're going to take the width of this and change it to 3,000. Take the height, change it to 2000. And if you want to, you can hit tab, and that will instantly go to the next thing, so you not to sit here and click through all these 2000 tab extension 100 is fine. Tab rounding 200. And you're going to notice that this is obviously just scaling up the width, height, and the depth of this scene of this actual backdrop. And then the rounding is changing the amount that that curve is there. Now we want to adjust the tilt, and we want to set that to 50 degrees. So that's going to lean back like that. And what that's going to do is that's going to give us this really nice, natural fall off. It's going to give us that infinite floor look like a studio psyche would have. Lastly, we want to go ahead and add a little bit of drop, not because we're going to use it that much, but I think it just helps to have that if we're ever moving our camera around. I think it's just kind of cool to have that little fall off there versus just cutting off at a harsh angle. The angle is 15, and the length we're going to say is 15, just to subdivide this a little more. And the reason we're subdividing it so much, one, it makes it a little smoother when it comes to the rounding, which we'll cover more in the modeling. But two, it's going to help us if we ever want to use dynamics or anything because the more geometry we have, the more accurate those dynamics are going to be, which is what we won't cover dynamics much in this course, but I want to do a course in the future that covers dynamics because they're awesome. So now we have this cool studio setup. You may notice that everything we create when we create something new, it spawns at this point. And that is because this point coordinates are zero, zero, zero. This is the center of our world. And so our backdrop, you may notice, is not really quite centered in our world. So what we want to do is just kind of move this forward a little bit, just so we kind of are putting our objects more towards the middle of our scene here, so we don't have to move that every time or move our object every time. That way, when we load stuff in, we can just raise it up a little bit. And it will be good to go. Now, we could lower the backdrop, obviously, but I'd rather leave the backdrops floor at the lower plane level at zero rather than make it lower or anything like that. So we can adjust accordingly. So let's just pull our sphere up a little bit until it's above the ground. Now, one way to do this a little easier is obviously to know the radius of your sphere. So if we know our sphere is 100 centimeters for our radius, we can go into the Y in the coordinates tab and raise it up 100 centimeters, and that will put it exactly on our floor. Which is what we want. Alternatively, you could come in here and try to line this up and really zoom in or a side view and plop it down, fine. But we're just going to do 100 just because we know that radius, and we can do that on our own perfectly. So now you may notice that we don't quite have the edges completely blocked off, right? We can kind of see back here, there's a little bit there. So what we want to do is just scale up our backdrop. We could either come in here and adjust the width, height and depth until we get it where we want it or we can hit and that's going to bring up our scale tool, which is available here. Just click and drag until that covers up our corners here. Okay, so it's a little bigger and now it's filling up our whole scene. Okay, which is what we want. Perfect. Now, let's go ahead and add a light, and then some materials on here, and then we'll actually be ready to save this and be good to go. So firstly, we want to create our camera. Now we are ready to create materials. We're ready to create our camera. We're ready to create our lighting, and then we'll be ready to actually save this. So in the next video, we're going to talk about creating our camera and setting that up really quickly so we can get going. 8. Camera Setting Basics: Okay, so now we're ready to add our camera to our scene, and for me, you notice there's a camera icon down here. This may not be there for you. It should be by default, but I don't think it is anymore, which is really annoying, and I hope they update it and bring it back because it was there, and then they took it away. That's what I said in the last video, they've added it back in here, which is fantastic. Okay. So let's go ahead and just click this standard camera right here, and you'll notice that brings in a red shift camera. And we have this little white box here. And so right now when we're looking around, as you see, it says default camera. Don't get confused by that because that's not actually a camera. It is just perspective view. Okay? So we're just looking around, and our camera is still looking, and you can see that we can actually see our camera in the scene, and we can see these yellow lines indicating what our camera can see in the actual framing of our camera. If we want to look through our camera, we can click this little white box here. Now we're looking through our camera and controlling our camera. So if I move over here, untick this box, you can see we've actually moved the camera in the scene. Now, it's important to note that it's very easy to forget that you're looking through your camera and have your camera set up and be like, Oh, shoot, I've accidentally just moved my camera all around, and I want to go back to my framing. Oh, but it was so long ago that I can't even undo that far. There is not a whole lot you can do about it. So what you need to do is pay very much attention to the fact that when this is on, it's going to highlight the border of your screen so that you can see that you're looking through your camera. But this is kind of a bull crap thing that you'll never notice ever. You need to make sure you're paying attention to this box. And another thing you can do is once you have your camera set up how you want it, you can come in here and right click this, and then type in Protect, right? So Pt Rigging tags protection. So what I did is I right clicked my camera, started typing Protect, and it's the only one that's available here. And what this is going to do is it's going to not let you move your camera. So you're like, Oh, you can accidentally move your camera. You have to un, you know, select your camera and get out of it, and now you can move around. So now it's idiot proof, and you can accidentally move your camera around. Alternatively, you may notice that while I guess, additionally, you may notice that while you're moving around, you might have liked the way that you're looking at it from this angle, and then you go over here to look at this, and you want to go back over there, and you realize, shoot you've messed up and you hit Control Z, to undo, and you realize it doesn't undo your move. It will undo camera moves, but it won't undo viewport moves to undo your move in the viewport, when you need to go to view. And you can see here this undo view is control shift to see. So you have two different commands that are being saved. You have actual things like moving objects and moving cameras and selecting materials and typing in values. All those things are going to be affected by Control Z, and then to undo. And then if you want to undo a view, you have to Control Shift Z, and now you can see we're actually undoing our viewport view. So if you're in your scene and you're building and you're creating this cold view, and then you move everything around, and now everything's not framed up, how it was, you need to go back. Control Shift Z, okay? But that's where I like to set up the camera first. That way, have it locked in, so I don't have to really worry about that because I always can just snap right back to my camera. Okay, pretty cool. Next, let's talk about lighting. Well, actually, let's go to our camera, and let's change it. It defaults to a focal length of 36, which is really weird because you don't ever really see a 36 millimeter lens, very common in video production. A lot of stuff is 35 or 50 is kind of the most common and the closest to the human eye as far as, like, warping and stuff like that. But 50 is a really good one. You see a lot of interviews and stuff like that. You'll notice we're allowed to change the settings and stuff of our camera. But we're not allowed to move it still, because we have this protection tag. If you want to move it, you need to either uncheck this stuff. So we could uncheck all these, and then we can zoom out a little bit. And the controls for the camera are exactly the same as the viewport. It's like shift, I mean, sorry, to meddle mouse wheel, all that stuff. It's all exactly the same. And now that we have this kind of more where we want it, we can just snap right back in here. Now, one more thing that's a very helpful tip for the camera is before we get into depth of field, and any of that stuff, a good thing that I like to have set up for my default look Dev scene is I'd like to go into display. And I like to turn on grid. And so this is going to bring up our, you know, rule of thirds kind of thing. So it's actually a little easier to frame things up and put them where you want them. You also can turn on a crosshair, which will help you line things up and know where the exact middle of your scene is. So you can see we actually should, you know, undo our tag here, move this up. So it's more like that. Let's zoom in a little and down. And we want it to be like that. We want it to be just a little little below, perfect. The middle. That's kind of where we want it. Now we like that. Type in our protection tag again. Boom now we're in the middle. We're framed up how we want. We're looking good. We have this to go off of. Very helpful to have that. You can come in here and affect the colors of it and stuff. If you want it to be like lime green or something that's a little, you know, easier to see or white, something like that. So you can make it whatever you want. It's not bad. That looks kind of old school. I like it. I like that. We'll leave it at that. And so now we have our camera set up, how we want it. We've got to with the lens effect so we can actually see our rule of thirds and frame things up because without this, it's actually really hard to get things lined up in the middle. I used to render out a lot of stuff slightly off center and stuff like that because I didn't know that that existed. So I was like, trying to eyeball where the middle was and stuff like that. And now I don't have to. And you can adjust the amount of the grids and stuff like that by trolling this down. And so you can start adding in more. So if you want to make sure you have one in the middle or whatever you can, I like the rule of thirds. Myself. But if you want to, you know, figure out where the middle is, you can do that. You also have the golden spiral and stuff like that, and you can layer these, which now it's just kind of, you know, you're getting into there's so much going on. It's hard to see. But pick whichever one you want, and there you go. Alright, so now that's the camera. Next video we'll talk about lighting, and I know, again, I keep saying it, but there's a lot of setup here, but you'll be so glad you did it, I promise. 9. Setting Up Look Dev Lighting: Okay, now we're ready to actually light our scene. Now, when I say light our scene, we're only lighting it for look down. This isn't going to be render ready, but it's going to be a really good way to get us started with having sort of a nice look. And the reason we're going to do lighting before we do materials is because a lot of materials are very heavily based on how they react to light. And to be honest, if you can make your scene look good without materials and just with lighting, then when you add materials, it's going to take it to that next level. Building all these materials that you think look really good. And then when you throw lights in there, you realize they look completely different, and you're just going to have to go backwards and redo all your materials again, or you'll be tweaking your lighting, trying to make it look right, and just really your workflow is kind of backwards. So hopefully throughout these videos, you're kind of not only seeing how to set up a scene, but also kind of understanding the workflow for creating a project, you want to add up your framing, set up your objects, then set up your lighting, then do your materials, and then you're good to go, okay? So for lighting, what we want to do is use a dome light for our lighting. So you might think that this little circle is a good one. Sun and sky is a really cool one, and we'll cover it later, but that's not what we want. We want to click and hold this area light and choose dome light. So dome lights are often referred to as environment lights or HDRI, map lights, things like that. So basically, think of it as a 360 degree sphere, like an entire sphere around your scene where you're going to put something like a sky or a factory or some kind of image that's a 360 wrapped image in there that's going to be on the inside of that sphere, emitting light, okay? So it's wrapped around your entire project, emitting light towards the center of your project. So it's a really cool way to quickly get different looks and stuff just by adding in different maps and texture maps and stuff like that to kind of build completely different looks really fast and easy as really good jumping off points. You can render them out as, like, your final light image. I don't highly recommend it. You can always make things look better with more lights. Dome lights are fantastic for things that need reflections and stuff like that. You're almost always going to want one. Even if you are lighting everything with your other lights just because you wanted to fill in those gaps where there is no area light or anything like that. So very important, you're going to want to use it a lot, so we're going to go ahead and add it in there. Now, by default, it is just solid white. Boom. Super white, super even all the way around. But you can tell already that, you know, our background and the way our psych looks is a perfect infinite floor. You cannot see this curve. You can't tell where it ends. It's a really nice infinite floor. So so far, that's looking really good. And you can see our shadow is just kind of all the way around our light, like it's high noon or something, but also all the way around. So we're getting an even light distributed everywhere, okay? So what we want to do is we want to open up our black bag poop. And we could use studio here. This is a good one. And instead of studio, you see we have down here in the image media. Now, you might think that these materials that say Studio and stuff like that might be good options, but you actually don't want to use these. These don't work with red shift. But image media where its textures actually do. So what we're going to do is rather than type in Studio, we're just going to type in HDRI, okay? And that is a high dynamic range image kind of thing. And what we can do is we can scale this stuff up. And you'll see we have these images here that we can use. Some of these have these new previews that are built in, and they're really cool because they are Aces. They're new. And basically what these are telling you is they show you the image that it's going to use for the dome light, and then it shows you what that's going to look like on different materials. There's a chrome, a black, shiny, a matte white, and a glass with serial. So you can kind of see how that's going to be affecting your scene just by these little previews. So that's really nice. Really cool. Sun, you'll see that as well. So we have rooms, interiors, cool, like car garages, stuff like that. That's really helpful. For creating a cool look. Now, one that I like to use the most is the softbox studio. But another one that's just really nice for Lo Dev is this Studio 21. Once you have one you like selected, simply click and drag that into the texture icon here of your dome light. Now, if you wanted to use your own material, you simply need to click the folder here next to this texture icon, select your material and open it up. Okay. So it's going to default to a texture type of spherical. You want to make sure you change your color space to seen linear Rec seven oh nine SRGBp or any images out of the asset browser. You don't have to. I think the Auto actually does a good job with the HDRIs, but just in case this is a good thing to do. Now we have intensity and stuff like that. We're not going to worry about. What we are going to do is open up our renerview and you can see this is what it looked like before with the solid white, and take a look at how different it looks with this new studio light. So you might notice that we kind of have this weird shadow back here, and it doesn't look that interesting. So it's kind of hard to tell what this is doing. Well, what we can do is get out of our camera here, and if we zoom out and look, we can actually see our scene back here in the background. So what we want to do is we kind of want to rotate this around. Actually, no, we don't. It's totally fine. Yeah, that's what you want. That's fine. So we can actually see, you know, we've got two soft boxes here on the back. We've got a fake psych wall back there. Then we've got our camera here in the front. So it's very much a studio setup, indeed, which is good for L Dev, like I mentioned, but not good for final render because obviously our image looks a little flat, we really just have two lights sliding it. Then a little bounce from the background. So we have a little separation between our object and the background, but not really enough. We still want to add more lights, but it's a good start for Look Dev, so we're going to leave it at that. And obviously, you can play around with different materials and different images. Like if you come in here with this pro render one, we'll go to our dome light object, and we can just drag that in there. You're going to see how much that changes our scene. Let's go back to our camera. Now it looks like we have a stronger light here on the right, and I kind of like that a little better. We could even come in here and do a sky. And obviously, these are going to create entirely different looks instead of seeing so you can just pick one that you like. This one's really pretty. I kind of dig it, and I might use it for a while, it's a little different than what I'm used to. And I like that kind of warm light coming from the side. So you can pick play around with him, find one that you like, because really this is all just for look dev, again, we can play with this cool garage one. And even if you don't have it downloaded, it will download it for you. You have these little Cloud icons you can click to download them, but it will download it for you if you tell it to apply to your material. And when it's loaded in, it will automatically update in here. And if you ever noticed that it doesn't update or anything for whatever reason, you can always hit this refresh button, but it will have to do things like process the texture and stuff like that because a lot of these images are really big because they are 360, so they may take a little while to load in. There we go. That one, obviously, it's a very overhead heavy lift one, which is kind of nice as well. Yeah, you kind of get the sense of how these are going to look. So I'm going to leave this one I kind of like the overhead garage look. Uh yeah, for now. And so now we have a light, we have a ball, we have a background. Now we just need to add materials, and we'll be good to go. So next video, let's add some materials real quick. Go over that basically. And then finally, save it. 10. Quick Look into Material Nodes: Alright, in this lesson, we're going to take a real brief look into creating our first material. Now, we're going to just scratch the surface here because what we're going to do is actually create a button here that you'll see here in the next lesson that allows us to speed up this workflow, and then from that point we set that up, then from there, we'll take a little deeper dive into creating our materials from that because it's just going to be easier. We're going to set up a way that's going to be easier to work with, and then we're just going to work from there versus trying to learn it one way, go backwards just learn it another way. It's all going to be applicable and make sense. But one thing I just want to make sure that you have set up before we get started in this is just to double check inside your edit preferences, go down to reneber and then redshift, and you want to make sure that node materials for presets is checked off. And in order to tell whether this is working or not quickly without opening this up, is just to double click inside the material manager, which if you're new to c4d or anything, you may not know where your materials are living. They are living here in this icon that is a little looking sphere on top of a plate or something. It's hard to tell what it is, if you're new. But what it is is a shader ball, and I'll show you that here in a little bit. But you click this. This is the material manager, and then you can double click inside of this window. And that's going to create a material. It's going to be called MT. And what it is actually is if you went down here and you hit Create, and then you went to Redshift, and then you went to materials, and then you created a standard material. Now, standard materials are different than red shift materials. Basically, these are outdated now. There's some uses for them, but the new standard material is far easier to use and has a lot more potential, and this is what you should learn. So when we talk about red shift materials from now on, we're pretty much talking about the red shift standard material because that is really what the cool new thing is. Now it's confusing because it's called MT, so you would think it was a red shift material. If you double click it, you'll see it's actually a standard material and a red shift standard material. So that is now the default after the latest update to make sure that people don't create the old way. This is going to use the new standard material, and this is going to be inside of our node editor. And this is what we're going to really play around with a lot in the next lesson. But one thing I just want to show the difference is we're going to actually going to set it up so that this isn't what opens up. Yes, it's what we want to use. The new node editor, in my opinion, is far superior. It is easier to work with. It is easier on the eyes, and it's far, far easier and quicker to connect things and build materials in versus the old way. And the old way is what we get when we uncheck this. Now, the only reason we're unchecking this is if we're going to use things like third party assets from things like Kit Bash cargo, three D models and stuff that you purchased that were created before the new standard material existed and the new node editor existed. So things such as Quixel Bridge, which is one we're definitely going to use, which has a lot of really cool, three D scanned assets, and that are completely free to use for educational purposes. So we're going to use these throughout the course because they're just really, really cool looking, and you can create some amazing looking scenes and things really quickly with these and they're totally free to use for learning and for your own personal use. As long as you're not making money on them, use whatever you want, which is really, really cool. Okay. So the reason, but the thing is, when we bring something like this in, these are all if they're not the brand new ones, at least some of the older ones use the old shader graph. And what I'm talking about there is with this unchecked and we double click material now, you see it creates an RS shader graph material. The two materials look identical pretty much, but when we click this, you'll see it actually opens up the old shader graph. Which actually has less functionality now than it used to, they've actually just kind of taken away the attribute panel and put it on the new one. And we'll talk about that in later lessons for sure as well. But I just want you to know that basically the only reason we're going to leave this off is so that we can bring in those third party assets, it doesn't break them. Because if you try to import stuff in, while we still have this default, it doesn't know what to do, and it breaks in. The cool part is with Redshift is even if you don't want to learn in the old Shader Graph, if you've watched older tutorials or anything, I mean, older, like a year. Like, the node editor is new, okay? But everything that works inside of this Shadograph works in the new shaded graph. The new no Editor, exactly the same, more streamlined and easier to use. So you can't like if you watch an old one, you're not going to be lost. You're going to understand things till plug in to the same place and stuff like that. Okay, so we've got this setup, and what we want to do is the cool thing is, if you don't like the way this looks and you want to tweak a material that you did bring in, you actually can select your old material here and go to material tools and then convert to nodes. So we can convert and replace with nodes, which will simply change that material, and now we can double click we have the exact same material now inside of here. So we actually just don't use the old Shader graph anymore, so you can simply select those and convert them. That way we can keep working in the new node editor without breaking into the old ways. We literally only have it unchecked so that we can bring things in without breaking them. So that's why we set up this button so that when we can just click this, we get a new button that works out with our favorite nodes already in the new node editor. That way we don't have to worry about the fact that this is the default when we double click, okay? So we're skipping a big step and tweaking things and converting things and all that stuff. I know it's a lot to catch up, but I promise it will make sense once we get into making assets and actually using these plugins. It's just one of those things that's going to be a lot handier to have set up on the front end rather than trying to add it later on and then kind of be like, Oh, well, we actually could have used that earlier on, that kind of a thing. So let's talk about what is inside of these nodes when we look at these. So if you come in here, what we have here when we open up our node editor is our standard material and an output node. And if you notice, our standard material is connected with its one output here into the surface here. So the way this works is these are nodes, and these are just links to connect them. That's how node editors work. Everything is in a hierarchical chain from left to right. So it's going to go anything that's over here, plugs into the left side of these, and then the right side of whatever these are plugs into the left side of the next one down. So if you want to add a node, we simply hit C, and that's going to bring up this window. It's going to populate with all of the nodes that we can use. And you can favorite nodes are most common used ones and things like that. We can go in and search through filters. We can go through math nodes, texture nodes, all kinds of things. If we know there's a node we want, like a bump node, we can search for that, and instantly that will pop up as well. So that's pretty cool. So let's go ahead and do Amax on noise, which is one of my most common nodes, and we use that later on Bubble grab this max on noise, and then you just simply drag and drop them into our scene. So that has created Amax on noise node. And you can see over here in our attributes panel, this is populated with information about this node. Now, for a while, this is the only way to work, and it was really a pain in the butt to go from one window and then into another window and then and then back and forth and back and forth. And it wasn't a lot of fun because if you click this node, you'll see it changes and it's just really annoying to work that way. Well, there's actually a cool thing they've done, which is added the option to show attributes and show assets as well. So what you can do is just click this little button, show attributes. And that's basically going to grab this window and just plop it here inside of this so we can actually just make this full screen. I suggest if you have a dual monitor setup, you can create null materials off screen and then watch them and the effects of them in the renders time on your main monitor, okay? So you can work in two different spaces here without having to go back and forth and back and forth. So it's really cool. And as you click around, you'll see it changes how these are being selected. And one thing I want to make sure is that if you don't know what nodes are there, obviously, when you hit C, this doesn't really give you a lot of information. Obviously, we're in the nodes tab, but there's not really an easy way to look at everything. You can hold Shift and that'll allow you to look at everything. But again, not super, I don't know, not super friendly. So you can actually just click this little icon here, which I recommend you do if you're starting out. Basically brings that window in and so that you can start to kind of see things together and how they are going to be connected and looped together and stuff like that. So pretty neat that we could come in here now and grab, you know, a ramp or a texture map, texture node, stuff like that. And this is basically where everything we're going to need to build a material lives in here, except anything that's driven by a texture map or something like that. Obviously, those files need to come from outside of c4d or inside the Asset browser. So let's just go ahead and talk about connecting things really quickly. Max on noise, what we can do is just simply click and drag, and that's going to snap into these. We'll cover this later, of course. And you can see normally we have colors yellow to yellow, totally fine. Doesn't have to go yellow to yellow. Anything black and white data can be driven into any of these white values as well. So any white dot is grayscale values can be put into there or numbers. So we'll talk about that as well. Again, this is a quick guide into how this works and what you're looking at while you're in here. You have access to all the attributes, different tabs inside of here as well. So yes, there's a lot of information, but I promise it's all really basic and very similar, so you'll pick up on it pretty quick. And the other thing I would say that is very, very useful to know is if we grab our material, and we either throw it on our object by selecting our material and clicking and holding and dropping it on our sphere, or we can click and hold and put it on our object in our viewport, which works the same way. And it creates the tag right here next to our object. So we know that this material is on this object. One cool thing is, if you come in here and obviously go to renterview we'll see that this material is being applied and we see our noise generated on the surface through the color channels of our material. Now, we also have all of the reflection attributes and everything coming through here. So if you make this really shiny, we'll see that effect in our dome light and stuff, which we won't see too well with this dome light. But let's say you just want to see exactly how this noise is being applied without all the reflection and all that stuff kind of mucking up your image. You simply can click this little tiny S, which is one huge advantage that this new node editor has over the previous shader graph is the solo button. So we can just solo and instantly it gets rid of all other attributes, and it's like, This is exactly where this is going, which is perfect for when you want to adjust the size and things like that of your scenes, and your attributes. And you don't have to follow along. I'm just showing you how this is working. So you can see it gives you a perfectly clean image of where this is going. And then as we turn this back off, you'll see we get those reflections come back in and stuff like that. And it kind of gets mucky again. So it's really cool if you want to add this to a reflection map, you see how that's going to create that, and it'd be a little tougher to see kind of how this is being applied if we didn't have the solo button to work with, which is really nice to bring that in and get working. So pretty cool. You can always come in here and make this, like, red, so we see a little better. And again, you can see how applying this as the roughness, it's kind of hard to see what's going on and where this is being applied. Silhouette. Boom, actually, you can now tell where this stuff is going and how it's being applied on your object. So that's going to make it a lot easier to work with. Okay, so let's go ahead and turn off this left panel because I don't really need it. Most of the things you're going to want to use, we can actually just add them in. You can favorite them, and then just drag and drop them in and hook up some things. So we'll talk about doing that in the next lesson where we create our most common things and create this button that allows us to speed up our workflow by opening up everything and having it ready to go with our most commonly used things. And then from there on, we'll go a little deeper into materials. But this is how the new node editor works. And I've had people ask me about do I need to learn the old one to learn the new one? No. But if you know either one, if you know the new one, you'll be able to follow along in the old ones, and if you know the old ones, you'll be able to follow along in the new node editor. It's just better. But the workflow is exactly the same. Left or right. Everything ends up in the output node, okay? That's the key. All right. Cool. Let's move on to the next lesson. 11. Instant Easy Material Button: Okay, in this lesson, I'm going to show you a really helpful quality of life tip, sort of a hack that allows you to create basically an easy button when it comes to material creation, where I can just click this button right here, and when I open that up, it has all of my favorite nodes in there and saved, as well as starting out in the node Editor. With the red shift standard materials as well. So the cool part about this is we're actually able to set up our scene to still work with things like Quixel Bridge and stuff that come in in the old shader graph, because if you bring them in and they're not set up the right way, they don't work. So the cool part is we're going to set it up. So if we double click in here, we create a material in the old shader graph. Right? So that's the default. So how do we create a material quickly that still brings up the new Noitor because that's what we want to use. We want to use the Noitor not the shaded graph. What is this doing? Refresh that. So all we need to do is there's two settings we need to change. One thing we need to do is go to edit preferences, and we need to go down here to our red shift settings, and we want to make sure that node material presets is on for right now, and then we're going to turn it off later, okay? Then we're going to go down to material, and we want to make sure the default material is set to red shift shaded graph, and always open node editor. It is going to be helpful for things like cargo and stuff like that from KitBash. But the main reason we're going to come in here to the red shift settings and turn this off later is almost specifically for Quixel Bridge and any other old files that were created before 3.5. It's just going to make those materials and stuff work again. But for right now, we're going to leave this on, and I'll just minimize this for now, because what we're going to do now if we double click in here, is it actually creates a red shift standard material, which is perfect. So what we're going to do is type in C and add in our most commonly used maps. I almost always use a bump map, and I always used a displacement map. Almost always, not really always. But the cool thing is, is we can drag this displacement into the surface here and the bump into the bump here. And the main reason I do this is because if we don't add any other texture maps into this because we're not going to use a bump or displacement, it's fine. We're not hurting anything. It's not creating any extra render time or anything like that. So it's pretty harmless to get those things plugged in. And it's always a pet peeve when I bring in a bump map, and then I have to take that bump map and plug that into a bump or if I want to use a noise as a bump map, I can't really just plug it straight in. I want to plug it in here so we can adjust these fields and things. So it's nice to have this built in and ready to go. Now, another common node that I almost always use is a max on noise because I love to create procedural noise, roughnesses, stuff like that. And I almost always use a ramp. And that's either to change colors or whatever. So I just bring those two things in, as well. And then I like to have a color layer as well. So I bring in a color layer because I'm often blending things. And really, I'm just saving a little bit of time. But after making, once you make 100 materials or so, you've saved quite a bit of time, and it just takes you basically some of these things where you have to bring in and add these things kind of takes you out of your flow a little bit. So anytime you can shave off a few seconds is always beneficial, in my opinion. So we're just going to kind of arrange these things a little out of the way, not so much that they off screen or anything, but we're going to have them here, but we can start building and creating things without really getting in the way. So now we have this saved. How do we take this, which we're going to name as RS standard Start, okay? Whatever you want to name it. And you think we can just click and drag this up here. Well, we can't you go to Window customization, customized palettes, that's how you get into this editor here, but we still can't click and drag this in here. So how do we actually bring this up here? Well, the first thing I'm going to do is tell you how to remove buttons just in case you want to know. When you have the customized palette thing open, you can just double click and that will remove things. So how do I bring that back? Well, we're going to close that. The trick here is actually just to open up the asset browser. Grab your material and just drag it into the asset browser. Doesn't matter where you save it, just so you know where it is. Open that up. And here it is in our asset browser. Now we can go to Window customization customized palettes. And now we can drag it from our asset browser right there. And so now we can just drop it in right there. No problem. So now we still have the option to go back to our edit, go to preferences, turn off node material presets. So now if you notice when we click any material, open that up, it's the old Chata graph. But we don't want that, but this is what we want in order to use Quixel Bridge and old plugins. So how do we create a new material? Well, we can just simply click our button here, instantly generates our material, opens up in the node editor, and has our scenes built in. So really nice way to kind of streamline your performance without having to mess with the settings and things when you're dealing with third party plugins, like Quicksil and stuff like that. So you'll be able to still create your materials fresh and new but also not break other materials and stuff like that. So legacy shader graph materials will still work just fine in your scene, whereas you'll be able to create the new one, which I highly recommend. So there you go. And now this is saved. So if you want to save this here forever, you need to go into your window customization, save your layout, save it as whatever you want, and then make sure to save as the startup layout and save as the default scene. Now, I will say when you do these things, you also will save everything else in the scene, camera placement, lighting, all that stuff. So you want to make sure you kind of set the rest of that up first. But you also will save this little button here. So now you always have the ability to come in here and quickly create a new material and start working. Cook things up instantly, which, you know, do whatever you want to do. And drag and drop those in, connect them, whatever. Pretty cool. 12. Creating Our First Materials: Alright, so now that we've created this button that allows us to instantly just create a new material, let's talk about creating our first material for our scene. So let's double click this, and that's going to open up our node Editor. And the very best thing that Redshift has added in the last update the 3.5 14, I think, might be 13, but I think it's 14. They just keep adding decimals. But what we've got going on here is the ability to actually control all of our attributes inside the node editor rather than having to work in here and then come down here into our attributes panel, which is what we've had to do previously since the previous update. And it's just kind of a disjointed workflow, and you have to go back and forth, and it's pretty lame. So what we can actually do is this little button right here is called the Show attributes panel. Clicking that brings this back up so it can work in here. So basically, you can put this entire thing on a side monitor and work completely in it, and it'll be totally fine. So now as we click around through our nodes here, you see that this updates. So every node has its own attributes. They are customizable, and you can scroll through these, and you see there's a lot of numbers and categories and sliders, and this is what we're going to use to control all of our material attributes. So it's very nice to be able to work with all of it in here. So you might be like, Okay, well, where do I grab my nodes from? And how do I know what kind of nodes I can even use? That's a very good question, and there used to be a list of nodes over here, which we actually can bring back now, as well with the update. And that's over here on the left. It's show Assets. That's what it's called now. So it's not completely intuitive that this is exactly what you're looking for, but we're going to go ahead and go full screen here. And what we have here are all of our color node assets instead of the color category. And we have all these color categories here. We've got legacy, which we're probably not going to use that much because legacy means that they're basically phasing it out. There's something better that's available, and this is really just so things you have don't break, but they're not going to update these anymore. Light, our lights and stuff, which we're not going to use too much. The main stuff we're going to use are material attributes here, as well as math, which has a bunch of different sections, which we're not going to use a ton. Texture is going to be the huge one and utility, which has AOV options, attribute options such as vertex and color user data, bump blender round corners, displacers. So we have all of these, and what I would suggest doing is after you start using your materials for a while and you're creating things, come through here and find the ones that use the most, such as the texture ones, which things we're going to use the most are probably going to be curvature, Maxon noise, and the ramp, 100%, we're going to use the ramp a bunch. Come in here and just go ahead and maybe heart those so that we can actually use those. And so that way, once you have everything done, rather than having to click through here, you can just look at your favorites here and you'll have your most common notes here available to you, so you can just drag and drop them in. Just click and drag and drop. No problem. Another option is if you're inside the view area here, you can just hit C, and that's going to pop up the ability to search and type in for whatever you want. So if we know we want to ramp, we're just type in ramp, so you say C and then type in ramp, and you'll see that that gives you the ramp category here. And you begin drag and drop, just plop that in, and that creates that for you. So you'll notice that with nodes, what you do is you connect from one output to the next. And basically the way it works is almost always you're going to just color match, which is very helpful. And one thing I will say about the colors with this last update is it's kind of confusing why they did the colors the way they did because basically, these options here, like Maxon noise and AMP, basically all the texture options used to be yellow, which would make sense because most of their outputs were yellow and they connected to yellow inputs. And the bump and displacement and utility nodes were purple. And that's why they have the purple output and connect to the purple inputs. But they actually changed them to yellow and these to gray I'm not sure why they did that. I kind of hope that they can change that back. There might be a way to change the colors of these, but I have not been able to find it yet. But what we have here are a couple options. Let's go ahead and take a look at what we're talking about here. So Wait. There might be a couple options. There might be a way to change the color here, but let's not worry about that. Now, let's go ahead and create our first material. So firstly, what I like to do is grab my material and put it on my object. You can click and drag it onto your object, or you can click and drag it onto your object over here in the hierarchy, which is a little easier if you have a lot of stuff in your scene. Now, you may notice actually have a question mark here on our sphere, which is because we used to have a texture on it, and then we deleted that texture. So that means it's like, Hey, this used to have a texture on it? Where's the texture gone? Okay? So if you ever see that, that means that your texture that you were using has been deleted, and you need to either reload or find that or rebuild it. Okay? And so what you'll notice here is if we click and drag this onto our sphere, it's actually going to add that on after that, so that's actually called material stacking. And now we have material stacking where we can actually stack up to four materials on one object that will overlay and you can use opacity and stuff and create stickers and things like that. And this isn't really what we want when we don't need it. So what we want to do is actually you can either come in here and delete this by mousing over it, clicking it, and hitting delete the actual delete key or when you click and drag this, actually drag it over top of the existing material, and that will replace. And so you can see that updates our preview here in our view port. Let's go ahead and open up Redshift. We have our new Redshift menu up here. We're going to say Redshift renerview. We're going to slide this over, and we're going to go ahead and hit this IPR button, and this is the play button here, and this is going to use those progressive passes that we talked about earlier to generate an image very fast for us. Okay, so we can see our sphere here and we can see our little geometry issues here, and we'll fix that and clean that up in a minute. We're just going to focus on this texture right now. And so what you can see is if you go into our standard material here, I'm going to close this left panel here so we can just see a little easier. And we have our attributes. If we go into our base color, we can go ahead and change that to red, and that's going to affect it. Now, we'll go in depth into all of these things. In the next week, where we're going to go in depth, break down every single aspect of all this stuff. I just want to create a base material here that we're going to use on some things. So basically, for this you just want to pick a material that you like this is kind of just your beauty item. It's going to be here. You're almost always going to delete it out of your scene, but it's just kind of there to welcome you as you love it open up Cinema four D. So it could be whatever. It doesn't have to be a sphere. It can be whatever object you want. But we're going to do a sphere, and let's do something a little fun here. So let's go ahead and just follow along, and we're going to do, like, a nice blue here. Okay. And then we're going to go down here to metal ness, and we're going to crank that up all the way to one. And you can see that's going to create this cool metal sphere. And then for our roughness value here down in the reflection, what we're going to do is we're going to kind of like a quick, dirty intro into just how these are going to work. We're going to use our Maxon noise and our ramp feature here, and we're going to use these attributes to drive the roughness. So if we solo this Maxon noise, which right here, we can click this little S, it's going to render that on our object. So now we can come in here to do our Maxon noise. So what I want to do now is actually go in here and change the noise type to turbulence. And then maybe go down here underneath the input and increase the scale to like ten, that's going to make it larger. And we can come and scroll down here to the output and just kind of pull up these values at the low clip and create some black values there. And that's pretty much all I want to do right now. So what I want to do is connect that into the ramp and the way to do this is you click and hold from this dot and just hover over anywhere in the ramp. And this works with any node, and it's going to pop up all of your options that you can plug this into, and we want to plug this into the Alt input. It's kind of kind of tuitive that you don't connect straight into the Alt input. But here you go. I mean, straight into the input, it's called Alt input. That's what you do for the ramp. Not going to see any difference until we unsolo this and we can solo this ramp so we can see kind of how we're working. And basically, all we're doing with this ramp is we're going to come in here and kind of clamp up some of these values and maybe bring down our whites a little bit more. We can just kind of fine tune that, and that's why I do that a lot. And we can unsolo that and you're going to see nothing's different because we still haven't hooked this up to anything. And the main reason we're using black and white values is because black represents the value of zero, and white represents the value of one, and almost all of these attributes are ranged 0-1. So we're basically creating a color map that drives the integer data for our nodes in the short kind of sum so what we want to do is we want to click and drag this and we can actually just mouse over our common inputs here and you can see it starts snapping, and that's only a feature available on the node Editor. And we want to go down here to roughness and just let go on that. And you can see that just adds this kind of weird roughness over top of our object. Now, I think it's a little strong, and this is the beauty of the ramp node can come in here and double click on this white dot, and maybe we'll type in like 40% gray, and now we're going to get more of just a kind of scuffed and blurry object here. Pretty cool. And you can obviously come in here and adjust and just play around with whatever and just make kind of a fun material that's going to welcome you into Cinema 40. You can change the color. Something a little more fun. You could do glass if you wanted to. I would say away from things that were too shiny or too glass just because it's going to take longer to render, but we're just going to up the color this maybe purple. No, definitely that blue. Yeah. Okay, cool. So now we've created our first material. So now let's create one more material for our psyche wall here. This one's going to be one that we actually need to create and follow along. Double click that. Open up our panel here. And what we're gonna do is we're going to click and drag this onto our psyche wall here. Okay. And we click this these red shift standard material. And we want to make sure that our color here is about 95% white. Really, I just got to stay away from 100% white because nothing's really 100% white, but you can, if you want. If it's a good rule of thumb, kind of stay away from it so that basically, when you add lights and stuff, you kind of still are able to see that variance when things get brighter. And it's a lot harder to get that attribute. When you're at 100% white, it's harder to get brighter than 100% white. So if that makes sense. But you can see how with this material and the way we set up our psyche wall and our dome light, we have this perfect, seamless floor, which is fantastic. The next thing we want to do is we want to actually take our diffuse roughness and turn this all the way up to one, and we want to take our reflection and actually turn that all the way down to zero. And basically what this is going to do is that's going to create this super matt material. So we have an incredibly mat material versus having something that's going to be very shiny where we're trying to see the reflection of our sphere and stuff. We don't really want to have reflections and stuff in a cyc wall, so we want to turn that reflection value all the way down to have a nice mat finished floor. And if you don't like the way the metal's looking and stuff, obviously, just come in here and we can just go ahead. And honestly, we can take the reflection and metalness values off of this as well if you just want, like, a very, very basic scene, but I like having that reflection on there, even without a bulk map. Just so we have something to look at. So pick something fun. And now we have this really nice floor. I mean, Mike can adjust it so that it's gonna have an even smoother floor. So it'll go to our backdrop. And as far as rounding goes, let's go ahead and keep rounding that up to 200. And that should help smooth that out. We also can just go ahead and take our depth and just pull that back a little bit so that our psych wall isn't so close to our object here. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Cool. So now we've created two materials. So as you noticed, since we have material previews off, one thing I like to do is since we're going to save this as our default scene is just enable material previews again, rebuild these, and also we should probably name these. So don't be lazy like me. I teach you good habit, so do what I say. Not what I do. Right, so we're gonna go on to the render, open up redshift, and material previews on. Select both of these, twirl this down, click default, and that's just going to cause us to rebuild this for us. Here we go. So now we can say psyche white. And all I'm doing is psych Whitey. White. I can't type. And then double click instead of the title here and we're going to call this just blue or whatever you want. There we go. So now we have this setup. We are ready. And also, one thing I want to do is I just want to up the geometry of my sphere to 64. I think that creates just nicer. It just makes it smoother, so we're going to leave it like that. But now that we have this setup, we are ready to talk about setting up some extra lights and a camera in the next lesson. After we come back up here to the preferences and once again, make sure we turn off that material preview so it's not on by default. And what we want to do is we want to just update our starter scenes since we've made changes because we want this psych material and stuff to come in every time. We don't want to have to rebuild it every single time. So the cool thing is, those things will save with this, so we'll go ahead and go to Save starter layout window customization, save as default scene. Alright, now let's go ahead and talk about lighting. 13. Lighting Basics: Alright, so now we're ready to add lights to our scene. So let's go down here and you see this little square with an arrow. This is called an area light. Think of it as like a giant silk or something or a big diffusion layer of light coming down or just a big old light, whatever you want to picture in your head to kind of make that make sense. But you can click and hold this. We have point light, spotlight, infilt. We have all these lights, and we're going to go over all these next week in the lighting course and some of them are really cool, but the one we're going to use the most is definitely the area light, and that's what we want to bring in here. Think of these as just studio lights that you're going to bring in. We're going to click and hold that that's going to bring that into our scene. If we uncheck our camera so we can move around here, notice we can't even see it, let's hide our sphere by just clicking this dot until it turns red. We go, so you can kind of see our area light, but if we rotate away from our ramp here, our psyche wall by holding Alt and left clicking, we can see our area light is actually here, and it's just represented by this box. So it's still kind of really hard to see what's going on. So let's go ahead and do the same thing to our backdrop here, our back ground. So now we can actually ER square here. And another thing that the aerial lights kind of R is kind of hard to move around. So if we wanted to point at our object here, here's our sphere, we're going to grab this by hitting E to create the move tool and then we're going to hit R to rotate it. And it can be kind of a pain to move these around, and then we need to rotate around this way, and we can hold shift to go in crements, but it's still kind of difficult. So it's actually the easiest thing to do and the coolest thing to do is use what's called a target null. We can do is you can right click and add in these targets and stuff like that and then add in null and target that and hook those two things up. But we can actually do that even faster than actually coming in here and doing it manually, and that is this little arrow right here. Just click this and you can say add target and null. It will automatically add a null object, which is basically just basically like a null and after effects. It's something that doesn't take up any space or matter, but it's just like a reference point, right? And then what we've done here is we've added a target tag onto our light and with that null as the target object. So no matter where if we hit E, no matter where we move our light, it's going to look at that null, which just makes moving these around so much easier. So if you have something in your scene like the sphere here, you could set your sphere to be the object. But the easiest thing to do with the null is actually come over here to the place tool on the left, and with your null selected, click and place this, say on the front of this object, and that will put that exactly where you want to focus your light on. Now we can come in here and move our light, let him go our top you, move our light around this way and up a bit, and we know it's going to shine on that scene. So we'll go back into our camera and render this and you can see how that light is working. Before the light, after the light. Obviously, our light is very bright. Come down here to the intensity, lower it down to 20 there we go. We have this nice subtle light coming in. You can see the reflection of your light here, which is why light shape matters, which we can change that. We talk about all of this later as well as the spread and everything. But what we want to do with our light is actually just create a really nice big overhead. Because if you've ever been in a physical production studio like I used to work in and set up and stuff, actually we had a giant 40 foot silk above, which silk is just a literal silk that is designed to create diffusion, so all of our light from above, we was hanging from the ceiling, and then behind that silk was about 40 different lights. Now, the cool thing about three D is, rather than having, you know, a bunch of cloning a bunch of these and then using a diffusion to set them up is so we can just actually make one giant light, and that will act as if it's a diffusion. So we'll go ahead and roll raise this up, and what we're going to do is we're actually going to go ahead and delete our target tag now that we have it up kind of near where we want it. And then we're going to go into the coordinates tab here and just clean these values up 180 degrees, and this is near negative 90, so negative 90. So now it's going to be perfectly straight down. Alright. And we can center this with zero and zero, and our Y is just how high up above this is. So what we're going to do is we're going to grab these little yellow dots here and scale these out and scale it back as well. So we've just created this nice big overhead, and we can bring our backdrop back in, so you can kind of see where this is fitting in our backdrop, as well. So what we want to do now is we can just go ahead and take a look at what this is going to look like because though we adjusted the level of lighting earlier to just 20, you'll notice now that it's very much a lot brighter than it was when it was set to 20, and that's because the actual size of your light matters, because think of it as if they are real world lights, we just created, like, a grid of 40 lights rather than one small light. So what we could do is just lower this down even more, somewhere around two, maybe four. And maybe even five. I think five is going to give us just kind of this nice soft rim light. And already, just without this light, you can see, like, a dome light is good. It works well. But adding in that actual light is just going to create just a really nice soft starting point. Top lights are almost always used, especially for automotive renders, product renders, stuff like that. So it's just a really good one to have in your scene to start off with. So I like to put it in there. If you don't like it, you can uncheck it and stuff like that, but I think it really adds just a really nice layer of lighting and smoothness to our entire scene. So now we have this really pretty blue ball, and we've got a camera set up. We've got lights set up. I think, guys, we're ready. To move on to the project. We know how to navigate the scene around. We know how to add things in and create some materials and some objects and stuff like that. It's time. It's time for you to take the reins. Alright. Pretty much the next video you're going to do is going to be what the rest of your videos from now on are going to be. It is going to be a lot more hands on. You're actually going to be following along, doing stuff, creating something rather than just setting things up, which is what we've been doing for the past week. But hopefully, after doing what we've done, you understand why we needed to do it and set it up, so we don't ever have to do all of that again because that was a lot of work. Now, granted, you'll get faster at it and it won't take you an hour or whatever these videos add up to. It would take you a minute or two to set that up each time, but that's just a minute or two that you could be spending creating that you don't actually need to spend doing this. So hopefully, you appreciate the fact that we are going to now go up to window customization and once again, save a startup layout, customization, save as default scene. And now every time we open up Cinema four D, we will be greeted by this little ball and our lights and everything. Put a little smiley face on here or something, please go ahead. If you create a cute intro scene, please feel free to share it either with the discord or with our private community here. I just would like to see what you guys have made, and maybe I'll use your default scene because sometimes, you know, it's just some people have this really nice thing that you didn't expect to see, and it looks really good. So awesome. There we go. Let's go ahead and start our next lesson and our first project assignment. 14. Never have to mess with scene setup again: Now that we actually have everything how it is, one thing you want to make sure you don't do is once you set it to your default layout here, just want to go ahead and open up a new scene. So once you've saved set it as your default layout, and you start a layout just want to make sure you save it to a new scene, because if you don't and you start playing around in that project, and then you save it at the end, it's going to save those updates as your default scene, too. So just be mindful of that. And we're not really not that you're going to keep working on this or anything, but if you ever do change your scene and then try to save it and then keep working on that scene without starting a new project, just be mindful that you might accidentally create a very complex loading scene. So you go. So now that we have everything how we want it, we've got an Infidet Light. We've got red shift settings. We can go to render view down here in our red shift twirl down. We can set up a hot key for this, which we can do later in the render settings to bring this up. But it's up to you, but I like the way everything's looking. You can spice it up, do whatever shape you want or anything. I might actually change it to something a little more fun. Roughness value, this is just for me. I'm going to crank this up to like 0.4 for the reflection roughness, just because I don't like seeing how perfectly reflective that was of our dome light. So I kind of like the way this is looking a little bit better. Pretty cool. So obviously, you know, you can choose whatever version of dome light and stuff that you want. But so now what we'll be able to do is go up here to Window. Again, customization, save let's just say save layout as, and we'll change this to, like, red shift, you know, EtronEfctron is the best Etron layout, right? Save. And so you can have multiple ones. So if you're going to have different projects going at once, where you're going to have a similar starting point, you can just create your own layouts and stuff. So if you're going to do something for Instagram, you can have an Instagram layout one or something that you're going to do sculpting and you can have a sculpting one, that kind of thing. So whatever works best for your workflow, and you can save multiple of these and whatever and load them up at any time by going to Window customization load layout, and then you can choose in there. You also have the option to go to just different layouts that already exist by going to the layouts tab here, and you can choose any of the ones that you've created, as well as some of the ones that four D created, which are also available up here, okay? Pretty. So now we've saved it, save it as a startup layout, and we'll also go to the window customization save as the default scene. Cool. So now see you've noticed it changes the name to new.c4d. So that is, like, the default of what it looks for when it creates the layout. So now if you come in here and change it and save it again, it's gonna save that as the startup layout. But we don't want to. We're good how it is. We've done it oh, there was a lot, but I think hopefully you understand why we did a lot of that stuff. And as we move through these weeks, they're going to be a lot more fun. That is probably the most boring one. Hopefully, it wasn't too painful to sit through all of those change click these buttons, do this, do that. I know it's a lot of groundwork. Hopefully, some of it makes sense. Let me know in the live stream that we're going to do this week for the feedback, write down these questions you have about what we've changed, if you have any questions about why we did this or why we did. Or how come mine, it looks a little differt. When I try to do it, let me know those things. That's why we have the Q and A. It's because things happen and things change and stuff. So let me know and definitely come in with your questions of what you need to know and what you're excited about for the next week where we're going to cover creating some lighting. So we have this cool default scene now if we go in here and open up CPD hit new Yep, a new thing we're going to see we already have all of our stuff built in, our protection tag, our dome light backdrop sphere. Everything is good to go. We could take all these selection tags off of our backdrop, actually, it's just kind of really clumpy, clunky. Let's just go ahead and do that. Let's do that back in our new thing. I don't like the fact that that had all that stuff on it. And while we're here before we save it for the very last time, let's go ahead and go to our edit preferences and once again, go down to our renderer. This is so I hate that we have to do this. We don't have to, but I don't and then we'll just go ahead and just change anything from one. So we'll go into our backdrop and delete all those tags out. And now we've come in here and just double click. One thing we can do is go to our preferences, go back to our winter settings and turn material previews back on, and then double click these to open them up, and they will load in because I just think it looks nicer when they're loaded in. So we're going to leave that on for now. And now we have this is looking tidy. This is looking good. We have this window, how we want it. Things like the Redshift render view like this, they're not going to stay popped out. Any window that's popped out is not going to stay. This is a pretty good layout, and it depends on how much screen space you have and stuff. But you might be able to do something like open up your render view. And if you have the real estate forward on your screen, you could dock it right here next to your material previews, so you can slide this over. And just so you have this workspace here, and you also will have a render window here, it's good to go. But, you know, it's really up to you and how much space you have on your screen and stuff like that. So if you want that feedback kind of locked in, it doesn't seem like the best use of space to me, but that's okay. It's really up to you. I normally just pop it out, but also it's mainly because a lot of times when I'm doing it, I'm doing it to teach, so I have to have it on the same screen invisible and big, so I like to have it just pop out. It doesn't bother me. But if you have a second monitor, that's a really good use of where you can put it, just make sure your colors are kind of the same for both monitors. So there you go. But yeah, if you like that, go ahead and do that, but you can also undo that, and I'm going to leave it like this. And we're just going to save this and make sure we save it again. That's depot the scene. Just to make sure. Alright. Cool. So that was a lot. I know. Okay, don't forget to write those questions down and bring them to the Q&A coming up soon, check the teachable page for information on that, and don't forget to download this scene, as well. If you need to if you couldn't follow along for whatever reason, and you just want this version and then tweak it from there, you can totally do that. I understand. Alright. See all in a little bit later. 15. Importing Fun shapes: Alright, in this lesson, we're going to take a real quick look at how to import the assets we need for the final project. Basically, there's a download on class of the course curriculum. For this week, it's going to have the fun shapes model pack that's going to be available to you. That has all these crazy cool shapes that I've created that are ready to bring in. And so when you download that, what you're going to get is this zip folder right here. You don't need to extract it, don't open it. Don't do anything. All we need to do, let's go ahead and open up a new scene here so I can show you. We'll delete this. We can open up the asset browser, okay? And all we're going to do is we're going to go to Create. Then we're going to go to import assets, and we open up wherever we put our model pack. We just select the zip folder and hit Open. And it's going to go ahead and ask you where you want to put these preferences is fine. Now, for me, it's not going to import them because as you can see here, it skip these assets because they already exist. So all of these assets are what we're bringing in, but that will bring them in most likely in the uncategorized section. And then you can just create a new folder in here. You can go to create Create category, call it whatever you want. So it's like efectotron models. EfecttronFun shapes. Okay? It will create that category you can drag and drop this wherever you want. If you want to put it inside of models, you totally can. No problem. And then inside of there, you can drop all of our fun shapes. So you can tell it to save it there. You can copy and paste in there, whatever you want to do, totally fine. So then, once you have those in there, let's go ahead and take a look. I have my shapes here. You'll notice there are four channels here. We've got blocks, Sitler, spheres, and widgets, widgets are kind of just abstract shapes. They're kind of my favorite part. But once you have them, you can simply drag and drop them into your scene. Now, they're all kind of small by default. That's because some of the spheres and stuff, I thought would be pretty cool to put into real world scenes is abstract art. So they're about somewhere 3-5 centimeters, so they can fit on a desk or anything like that. But if you want to create some random shapes real we'll show how to do that and create this abstract art really quickly and easily. So just remember where you save them because you will need them in the assignment in the next video. Cool. Easy Ps. 16. Project! Create your render!: Alright, it's time for us to finally create. We've opened up Cinema 40 or made a new project, which you can just do by clicking this little plus button here, or going to file a new project, and we see that everything loads up. We're ready to go. First thing we are going to want to do is grab our little sphere here and hit Delete and say, bye bye. And what we're going to do is we are going to open up that folder that I showed you in the previous video. If you didn't see that, be sure to check it out, and I'll show you how to import in all of these fun shapes that we've created that I've created here. If you go down here to our fun shapes, and we just select right here and hold Shift and select our witches down here, we actually can see all of our shapes, all at once, so we can scale these up, and let's go ahead and grab this window, pull it out so we can see all of our fun shapes that we have to choose from. So what I want you to do is choose five shapes. Let's go with one. Two, three, four, five. You know what? If you're feeling froggy and you want to go for six Go for six. Here we go. We're going for it. Alright, you can go for as many as you want. The cool thing about the way we're going to build this is that everybody should look slightly different and you'll be able to create it with your own flair. So it's going to be pretty cool to have your own unique render right off the bat, rather than just like everybody is like, Oh, I rendered the same thing. I followed the instructions. Yeah, we're all going to have our own cool thing. We're all little snowflakes, okay? So basically, we're going to zoom in with scroll wheel. Scroll wheel. And what we want to do, if you don't remember just to refresh your brand new scroll wheel in and out, hold Alt and left mouse click to rotate around, and of course, it's going to go from wherever you look at. So we can see we have all this stuff lined up. But if yours doesn't have the display lines here and you're set on garage shading, you can do that. But I prefer either constant shading with lines or quick shading with lines is probably my favorite because it normally looks the cleanest and it's the easiest to see everything. So those options are within the display area here. Okay. So we've got all these shapes, and they're all pretty very high poly, really. They might slightly be too high poly, but you know what? I just made them how I wanted to make. So we've got these shapes, and what we're gonna do is we're just going to kind of pull them around and just spread them out so they're not intersecting with each other, just like that. All right. And we're actually going to turn off do quick shading so we don't have all the lines, so it's a little easier on the eyes. And what I want to do is I want to hold a shift on the bottom cube here or your bottom object and then hold shift and click up here to the top. You have them all select basically. What we want to do is we want to actually go over here to this dynamic place tool. When we click this, you're going to notice that we have all these bounding boxes built around our object and we have a different looking mover here. What this is actually going to do is it's going to provide real time dynamics to our objects and allow us to do things like grab this purple line here, which is the overall scale, there's the Z scale, Y scale, scale and rotation and move. The difference between dynamic place and the normal move tool is we actually have all three options here in one control versus rotating between each of them. So I kind of actually like that a lot about the demi tool. But what's cool is if we take this and we grab this purple line and we scale in, they're all going to crash into each other. We can just go B bow, bow, bo bo, right, that, right? And you can rotate it around, get the rotation. And if you want, you can go here, and we're just going to kind of just shimmy them around, spread them out, rotate them, smash them in, smash them out. And just kind of create your own look of whatever you think looks good. And if you think, You know what? This isn't enough. We want more. Spread them all back out just a little bit. We're gonna grab all of these, hit Control C, Control V, and do that one more time. And then we'll take those and move those over and do it one more time, Control V, and move those over like that. So now we have a bunch of these, and we can come in here and shift click drag. Again, dynamic tool with them all selected, smash them all in. We're gonna start slowing down a little bit, but not too much. Smash the sand. There we go. And now we can rotate this around. Like, so really, we're just going for, like, completely random looks and vibes. So just have fun wiggling it around. No. You can also come in here and just grab individual ones, and they're still going to react to other things. So if you don't like where one is, you can rearrange them individually. I'll say, Okay, I've got too many of these balls over here together where I like them. So I can just kind of grab them and move them around individually. And now we can shift drag, click select them all. Again, scale them all out, scale them all in, boom. And let's grab one of our widgets, which are the kind of more fun shapes and try to pull it out of there. And if you can't pull it out, switch back to normal move mode, ink it out. And we'll do another one like that. And then we'll grab those by themselves with a dynamic tool and just kind of bring those in, like, so maybe pop them out. Yeah, like that. And we'll grab this, move it out. And maybe take this one. And we're just trying to move things around. And we just did that to get kind of a nice dynamic look, and we're going to just sort of rotate some things around so we get kind of a more kind of cool vibe without a bunch of stuff intersecting. Do, we'll move this to the back back here. You're just playing around looking for places that are intersecting and stuff and you just want to build out. That one's good. You don't want things to be too similar to be next to each other. You can scale certain objects down if you want. If you think they're too big, scale other objects up if you want. I think this one looks pretty fun to scale up. So let's put dynamics on that guy and move him back. Here we go like that. I like that. And we'll grab this guy, pull him forward. Rotate him, maybe. Here we go. Like that. Cool. So we have a bunch of shapes. These two look too similar to me, so I'm gonna rotate this one around so they're not so exactly the same. Yeah, now we've got a bunch of shapes, however you want them. And if we go ahead and render them out, you know, just on their own, they're gonna look pretty fun with our overhead lighting and everything. Even without materials on them, it should look like a pretty nice dynamic scene. And if we'd gone in here and tried to move every single one of these individually on our own, it would have taken a while, and it might have been a little tricky, but we could have definitely done it. But the dynamic tool really just helps you create an organic look really quickly and fast. And this is looking pretty good. Is my HGRI such that sky it is? That's kind of really pretty. I used an ACRI sky from Poly haven, but let's go ahead and just swap back to the studios just so we're all on the exact same page. A lot of times I make tutorials, even in these, I will do entire videos that I end up just deleting. And we'll see what studio looks like. I hate it. I hate it in comparison. That's it. We're going back. We're going to learn the 16, here we're going for it. This is all live, right? So we want to go to polyhaven.com. Totally free ACRI textures and models. We're going to go to ACRIs and we want to use this one right here. Evening Road. And you can use whatever you want. You don't have to use exactly what I'm doing. But this is the one I used, evening Road. I did a 16 K. I'd probably say, really, if you're just doing lighting, you could get away with just a four K if you're not actually looking at your image. I'm actually going to replace you with that because it does go faster. 16 K R A k and up starts to kind of have a little hiccup because it builds the preview. Once you have that downloaded, you want HTR or you could do an EXR if you want, either one. But once you have that downloaded, you just simply click and drag that in to that spot right there. Now we have this nice lighting from the sun and we can rotate our dome lights around and stuff, just like anything else. So if you want, we can move it around. And if you need to see it, obviously, the easiest thing to do, turn off your backdrop, so you can actually see kind of where your sky is in relationship to your scene. So you kind of want this nice side lighting, so you want to put the sun kind of over there. It's kind of a side lighting. I like the way that's looking. Turn our backdrop back on. Here we go. Infinite white with this nice bluish hue to it. I like that. Alright, so now let's start creating multiple materials and variations for our scene. So we're gonna leave this white, how it is, and we're going to take our blue. And let's just pull this down so we can see all of our hierarchy here. Alright, so we have a bunch of these materials here. And what we can do is if you want certain materials and stuff to all be kind of the same color, one thing you can do if you want things to be the same color is let's go in here and just select some objects. We'll go and then hold Control, and we're just going to kind of click every other one or so. We're not really trying to be too specific, but now we've created this group, and we're just going to take these, and we're going to click and hold this button right here, which is normally the subdivision surface. And we're going to go down to connect, and we're going to hold Alt, p. And we're going to hold Shift Alt. And we're going to hold Control? No. Okay. We're going to grab all these and we're going to click and hold them. Actually, we're going to click. We're going to right click these and hit group objects. That's going to create a null and this is basically just created a folder for objects. If you want to come in here and change the icon and stuff of these, you can. It just makes it look cleaner, but you don't have to do that at all. Okay. So now if I take this blue and I throw this on the null, it's going to just put everything that's in that null and make it blue. So now we can come in here and just make another group of a couple different things together. Again, I click group objects, null one, and what we want to do is create a different material. So let's grab our blue, hold control, click and drag, and now we have Blue two. And let's just call this green for now. And basically, we're just making alternates real quick and then we're going to actually come in here and color these correctly. And throw that on there. And then for this last group, we'll shift right click and we'll throw we don't want to throw the actual psyche there. We want to use the same kind of material, so click and hold the blue, and for this, we'll call it white for now, and we can throw it on there. And this is just like a base start, obviously. But I'm going to show you how to actually create some really nice colors and textures really quick. But just for example sake, how we built this scene, all we did we dragged and dropped a bunch of objects in, copy and pasted, changed one attribute of a color. And then we have this kind of fun dynamic scene just already looking good. So pretty fun. So let's go ahead and tweak our colors because I don't like how lost the whites getting. And we can deal with that in a bit because you can also come in here and do something like throw a different color on your white wall, and now you have a more dynamic scene, and you still have that nice infinite floor look. So we can mess with that in a bit. So what I like to do for my colors is actually go to a website called coolers.co. And if you watched any of my YouTube tutorials, you might have heard me mention it. It just is a way has this way to create color generation templates and palettes. So you can just come in here and hit Space Bar, and it's just going to make color palettes. You can just go until you like one and you're like, oh, I really like this color. Lock that one in and keep hitting space and you're going to get things that match with that. So really, really cool feature, as well as just the ability to explore tunning palettes, which is where we're going to too. And I like this palette right here, I believe. So what I want to do is I want to open up this blue and go ahead and open up this panel. And basically, what I'm going to do is I could either come in here and copy this Ag code by clicking right here, open this up, and then Actually, I could come in here, I could twirl this down, and then right over here, we'll see this little arrow and then has the option to put in hexadecimals. So we can just go right here and paste that in so we get exactly that color. Now, if it doesn't quite look right, you might want to make sure that you have linear RchP on because it will change the way it looks. Okay. Alternatively, if you have a side monitor like I have, you can literally just color pick. So we're just going to color drop and select. I'm changing my mind. I'm calling an audible, guys. We're going to go and girls, we're going to go and whoever. We're calling an audible. We are going to switch up and do these colors because I think these are going to look fun and kind of tropical. So I like this vibe. So we're going to go color, choose this color, make a new material, color, choose that color, new material, and so on. Okay? Okay, so we've created our yellow, our light pink mint and deep pink here, and I've just created those, and we still have all the same attribute colors and things on them. So if you want to, you can come in here and just we have more colors than we have nulls now. So let's just go ahead and select a couple of these and just pull them out on their own. And we're just gonna grab the pink, and throw it on that one. Grab the mint to throw it on that one and the deep pink, and maybe throw it on that one. And the cool thing is, even though it's in a null, if you throw that texture on the actual material, it's gonna override it. So we can say, right, deep pink on this cylinder as well. So we've colored the whole group, but now we're saying, You know what, override that group and put it on here. So mint need a couple more mints in there. Let's grab that, throw it on this sphere. I really like this giant ball to be all perfect. Deep pink, and we're just throwing these on randomly, however you want. So we didn't need to take those out, but you totally could. We'll drag that one back in. There we go. So I like this color palette a lot. And now what I think I want to do is I want to decide what color I want the background to be. And I don't know. Oh, do we have white on this at all? We'll do white on there and there. Oops. That one's already got it. We'll be down. There we go. Make sure you don't have any double copies on anything. Very nice. And what we can do is just see what these look like, throwing them on our background here. Mm. I like that. Let's throw the I like that too. I bet the yellow is gonna be good looking, too. That's the cool thing about using these color palettes is when you just start mixing and changing things up, it all looks good because it goes together. And honestly, I'm not the best with colors, so coolers.co is phenomenal. I like this yellow quite a bit. I like that. I like that. I'm happy with that. So what we're gonna do is we're actually grab this yellow hold Control click and drag, and we're going to call this yellow MT. And we're going to make sure that we put this one on our backdrop, okay? And we want to open this up. And instead of our RS standard, we want to make sure we have this rolled open. We're going to take the roughness of this and just turn it up to, like, 0.8. And basically, we are saying, we want this to be pretty Mt. We don't want it to reflect. We can go all the way up to one, honestly. There we go. I like that. Okay, so now what we can do is we can come in here to some of these other materials and start messing with the reflection values and stuff. We don't want to go crazy because we actually want to keep it pretty clean. So what we want to do is let's go to our yellow, and I think the yellow would be really nice. We're gonna double click that open. We can zoom in here in our window. And the same controls applied all of these scroll wheel and Alt middle mouse click hold to move around old winter mouse, click hold. Now, in here and you get lost, hit H, and that frames everything up. And if you have a whole bunch of spaghetti and stuff all over the place, you can hit Shift L, and that's going to arrange everything for you, okay? So it groups things that are together for you. So pretty cool. Alright, open this panel back up. Sand retrial, and we can kind of take our roughness of this yellow. Maybe bring it down and make that yellow kind of shiny. And maybe up the IOR, which we'll talk about when we get into the materials. So basically, we're going to tell this to be a little glossier, really. Okay. Then let's go into our deep pink, twirl that open. And I think I want this to be kind of rough. So diffuse roughness up and roughness here up as well. Just go to make that a little more matt. Mm hmm. And we can come in here, too, or pink. And the cool thing is we can just double click this and we don't have to reopen the window or anything and close it every time. We're gonna take this. And maybe let's go ahead and turn the metal ness of this up and see what that does. Ooh. Interesting. So we can come in here, lower the IR to like 1.3, make it more like plastic than metal. And we can take our mentalistyu. We don't have to go full metal. We can go, like, half metal, and we might get or even lower. We might get just this nice, cool, weird, shiny material that looks kind of nice. I did like how shiny that was. I think that looks pretty cool. But is it too much for this scene? There's a lot of creative decisions that you're gonna have to go through while you're creating things. And really, it's just like, Well, let's try it with this. It's just my what's the word I'm looking for? Method is to just I'm like, Okay, that's the beauty of red shift and the fact that it's so fast, is that I can be like, Well, actually, let's see what it looks like if I don't do that. Pretty cool. Let's just do that. Yeah, let's just go to like 0.2. I think how it was. Like, normally, I think I like that maybe 0.3 for the roughness ring this back down. I think that one needs to be pretty simple. The mint, I think, can be glossier, so we'll turn the roughness value down and maybe turn the metalness up. That's interesting. Maybe with the roughness up, it'll look good, too. Now, no, metals down, roughness down. It's worth trying. Worth trying. Okay, so we're not going to worry about mixing in noises and maps and stuff in here just yet. And there's one more thing I do want to create here because I think it's going to make it look super, super cool is I actually want to take this widget here and hit E to get the move tool, hold control and drag it up. And what I want to do is I'm going to hit R and rotate this. And I just want to make and if you don't have this shape, obviously, go into the widgets or all of the downloads and find a nice flat one. And we're going to scale it up pretty big, and we're going to put it kind of right in front of our scene. Like maybe, like, this. Okay? So it's kind of covering up some big chunks of it. And we're going to actually make this glass and this, like, cool. I think it's going to look cool. So we're going to make a new material by clicking our standard button that we created. Put that on this object, which if you ever can't find the object that you have selected, which is this one, you can come over here while you have that selected and hit S, and it will show it. So for some reason, we couldn't see it. We're like, Oh, where is it? We can S, and it's going to bring that to you. So a nice little tip there. Grab this, throw this on there. Boom. And we want to go ahead and double click that, take a look at here, and we're going to go into the standard material, open this up, and we're going to just turn the weight of this off on the color and scroll down to the transmission. And we're going to go more in depth into glass and stuff, but we're just going to make something really quick. We're going to up that weight all the way up to one. It's going to make it this nice glass. And we're going to come in here and we're just like let's do white. And what we're going to do is we're going to come to the roughness and we're going to turn that up. We're gonna turn that roughness up a bit and our IOR, we're going to bring down to, like, 1.1. 1.1. You can type in there if you need to. And then we're going to scroll down here to the transmission right now, it looks awful. We're going to take this weight, and we're going to crank it all the way up to one. And that should make this look like clear glass, and we're getting some nice blur because of the shape of our object and stuff. And basically, glass and stuff is going to be dependent on the thickness of your object, the way it refracts. That's what the IOR is, and we'll talk a lot more about that. But let's go ahead and close this for right now and just kind of organize this a bit. We're going to kind of maybe make this a little more aesthetically pleasing and make it straight up and down. And then we're going to rotate this, and we realized I just moved my camera, I think I sure did. So shift Control Shift Z. And what we want to do is we want to make sure we go in here, uncheck our camera. And the cool thing is, we can come in here to our render view and make sure we're looking through our camera. So even though we're moving around, we can see what we're going to see when we hit render. So we can move this around, come to our shape here, hit T for scale. And we're going to actually just make it thinner and just scale that in a little bit like that. And now it can come back to this camera like that, unless maybe you hit hold shift to rotate in increments and do something kind of like that. D. Now, I think it needs to and this is partly why I say not to do materials before you finish lighting because we're actually going to add some more lights in this as our project, but I didn't want to you have your lighting done before we started the project. But you can see now why Because this class with just an overhead light and a dome light doesn't have a lot of interest, and the whole thing just seems kind of flat. Even though the whole thing looks cool, it just kind of seems like it could be jazzed up a little bit. So I think it's time to add some lights in our scene. So let's go ahead and go to our lights, click this on hide this now because we're going to come back to those, but we don't need to deal with them. We've got our light. We want to click this little arrow, do a target and null. And the fact that we've created everything to come in at the point of zero, our null is going to be there, so we're in good shape. We can scroll up to the top, which is where it's going to always add new things, and grab this area light and just pull that up and maybe over to the left. It's going to be way too strong, as you see, it's blowing out our scene. So come in here, we'll change just about five There we go. And we're going to go into the side views here by middle mouse clicking. And what we want to do is we have our camera here and we have our scene here, and it looks like our null is behind our scenes, so we just want to make sure that we put our null up to where our objects are. And we could use the place tool if we wanted to. But what I want to do is I do want to create some nice back highlights on this. So I'm actually going to put this back here and above our shapes. I'm going to make this shape just a little smaller and narrower. And that should create some nice highlights on some of these shapes. We're going to bring this spread down here. And if you want to, you can come in here and minimize these to make them smaller so you have more room. And we can come in here to our other lights and just turn off the dome light for right now and our other light just so you can see exactly what this light is doing. And sometimes when you do that, you realize, Oh, that looks a lot better with just that light, but we're not there in this scene yet. So let's go ahead and maybe we can change this up to 20. It's creating some nice highlights. We're gonna go up even higher. 50. There we go. So now we're getting these nice highlights on the glass and our shape. And let's lower our spread down. And basically, all this is doing is focusing the power of our light. Think of it like a fnelle on a spotlight. We're making it more of a spotlight and less of a diffusion light. So now we have this nice back lighting on our object, and this looks kind of neat on its own. Let's turn on the dome light with this. And you can see we kind of still have those highlights in here with our object, and it's looking pretty good. So we can come in turn back on our overhead light. And I think we want to just add one more light here on the front to kind of get a glint on this. So let's go back, turn these off. And we're just going to hold control on this area light and copy that over. And that's going to keep that target. It's going to copy that target tag and where our null is aligned. So we can actually just move this one around now, and it will be adjusted straight into. So I think what I want to do is come in from above, like that. Mm. Maybe a little maybe beneath might be cool for this scene. I kind of like the way that looks across some of the details of this. Mm. Let's move it a little bit in front of that glass. There we go. And we can say we can spread this back out, make it more flood fill light and lower this down to about 25. And obviously, it's going to be kind of dependent on your scene, but just, you know, be mindful of how bright things are. And thanks. We're really just looking to create some nice contrast in our scene with our lighting. So we have, like, this really nice, sharp, bright highlight on our edges and stuff from that backlight. And then this light's just really here to fill in some of these spots and create some shadows. And I think this might be a little too much to but we're going to go somewhere in between, like 20. And so we have some nice colors and shadows on our scene. So we have this nice look. So it'll come with the overhead light. Looks pretty good. Dome light, that's going to help blow everything out. And if you ever think your dome light is a little too bright, you can come in here to your dome light and just turn it down with the intensity. It works just like any other light. But I think we're going to leave it how we have it. And I don't love our glass, so I'm actually going to double click our glass and open up the panels back in. And I think what I want to do is I want to add either some color to it or mess with the roughness value. So maybe I would just do like 0.05 for the roughness, so it's pretty shiny, but add extra roughness in there, which is going to put that sort of in the thickness part here, which makes it look more like frosted glass, which I kind of and so with that, I mean, we're looking we're looking pretty good. So let's come in here and do the final touches of our project and hit this little gear here instead of our interview. And we're going to go to ts, checkbox that. And what I like to use is the filmic medium high L. So you have a bunch of different lets in here. The filmic medium should be included. And we have the slider here to control the value of that. And we're going to go at about 0.5. What we're going to do is we're going to go down here to the color controls enable that. And we're going to up the contrast on this like points oh eight. And we're going to take this and raise it up just a bit and take this down here and click and pull this down. So that's going to give us just that classic S curve that you've probably seen before, and that creates just kind of this nice look. And we can mess with our glass. I think it's something about it just isn't hitting right for me, and maybe we just need to put it in the middle or make it frostier. So let's go ahead and grab that glass, and we can scroll down here without having to go into our node panel if we want and just up the roughness of this It's like 0.25. Maybe 0.3. Yeah. So the last thing I want to do here is actually tint my glass to be a little more pink and a little more frosted because I think it's just going to help add a little bit of depth to the scene. So everything's pretty clumped up, which is fine. So what we're going to do is open up our glass, open up our panel here, send our material, go down to the transmission color, and we're going to actually go down to our scatter color. And we're going to grab either our deep pink or our mint. Let's try our mint first. Right click copy back into our glass. And we're going to go down here to the scattered color, right click paste. And nothing's going to change by default because we have no depth, and we'll cover all this later, but we're going to change this to 0.5, and we're just going to see what happens here. Glass does take longer to render than most things. And it's going extra slow for me because I am recording. But that looks right. Kind of has a waxy look, which is fine, but not what I want. And I think I want it to be that pink. So we'll just choose our deep pink, right click Kopi ectorGlassR, click paste. Obviously, whatever colors you think look best for you scene. And if you're following along exactly, you know, follow along exactly and then, you know, do your own interpretation. Mm. I like that. Let's lower the roughness to 0.2, up the IOR to 1.2 and possibly mess with a scatter and trope. Let's see what this looks like first. 'Cause we might just need to lower our extra roughness down for this. Yeah, I'm liking that. I think what I want to do is come back in here, turn this off, go off my camera, rotate around, and maybe make this thick again now that we're actually adding some thickness here. And another thing I want to do is I think my scene is just a little heavy on the yellow on this side and a little light. So I actually want to grab this color here and I'm going to grab my deep pink and put it on that. And I'm going to grab this ball right here, and I'm gonna put the yellow on that ball. Alright. And because we don't have any opacity or anything, it's okay that we have some stacking, but we can come in here and delete those duplicates. If we see them, okay? And now, with this ball being also pink and pink there, let's throw mint. Now, let's see the whoops. Let's show the lighter pink on that ball. And then this cube in the middle here will make that be yellow. And then this square will make B mint. So I think the Mint's really pretty. So now we'll come in here, it interview on this and just see what we have going on here. I don't mind that bottom one being yellow though. Yeah. See how that thickness is created, kind of that cool look. So let's go into our scene here and just go down here to the transmission depth and crank it all the way up to one. And basically, that's gonna say allow more light to get through, and we'll go over this more. So now we get more of that just like tinted glass. Look, I like that. And we might just mess around with some of our colors. We'll do that yellow down here on this cube again. And maybe we'll put that deep pink on this cube in the middle and we'll put we'll hide this really quick by clicking this top dot, and we'll put the yellow on this cylinder here, so it'll show up a little better through our glass here and turn that glass back on. There we go. So you can see that in there. Maybe? Yep, I'm going to go back and forth on this forever. But let's go to our glass and just ever so slightly lower this down to 0.085 and the depth, maybe go up bit more to 1.25. All right. Now, if we wanted to, we could come into your tour glass, go over to our asset browser, type in Imperfections Imperfect, and you'll get all these nice texture maps. And let's just grab one that's like some dust and smudges, and we're just going to throw that on our glass material. So something like this one, metal cast iron. Click and drag that over here. Let's bring our glass up here. Now, we're just going to take this and plug that in to the reflection roughness. We're going to see what that does for our scene. Actually, no. We're just going to take that, and we're going to plug that into our bump map. And we're going to go into our bump map, open this panel up. And we're going to say negative one because we actually want it to, like, suck in rather than stick out where we're getting those scratches and stuff. And we're going to see what that does to our scene, we might need to come down and go even lower on this. It's like, negative 0.2. And that's just going to add a little layer of realism to this for us without it being so distracting because if we hit S on this and solo, this should see our layer, and you see that I don't have this particular shape UV mapped very well. So we're getting weird results. So in order to fix this rather than worrying about UV mapping, we can just grab this widget, grab the texture file we have here. And instead of saying UV mapping, we're going to switch it to Kubic. Now, there's another way to fix this as well using triplanter, but Kubic will work in this scenario, which is totally fine. So now we can say that looks pretty big. Let's go ahead and just up the scale of this to two. And by scale, I mean, the tiles. So we're actually shrinking it down. So it's going to tile twice over and come in this spot. And so now we can unsolo this and we might see that difference just a little bit cleaner and better. And we can grab this same one. Actually, that's looking pretty good. We might throw this into our scene and put it in the transmission extra roughness to create that roughness where those scratches are. That might be cool. Yeah. I think that's good. I think it's a little too intense. So what we're going to do is we're going to go to negative 0.08. And if you ever need to zoom in here and just focus on our region rather than having to render out the whole thing, you can click this render region option, and we'll go down here and just kind of zoom in on a spot we want to see. And what we can do is actually switch it off of progressive, which is going to do progressive and then apply that noise. We're actually going to go ahead and hit bucket rendering right here, and it's going to bucket render inside of this render view without us having to do with like a final render or anything. So what it's going to do is it's going to build those squares, but our buckets were big enough. So this is what it looks like. I think, honestly, we can shrink this down even more. Grab this, and we can either tile it more or we can adjust the texture. We're just going to tile it more because we can. It's just already set up that way. And so let's see if that looks a little more organic. And so when you're doing a bucket rendering, it's not going to kind of have that progressive style way of getting it cleaner and cleaner like progressive does, it's just going to show nothing and then show it done. So it's just a little slower to watch and stuff. But we should be okay. You can see these little white corners. Those are indicators that we're actually rendering out this entire region because our buckets are big enough to do so. Okay, so it's not rendering as fast as I wanted it to. So I paused the recording, and I fiddled around with it. And basically, the long or short of it without making you watch the 15 minutes of me troubleshooting entirely, 17. Chapter 2 Tease for Lighting: So what this is is kind of just a little bonus, sneak peek, a little teaser for what you're going to do next week, and that is you're going to learn lighting. And lighting is just going to completely change the mood and look of your scene. And I'm going to show you how to take things from what we did where it's very plain lights, which they definitely have their place, and they look really well and they look great and everything's fine. But then I'll show you how to add gobos and some environmental lighting. It's going to take the exact same scene and just create a completely different vibe. Exact same scene, lighting is different, and I mean, that looks good. So get excited for lighting. All right.