Blender 4 Essentials: Cycles Lighting and Rendering

1. 00-01 Introduction: This course is the third part of the Blender TD Version four essential series. In this course, you will learn all aspects related to cycles rendering engine, including lighting, camera, Blender settings, and post processing. Essentially, everything that you need to create stunning images using Blender. I have carefully crafted the curriculum so that students can gain the skills gradually with no friction at all. After this course in Shala, you will be able to optimize circles for different scenarios, maximizing the image quality, while at the same time, minimizing rendering time. A Salam Waleku, my name is Wide Mutakin, founder of Expos Studio. For more than 20 years, I have created thousands of treed renderings like this for architectural, interior and master plan projects. I have worked with many clients all over the world. I have clients on almost every continent in the world. Besides doing projects, I have also been teaching TD and computer graphics academically at various schools since the year 2000. In short, I have real world professional expertise in TD and teaching experience. In the lighting chapter, you will learn how to use various light sources inside vendor. We will start with the word background and Sky texture. Then you will learn how to use HDR and XR files and then learn to use light objects such as point light, sunlight, spotlight, and Aalight you will also learn how to create caustic effects, learn how to make lighting more realistic using IS files and then learn how to make material emit light using the emission header. Next, in rendering chapter, you will learn how to easily set up cameras using different manipulation techniques, then you will learn the ins and outs of cycles render settings such as samples, the noising, clemting color spaces, transform, white balance, and so on. In the final chapter, you will learn how to perform post processing with the rendered result using the compositor. Everything is done non destructively via nodes. And then you will learn how to easily isolate pixels for compositing using crypto math. Besides the small exercises throughout the course, you will be given a final project at the end. Basically, you will create product renderings of launcher set in three different styles, first with a transparent background, but with shadows that can fit into any color or background. Second, with a TD environment and an evening sky. And third, using the same T environment, but now with a day or afternoon sky. So join now and take your Dunder TD skills to the next level. Have fun learning Waamoicum. 2. 00-02 Exercise files and conventions: Welcome to the course. Before moving on, there are several important things I need to mention about the course. This course is the third course in a wonderful essential series that I published on Skillshare. In the first course, we discuss the remodeling in depth. Then on the second course, we focus on material creation, texturing, and UV mapping. As for this course, you will learn lighting, camera, rendering, and post processing using cycle's rendering engine. Although you can take this course directly, I strongly recommend that you take the previous two courses before taking this one, especially if you are very new to blender, because most of the time, I assume that you already know things that I explained in those courses. Just keep in mind that if you find something confusing and I don't explain it in detail, it might be that you miss out on lessons from the previous course. Next is about the exercise files. You can download all the exercise files for the course in the resources section of this lesson in case there is a problem, as a backup, you can also download the files from the following link. Please pay attention to the capitalization of the letters, as this link is case sensitive. You can download the files one by one, but it will be easier if you just click this download button to download them all in one zip file. The text you see here depends on where you are or your language preference. It says download Samoa because I am in Indonesia. You will see the text download all if you are in US or UK or other English speaking countries. As you can see, the files are named based on lesson with additional chapter code in front. If lesson has multiple exercise files, then I put them in a folder with the same name as the lesson. Next, it's about the structure of the course. I have carefully crafted the curriculum so that everything is placed sequentially. Each lesson you take on one level will become the foundation of lessons in the next levels. Therefore, it is important that you take the course in order step by step, not jumping around. If you take the course by jumping around, most likely you'll get confused at some point. The second thing I need to mention is that you need to practice. For each video, please try out the lesson yourself at least once. The course is not just about theories. Most of the lessons are practical skills. So again, you need to practice if you really want this online course to benefit you. In this course, I'll be using a PC computer with a Windows ten operating system. So every shortcut I mentioned in the video will be for PC and Windows OS. If you are using a Linux OS, most likely, you won't find any difference in terms of keyboard shortcuts. However, if you are a Mac user, you will find some differences. I believe most Mac users already understand that the command key in Mac is often used to replace the Control key in PC, and the option key in Mac is often used to replace the key in PC. But the thing is about vendor. I found that most of the control shortcuts in PC in Mac mostly become this control key and not this command key, although there are some shortcuts still use document key. Essentially, if you are using a Mac computer, you may need to check the menu or the preferences window or the official vendor's online documentation for the keyboard shortcuts. In this course, I will be using vender version 4.4. So all the UI features and shortcuts are related to this version. If you are watching this video and have vendor version five or six or higher, you might find some differences here and there. In such a case, I recommend you check my course list as I might have already released a new version of this course that is better suited for the version of vendor you are using. There are at least two things that you need to have if you want to walk in bender comfortably. First, you need a standard mouse with a scroll wheel. Usually, if a mouse has a scroll wheel, you can press on the scroll wheel to activate the middle mouse button. We will use the scroll wheel and also the middle mouse button a lot for viewpoint navigation. You want to avoid using minimalistic most products that do not have any scroll wheel or middle buttons. The second thing that you need is a full size keyboard. What I mean by full size is that the keyboard should have a numpad area. This is important because a lot of Werner's navigation shortcuts are placed in the numpad area. Yes, there is an option in lender's preference window to simulate the numbered keys, but that will be at the cost of overriding other important shortcuts related to TD modeling. So again, you really want to invest in a decent full size keyboard if you want to use lender for long term. Throughout the course, I may display images and videos. Some of these contents are not made by me. Please note that I am using them merely as references or for inspiration. I never claim that these images or videos are made by me. If I can find the owner's name, I will credit him or her by putting their names on top of the content. Otherwise, I will display image or video with the URA link of where I found them. As for stock images or videos, if I don't specifically state that they are made by me, most likely the copyrights belong to the respective owners, okay? 3. 01-01 Background and Sky texture: Starting from this video, we will discuss the lighting techniques that exist in lender. As a macro overview, we can divide lighting or light sources in lender into three main categories world light objects and materials. In this video and the next one, we will cover the first category, and that is the word lighting. The old lighting or sometimes referred to as environment lighting are specialized sources that affect the whole scene. You can access this lighting in two places. The first place is the properties editor, which is inside the at tab. At a glance, the tab icon looks like the material tab, but this icon is actually a globe symbol, not a sphere symbol. The second place is the sudar editor. That is, if you switch the mode to word essentially, what you see here are the same priameters as what you can access in vote panel. It's just that they are represented in nodes. By default, the vote lighting uses a node called background. The node provides two basic parameters, color and strength. We can see the effect better if we are in rendering mode. Notice, as I change the color, the overall look of the scene changes this is yellow. This is green. This is ion and so on. We can try changing the strength parameter. As you may have guessed, this controls how strong the lighting is. Let's just set this to one for now. Essentially, the background node floods the scene with single colored lights uniformly from all directions. Although the ground node is the default node, it is rare that you need to use the ground node by itself unless you do want to have this uniform looking like effect on your project. In most cases, you either need to set up architecture for a procedural workflow or an XR or HDI texture for static image based lighting or a combination of both methods. Let's see how we can create and use the sky texture. To create a sky texture, you can simply press Shiv A in shadow Editor and then type in Sky, then Browse Enter. And then you need to plug this into the color slot of the background node. If you connect the node correctly, besides the shaded editor, you can now also access the sky texture parameters from rule panel. Out of the box, our scene now looks more interesting compared to the previous background node. Instead of just a red or uniform color, we can now see a sky color on top, a haze color on the horizon, and a dark color at the bottom. Although this node is called sky texture, it can also generate a sunlight effect. By default, the sunlight effect is already turned on. In case it is turned off, you can turn it on by activating this sun is option. This is off or just the skylight. And this is on or both the skylight and the sunlight are active. You can see the difference yourself, but to recap, a skylight is basically lights coming from all directions. With only skylight, we have soft shadows in the scene or are also known as ambient occlusion shadows. On the other hand, sunlight is one directional light coming from a point of an infinite distance. So the light waves are basically parallel with each other. Besides the sun, you can also use the sunlight system to simulate the moon. Okay, the sun size perimeter controls the size of the sun and eventually how soft shadows are generated by the sunlight. Higher values mean larger sunsize and softer shadows, while lower values mean smaller sun size and sharper shadows. The sun intensity perimeter controls how strong the sunlight is. If you set this to zero, then this is like having only the skylight without any sunlight. If we set this to 0.1, then it is one tenth of the default intensity and so on, you get the idea. Now, you may be wondering, where is the sun's shape? We cannot see it anywhere in the sky. Well, Bender simulates the sun and sky lighting system just like in the real world. And just like in the real world, we are barely able to see the sun's shape as it is just too bright. We can, however, see the sun's shape during sunrise or sunset. That is when its intensity becomes very low, or you can still see it at noon using a camera. That is by setting the camera exposure to a very low number. I vendor, we can simulate the camera's low exposure setting by going to the vendor setting panel and then scroll all the way down to the bottom. You can see the color management category. Here, you can access the exposure setting by default. It is set to zero. If you turn this down, usually when the value is below minus one, we will be able to see the sun shape. So this is one way to do it. Let me bring this back to zero for now. Another way to see the sun shape in lender is to simulate the sunrise and sunset times. To control the sun height, we can use this sun elevation primeter. It uses angle degree as the unit 90 degrees means that the sun disc is exactly at the top of our head or in a positive Zaxis direction. 45 degrees is at the perfect diagonal, and zero is at the horizon line. Basically, if you set the value near zero, we are simulating a sunset or sunrise thus making the sun shape visible. Let's try changing the size again, just to see how it affects the visible shape of the sun. As you can see, smaller values lead to smaller sun shaped sizes. While bigger values lead to larger sun shaped sizes, right? Well we have the sun shape at the horizon, let's discuss the next primeter and that is the sun rotation. Basically, this primeter controls where the sun is located against the center of the world. Zero means that the sun is exactly in the positive Y is direction. Breaking this value up or using positive values will make the sun rotate this way or clockwise. So if we set it to 90 degrees, for example, the sun will be located exactly in a positive X axis direction. Dragging the value down or using negative values will rotate the sun control clockwise, so -90 degrees means that it will be in a negative axis direction. So again, to recap, we can use the sun elevation primeter to control the sun height, and we can use the sun rotation primeter to control the sun's direction. For now, let's set the elevation to 45 degrees and the rotation to 30 degrees. All right. The last four primeters control the sky color or the atmosphere color. The altitude primeter controls the horizon position. Zero means that the center of our three volt is located at the sea level. If you want to simulate the atmosphere on high lens or regions, then you can start increasing the value if, for example, you want to create a scene from a spaceship that is 40 kilometers above sea level, then you can type 40 then KM 4 kilometers and then press Enter. So this is how the sky looks like when viewed from a spaceship, 40 kilometers above the ground. Now, if we set this to high, such as 60 kilometers, everything looks black as there is almost no atmosphere at this height. Let me set this back to zero. The air perimeter controls how much air particles exist in the atmosphere. In other words, the amount of pollution in the atmosphere. If you set this quite high, you'll get an orangish color. This is suitable if you want to simulate a mars surface, for example, or if you want to create a post apocalyptic world, like you often see in Sci Fi movies such as Blade Runner and L. Next, the dust perimeter controls how much dust and humidity is in the atmosphere. If you set it quite high, it tends to tin the sky with a brownish color. The last one is the ozone primeter. This primeter controls the thickness of the ozone layer. Visually. The higher set this value, the bluer the atmosphere becomes. Okay, guys, so that is how you use the sky texture to simulate the sunlight and skylight procedurally. 4. 01-02 Environment texture: In this video, we are going to discuss the next method of world lighting, and that is using the environment texture node. And then up through that, the combination method. The environment texture is like the image texture we discussed in the previous material and V mapping class. But unlike the regular image texture, it is designed to be used together with the background node as a world lighting. Although you can use regular JPEG or PNG files, for environment textures, you should use high range images such as EXR or HDR. For those who don't know what high range images are, they are images that have more than eight bits per channel. So they can contain more light information compared to ordinary image files. That is why they are better used as light sources. A long time ago, you needed to prodss these kinds of images. Fortunately, nowadays, you can download them for free at polyhaven.com or other similar websites. If you open plyhaven.com, you can go to HDRI section. And just browse for the one that you like. Now, if you have a GPU with 8 gigabytes RM like mine, I suggest not downloading files larger than four K as these textures can take a lot of varims when rendering. But if your GPU has larger VM such as 16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes, you can try using eight K or 16 K resolutions. As for the format type, you can download either HDR or XR version as vendor supports both file formats. You can browse online to understand the differences in detail between the two formats. Long story short, EXR is the newer file format, and so it offers more features than HDR, but at the cost of larger file sizes, most of the time, I always oe EXR if it is available. After you specify the resolution and a format, you can proceed to download the file by clicking on this button, right? Back in blender, let's unplug and move this sky texture node aside for now. We will use this node again leader, so you don't want to delete it. Okay? To create an environment texture node initiator editor, you can press Shift A and then search for environ, then hit Enter. Next, you need to plug this into the color slot of the Bagger node. After that, you can add the mapping and texture coordinate nodes manually. Okay? So there is one way to do it. If you have the No wrangle addon installed, you can do this faster using the Control T shortcut. So yes, it is the same shortcut that we usually use to create image textures. Let's just delete this node for now. All right. For this to work, you need to make sure that the background node is active or selected and then press Control the node wrangular add on detected the background node, which is why it created the environment texture and not the ordinary image texture. Notice that currently you see looks pink. This is just Bender's way of telling us that there is a texture missing. To si a texture file, simply click on this open button then browse to the folder where you save DXR and XDR files. Select the file you want to use. I'm going to pick this one called citrus Orchard. This is one of my favorites that I often use in my projects lick the open Image button. And there you go. We are now using a high range image as the light source for our three scene. In most cases, environmental textures produce more realistic results compared to the sky texture node. This is because these images are commonly created by capturing real world environments, and they are not only for outdoor scenes. You can also find many indoor textures at polyhaven.com or other websites. For example, I'm currently using an XR file of O Billiard Hall from Poly Heaven. By using indoor textures, you can quickly set up lighting for product rendering, for example. Now, sometimes the environment texture is not facing or oriented in a direction that you want. To fix this, you can tweak the Z axis rotation slider. You want to avoid rotating using the X axis or the Y axis, as this will tilt the texture. Well, unless you have specific needs or reasons for doing this. Again, most of the time, you only need to use the Zapis rotation, right. Let's change the texture file to an outdoor scene. For example, Limpopo golf course. As you can see, this texture produces strong sunlight and sharp shadows. Glass rod lighting technique, which I often use is the combination method. Essentially, we use both the sky texture and environment texture together by joining them using a mixed node. For this, you can use two different approaches. The first approach is to use the mixed color node, create a mixed color node by pressing **** A, then type mix. Remember, it is the mixed color node, not the mixed shader node. We will discuss the mixed shader method after this. Max, you need to plug the sky texture color into the first color input slot and plug the environment texture color into the second color input slot. Then we can plug the result into the background node. In this condition, the factor of slider plays a very important role as this value controls which color is the dominant color. If you slide this all the way to the left or zero value, now only the sky texture is active and affecting the scene. The environment texture has no effect at all. Vice versa, if you slide this all the way to the right, now only the environment texture affects the scene as the sky texture is turned off. Usually, I use a value between 0.6 to 0.8 depending on the situation. Now, the problem with this method is that you cannot control the strength of the environment texture independently from the sky texture. The sky texture has this sun intensity value. But the environment texture does not have any. Yes, you can use the strength value in a background node, but this will affect everything, including the sky texture, not just the environment texture. Another approach is to mix the two nodes, not at the color level, but at the shadow level. For this, we can delete the mixed color node and then duplicate the background node by pressing CFB. So yes, we now have two background nodes. Connect the sky texture to the first background node and connect environment texture node to the second background node. We can disconnect this node for now. Next, we can press Shift A and then type mix. What we want to use now is the mixed Shader node, not the mixed color node. As you may have this already, we need to plug these two slots and then these two slots, and finally, these slots, right. Just as before, we can use this factor value to determine which shader is more dominant against the other. But unlike before, we now have the strength value to control only the environment texture node independent from the sky texture. All right. One final tip that I want to mention is about texture reference. The reason why we want to use this combination method is because we want to use reword environment texture, but at the same time, want to control the sunlight position. The sky texture already creates the sunlight and shadow, so you don't want the environment texture to create them as well. Otherwise, you will see two shadows like this. This looks fine for an indoor scene. But for daylight outdoor scenes, these double shadows just look strange. Let me change this to another XR file that does not have strong sunlight. For example, this one called Belfast Open field. As you can see, it looks more natural. So again, with the combination method, you want to use overcast or cloudy skies that creates soft shadows like this one or this one, and you want to avoid this one or this one because they have strong sunlight and visible shadows. 5. 01-03 Light objects: Starting with this video, we will discuss the light objects in Lender. If you want to follow along, you can open the file I provided in this file. I use a dark gray background color for work lighting. This is so we can see better lighting effects from the light objects. To create a new light object, you need to specify the location first using the T cursor, so hold Shift and then right click at this location, for example, and then you can press Shift E. If you go to the light sub menu, you can see all four types of light objects that Bender provides. They are point, sun, spot. An area. Let's create the pon life for now. Essentially, the point light is a light type that emits light rays from a single point into the space to all directions. The point light is suitable to simulate candles, camp fires, torches, light bulbs, et cetera. Again, any light sources that emit light ways in all directions. To control light parameters, you can go to the properties panel and an open light data tab, the one that has light bulb icon here, you can change the color of light. You can make it red. Yellow, green, et cetera. Then you seeing the power of value, you can control the intensity of the light besides emitting light rays from a single point. You can also make the point light emit light rays from spherical surface to that, simply increase this radius value. Using this slider or typing the value directly, we can set a very precise value, but sometimes we just want to tweak it visually into viewport. For this, you can use the Gizmo instead. Notice that the point light object shows a circular gizmo in the viewport. You can use this Gizmo by clicking and wagging it to control the radius value. The higher the value, larger light sphere is, thus making the shadows generated by the light softer. This is the basic rule that you always need to remember as this applies to all light sources. Again, the larger the surface of light source, the softer the border of shadows will be vice versa, the smaller the light source size, the sharper the shadow borders will be, all right? Now, when you have a quite large light sphere like this, and then the volume of light sphere intersects with a mesh object, you can control whether you want to have a harsh light border or a soft light border. For this, you can use this soft full of checkbox. If it is off, you will get a harsh or sharp light border. If this is on, blender will smooth out the light borders that intersect the mesh surface. The next four parameters are specific to cycles rendering. So you won't see these parameters or you will see other parameters instead if you are using DV rendering engine. We will discuss this reader in another video. For now, let's discuss the other light types. What is so great about light object in render is that you can easily switch the type from one to another simply by selecting the options at the top. So this is the sunlight type. This is the spotlight type, and this is the area light type, okay? The sunlight type is perhaps the most unique compared to the others. Why? Because its position does not affect the lighting. What affects the lighting condition is its orientation. So if you place this object inside a cube or even below the ground, for example, it will still illuminate the whole scene. Essentially, with the sunlight type, the light rays are coming from an infinite distance, not from the light position itself, and the light rays are all straight or parallel to one another. If you rotate the light object, now you can start to see the different lighting conditions. Besides using the rotation tools or shortcut, you can also rotate the sunlight object using its gizmo. It is quite small, but you can see a small yellow circle near the light object position. You can drag this circle around to set the rotation or the direction of the sunlight. What is great about this gizmo is that it automatically detects surfaces. What I mean is that if you drag the gizmo and then hover the mouse on a certain surface, Blender will automatically direct the sunlight to the point on the surface, which makes setting up lighting very convenient in blender. And the good news is this gizmo also exists in the other light types, not just the sunlight type, right? So again, to recap for the sunlight type, its position does not matter. Only the rotation matters now, you may be wondering, what about scaling the light? Well, you also don't want to scale the sunlight object as it does not affect its intensity unless when you scale it to zero, which makes the lighting behave strangely. So you want to leave the scale value to its default. If what you want to do is control the softness of the shadow borders, then you should use the angle value instead. Higher values mean softer shadow borders, while lower values mean sharper shadow borders. A is point, we now know that in Lander, we can create the sunlight effect using three different methods using the sky texture node using XR or HDR texture that has a strong sunlight effect. And the third is using the sunlight object type. But as I mentioned before, you do not want to have multiple suns at the same time. So although you can have all of these at once, you should just pick one method. Personally, I prefer the sky texture method, as I like to control all the environmental lighting in one as, which is the shaded editor, okay? The next slide object type is to spotlight. This type is almost like the point light, that is the light rays are projected from a single point in space, but it adds a cone shaped constraint. So it only focuses the light rays in a certain direction, as the name suggests, this type is suitable for simulating spotlights. You can also use it for down lights, flash lights, car lights, and so on. Essentially all lights that are constrained into a cone shape. As you can see, it has the soft fall off and radius parameters just like the point light. For now, let's set this to zero so we can see the cone shape effect better. To control the cone shape, you can open the beam shape category. We can use the spot size parameter to control the angle of the cone, and we can use this band value to make the shadow border softer. We can also visualize the cone by turning this checkbox on. If you prefer to control things using Gizmos, the spotlight type also provides supero gizmos that you can use. You can react from the center to resize the radius, but you can only do this if none of the transformation tools are active. Let's change the radius back to zero. You can react with circle Gizmo to control the light direction just like before. It also detects mesh surfaces, which is nice. And if you zoom out far enough, you can actually direct with circle Gizmo to determine the blend value, right. So that is the spotlight type the last one is the area type. This type is suitable for simulating light rays that are coming from an area the area itself can be a large flat surface, an opening or even a very long object. You can use this type to simulate windows, skylight roofs, rope ceilings, TV screens, and so on. By default, it uses a perfect square shape. That is why if you try to use the Gizmo to change its length, the other length or the width will also follow. If you need to have different width and length values, then you should use the rectangle shape instead. As you can see, this shape allows you to change the weight and length independently. With this rectangle shape, you can easily adapt the area light to fit any window size, or you can also simulate a very long LED strap. For example, if you want to be more precise, you can use the size input fields instead of the Gizmo. Say you want to create an LED strap 5 meters in length and one centimeters in width All right. Next is the disc shape. Basically, this will use a perfect circle as the shape. Currently, the size is too big as it uses all less input. Let's change the size to 40 centimeters for now. This size value is actually a diameter, not a radius, so the overall length and width of the light is now 40 centimeters. Last shape is the ellipse. This is basically an oval shape, so you can specify different values for the width and length. Now, if you try to move light, but you end up taking the gizmo, you may want to turn it off temporarily. For this, you may be thinking of opening the viewport overlays panel and then deactivating the extras checkbox. This may hide the gizmo, but not their functionalities. As you can see, if I move the mouse close enough to the gizmo border, it will still activated. So this is not the option we are looking for. What we need to access instead is the viewport Gizmo panel. Here, you can turn off the checkbox called active objects. Now you can move light object without any distractions from the Gizmo. Most of the time, I always turn the Gizmo option on. I only turn it off occasionally when the Gizmo gets really annoying. All right. The parameter you want to look at is to spread value in a beam shaped category. Essentially, this controls how spread versus how focused the light rays are. 180 degrees means that light rays will spread from side to side, creating a 180 degree angle. This is the default and maximum value. If we set this to 90, then the light rays will be constrained to form a 90 degree angle from side to side. If you set this to zero, then the light rays will not spread out. Instead, they will be perfectly straight. This can be very useful if you want to simulate lasers. As we all know, lasers travel in straight direction. Okay, guys, those are the four light object types that you can find in blender. We will discuss more parameters and techniques related to light objects in the upcoming videos. 6. 01-04 Blackbody: In this video, we will discuss the black body node for controlling light colors. In lender, you can set light objects to have any color that you want. This gives us full creative control over the lighting. This is great, especially if we want to create styles rendering or animation. However, this total freedom can be a bad thing if you aim photo realistic rendering. Why? Well, in the real world, most lens do not produce all possible colors that we can choose from the color picker. If you blindly choose random colors for your light object, most likely, you will end up with rendering results that are far from believable. In the real world, most lends produce a unique spectrum of light which is measured in kelvin. The lower the value, the warmer or the hotter the color will be. These are colors like red, orange and yellow. Vice versa, the larger the value, the cooler the color will be. In other words, more toward blue. Most people consider 6,500 kelvins as the center color or the neutral white. If you are simulating length objects and aiming for photorealistic results, then you need to confine your color selection only to this spectrum. To use these colors, you do not need to copy and paste the chart, as Blender already provides a special node that can generate colors based on calvin temperature called the black body. To use the black body node, first, you need to switch the light object into a node mode. For this, simply click the button down here that says use nodes. By doing this, the light object now incorporates an emission shader. We discussed the emission shader briefly before in the previous claps. If you open the shader editor and you have the object mode active, you can see the shader node structure here. Before we add the black body node, there is one very important thing that I need to discuss first regarding the node mode of the light object. Currently, the light object now has two color parameters and two intensity primeters. Please note that they are all active and affect each other. So if I choose light blue color on this color field, and the nouse an orange color on this color field, the resulting color is green, which is something that you may not expect. Also, both of the intensity values multiply one another. As you can imagine, these double parameters can be confusing to work with. If you use the note mode for a white object, I suggest that you set this color field to pure white. This way, you only need to control the color using the color field in the emission shader. But for the intensity, I prefer to keep the strength value of the emission shader at one. This is so any value you set in a power field will not be changed as it is multiplied by one. So again, for controlling the light color, you use this color field, and for controlling the light intensity, you use this power field. All right. To add the black body node in the shader editor, you can press Shift A and then type in black body or just black for short, and then hit Enter. Next, you need to plug this into the color input slot. Now we are using the Kelvin temperature to control the color. Input 6,500 here, we will get a white color. If we input 3,000, for example, we will get an orangish color, and if we input 8,000, we will get a bluish color. Let me delete the black body node for now. Sometimes we do not want to bother opening the shddar editor and just want to work inside the properties editor. For this, you need to click on this yellow circle and then choose black body from the pop up menu, and here is the color temperature field. As you can see, you'll get the same shedder nodes as before in the shedder editor. So that is how you use the black body node to control light colors. From now forward, I will mostly be using the black body node instead of the ordariclor picker. 7. 01-05 Cycles related light settings: In this video, we will discuss light object parameters that are related to cycles rendering engine. If you have cycles active and you select light object, you will see these parameters is below the main light parameters. First parameter is the maximum bounce. Essentially, this determines the maximum number of bonss that the light is allowed to perform. So again, setting this value to 1024 does not mean that the light will bounce off 1024 times. It will just cap the bonds to 1024. Now, you might be wondering, why do we need to cap the bonds value? Well, in the real world, light bounces around almost infinitely, or at least until it loses all of its energy. In computer graphics, however, you cannot have light bouncing around infinitely, as rendering will take forever to finish. What rendering engines do instead is use approximation. With just several light bounces, the rendering engine will try to approximate the final result as if it is bouncing off infinitely. Of course, the more bounces we set, the more accurate the approximation is making the final result closer to Rioti as with cycles, a minimum of four bounces is generally enough to get good looking results. So you don't want to go lower than four. Now, although the default value is 1024, which is the maximum number that you can get in vendor, the real number of light bonses is also determined globally by the cycles vendor settings. Essentially, whichever is the smallest, then light object will use that value. I know that we haven't discussed the cycles render settings, but just for an insight, you can open the vendor tab then in the light pads category, you can see the max bones subcategory. The most important light bonds parameter is the diffuse. This affects almost 90% of the lighting in your scene. As you can see, it is now set to four. This means that all the light objects are kept at four bonss only. Because of this, if we go back to the object parameters, it doesn't really matter if you set the maximum bonds value to 512, for example, or 232 or any number larger than four. But if I set these 23 or two, for example, you'll be able to see the difference if we set this to zero. Now, the light rays cannot reach the monkey head object. Again, this is the light rays need at least one, two bounces to reach it. Yes, you can still see the monkey head, but this is due to the gray background lighting, not because of light object. Okay? For now, let's just set this to the default by hovering the mouse on top of the slider and then pressing the backspace key on the keyboard, right? Cast shadow checkbox is used to determine whether the light object produces shadows or not. The result may look strange and may not be that useful for architectural visualization, but you may need this option for visual effects such as adding ridden lights or Black light effects or adding a certain lighting mood to the scene and the like. Next, is the multiple important sample checkbox. Essentially, this option helps reduce noise in your rendering, especially if you have seen contains large surfaces that emit light or when you have strong glassy reflections, I don't know any scenarios that you want to set this option off. So just leave this checkbox on all the time. Okay? For the caustics options, we will discuss this in more depth in the next lesson. For now, let's discuss the portal parameter. Note that you can only see this primeter if you set the light as an area type. A light types do not have this primeter. So what exactly does this primeter do? Simply put, this will make the area light only work as an opening that channels the light samples from the background or the world shader. So you usually use portal lights at windows, doors, or any opening that connects an interior space to the outside world. You usually need this portal option for interior scenes as it has almost zero benefit if you use it on exterior scenes. Please note that in portal mode, the area light does not produce its own light. That is why any color or intensity you specify on the light does not matter. They will just get ignored. Again, this is because currently the area light role is only to help reduce rendering noise by channeling light samples from the outside. You may get a slow rendering time when using the portal option, but in the end, because cycles concentrates the samples, you get cleaner results while reducing the number of samples required. Personally, I prefer not to use the portal option and just have the area light emits its own light. Why? Because with this, I can have finer and more independent control over each of lights coming through the windows, doors, or other openings in my interior scene. 8. 01-06 Caustics: In this video, we will discuss how to create caustic effects in cycles. So what exactly is caustics? Essentially, it is an optical phenomenon where the light rays become unevenly or randomly concentrated due to reflection or reflection of curved surfaces. You can easily spot custis around swimming pools or when you shine light through a transmisive object such as glass or bottle, but before we start anything, I need to remind you that cycles is very bad at producing caustics. This is not a problem specific to cycles, but a problem that all pat tracer based rendering engines have. Basically, the way pat tracers work is just not suited or not effective in creating caustics. Rendering time will be significantly longer, but the caustic effect generated is not great. Personally, I will avoid using cycles and prefer to use other rendering engines if the project requires strong caustic effects. What you want to use instead are rendering engines based on a photons technique or ones that can combine different techniques with the photon techniques. An example of such a rendering engine is LCR. Looks CR is an open source renderer that is available for blender. Another alternative is the octane renderer. This is a paid rendering engine developed by a company called Oti. These two rendering engines can generate caustic effects far better than cycles at shorter rendering times. Because of this limitation, Blender turned off the caustic effect by default. As you can see in the viewport, although I have transmissive material on a glass object, the shadow is just a solid black color as if the glass is made of non transparent material. If you want to turn on the acoustics effect in blender, you will have to tweak the settings in six different places. First, you need to access the global render settings, then the word settings, the light settings, the material settings, the object settings that emit the caustics, and the object settings that receive the effect again, even with all of these settings, you won't get good caustic effects. Let's discuss each of the settings one by one. First, let's open global cycles rendering settings. You need to open the light paps category. Then in caustics subcategory, you need to activate this refractive option. As for the reflective option, you can have it on or off. Basically, if this is on, you will get more caustic effects as reflective surfaces will also contribute to creating the effects, of course, at the expense of longer rendering time. For now, let's just turn this both on. Now, if you have an XR or a sky texture in the world shader and you want them to also contribute to the caustic effects, then you need to go to the world tab, find the settings category in the surface subcategory, turn on shadow caustics. The next settings, we need to tweak are the light object settings. Please note that caustic effects work best with smaller light areas or sharper shadows. So in our case, we can change the light type to a point light with zero radius value then the most important part is to turn on the shadocaustics option. Okay, so we have three settings done. The next place we need to go is the material setting to create a caustic effect. Of course, you need to make the material transparent or reflective. We can do that by increasing the transmission value. We have discussed material settings in depth in the previous class, so I won't go into detail explaining these settings again. After we have the basic material setup, the next important setting that you need to turn on is in the settings category. Then in the surface subcategory, you can see an option that says transparent shadows. Make sure this is turned on. All right. The next place you need to go is the object properties that generate the caustic effects. In our case, it is the glass object. In the properties editor, open the object tab, find the shading category, and then in the caustics subcategory, turn the shadow caustics option on. Finally, you need to select the object that will receive the caustics effect, which is in our case, this box object. As before, you need to go to the object tab, open the shading category, then the caustics subcategory. What you need to turn on this time is the receive Shadocaustics option. Finally, we have the caustic effect. As I mentioned earlier, cycle's caustic effect is not that great, at least, if you compare it with photon based rendering engines. 9. 01-07 IES: In this lesson or video, we will discuss AES. In blender, although the computer graphic software in general, by default, all light objects produce an even or uniform pattern of light ways. Those light rays then become uneven when they go through refractive materials or bones of non flat reflective materials. We discussed this in depth before in caustics lesson. That is why we can see caustic effects easily on glasses or around swimming pools and the like. But in the real world, although we may not see them clearly, caustic effects are actually more abundant. This is because the glasses or reflective surface online products itself cause caustics. So unlike CG, most real world lighting products generate caustic effects out of the box. For example, round LED bulb generates a different lighting profile compared to an oval shape, a decent conventional light bulb again, this is due to the caustic effects generated by the glasses of each product. Some products even have reflective piecings and irregular glasses or transparent plastics in front of the filament or LED miter. All these factors contribute to different and distinctive lighting profiles. If you want your rendering to be as realistic as possible, then you want to apply these irregularities in your lighting. But you do not want to model each of the glass parts and the reflective parts for every lamp products you want to use in your wondering, that would be too time consuming. And also, as we discussed earlier, cycles is not that good either in generating accurate caustic effects. The best solution is to use an IS file. So what is exactly IES? Well, in terms of name, AES is derived from the words Illuminating Engineering Society, which is Lighting Industry Consortium founded in New York City on January 10, 1906. So, yes, the name does not really help to describe what AES actually is. In terms of file definition, IS file is a file that describes how lights coming out from a certain lamp product are distributed or spread across three space. Some people also refer to these files as photometric files, light web files or web light files. Almost all lamp manufacturers already measure the light distribution from their products, and they usually provide these files for free for us to download. These IS files can then be used by lighting engineers to simulate how the line product behaves when installed on different buildings, structures, vehicles, and other scenarios. As to the artists, we may not need to simulate lighting ignitions accurately or in too much detail. But these IS files are certainly helpful for us to create more realistic lighting because they can prevent us from having to simulate caustic effects. You can search the Internet to find a lot of free IS files. You can even find AS files directly from the manufacturer's website. That is, if you need to simulate lighting of a specific product, for example, on the Zanine website, you can scroll down and download these serious technical files. This is basically a zip file with the IS file inside. Some lamp manufacturer websites have two different versions. One version is for general customers, and another is for resellers or partners. For example, if you open flows.com by default, you'll see this type of product pages for general buyers. You won't see any link to download the IS file. But if you click on Link Visit Professional space, you'll see a different page where you can find all the technical specifications about the product, one of which IS file. Please note that some manufacturers require you to create an account first before you can access their partner portal, right? This lesson, I already provide you with two IS files called art Is and defined dotIs. There are also PNG files that go along with them, so we can preview how DIS will look, even if you are not using any today software. Please note that I did not create these files myself. I download them from a website called Leomonstudios. Now, to use the NIS file in lender, first, you need to select the lamp object. Please note that although you can use any light type to generate an IS light profile, you should stick with the point light. We will discuss more on this leader. And then you also need to make sure that the light object is in the node mode. If not, then you need to turn on the use node option in this area. Next, inside the shader editor, you can press Shift A, then texture, and then choose IS texture or simply type IS then enter. After that, you need to plug the node into the strength input slot of the emission shader. Let me delete this for now. A faster way to do this is by dragging the strength input slot, then releasing the mouse, and then type IS and then Enter. Okay. Next, because we already have the code inside an IS file, you need to ooe the external option and then click the Browse button to select the file. Just open a folder where you save the IS files. Feel free to use your own files if you want to. Remember, you need to select the IS file, not the PNG file. Again, the PNG files are only for previewing. If you select the PNG file, the result will not be correct. Click Accept, and now you can already see the result in the viewport. Somehow, the result is a bit of. It is rotated and the intensity is way too strong. Let's tackle the rotation first. Essentially, the profile looks rotated because glam object is rotated. In vendor, IS profiles are always projected in the minus axis direction of glam object. If you activate the local coordinate mode, we can see that indeed the Z axis is looking this way, not straight down. Just as a reminder lamp object was rotated because in the previous lesson, we use the other light types and then drag this look at Gizmo around. So yes, you can direct an IS profile using this method. Just activate the other light types, move the look at Gizmo and then go back to the point light type. But for now, let's say we want a straight top down IS profile. To quickly reset object orientation in Blender, you can press O R. If you forget the shortcut, you can also open the object menu, then choose clear and then use rotation. As you can see, the shortcut for this command is OR. Another method that you can use also is by clicking on any of the rotation values in the item wright panel. Then just reset all default values. This will zero out all the values, which makes light object Z axis straight. Okay? So that solves the rotation issue. As for the intensity, first, you need to understand that most IS files already contain information about how strong light is. So most of the time, you should set the strength value here to one. And strength value here at one or one watt also. This should set the intensity to its default or follow the IES data. If later, you want to increase or decrease the intensity, simply use either this value or this value. You do not want to use both values at the same time as they multiply each other. Personally, I prefer to keep this value at one and just play around with the strength value in light panel. I think I'll go with five watts for now. The next thing you need to be aware of when using an IS profile is the radius value or the area size of glam object. If you want a nice sharp looking IS profile effect, you should always set the radius to zero or at least a very low number. If you increase the radius value to high, the result will become too blurry, making it look like an ordinary light without the IS profile. It beats the purpose of having the IS file in the first place. This is also the main reason why you want to stick with the point light type as other types have area or radius by default. The only exception is using the spotlight type. That is, if you want to clip fact of the IS profile. For this, you also need to make sure that the radius is set to zero or a very low number. Then to clip the effect of the profile, you can use the spot size perimeter, lower the number, the smaller the con angle, making more of the AS profile being clipped. If you want to see the complete AS profile, you should use the maximum number, which is 180. But even with this value, the point light type still shows a more complete profile if compared to the spot light. So again, you should stick with the point light when using AS files. Unless you want to clip the effect in such a case, then you can use the Spotlight. 10. 01-08 Material based lighting: In this video, we will discuss how to create lighting using materials, just to recap what we have learned so far. In blender, we can light or scene using three different categories world light objects and materials. In the world category, we can use just a simple background color, sky texture, environment texture or a combination of sky texture and environment texture. As for the light objects, we can divide light objects into four types, poin, sun, spot, and area. Finally, the third lighting category which we are going to discuss now is materials. Essentially, we use material as the light source to light or scene. In this category, we can use either the principal BSDF Sader or the Mission shader. We have discussed how to use the principal BSDF seeder as a light source in the previous class. We even discussed how to have finer control of the lighting using an emissive texture. So I'm not going to discuss it again in this video. What I want to focus on instead is how to use demision shader and different scenarios on when to use both methods. When you want to make a surface glow, but at the same time, you want to surface to have material properties such as reflection, glossiness, transmission, and so on, then you should use the principle BSDF shader. Just for example, you want to create a goose shader or a holographic effect shader. For this, you can turn down the Alpha value of the shader. And then increase the emission strength to make the material emit a bit of light into the scene. Another example, let's say we have this mirror model. We want to create an LED effect around the mirror, but we want it to be subtle and look like the LED is placed behind the glass, not in front of the glass. For this, we also need to use the principal BSDF shader. First, we select the faces on the face loop by holding out and then clicking on one of these edges. Create a new material slot, then sign it to distracted phases. Next, create a new material. To make the material look like a mirror, we can bring up the metallic value all the way to one and then set roughness value to zero. After that, we can increase the emission strength to make it emit light. If you still want to see a bit of refraction, you should avoid values higher than one. So 0.9 or 0.8 should do it. All right. Now, if you need to create a light source material, but you don't need any other material properties, then what you should use instead is the emission shader. Why? Because the emission shader is cheaper on a performance compared to a featured principle BSD of shader. So how can we create an emission shader then? There are two ways to do this via the properties editor and via the shader editor. For example, let's say we have a ceiling like this. And we want to add a hidden light in this area. First, select the pace or pass that will emit the lights, then create a new slot, assign the slot to the face, and then create a new material. By default, vendor always creates a principle SDF shader. To convert this shader into an emission shader, simply click here and then choose emission. This is one way to do it. Et me change this back to the principal BSDf shader. If you prefer using the shader editor, just let the principal BSDF node and then press Shift A and then type emission, then enter, and then plug this slot into the surface slot. After this, you can set the color to a black body node. That is, if you prefer realistic light colors, let's say, 4,000 kelvins, so it is a bit warm. And then you can play around with the strength value to determine the light intensity. Under this point, you may be wondering, what if we want to create a monitor or a TV screen? Can we do that also using the missive Shader? The answer is yes. But because we will be using a texture, you need to make sure that the model already has a correct UV map. We discussed how to set UV maps in depth in the previous class, just as a reminder. Let's say we want to create a UV map for this TV model, just like the phase that forms the screen part, then because we will be using the project from view method, press one to view the scene straight from the front view, then open the UV menu and then choose project from view bounds. We want to use the bond version so that the phase makes use of all the available UV space. Then just like before, we can create a new material slot and then a new material, assign it to the phase. Then change the Shader type to the emission shader. Next, in a shader editor, select the emission Shader node, then press Control T to create the image texture nodes. Click the open button, and then browse for the image you want to use as the texture. Then click the open Image button. Finally, you can use the strength value to control its intensity. And here's the result. It is almost the same as what we created in the previous class. But this time we use an emission shader instead of the principal BSDF shader. Okay, guys, those are different ways. We can use materials as flight sources in lender. 11. 02-01 Camera creation and transformation: From this lesson forward, we will discuss the cycles render settings. But to perform render in lender, you need to have at least one camera in the scene. Bender will just throw an error message if you try to render without any camera. Because of this, before discussing the render settings, we better discuss how to work with cameras first, just like in the real world. In lender or to the applications in general, a camera is a type of object that we use to define a view. To create a camera, we can use the usual object creation methods. We can open the ad menu and then choose camera or if you prefer the shortcut, you can press Shift A and then choose camera. The new camera object will be placed at a t cursor location. Let's move this camera so we can see it better. To see what the camera sees or to activate the camera view, you can press the zero key on a numpad in a camera view mode. You will see this dark overlay on the viewpoard. This dark overlay indicates the area outside of rendering result. So again, when you render, you will only get this square bright area. The square shape is due to the resolution values in the output format. Currently, I have the shape of a perfect square because I assign the same value to the X and Y fields. We will discuss more on its parameters later. This view mode, you can freely scroll the mouse well to zoom in and out. You can also press Shift middle mouse button to open the viewport. This will not take you out of the camera view. But if you try to rotate the view using the middle mouse button, you will go out of the camera view and back to the standard view mode. Activating the axis view modes such as stop, front, side, and so on, will also get you out of the camera view mode. Now if you are in a certain view and then you press the zero key to activate the camera view in this condition, if you want to go back to your previous view, you can do that by pressing the zero key again. If somehow you forget the shortcut, you can also activate the camera view by going to the view menu camera and then active camera. Or you can also click on this camera icon on the right hand side of the three viewport, right? Let's discuss how to control the camera object transformation. But before we do that, let's first divide the viewport into two parts. While the mouse is on the right part. Activate the camera view by pressing zero. Okay. You can move a camera object using the move tool or via the G shortcut. You can also rotate a camera object either using the rotate tool or via the R shortcut. As you can see, moving and rotating the camera object will affect the camera view. What will not affect the camera view is scaling. Scaling a camera object will only change its appearance in the scene, but it will not affect the camera view in any way. So most of the time, you don't need to use scale transformation on camera objects. Now, although using the global orientation is needed in most cases, you want to tweak the camera position or rotation in its local orientation. You can activate the local orientation mode and then move or rotate the camera object within this mode. However, I found this method not that convenient as we have to switch the orientation mode back and forth. A faster and easier way to do this is by using the transformation shortcuts right inside the camera view for this approach. You do not need to set the rotation mode to local. You can just leave it as global, but make sure you are inside the camera view mode. Also, you need to make sure that the camera object is selected. If you select another object and then press G, for example, that object will move instead and not the camera object. One easy trick to select the camera object while the camera view mode is by clicking on this rectangular border. If the border is yellow, you know that the camera object is selected. To move the camera on the X and Y local xs, you can simply press G. Again, as a reminder, your most cursor needs to be inside this view, not this view because this view is the camera view. If you use the G shortcut in camera view, the movement is locked to the X and why local axis. After that, you can left click to confirm or right click to cancel. If you want to only move the camera up or down after pressing G, you can press Z key once. Essentially, the camera is now moving in global Xaxis direction. In this condition, if you press Z again, this will activate the local Z axis constraint. Now, you can only move the camera forward or backward. This type of camera movement is also known as dolly. And if you press Z again, you are not back to the initial movement mode where you are moving the camera either in x or local axis. All right? The same concept applies to rotation. Basically, you can use the X, Y, and Z keys to constrain the rotation globally or locally. If you press R once, you are rotating the camera using local Xaxis also commonly known as roll. In this condition, if you press Z, you are now using the global Xaxis to rotate the camera. This camera movement is often called pen. And finally, if you want to tilt the camera, after pressing R, you can press the X key twice to activate local X axis constraint. Again, this type of camera rotation is commonly known as tilt. After you understand all of these transformation techniques, you know now that this secondary viewport is actually not necessary. So let's join these two back together. If you like to play games, especially for sports and games, you may already be familiar with the WASND keys for performing navigation. In Lander, this type of navigation is called the fly walk navigation. To activate this navigation mode, you can hold the shift key and then press the tilda key, which is the key just below the escape key. On my computer, I already assigned this command to a custom keyboard shortcut, which is the W key. I did this because I relied on the fly walk navigation lot, especially for navigating large scenes. While it is mode, you can use the W A S and D letter keys to move around the three d space and then use the mouse to look around. To move up and down, you can use the Q NE keys. While in this navigation mode, you can activate gravity and for collision detection by pressing the tab key. Just make sure that you have an object below your feet. Otherwise, you will fall down infinitely. If you want to cancel, you can right click. This will bring you back to where you were before. But if you happen to like the view, you can click or press leftmost button to confirm. Okay. Regardless of whether you know this flywak navigation or not, you may be wondering. So what does this technique have to do with the camera object? Well, if you are in a camera view and you perform the flywak navigation, you will not go out of the camera view. Instead, you are controlling the camera object via the Flywoknafgation method. To prove this, let's press zero to activate the camera view mode. Then while we mode, press Shift Tilda to activate the fly walk navigation. In my case, I just need to press W once. You can now move around the scene while taking the camera object with you. You can go forward or backward, left or right, up and down. And you can look around with the mouse. As you can see, we are doing all of this while never going out of the camera view mode. If you like how the view looks, you can left, click to confirm. But if you wish to revert back to the previous view, you can right, click to cancel. Another approach of controlling the camera position and rotation is to align it with the current viewport view. For this, we can use the shortcut Control O numped zero. For example, say, we rotate and zoom the viewport freely, and at a certain point, we really like how the view looks. In this condition, we can set the camera to align to this view by pressing Control out numped zero. As you can see, the camera just jumps and orients automatically to where we are looking at the scene. If you forget the shortcut, you can also access this command via view menu, line view, and then use line active camera to view. 12. 02-02 Resolution and the active camera: In this video, we will discuss the output resolution settings and after that, how to work with multiple cameras in lender. In the properties editor, you can open the output tab to access the resolution settings. Up to this point, we already know that the shape of the camera border is defined by these resolution X and Y values. I don't know if you consider this a benefit or not, but in lender, rendering resolution is a global value that will affect all cameras in scene. Some people do not like this concept and prefer to have different resolutions for different cameras. If you are one of these people, then you may be interested in using an official add on called P camera Resolution. You can get this from the extension repository in its course. We will be using the default behavior, so global resolution values for all cameras. All right? To see the resolution effect on camera, we can try different values. For example, we can set the X value to 400 pixels, then the Y value to 300 pixels. Basically, we now have a four by three image ratio, which is a landscape ratio. But if we swap the values, we set this one to 300, while this one to 400. Now we have three by four image ratio or a poultrt ratio. Note that when vendor performs rendering, it will take into account the percentage value. Usually, the way we use these parameters is that we set the actual resolution target on the X and Y values. But before we do the final render, we usually need to do a series of test renderings. To make tests or preview renderings, we can lower the percentage value to 75% or 50% and so on. Yes, the image results will be smaller, but the rendering process runs faster. Only after we are satisfied with the preview, we set this to 100% and then do the final render. You can also input higher values than 100% if you want to. Indeed, it only max out to 100% if you drag the slider. But if you click on it and then type 200, for example, now the actual rendering will be at 600 by 800 pixels, 200% horizontally, and 200% vertically. Essentially, this will make the actual pixels generated four times the previous, right? Now, I know that these numbers are not a common video resolution. If you want to use a full HD resolution, for example, you can type the values manually, which are 1920 on X field and 1080 on a field. An easier way to do this is by using the preset feature. To access it, you can click on this icon. It looks like a list. Sorry. Let me drag this down so the pop up menu does not block the parameters. So this is the full HD resolution. This is the HD resolution, and this is the four k resolution. Notice that selecting some of these presets will change not just the resolution, but also the aspec values and frame rate value. This aspect X and Y values are not the image resolution aspect ratio, but they are the pixel aspect ratio. You see in your old days when we still had large tube or CRT televisions, when we look closely at each of the cells in those monitors, they are actually not a perfect square. Instead, they are squash or elongated horizontally. So the actual size presented to the viewer is usually wider than the resolution we set. Different countries use different TV standards. In my country, Indonesia, we use the Pell standard. If you live in Europe and you are as old as I am, I believe you are already familiar with the Pell standard. But if you live in America, Canada or Mexico, you may be more familiar with the NDS standard. Nowadays, people are shifting away from traditional TV to YouTube or other Internet based video content. And also the pixels that exist or modern LED monitors have a square aspect ratio. So most of the time, you want to leave these aspect values to one by one. That is, unless you have specific reasons to target all television devices. Now, if you often use certain resolutions or frame rate values, you may want to consider saving those settings as a custom preset. For example, suppose you use 1080 pixels by 1080 pixels resolution with 30 FPS very often for creating sogran reals. You can save these values as a preset by clicking on a preset icon again, and then click on this field that says new preset, type the name of the preset, say, Instagram ten ATP, and then click on T plus button. Lender automatically orders the preset alphabetically. So you can find the new preset just after DH letters. If you want to remove a preset, simply press this minus button. Okay? The rest of the settings below are mostly for rendering and not so much for camera settings. So we will discuss them in later lessons. In a single scene, you can have as many cameras as you need. You can add more cameras using any of the create object methods. Or you can duplicate the camera using the Shift shortcut or the output shortcut. Or you can also duplicate the camera using the Control C and control with shortcuts inside the viewport or inside the liner editor. All right? Now, although blender allows you to have mini cameras like this, there can only be one camera active in scene. You can tell that the camera is active but its solid triangle on top of it. In our case, this is the active camera. Please note that the active camera is different from the selected camera. You can select this one, for example, but that does not make it an active camera. This camera is still the active camera. You might be wondering, why is understanding the difference crucial? Because when you press the Numpad zero key to switch to the camera view, Blender will use the active camera, not the selected camera. In a three D viewport, you can set a camera object as the active camera by clicking and then use set active camera. As you can see from the menu, the keyboard shortcut for this command is Control Numpad zero. Now this camera object has a solid triangle on top of it, so we know that this is the active camera. That is why if you press number zero, Brender uses it as the view. Personally, I prefer to use the outliner to select and activate cameras. You can tell which one is the active camera, but the small camera icon on the right side. If the icon has a dark color behind it, you can be sure that it is the active camera. So the left icon shows the selected camera. While the right icon shows which one is the active camera. If you want to set a certain camera as the active camera, simply click on the White icon. Notice that if you are in camera view, switching the active camera will automatically switch the view. 13. 02-03 Camera types and settings: In this last and video, we will discuss the camera settings. That is the settings that are unique to each of the camera objects. To access these settings, first, you need to make sure that the camera you want to control is selected. It does not have to be the active camera. But if you want to preview the changes right away in the viewport, you do want to make it an active camera, right? In the properties editor, you can find a tab for the camera data, the one that has a camera symbol. The topmost parameter is the camera type. There are three options that you can choose from perspective, orthographic and panoramic. Notice how the parameters below change as we change the camera type. Let's discuss the prospective type first. Most of the time, this will be the camera type you want to use as it simulates how common consumer cameras work in real world. The most important parameter of the prospective camera is the focal length parameter. This controls how wide the camera captures its surroundings. If you use cameras before, you may already be familiar with this lens millimeter value. The higher you go, the closer you zoom in on a subject, thus making the prospective effect almost gone and making viewer objects in the frame. Vice versa, the lower you go, the wider the viewing angle is making more subjects visible at the cost of stronger perspective distortion. Personally, I like to use values between 20 millimeters to 35 millimeters. Now, besides using lens millimeter value, Blender also allows us to use degrees for the camera angle. For this, you need to change the parameter to field of view. As you can see, now we are using degrees instead of millimeters. If you set this to 60, for example, it means that what the camera is seeing forms a 60 degree angle. So larger the value, the more subjects can be captured, but at the cost of stronger prospective distortion, while smaller values mean fewer subjects can be captured and with less prospective effect. All right. The next parameters are the shift values. We can use these values to add small offsets to the position of the camera frame. You do not want to use large values on these two parameters as that will make the rendering result look strange in terms of the prospective effect. If you want to make big changes to the camera position, then you should use the camera transformation instead. The most common usage of these shift parameters is when you need to create a two point perspective effect. This is very common in the architecture field when we have vanishing points horizontally or at left and right, but no vanishing points vertically. In other words, all vertical lines stay parallel to one another. If we switch to this camera, for example, when we position the camera quite low, while it is looking up, trying to capture the whole subject, inevitably, you will get these vertical distortions as the vanishing points kick in. To get rid of the vertical perspective, first, we need to turn off the camera tilting in Lander, as we discussed before, camera tilting is controlled by the local X axis. You do not want to set this to zero as it will look straight down to the ground. What you want is to set this to 90 degrees. Then you also want to make sure that they tilting is set to zero. The CSO D camera does not roll. For safety reasons, you can lock these two values to prevent any accidental changes. Now, even if we are controlling the camera by the fly walk navigation, the camera won't tilt or roll. Notice that currently the subject is not really in the frame. If you only use the zip position like this, you are changing the vanishing points. This is not what we want. Imagine if you have to render a skyscraper building, you do not want to have the camera positioned at the middle of its height. This is where the Chef Y value can come in handy. Without changing the perspective or moving the camera up, you can have the subject in the frame. We can also use the Shift X value if you need small adjustments in framing the object horizontally. And if the subject is still not in a frame perfectly, you can move the camera forward and backward. Alternatively, you can change the focal length or the viewing angle. All right. Next, other clip parameters. Essentially, we use these values to hide or cut off objects from rendering if they are too close or too far from the camera object, if I change the clip and value to perimeters, for example, and then drag the value up or down, you can see that all objects located farther away from the clip and value will get cut off or hidden. You can see the camera clipping effect in all the viewport modes. Currently, most of the back part of the house is missing or being clipped. Let's say this to 100 meters for now, so we can see the back part of the house again. Now, let's try turning down the clip start value. As you can see, all objects or surfaces that are closer than the clip start value get cut off. This feature is interesting, as you can use this to visualize the sections of a building quite easily without having to use the bull modifier. Now let's discuss the other types of cameras that vendor can offer. If you set the types option to orthographic, vendor will disable all perspective effects completely, making rendering result flat or look like two D. I think we can see the difference better with an aerial view camera. So this is the perspective mode. And this is the orthographic mode. As you can see, in orthographic mode, blender removes all vanishing points, making all parallel lines become truly parallel. This camera type can be useful when you need to render isometric floor plans, for example, you can also combine this mode with the clipping parameters to create straight or top down floor plans. Essentially, any rendering that looks like two D now, in autographic mode, you don't have the focal length or field of view parameters. What you have instead is an autographic scale parameter. If you increase this value, larger rendering frame will be. Please note that this number is actually in middles. That is, if you seen uses the metric system, so if I use ten, for example, its frame size is now 10 meters width by 10 meters height. Up to this point, you may be wondering, what if we use a different image aspect ratio? Say, we set the output X value to be half of the output Y value in Knesian, whichever is the longest will be granted 10 meters in length. So the frame height is now 10 meters, while the frame width follows in propultion which is 5 meters in its case, right? The rest type of camera is the panoramic type. Basically, with this type, you can render the scene as if you are using the 60 camera in the real world. Then supports many different types of panoramic rendering. But please note that you cannot preview the panoramic effect if you are in a solid view mode or the material preview mode. You need to use rendered view mode to see the effect. So this is the fish eye mode. This is the mirror ball mode. And this is the equirectangular mode. If this looks familiar, it is because most of the EXR or SDR textures available on the web use this equirectangular mapping mode. As you may have already guessed. Mostly, we use panoramic rendering results for further three applications such as VR, 360 videos, game environments, and so on. 14. 02-04 Sampling and Denoising: In this video, we will start discussing cycles render settings. As you may already know, we can access rendering settings in the properties editor inside the render tab. But before we do anything, just as a reminder, you should first set your rendering device correctly. To do that, you can open the preferences window and then open the system tab. If you are using an NVD RTX graphics card, you want to make sure you oboe optics and activate your graphics card from the list. Personally, I do not turn on my CPU as it can actually slow things down. Now, if you own an older NVDA card prior to DRTxs generation, then you can choose the Cod option instead. If you have an AMD graphics card, you want to choose the hip option. And if you use an Intel graphics card, then you want to choose the one API option. After you set the device correctly, you also want to make sure that in cycles render setting, you have GPU compute as the device. This makes sure that you have the optimum hardware acceleration for the rendering process, okay? To perform image rendering, you can open the render menu and then choose render Image, or you can simply press F 12 on the keyboard. After you run render command or press F 12, Blender will open a floating window to show the rendering result. You can press the X button to close the window and cancel the rendering process. But if you wait until the rendering is finished and then you close the window, you can still see rendering result in the image editor or simply by opening the rendering workspace. All right. As you can see, Cycles offers a lot of render settings that you can tweak. In this video, we will focus on the sampling category. Inside the sampling category. You can see two subcategories, viewport and render. Please note that you'll see a lot of these two categories, viewport and render throughout the render settings. Essentially, the viewport category affects the rendering that you see in a TD viewport when you set it to render view mode. While render category affects the final rendering or when you press F 12. Usually, you want the viewport settings to be lower in quality but faster. While in render settings, you want higher quality, although it is slower. The two most important parameters in cycles that you need to know are the noise threshold and the maximum samples. You see cycles is a path tracer rendering engine. In general, the way path tracer work is like this, first, it analyzes the camera view and divides or map it based on a target resolution or inaugrid of pixels, then to determine what color should be put on a pixel, the render engine shoots out a lot of rays from that particular pixel in a tree space in all directions. These rays are called samples. The more samples a pixel emits to the scene, the more accurate information that can be gathered. And so the more realistic the color assigned to the pixel, the maximum sample value determines the maximum number of samples that cycles is allowed to use for each of the pixels. Again, the higher the value, the more realistic or accurate rendering is, but at the cost of longer rendering time, the default value is 4,096, but usually you can get away with lower values for exterior scenes. You can safely set this to 1,000. As for interior scenes, you can safely use 2000 3,000 samples now, each pixel is not created equal. What I mean is that some pixels may require a lot of samples while others require fewer samples. This is where the noise threshold comes into play. By using this feature, cycles can stop processing more samples for a certain pixel if enough information is gathered. So it does not matter how high you set this maximum sample value. If a pixel has already had enough with sending 500 samples, for example, it will stop at that point. So as you can see, this value plays a very important role in speeding up rendering time intelligently. If for some reason, you do not want to cap the samples, you can set this value to zero. Alternatively, you can also just turn off this checkbox. In this condition, each pixel will emit samples the same amount as the value you set in maximum samples. Just be aware that the rendering time will be quite long. If you decide to do this personally, I always set this on. So how does this value work then? Simply put the lower the value, less forgiving cycles will be. And so the more samples are used, the higher the quality you will get, but at the cost of longer rendering time, vice versa, the higher the value, the more forgiving cycles will be, meaning that each pixell can have fewer samples, which results in lower quality rendering, but faster rendering time. There is no magic number that works for all scenes, but to get you started, you can use values between 0.01 to 0.1. 0.01 being the highest quality and 0.1 being the lowest quality, right? Besides limiting the number of samples, you can also limit the sampling process by time using this field. If you set this to 10 seconds, for example, then cycles will use whatever information it has already gathered after 10 seconds and finalize the rendering or continue to the denoising process if you have denoising turned. Personally, I almost never use this feature, so I just leave this field to zero. After the sampling process, the rendering result usually still looks noisy. That is why we need to use the noiser. Essentially, the noiser is a program that will scan the rendering result and then try to remove the noise from it. Most the noiser uses an AI model trained in many scenarios using a lot of images. Just for an example, it is an image that I rendered without any noiser. And here is the image with the noiser tendon. As you can see, the image before the noising looks quite noisy. Well, the image after the noising process looks smoother. Now, you may be wondering, can we render an image without a noiser? Yes, we can. We can turn it off if we want to compensate for the noise. You can then set the max samples quite high and also set the noise threshold to a very low number. But in my experience, you will need about one to 3 hours of rendering time if you want the result to be completely free from noise. So in most cases, that is, if you want to render in just a couple of minutes, you should use the noiser cycle support two different noiser engines. The first one is called optics, which is a noiser developed by NVDA. And the second one is called Openimage the Noiser which was developed by Intel. Before the openimage the noiser always performed better than optics. But since version 4.4 and Video upgraded optics, so now it performs better than open image, the noiser at the time of recording this video, you can only use optics if you have an NVD ArtaxGraphic card. So if you use other graphics cards, you can only use the open image niserEengine. For the highest quality, you want to leave these settings to their defaults. And if you want to faster the noising process, you may want to turn on this option. Again, this works on all graphics cards, including NVDA, EMD and intel graphics cards. The rest of the settings in the sampling category, you should just leave them to the defaults as they already work best for most scenarios. 15. 02-05 Max bounces: In this video, we will discuss the maximum bounces parameters to access these parameters. You need to open the light pads category inside the render tab. Let's first reset all these parameters to the defaults, so we have the same values to begin with. You can hover on any of the fields and then press the B space key on the keyboard. This is doable if you only need to reset one or two values. But if you have a lot of values like this, it would be better or faster to use the preset feature. Simply click on this list icon and then choose default. We've discussed value presets before. So just consider this aster reminder. Okay, as the name implies, the maximum bounce parameters control the maximum amount of bounces that the light rays can perform during rendering. The total value at the top will cap all these values below it. So if you set these to two, for example, then it does not matter if you set any of these values to three or four or even 100, all of them will be capped at two. So again, it is just a faster way to cap all the values globally. One value that will not be affected by the total value is the transparent maximum bounces. That is why the transparent field is separated from the rest of the fields. As you probably guess already, in general, the more bonss you set, the more accurate under result will be, but at the cost of longer rendering time. The most important maximum bons value is the diffuse. Essentially, this controls how many times light bounces when it hits diffuse or rough surfaces. This bonds also contributes to the color bleeding effect you can see a bit of green color on the floor object due to the green color of this block. Notice that the floor is actually just a plain gray if the green block is hidden. If you set this value to zero, then the light does not bound at all on rough surfaces. The only reason why we can still see the teapot under this green block is due to the wat lighting and also the reflection of glossy bonds. If we turn off the wat lighting and zero out the glossy bonds, now the teapot under the green block is completely black. All right, let me turn this back on and also set this to the defaults. The next one is the glossy bounds. Essentially, this controls the number of visible reflections in rendering result. Four means that we can see reflection as far as four bounces. In other words, we can see objects inside a reflection, which is inside a reflection, which is inside a reflection, which is inside a reflection. For example, we can see this tepod because the reflection way bounces two times. The first is on this mirror, and the second is on this mirror. If we lower the glossy bones value as we go down, less and less reflection bonss occur. By the time we reach one, we can only see direct reflections. Reflections that are inside other reflections will just be black. If we set this to zero, then no reflections will be visible, right? Next is the transmission bonds. In other words, the number of times light bends or turns due to refractive surfaces. If you have a refractive surface such as a glass panel, when a light goes through it, cycles does not count it as one transmission bound, but two transmission bounces. One, when it hits one side of the surface and two, when it leaves the other side of the surface. So if you have three glass panels stacked like this, you will need one, two, three, four, five, six transmission bones. Just to prove this, if I set the transmission bones to six, we can still see through them. But once we go lower like five, four, and so on, the less refractive panels that we can see through, by the time we reach zero, then all refractive objects will just look like solid black blocks. Next is the volume bounce. Essentially, it defines how many times lights can bounce around inside a volumetric object such as fog or smoke. By default, it is set to zero because in most cases, fog or volumetric objects already look nice without any light scattering effects. To show you what I mean, I have already created this cube object. I use Opencipot volume shader that is connected to the volume output. Let's go back to render view mode and I want one hide an object with an emissive material just so we can see the fog effect better. Okay? If you increase the volume bonds up, the fog will become denser because more lights are scattering around inside the volume. One scenario in which you can find the volume bonds is useful is when you decide to use a volume scattered shader. This is a simpler version of the principal volume shader. Because it has fewer parameters, it can be rendered faster by cycles compared to the principd volume shader. One important feature that is missing from this shader is the absorption color. And so if you use light blue for the four color, for example, and you have the volume bond set to zero, what you get in rendering result is mostly the opposite color which is orange, which is kind of strange. Well, these orange colors are not the foul color, but the shadow color of the fog. In this condition, you do want to increase the volume bounds value. As you can see, as you go higher, the more actual four color shows up in rendering. So again, if you use the principal volume shader, you may not need to increase this volume bonds value. But if you use the volume scattered shader, then you may want to increase the volume bonds value to get more realistic results, okay? Less perimeter is the transparent bonds. This is almost similar to the transmission bonds, but it works on shaders of a value rather than the transmission value. We have discussed the difference between Alpha and transmission in the previous course. Essentially, unlike transmission, Alpha does not generate refraction. The way we count transparent bonuses is the same as how we count transmission bonses. So if we have three panels of transparent material like this, we do not count them as three bonses but six bounces, one, two, three, four, five, six. If you change the transparent bonds value as we go down, after the value goes below six, we start to see some of the panels become solid or opaque, and when we reach zero, none of the transparent shaders are working. 16. 02-06 Clamping: In this video, we will cover the clamping feature in cycles. You can find parameters inside light pads category. You can see that there are two clamping priameters direct light and indirect light. Essentially, these primeters will scale down higher intensity light values in your renderings. This can be useful to avoid fireflies and also to reduce burnout or excessive white colors on the image. If you are not familiar with the term fireflies, in computer graphics, fireflies are small dots of noises that are very bright and very different from the other noises surrounding them. Most of the time, fireflies happen due to strong light hitting small areas of reflective surfaces. So it is often caused by bone lights or indirect lighting, and rarely do you get fireflies from direct lights? Please note that fireflies were mostly problems in the past when we didn't have the noisers since the noisers exist. I almost never experienced fireflies as they are intelligently removed by the Dniser. So nowadays, I just leave these values to zero, which basically turns off the feature. But because every th you've seen is different and has different challenges, there is no guarantee that your renderings will be free from fireflies, especially in the case where you don't want to use any noisers. So let's see some charts and render examples to give you a better understanding on how exactly this clamping feature works. Imagine that this is light intensity distribution in your rendering. Without clamping, all light intensities are possible to exist in your rendering. We do this by setting the clamping values to zero. Usually, fireflies happen in these higher areas. By turning on the clamping feature, we basically scale down a portion of the highlights in the hope of mitigating the fireflies, but at the cost of making the rendering look a bit dull. Basically any value larger than zero will turn on the clamping feature. If you set the values quite low, such as five or ten, then the result will be very dimmed or scaled down as large portion of highlights will be gone from your rendering. If you set the values high, such as 50 or 100, for example, result will be less dim because cycles only scale down a small portion of the highlights. But nonetheless, you understand by now that clamping is not an intelligent solution, as it will affect all highlights, not just the fireflies. Let's see some rendering result examples. What you see now is a scene of a kitchen with a Japanese style or Wabisab style to be precise. This is a design project from one of my clients in California USA. I chose this scene because there are four strong light sources from the cooking hood that shine on a reflective induction cooktop, stainless steel pot, and glass jars. Even the marble countertop is also a bit reflective. Basically, it is a perfect scenario for fireflies. Unfortunately, I do not have permission from my client to share this file with you. But for the purpose of lesson, I believe comparing the rendering results should be enough. For the first rendering, I use ten for both direct and indirect values. Notice how the lighting looks very dull. In the second rendering, I use 50 for both values. The rendering now looks a bit more exciting as more highlights are allowed. Next, I only use 50 for the indirect value and zero for the direct value. The rendering now looks so much better than before. Again, fireflies usually happen in the indirect lights. So most of the time, you should turn off clamping for the direct light. And finally, in the last rendering, I set both values to zero, making the clamping feature turn off completely. Now we get all these nice highlights on the curve reflective surfaces without any reduction. Let's compare the four renderings side by side. To recap, if you use a Dniser should always start by turning off the clamping feature completely. If you see some fireflies, try higher values first, such as 50 only to the indirect clamping value. If that still does not work. Try lowering the values and also try using the direct clamping and so on. These steps should resolve the fireflies problem in your rendering eventually. 17. 02-07 Fast GI Approximation: In this video, we will discuss the fast GI approximation feature. You can find the parameters in render tab inside light pads category. For easy pronunciation, I will refer to this feature as FGIA or just fast GI for short. By default, this feature is turned off. The main goal of FGIA is to speed up the rendering time by replacing or adding sharing information to the final render using an AO or Ambien occlusion technique. We learned about Ambien occlusion in the previous class. Essentially, they are soft shadows that you can see on surfaces when lights are coming from all directions uniformly. There are three important things that you need to know about FGIA. First, because it is based on ben occlusion, it does not care about the actual lighting condition of the scene. It does not care about whether there is a sun object or not, or if there are light objects or not, it will just create shedings based on surface proximity the second thing that you need to know is that it works on diffuse bonses. So this is the only maximum bonses that will affect or correlate with the FGIA settings. The third thing that you need to know is that FGA uses the average color of the environment to simulate the Ambien o csion. So if you have mostly blue color in your environment texture like what I have here, then you should expect a bit of blue tinting in your rendering when you use FGIA. All right? If you turn on FGIA, you can see that there are two methods available. Replace and add. Let's first discuss and use the replace method. Essentially, the replace method will take over the shading calculation from the paracer after a certain amount of fuse bounces. For example, if you set this to four and then you set this to two, cycles will calculate the light bonss on the few surfaces using the path tracer up to two bonses only. After that, it will finish up the rendering using the Vn occlusion method. So it does not matter how high you set the max bones value up here. Cycles will cut off the process based on the value you set down here. Please note that if you put zero here, it will turn off the phase GI effect. So you need at least one diffuse bound from the paracer before the MV occlusion takes over. Let's see some rendering results to better understand how this past GI feature works. Let's set the diffuse maximum bounds to six and render the scene without the past GI feature. This is the result that we get. You can see how the shadows and highlights look normal and realistic as all of them are generated by the path tracer. This render took 1 minute and 10 seconds to complete. Let's name this render result as original for easy reference. Now we can try turning on the first GI feature. Again, we will use the replace mode for now. We are only interested in render setting, so we can ignore the viewer bonss value. That set this to one and then hit a 12 render. This is the result that we get in this rendering. Cycles only calculates one duffus bonds using the Patraser method and then finishes up with the AO method. It does look smooth and clean, but certainly looks very fake. As for the rendering time, this one took 30 seconds to complete. So less than half of the original rendering. Now, let's increase the bonds value to two and render again. This is the result that we get. As you can see, it is slightly more realistic than before. This is because cycles did two diffuse bounces before processing the NV and occlusion. But as we expected, rendering time is a bit longer, which is currently at 49 seconds. Next, if you set the bounces to three, this is the result that we get. Notice that after three bounces and beyond, you will get good enough results that are almost similar to the original rendering. Of course, you can still spot differences if you compare the two renderings side by side. With only three bounces, the rendering time is now at 58 seconds, about 12 seconds faster than the original. For a single image, 12 seconds faster may not be a big deal. But if you are doing an emission where you have to render hundreds or even thousands of frames, every fraction of seconds that you can save per frame can add up significantly. Okay? So that is how the bones value works. Next is the AO factor. You can think of this value as the opacity level of the abnoclusion effect. But please note that in lender, AO or Aben occlusion is not applied to make images darker but rather brighter. So instead of adding dark shadows on corners or crevices, bender adds highlights on non shadow areas. And so if you reduce the AO factor, the image will become darker. This is the result with the EO factor set at 0.5, and this is the result with the A of factor set at 0.1. Notice that the brightness level of this rendering is almost similar to the original rendering minus all the small detail color bleeding effects. With clever tweaking, you can fake the rendering to make it look like the original but with a faster rendering time. Just as an example, I set the render bonss two for this rendering but set the AO factor to 0.3. It took 48 seconds to render this image, which is 22 seconds faster than the original. For most people or in most cases, I believe this rendering quality is more than enough. Especially if you add a bit of color correction in the pose to make it a bit warm, just like the original image. All right. The AO distance value is useful to 12 cycles, how far it should try to detect surfaces. The higher the value, the more accurate the AO calculation will be as it will detect and compare surfaces at larger scale. For example, both of these trend rings only use two bounces, but the left one uses 30 centimeters for the AO distance while the right one uses 100 meters. Now, if your scene is quite dense, such as when you have a lot of trees or other objects outside the area you want to render, setting the AO distance value too high may increase the rendering time. As a rule of thumb, I usually set the AO distance value to about two to 4 meters larger than the maximum height or length of the room. If the room's longest distance is 10 meters, for example, then I set this value to about 12 meters, okay? Finally, let's discuss the add method. What makes this method different is that it does not take over or cut off the diffuse bonds calculation. Instead, it will wait until all bond processes are completed. Only then it will add the Ambien occlusion shading to the rendering. That is why in this method, there is no amount of bonss that we need to set. It will just use whatever diffuse bonds we set up here. For example, if you want to perform rendering that uses two diffuse bonses and then use AO after that, you can set the diffuse max bones value to two and then make sure you set the first GI mode to add based on my tests. The AD method produces more accurate color bleeding than the replace method. Just to prove this, left is rendered using the replace method. And one is using the AD method. Both are said to only have two Duffus boonss. As you can see, left one looks a bit pale in comparison to the AD method. I'm not sure what exactly is causing it, but I am guessing that because the Ed method waits for the path tracer to finish its job before taking any action. Therefore, the image still gets all the color bones quality from the path racer. If you compare the rendering time, we can see that the ad method took a slightly longer time to render compared to the replaced method. So there are always some trade offs that you need to consider when choosing these methods. 18. 02-08 Film and Performance: In this video, we will discuss the film and performance categories in cycles render settings. The first parameter is the film exposure. Essentially, this controls the brightness of the final render by simulating the sensitivity of conventional camera films. The value ranges 0-10 with one as the default value. If you set this to zero, the resulting image will be completely black. And if you set this to ten, the image will be very bright with mostly overborn areas. Please note that in cycles, this is not the only exposure parameter that you can use. There are more similar priameters in color management category for controlling the overall brightness. Personally, I don't like using this parameter as these effects image data directly. In other words, once you set the value and hit render, you cannot change it anymore unless you redo the rendering. This is very different from the parameters that you can find in color management category. We will discuss this category leader in a different lesson. Next is the pixel filter. These parameters control the anti aliasing effect applied by blender to the rendering result. If you are not familiar with anti aliasing, essentially, it is a method of blurring the image to make objects look smooth and not jagged or pixelted. Anti lasing is a very important technique in computer graphics because all objects that we see on screen are represented by a bunch of pixels. If you want to render without any anti leasing, you can set the filter type to box. If mage resolution is high, it may be hard to see the leiasing effect, but if mage resolution is quite low or you zoom in close enough, you can see how the lines are jagged or pixelated. Again, this jagget effect is what we call liasing. I know this is not a good example because currently some anti leasing effects still happen due to the Dniser. Sometimes you do want to have iasing in your rendering. For example, when you want to create a pixel style at work in such cases, you may also want to turn off the Dniser most of the time, you want to use anti sing in your rendering. For this, you need to choose either the Gaussian type or the Blackman Harris type. Please note that the Blackman Harris algorithm is more recon and more advanced than the Gaussian algorithm. And so you always want to prefer Blackman Harris over Gaussian. The width value here determines the amount of blurring. Higher values mean softer edges, but at a high risk of losing more details from the textures. Lower values mean sharper or crispier edges and also sharper textures, but at the risk of getting more more effects on the rendering. More effects are unintentional patterns that usually show up when you try to display images with repetitive lines or patterns. Moyer effects may become even more noticeable in videos, especially if the resolution is quite low. Just for example, I render this image with a value of only 0.5 pixels. Notice this headboard area creates curvy patterns. You can see similar patterns on the shear curtain and also on the blanket. Again, these patterns are what is called the Moire effect. The default value for the perimeter is 1.5 pixels. This is the save value to avoid moire. But personally, I like to start with one pixel so that the texture in my rendering looks sharp. I only increase this value to 1.5 pixels if I see anocb more effect in rendering. The next important film parameter is the transparent. Essentially, this will remove all background or environmental colors from the rendering by making them transparent. This is very useful. In a case where you want to add your own background in photoshop or Krita. Just make sure you save the image in RGPA mode and not just RGB, and you also need to use a file format that supports transparency such as PNG or XR. You will lose the transparency. If you save the image in JP format, we will discuss more about image rendering in another lesson. Now, if you have objects with transmissive materials in your rendering, such as glasses, bottles or crystals, and you want them to also become transparent in render result, you need to turn this transparent glass option on. And if you do turn this on, you also need to tweak this roughness threshold value. Basically, only transmissive materials with roughness value set below this value will become transparent. Larger than its value, then they will be rendered as opaq pixels. As an example, if I render this scene with the film transparent option turned off, the background will be filled with environment texture. But if I turn on the transparent option, Now the background is gone. This way, we can easily replace the background with image using compositor or using external software such as Photoshop or Krita, for example. Now, if I set roughness threshold value to 0.1, only this object becomes transparent as the other materials have roughness value larger than 0.1. All right. Next, let's discuss the performance category. We will discuss compositing and compositor editor in later lesson. But for now, if you have a fast GPU and you want the compositor editor to perform faster, you may want to use the GPU instead of the CPO. Next, in the trends category, you can control how many CPU curds you want to utilize during rendering. Usually, you can just leave the setting to auto detect to let vendor determine what is the best number. Next, in the memory category, you can specify whether cycles vendors using tiles or not. Essentially, the tiling option will force the rendering process not to be executed all at once, but gradually using smaller areas one at a time. The purpose of tiiling is to avoid the rendering process from running out of memory. For example, let's say your graphics card only has one or 2 gigabytes of VM, and you need to render an image at 2048 by 2048 resolution because you have a lot of objects and textures in the scene. Every time you render, Blender crashes or displays a message system is out of GPO memory. By turning on the tiling and then setting the size to 512, for example, instead of rendering the whole image at once, cycles will render only a half quarter of the image. After it is done, it will process another area another area and so on until all areas of the image are rendered. Basically, the smaller the VM that your GPU has, the smaller the tile size you need to set to prevent cycles from running out of memory. Please note that because cycles needs time to initialize each tile. The more tiles you have, the more time you add to the overall render time. All right. Next, is the persistent data checkbox. Essentially, if this is on, render will reuse the data that is already in the memory for the next rendering. This is useful if you are using the same scene for multiple renderings, such as when you render from multiple angles or when you need to render emissions, you may not see the difference in the first rendering, but at the second rendering and beyond, you will notice that rendering time is shorter as vendor skips the initialization processes and keeps using the geometry and texture data that already exists in the memory. The last parameter is the viewport pixel size. Is setting only takes effect if you use render view mode on the three D viewport. If you set this to one X, Blender will render the viewport is based on the size of the D viewport on the screen. If you set this two X, Blender will double the size of the pixel, or in other words, making the viewport resolution of the size of Vifor thus making the viewport render faster. For X, we have the resolution again and so on. The default value is automatic. This means that it will follow the resolution scale of the UI. We've discussed the UI scale before. Just as a reminder, you can open the preferences window and then open the interface tab, and here is the resolution scale value. 19. 02-09 Color Spaces and Display Transform: In this lesson video and several following videos, we will discuss the parameters inside the color management category. But before we can use these parameters correctly, we need to understand the basic concepts of how color spaces and display transform work in Lander are on computer graphics in general. In the real world, the range between dark and light is very, very wide. The darkest value is when there is no light at all. For example, if you are trapped inside a vacuum tight box and round in the bottom of the ocean in the middle of a cloudy night, in this speech Black condition, our eyes cannot see anything as if we are blind. As for the brightest value, theoretically, it is an infinite value, but in reality, for us living on planet Earth, the brightest light that we can see is the sun. There is no man made light that can beat the brightness of the sun. In fact, if you stare at the sun too long, you may end up damaging your eyes or become blind at wars. So there is lighting condition in the real world. In computer graphics, we call these light range definitions as color spaces. All right. Now, if we compare the real world color space to color spaces inside display devices such as TVs, computer monitors, smartphone screens, and so on, most display devices use a color space called standard RGB or S RGB for short. In algebical space, each channel consists of only eight bits or eight slots of data. At the machine level, computers only know binary values. So each of these slots can be occupied by either zero or one. If we convert the binary values to the symbol, the minimum number will be at zero, and the maximum number will be at 255. So again, for eight bit per channel image data, each of the channels, red, green, and blue can only have a maximum value of 255. As you can imagine, our display devices color space is too limited in comparison to the lighting range in the real world. Because of this limitation, all technologies that try to capture real world imagery need to compress the lighting information so they can be viewed comfortably on display devices. Without this compression. We can only see a small portion of the lighting conditions that happen in the real world. This light range compression process is what we call tone mapping or also known as vio transform. As CG professionals or digital artists, we need more flexibility in our workflow. Working inside an eight bit per channel color space is too limiting and not ideal for many cases. That is why higher bits per channel color spaces were created. This is what we call HDR or high dynamic range color spaces. Simply put, these color spaces use more bits per channel than just eight bits, allowing us to work with wider lighting information. The most common values are 16 bits per channel and 32 bits per channel. One important fact that you need to know is that cycle's rendering engine does not work in algeblspace, but in a high dynamic range color space with a maximum depth of 32 bits per channel. So in order to view the rendering result on the monitor screen, vendor needs to perform a view transform. This is what the color management category is all about. Again, to recap, we use the parameters in this category, so we can see the rendering results nicely on these pay devices or when we need to save them to RGB image formats such as PNG or JPEG. Before we continue to the next lesson, it is best to name things with the same fa names used by Blender developers and are stated in a blender documentation. For color spaces, the high range color space used by cycles when wandering is called linear color space. It is called linear because light range can expand or contract depending on lighting complexity of the scene. If, for example, you only have one light object in your sin with a very low intensity, light range will be quite narrow. But if you have multiple light objects with different intensities, light range will become wider. The light range can expand very wide until it reaches its peak at 32 bits per channel. Next, the target color space is called Image color species. It is called this way because Blender subots not only the RGB color space, but also other display color species that may not be as common as SRGB, as for the tone mapping process, Blender calls it Vo transform, but sometimes also calls it display transform. Please remember these terms as I will be referring to them quite often in the upcoming lessons. 20. 02-10 Color management basics: We will continue discussing the color management category. We have discussed the underlying concepts of color spaces and display transform in the previous lesson. Now, we will cover the basic color management primeters the first parameter is the display device. Here, you can tell Blender what type of display device you are using. Again, almost all computer monitors or display devices on the market use the SRGV color space. So most likely, you don't need to change the setting. But if you are using an Apple product or a computer, you may want to change the setting to display P three. This is the standard color space used by most Apple devices. If somehow you prefer to connect your computer to a very old CRT television, then you may want to ooe the Reg 18 86 option. All right. Nowadays, there are already display devices that cannot put more than eight bits per channel. These high end monitors are what we call HGR displays. If you happen to use this kind of monitor to really make use of its potential, you may want to use the Reg 2020 option. After that, you also need to go to display subcategory and turn on the hid crane option. Currently, I am just using a common or non SDR monitor, which is why this option is disabled. I am also using a PC, not an Apple computer, so I just the setting to SRGB. Vendor has a video editing editor called the video sequencer. By default, it uses DF RGB color space, which is enough for most cases. But if you want to edit videos using the video sequencer, while your videos or images are in HDR color spaces, you can also set the sequencer to use HDR color spaces. As you can see, vendor supports many different color space standards. With wider color spaces, color correction, cross fades, and other operations in the sequencer can produce different results. The next parameter is the mode for the view transform, also known as tone mapping in other software. Remember that cycles renders the seen in SDR color space independent of the target image color space. So this view transform is applied after the rendering or on top of the rendering result non destructively. This is great because we can see and change the effect without having to redo rendering. We can even see the effect while rendering is in progress. Just press F 12 to render an image. At an open rendering workspace, notice that this workspace also has the properties editor on the right side by default. As you can see, you can change the parameters in color management category and see the result immediately on image editor. Cycles provides different modes for view transform. You can read the documentation if you want to learn each of them in more detail. For now, I will try to explain them as briefly as possible. In most cases, you want to use the AGX method, as this is currently the most advanced view transform mode. It was designed to replace its older version, which is called filmic. So again, instead of filmic, I suggest that you use AGX instead, okay? Now, if you wish to perform further color grading on rendering result inside a video editing software such as the Vinci resolve or Adobe Premiere Pro, then you may want to use the filmic log mode instead. Log stands for logarithmic. Long story short. This mode compresses the dynamic range of an image to try to capture as many shadows and highlights as possible so the leader users have more flexibility in the color grading process. As you can see, the image looks very unsaturated and under contrast. Because it is not designed for final output, but rather for further refinement. If you remember the predator movies, the predator has different viewing modes, one of which is the hit map. Well, you can create that type of visual in blender using the false color view transa mode. Just be aware that the noiser usually screw up the result. So I suggest that you turn off the Dniser if you do want to output the hit map from rendering. The corns I neutral, will try to preserve the colors of the textures so that they match the original colors. Mostly, you only need this vo transform when the original texture color is important, such as when doing product renderings. If the customers need to know the color of the product or certain part of it, they can pick the color directly from the product renderings. Last one is the standard mode. Although it is named standard, this is not the default mode and you should not use it in common rendering scenarios. Essentially, this mode does not do any tone mapping besides applying this by D five setting up here. This is useful when you are rendering non photorealistic results. For example, if you use workbench engine and you want to output the exact colors you set in color pickers, all right. After you pick the view transform mode, you can then choose the low presets. The name of these presets should explain themselves. This is a high contrast preset. This is the medium preset, and this is the low contrast preset. Please note that different view transforms may have a different set of low presets. For example, you can find punchy or gray scale presets in AGx, but you won't find these presets in a filmic log mode. The last two parameters are the exposure and Gamma. We discussed exposure before in a film category. I basically, these primeters control the brightness of the rendering, just like the exposure in a film category. What makes these two primeters way better is that they work on a view transform level, not directly on rendering result data. So you can perform render and then after that, adjust these two parameters without having to render the image. Most of the time, you only need to adjust the exposure level without the Gamma. The depth of exposure value is zero. The lower you set the value, the darker the image will be, while the higher you set the value, the brighter the image will be. The gamma pameter below it used to be different. Instead of zero, it uses one as the default value. Most of the time, you do not need to tweak this primeterUnlike the exposure parameter, which moves the whole range of rock and values of the image, the Gamma primeter only moves the mid tones. Notice that, as I slide this value left and right, the bottom value or the darkest point and the top value or the brightest point stay the same. Only the colors between the two are changing. The best way to use these two parameters is that you want to focus on the exposure first until you find the best spot possible. Only then, if needed, may you add a bit of adjustment using the Gamma parameter? 21. 02-11 Curves and White Balance: In this video, we will discuss the last two parameters in car management category, which are curves and we balance. Just like the exposure in the gamma parameters, you can use the curse feature to control the brightness of the rendering result. What makes it different is that you have final control over which level of brightness you want to increase or decrease. By default, the curse feature is turned off, so you need to turn it on to be able to use it. This diagonal line represents the brightness level of the image. This is the lowest value or black, and this is the brightest value or white. Currently, we are working in color mode. So this curve affects all three channels or G and B. You can control only the red channel, the green channel, or the blue channel if you want to. The way they work is basically the same. So let's just focus on color mode. The way we use this curve is that we need to create control nodes by clicking on a curve line and then move it up or down. Let's just call these control node points for easier pronunciation. If you move this point up, then all of the midtones will become brighter. If you move it down, then all of the tons will become darker. Now, if you do this, this is basically the same as tweaking the game of value up here. So if this is the only thing that you want to achieve, then using the game of parameter would be enough. The true power of the curves lies in having custom brightness distribution utilizing multiple points. Say you want the dark colors near black to be a bit brighter for this, you can create a point near the black node and then drag it up a little. If you want this area to be darker instead, you can just drag it down. Another example, you want the areas near white to be slightly brighter. For this, you can create a point near the white node and then drag it up. If you drag it down, it will become darker. You can create as many points as you like by clicking on a curve. If you click on an existing point, you are selecting that point. You can change the type of the selected point by choosing one of these options to remove a point, you need to select it first, and then click on this X button. If you change your mind and want to reset the whole thing, you can simply click on Reset button. So that is basically how you can use the course. Next, is the white balance feature. Just like the course. This feature is also turned off by default, so you need to turn it on to be able to use it. Essentially, white balance is a visual processing that you can use to neutralize the colors from being affected by the lighting. Just to give you a bit of context, if you go outside in the early morning, you may not notice that everything looks a bit bluish. As soon as you take a picture using a camera or smartphone, you realize that the colors are indeed bluish or are mostly cool in terms of temperature. Well, that is, if you turn off the white balance filter in a camera the same thing happens when you are inside the room where most of the lamps are in warm colors. If you take a picture in this condition, the result will be yellowish or oranges. Our eyes or our brain to be precise can adapt to these sliding changes quite well. So up to a certain level, we can still tell that certain surfaces are actually white or gray, although they look bluish or yellowish. When producing photos or computer renderings, sometimes we want to help the viewers overcome the lighting conditions and see the colors in their natural state. This is what white balance is all about. Basically, we are shifting the neutral color reference from the standard 6,500 kelvin water temperature values. You can do this manually by dragging or in putting the temperature value here. Please note that because we are not adding color temperatures to the image, but specifying the white point. This value works in reverse. Values lower than 6,500 will make the image cooler, while values larger than 6,500 will make the image warmer. Additionally, you can tint the white color reference by shifting the color using the slider. Personally, I always prefer the easier and automatic way to control white balance, which is by using the eye dropper tool. With these two active, all you need to do is select the surface area in rendering that you consider to have a neutral white color. In this case, we can use the central ceiling area. As you can see, blender automatically finds the best values for us, and so now the colors in the image look more neutral. This is before, and this is after. Using the eyedropper tool, be careful not to choose the wrong white color reference. If you pick the word color as reference, for example, the overall image tone will become bluish or cool. Vice versa, if you select the blue sky outside, that will make the overall tone wrong or oranges. So again, make sure the color that you pick is white. 22. 02-12 Image editor and Render Result: In this lesson video, we will discuss the image editor and render result. Up to this point, you should already know how to render an image in ender. Just to recap what we have planned so far, to render an image, first, you need an active camera. You do not need to set the three D viewport as the camera mode, but this is certainly helpful to make sure the view is correct before we render it. For this, you can press zero in Numpad. Next, in the output tab, you can set the size of the image you want to render. Then in Render tab, you can tweak the render settings as needed. Finally, you can press F 12 to start the rendering process. When rendering, Blender opens up a floating window where you can see the image going through different rendering processes. You do not want to close this window as that will cancel the rendering. If you want to go back to Blender's main window, you can minimize this window instead. The image that is being rendered is also available in rendering workspace. If you do want to cancel the rendering that is still in progress, besides closing the floating window, you can press this x button in status bar of the main window or simply press the escape key. If you wait until rendering is completed, you can safely close this floating window. Again, rendering result will still be available in rendering workspace. Notice that the largest UI area in rendering workspace is an editor called Image. As with any other editors, you can access it from any workspace by clicking on laptop icon of any UI area and then choose Image editor. Notice that the shortcut for this editor is Shift F ten. Let me switch back to the TD viewport. As the name suggests, this editor is used to view images, all images that are active in scene, such as PBR textures, environment textures, and rendering results can be viewed using this editor. Besides accessing active images in the scene, you can also create a new blank image and open an image that exists on your computer. But for now, we won't be discussing these two features. To open an active image, simply click on this dropdown list. You can scroll the mouse to find the image that you want to view. If you click on it, vendor will open it in the image editor. You can zoom and pen the editor like any other editor in vendor. Now, if your scene contains hundreds of images, scrolling and trying to find the image manually like this would be too time consuming. Notice that, when you access the drop down list, by default, the text cursor is already inside the search field at the bottom. So you can quickly type in the filename or just part of the filename. For example, if I type in metal that will filter the list to only show texture files containing the word metal. You can also type in the file extension. For example, EXR. This will filter the list, only display the XR files. I am sure you get the idea. Now, from all of these images, there is one image that is unique called the render result. This one is unique because this is not actually an image file, but rather a special container for images rendered by blender. By default, the render result is opened when you open rendering workspace. But in case you open other images in this editor to bring the render result back, simply type in render and then press Enter. Another thing that is unique about render result is that it has eight slots of images. These slots are useful when you need to compare one rendering result with another. Please note that when you perform image rendering, the result will be placed inside the active slot you set in render result. Just to prove this, let's say we activate slot number two to produce a different result from the previous render. Let's make a new material for the wooden threads. And make the color light blue or inigo Okay. Now we can press F 12 to perform image rendering. Wait until it is done and here is the result. Modussablender uses the second slot for this rendering, not the first one because it was the one we activate before rendering. So again, this is the first rendering we did earlier stored in slot number one, and this is the second version stored in slot number two. Please remember that these rendering slots are stored in the system memory, not on your storage devices. In other words, if you do not save them and close the vendor file, they will be gone forever. It is not enough to use the save command in the file menu, as that will only save the through the scene or the blend file to save run results as image files on your computer. First, you need to select the slot you want to save, and then open the image menu and then choose saves. The bottom field, you can set the name for the file, and on the right side, you can set the settings for the file format. By default, these settings follow the settings you have in the output panel. You are free to change the settings or image that you currently want to save. But if you have a lot of images that you want to save using the same settings, you may want to change the settings first in the output panel. This way, you don't have to keep changing the settings again and again for every image you want to save because the video is already quite long, we will discuss the file format settings more in depth in the next video. A 23. 02-13 Image file formats: In this lesson video, we are going to discuss different image file formats that you may want to use to save your rendering results. I'll be using the bender file from the previous lesson. If you are an image editor and open the image menu, then choose saves. You can find the settings for the image file format at the right side. You can also access the settings in the output tab in the properties editor. If you click here, you can see that there are many image file formats supported by blender. You can wait online if you want to dig deeper into each of them. This video, I will only cover the four most popular image file formats, especially amongst CG artists. The first one is JPG, also known as JPEG. JPEG is the oldest file format compared to the other three formats. It only supports eight bits per channel. That is why you won't find any options for the bit depth when saving in JPEG format. When storing image data, JPEG compresses the file size by sacrificing the image quality. These types of compression method are called lossy compression. In blender, you can use the quality leather below to control the compression. Again, higher quality means lower compression and larger file size. Lower quality means higher compression and smaller file size. Please note that JPEG does not support alpha transparency. That is why there is no RGB option in color category. You can only find BW for gray scale colors and RGB for colors. The second most popular format is PNG or sometimes pronounced as pin. PNG has many variances. You can use the common eight bits per channel, or you can also use 16 bits per channel. So, yes, you can save more color information from cycles when doing results using 16 bits per channel. In terms of data compression, PNG uses voiceless compression method, meaning that it always preserves the original image quality the compression slider here only determines the file size against the processing time. This does not affect the quality, as the quality is always at 100%. The higher the compression, the smaller the file size is at the cost of longer time needed by blender or other software to write and read the file. Vice versa, the lower the compression, the larger the file size is, but software will be able to write and with the file faster in terms of transparency, PNG supports Alpha transparency. That is why you can find the RGB option here. As a reminder, RGB stands for red, green, blue, and Alpha. The RGB channels control the color. While the Alpha channel controls the transparency, the third most popular image file format is open XR or just XR for short. Unlike the previous two formats, this file format is designed to store high dynamic range images. You can save the image as 16 bits per channel or 32 bits per channel. With 32 bits per channel, you are basically able to store all the rendering result data produced by cycles in terms of compression. EXR is not constrained to only one algorithm, but it is compatible with a wide range of compression algorithms. Just be aware that the ones that have word loss mean that they will degrade image quality, just like the JP compression algorithm. So this is something that you need to be aware of lastly for transparency, as you can see, it can also contain Alpha transparency. The last image format we want to cover is web P. Web P is the new kid on the block. The biggest advantage of web P is its speed. It is relatively smaller and faster than both JPEG and PNG, making it an ideal image format for web pages in terms of compression. I supports both loves less and Los methods. If you set the quality to 100%, it will use the lossless compression method, but if you set the quality lower than 100%, it will use the Los compression method. WebP also supports alpha transparency. However, web P is not designed to store high range images, so it only supports eight bits per channel, just like JPEG. The biggest disadvantage of using WebP is its compatibility because the file format is fairly new. There are still many softwares that do not support it. But this condition is rapidly changing as I'm making this video. Hopefully, by the time you watch this video, all graphic software in the world already supports the WebP file format. Now, the question is, what is the basic strategy for using these different file formats? Well, if you want to save rendering result for backup purposes or for further editing in the SRGB color space, you should use the PNG file format. But if you want to further edit rendering result in SGR color space, then you should use the XR format. If you need to publish the image to the web or for your client to preview, then you can use JPEG, as this is currently the most widely used file format. In the near future, expect to use the web file format more often, as this might be the format to replace JPEG. 24. 03-01 Compositor basics: In this lesson video, we are going to discuss how to use the compositor. Essentially, the compositor is a node based editor that we can use to perform post processing on rendering results. So yes, in order to use the compositor, you need to perform render first. Otherwise, the compositor has nothing to process. After you have a rendering, you can open the compositor, just like any editor in Bender. You can switch UI area to become a compositor by clicking on the top left corner icon and then choose compositor, or you can just open workspace called compositing. As you can see, the main editor of this workspace is the compositor. We won't be discussing imion so we can minimize the drop sheet and the timeline areas at the bottom. Now, if you don't see any node in a compositor, make sure that the use node option up here is turned on, and then you can press the home key on your keyboard to zoom extend the default nodes. Regardless of the version of vendor you are using, you should be able to see at least two nodes, vendor layers, and a composite node. Because the compositor is basically a node editor, just like the shader editor or the geometry node editor, it works from left to right. In other words, the input starts from left side, then process, and then the output ends on the right side. The render layers node here is the representation of render result or images generated by circles or the rendering engine. While the composite node holds the compositing result. Currently, both display the same image as there is no process between the two nodes. The image data just goes straight from vendor node to the composite node. To see anything different in a composite node, we need to add some processing nodes in the middle. Just for example, press Shift A and then choose color and then color RAM. Place this in the middle. Vendor will automatically chain the connectors or plug the slots for us. If you remember the second course where we discussed material and UV mapping, we used a color ramp node before inside the schedule editor in one of our projects. Well, the color ramp node in the compositor works the same. Basically, this node will map the darkest color to the color on the left, which is black and map the brightest color to the color on the right, which is currently white. Anything in between will just be gray scale colors. Now, the compositor should display a different image than the original rendering result. But how can we see the compositing result then? Well, bender provides many different ways to do this. If you go back to the rendering workspace, the stat in the image editor, that is, if you have render result active, you can see a drop down list. The view layer option here is actually the render layers node inside the compositor. While the composite option here is actually the composite node in the compositor. That is why it is in gray scale due to the colorm processing. Let's note that sometimes the composite image in rendering workspace takes longer to update. So don't be surprised if you make changes in the compositor, but it does not do anything in rendering workspace. This is because bender does not seen data between workspaces in real time. Again, it will update eventually just not instantly. For now, if you want more instant feedback to preview the changes, there are at least two ways to go about it. The first method is to use the composite node together with the image editor. Currently, it can only work if both editors are in the same workspace. The second method is by using a different node called the viewer node. With this special node, we can use the backdrop feature while inside the compositor. Let's discuss the first method, and then after that, the second method. To keep using the composite node and image editor, you need to split this area and then activate the image editor in one of them. Make sure you have run result active, and you also need to set the view layer mode to composite. Now, any changes you make in the compositor, will reflect instantly on the image editor as they are both in the same workspace. Just for example, say we change the left color stop to green. And not color stop to yellow. As you can see, the changes happen immediately in the image editor. All right. Let me minimize this area for now. The second method to view the compositing result is to use the viewer node. To use this node, you can press Shift A, output, and then ooe a viewer. You need to plug in a node to be able to view it. The node can be the same as the composite node. If you have the backdrop uption turned on, you can see the composite result directly in the background of the compositor editor. So, again, this backdrop feature only works if you have a viewer node active. Just to prove this, if I disconnect the slot, the backdrop now only shows a black color. Let's delete the viewer node for now. A faster way to create the viewer node or to move it to other nodes to preview them is by using the Shift Control and click method. So if you hold Shift and Control and then click on a Color Ramp node, vendor will create a viewer node that connects to that color ramp node. But if you hold Shift Control, and click on render Layers node, the viewer node will move and connect to that node instead. This causes it to display your original image, not the compositing result image. Essentially, with this Shift Control and click method, you can quickly review any node in the compositor. If you have complex compositing nodes, you may find it a bit hard to see the backdrop as it is being blocked by the nodes. Performing the usual navigation methods such as middle mouse drag and scrolling only affects the nodes, not the backdrop. To navigate the backdrop, the shortcuts are a bit different. To zoom in and out, you can press the V key on your keyboard and read out shortcuts for zooming out, and V for zooming in. As for painting the backdrop, you can hold the key and then rag using the middle mouse button. Another way to navigate the backdrop is by clicking on the viewer node to make it active. While in this condition, you can move your mouse cursor on the corner or the border of the backdrop image and then rag it to resize it. You can also move the image by dragging the middle point that looks like an X symbol. Okay. Personally, I prefer to use the Image Editor to preview both the composite or viewer nodes. So let me first turn off the backdrop and let's bring back the image editor. Currently, the image editor shows the composite node, not the viewer node. To make it show the viewer node, simply click on the top drop down list, type in viewer, and then press Enter. Now what we are seeing in image editor is the viewer node, not the composite node. Up to this point, you may be wondering. So what is the difference between the composite node and the viewer node then? They both seem to do the same thing. Well, for image rendering, both nodes are equally capable. What I mean is that you can also save the image while in a viewer node mode. Just open the image menu and use the save Asman, the same as you would save the image in other modes. The real benefit of using the composite node is when you need to save multiple images such as hundreds or even thousands of images during animation rendering for each frame rendered, the image data will go through all the compositing process until it reaches the compositing node. After that, vendor values the file format settings you set in the output tab and then save the file in folder you specify here. We won't be discussing animation or animation rendering in course, but at least you know now that the viewer nodes main usage is for quickly previewing nodes in the compositor, while the composite nodes main usage is for saving the compositing result on multiple images automatically. 25. 03-02 Compositing with nodes: In this last and video, we will discuss how to create more complex compositing nodes inside the compositor. For now, we will use only the viewer node. So we can delete the composite node. Please note that you can only delete the composite node if you already perform rendering or already have the rendering result. If you delete the composite node and then try to render again, that is by pressing F 12 or by clicking on this icon, you will get this error message that says no render output node in the scene. The reason for this error is that vendor tries to compose the render result, but cannot determine where the or the output of it. If you do want to perform render only for the render layers node, you can open the output tab, scroll all the way down to the post processing category. Here, you'll see the compositing option. If you turn this off, you basically are telling Bender that you only want to render install result in render layers node. Now you can press F 12 or click on a small icon to perform an image render. Again, to recap, if you want to render an image, you need the composite node. If you don't have or don't want to create a composite node, you need to turn off the compositing option in the output tab, all right. The first node we want to discuss is the color balance node. To remove a node without breaking the connection, you can select it and then press Control X. So it is basically the same as the dissolve shortcut in mesh t modeling. Let's create a color balance node by pressing if A and then type in color balance and then enter what is node in the middle of the connection. Now, if your color balance node shows circular color pickers, that is c, you are still using the default setting. If you prefer to use the square type as I have here, simply head over to the preference window and then in the interface tab, select the square a HV option. Okay? So how exactly does this color balance node work? Well, glass color picker or the one called left is for controlling shadow colors. The center one or the Gamma color picker is for controlling the mid tone colors. The white color picker or the one called gain is for controlling the highlight colors. If the color is set to white, the effect is turned off, and so the image data just passes through this node without any modifications. Let's say we want to make the dark colors to be a bit more bluish, so we need to tweak the leaf color picker. The way we use this is we should start with only the colors on the top area because if you move the picker down, the image will become darker. Next, you can find a hue that you like. If you find the color picker is too small, you can just zoom in, or you can also click on a color box to open a bigger color picker, feel three to play around with these colors and see the difference in run result. For example, we can make the mid tone colors a bit green and make the highlight colors a bit orange. And I think I want to make the shadow color to be a bit purple. Finally, if you think that the effect is too strong, you can reduce it globally using the factor slider at the bottom. I'll go with 0.5 for now. The next common effect that people often use is adding glow or bloom effects to the rendering. For this, you can use the glare node. You can press Shift A, and then type glare and an Enter. Personally, I like the bloom color to work on your original image rather than the color graded image. So I place this before the color balance node. You can try putting this after the color balance if you want to. By default, the node is in strex mode, which explains why we have these strange streaks of lights in highlight areas. What we want now is the bloom effect. Essentially, the bloom effect will add transparent bright colors or materials or pixels that are bright. You can play around with strength, saturation, and size. Be careful not to overdo the effect, as it will make the scene look foggy. I think I already like how it looks, so I just leave most of these settings alone except for the thin value. Let's make it a bit yellowish. All right. So that is basically how you add a bloom effect using the compositor. As a reminder, you can hold Chef and Control and then click on a node to preview it. This is the original. This is after the bloom effect, and this is after the bloom and color balance effects. After comparing all the nodes, now I think the result is submit to dark to brighten up on image. There are many different nodes that you can use in the compositor if you press Shift A, color, and then adjust. Here, you can find common color adjustment effects such as brightness contrast, color balance, which we already used, exposure GEMA, HSV, curves, and so on. Feel free to try all of these nodes for now because when the result data is actually in azar color space, we can use the exposure node for simple brightness adjustment. Let's put this after the color balance node, and let's increase the value slightly. I think 0.5 is enough, but now the bloom effect has become too strong. Let's reduce the strength value to just 0.5. We can compare it again with the original image. I think we already have a nice looking result. The last effect we want to add is the Fin effect. If you don't know what a fin is, it is the darkening effect that happens on the borders or corners of an image. Fine is a French word which explains the pronunciation. In the old days, photos usually had fine effects due to the limitation of lens or camera technology. So back then it was considered to be a problem. Nowadays, with current camera technology, we rarely see pinar effects on photos, but sometimes we intentionally add pinear effects for artistic purposes, such as when we need to drive people's attention toward the center of the image or other areas of the image. The thing about vendor is that it does not have a simple node that can create a fine effect, at least not in the current version that I am using. However, we can still create the effect by combining multiple nodes. First, we need a node that can create black colors on corner or border areas. For this, you can either use the box mask or ellipse mask nodes. I'll use Ellipse mask for now. To see what this node actually generates, we can hold Shift Control and click on the node. As you can see, it creates white ellipse shape on a black background. Let's change the width and the height value to 0.99, so the shape almost fills up the entire image. Next, we need to blur out the shape. For this, we can simply use the blur node. Let's set the X and Y blur values to 300 pixels. I believe this is enough for our needs. Now to merge or superimpose this ellipse image on top of the main image. We can use the mixed node, press Shift A, and then type mix. What we want to use now is the mix color node. The way this node works is that the original image that we plug into the first slot will be covered with the second image in the second slot. So we need to plug the main image into the first slot and then the ellipse image into the second slot. Don't forget to move the viewer node to the mixed node so we can preview the result. Currently, the second image just blocks the image below it. To make the white color transparent, while the black color opaque, we need to change the blending mode to multiply. Now, we can see the FINA effect on our rendering result. If you think that the effect is too strong, feel free to adjust its strength using the factor slider. Let's make this 0.5 or perhaps 0.6. Alright, I think this looks better. Okay, guys? So that is basically how we can compose nodes inside the compositor to add non destructive post processing effects to our renderings. 26. 03-03 Render passes and Cryptomatte: In this video, we will discuss the render passes, and after that, the cryptomd feature. When you render using cycles, you may be accustomed to expecting the color or the RGB channels and sometimes also the transparency or the Alpha channel. But cycles is actually able to provide more rendering data than just RGB and Alpha. If you go to the properties editor and then opener, you layer tab, which is the one below the output. What you see here are all the different types of data that can be generated by cycles during rendering. If you zoom in closely to the render layers node in the compositor, notice that the slots available in a node are actually controlled by the checkboxes you set in V layer stab. You can check the blender's documentation if you are curious to know each of these render passes. For now, I will cover only some of them briefly. The combined option is the one responsible for generating the RGB and the Alpha channels. So you may always want to have this option turned on. For now, let's turn on Z option. The fuse color, glossy direct emission, bien occlusion, cryptomd object, and cryptomd material. After that, we need to render the image again by pressing F 12 or by clicking this small icon at the bottom of Brander layers node. After the rendering is done, you can open rendering workspace or the image editor. Make sure you have the render result active. Otherwise, you won't be able to see the render passes. You can access via render passes via the third dropdown list at the top. Combined means you are looking at the final RGB or Alpha result. If you choose deep, this is the Z dep data or the Z option you activate in view layer tab. Essentially, it adds value to each rendered pixel based on how far they are from the camera. Black is the closest to the camera and white is the furthest from the camera. This can be useful for the related effects such as lens blur or creating fog. The diffuse color pas shows the actual color or textures without any shading. The glassy direct pass shows the reflective colors from firs rays or before they bounce. This is the emission color, which basically shows all the missive materials, and this is the AO or the NBN occlusion pass. We've discussed AO before, so I'm sure you already know what this is. The last ones are the cryptomd data. The object has three passes, zero, one and two, and the material has three passes also, zero, one and two. At the glance, these passes look broken. They are not. It's just that the way we use the cryptomd data is not to view them like this using the image editor. In short, the object option provides data that we can use to select pixels based on the objects, while the material option lets us select pixels based on the materials. To give you a better context, let's first discuss what is a math in computer graphics, and then what is crypto Mt. The term math in computer graphics refers to images that we use to select part of other images. Usually, math images are single channel, so they can be visualized as black and white or gray scale color or as an Alpha channel. In the old days, we created mat images manually. For example, if I want to add a different background image to the window, I can apply an emissive white material on a window glass and then make all other objects black. Yes, you can easily crop window area in photoshop. But imagine a scenario where we have complex objects such as plant leaves, blocking the window area, and you are also creating an animation. You do not want to trace the selection manually for hundreds or even thousands of images. By generating the met image or images, we can easily extract the window area to make it transparent and then place a different background behind it. Okay? So that is basically what met images are. CryptoMt is the next evolution of the traditional made Image creation. It was an open source project first developed by Jonah Friedman and Annie Jones back in 2020. Essentially, unlike traditional met creation, cryptomt automatically generates met areas for all objects and all materials in the scene. The word crypto is used because it uses cryptographic techniques for indexing and retrieving pixel areas behind the scenes. No, you do not need to know complex math to use cryptomt. It is as easy as picking pixels using a color picker. Let's see an example. Imagine that we want to add some lens fare or strik effect, but only on spotlight objects. First, we need to create the cryptomd node. Then you can plug the main image into the image input slot. Please note that the cryptomd node doesn't actually need this image input to work. It directly accesses the cryptomd data from render layers, even if you don't plug anything as the input. The reason why we input the image is so that we don't need to use a plain white color for the mid color. It will use whatever color appears in the image estimate color. Next, you want to make sure you set this to render, and the active scene name we have up here is the same as the one displayed in this field. You do not want to use the image option unless you are using an external EXR file that contains cryptomd data. If you want to use the render result, you should always set this to render. Next, we need to specify whether we want to use the objects or the materials as our basis for the mid area selection. Notice that although these four spotlight objects are instances, they are still registered as different objects. So if we use the object mode, we need to pick each of the four objects. In this case, it will be easier if we use the material mode. Next, we need to pick a pixel that represents the material we want to select. For this, you can activate the backdrop and then pick the pixel from the backdrop image, or you can also just use the image editor, first, click on plus icon and then click on the Musive area in the middle of these spotlights. Any of them is fine as they are all using the same material. If you do this correctly, the name of the material will show up or be listed in this field. If you hold Shiv and Control and then click on this node, you can see that we have successfully created the Mt image. Now, if you want to preview different output slots using the Viewer node, you don't need to manually dig the connector. You can simply hold Shiv and Control and keep clicking on the node to cycle the node. As you can see, the mat slot outputs a black and white image without transparency. The pick slot outputs colors to easily visualize the areas that we want to select. Again, it is not a must that you activate this big mode to pick the pixel. You are free to pick from the backdrop or from the image editor using any view mode. The next step is to add a glare node. Previously, we used the blue mode. Now, what we want is the strex mode, connect the image output to the image input and bring the viewer node to this node. I want the color to be with yellow and also six strik to make it more interesting. And let's rotate effect about 20 degrees. I think this is enough. We can revise it again leader if we need to. Last step is to combine the strik effect with the main image. For this, we can create yet another mixed color node. Unlike the FNA effect, now we want to brighten up the main image, we use the ad blending mode. Next, log the original image into the first slot. And then plug the strex effect into the second slot, move the viewer node to this node, and here is the final result. Again, what is cool about the compositor is that it is non destructive and procedural. You can always go back to any nodes that you want and make changes there. Just as an example, let's say you want the lamp shade material to also produce a stric effect. For this, simply click on E plus button and then click on lamp shade material. Another example, you also want to add the monitor screen. And so on, you will see all of the material names that are active listed here. Of course, this looks too exaggerated. To take out the last two materials from the list, simply click on the minus icon and then click on the monitor area. Let's do the same with the lamp sheat material. Click here, and we are back to only having spotlight material active. 27. 03-04 Project Furniture product rendering Part 1: In the following videos, we will do a series of rendering projects. Basically, we are going to create product renderings of the launcher and an ottoman set called Cali Soft. This product was manufactured by Minotti, a well known Italian furniture company. I modeled this shared product a long time ago, so I don't think they still manufacture and sell this product. We already covered TD modeling and material in the first two courses, as the course focuses on lighting and rendering. I am providing the T D models complete with all the materials and textures. This way, you can practice lighting and rendering right away without having to create everything from scratch. All right. Let's imagine that a furniture company asks you to create a TD rendering of one of their share product lines. But the one rend ring that can easily place on different background colors. This way, their marketing department has more flexibility when designing the marketing campaigns. Notice that these rend rings have transparent shadows that can work on different background colors. So how can we create something like this easily and quickly in blender? Well, the key to creating transparent shadows like this is to use the shadow catcher feature. But before we do that, let's first tackle lighting, camera and render settings. Currently, if you activate rendering mode, we can only see black color like this. Again, this is because we do not have any light sources inside the scene. Now, for studio lighting, you can find that a lot of people use at least three types of light key light, field light, and Blight. You can read or watch about this online to have a deeper understanding of the concept and workflow. However, in this video, I'm going to do something different. For a quick, beautiful rendering result, you can just use an XR or SDR image that mimics studio lighting. You can find many of these images for free on Pool Avan or Ambien Cg and like. You don't even have to find or use a studio lighting type SDR file. As long as it is an interior type, you can try and see how it looks on your model. Personally, I prefer the ones that have neutral color tones, so the leader, I don't have to do any white balance. But if you do like certain SER or XR files that will warm or cool, feel free to try them also, remember to apply a white balance processing leader so that the color of the product that shows up in the final render does not stray away too far from the original for this lesson, I'll be using this HDR file called artists Workshop. In Blender, open the shader editor. Make sure it is set to the world mode, not the object mode. Press the home key if you cannot see the nodes. If you already have the node wrangular add on active, you can simply select the background node and then press Control T. Currently, the same with spin. This pink color is a way for blender to tell us that a texture is missing. Click the open button and then browse the folder in which you save the HDR file. Click Open image. And here is the result. As you can see, we can get nice looking lighting for product rendering quickly and easily just by using an HDR file. If somehow light direction still looks off, you can try turning the z rotation value. You can also turning the X NY rotation if necessary. Try not to make the main light source look at the subject straight from the viewer's eye, as this will make the product look dull and the shape becomes harder to read. What you want instead is to make the main light source slightly off to the left or right. This way, the subjects shape is more defined and more interesting to see. In our case, I think 30 degrees for the right side, lighting is good. Or if you want light coming from left side, I think 170 is nice. Again, these are not fixed numbers, as they may vary depending on your model and your SDR file. All right. Next, let's add a camera, press Shift A, then type camera in an Enter. To make the active camera use our current viewpoint angle, you can hold Control out and then press zero on numpad. Usually, it does not exactly match how we viewed the scene before, but it should be good enough for the starting point. Next, you can use all the different techniques we discussed to control the camera. You can activate the fly walk mode using the shift till the shortcut. This way, you can control the camera using the WASD keys and your mouse. You can also use the transformation tools or use the transformation shortcuts, such as G and R, and also the transformation fields on the right side panel for this case. I don't want the camera to roll to the right or left. That is why I set a zero value for do I rotation. Next, you can make the camera look straight horizontally by setting the X value to 90 degrees, but in this case, I do want to see more of the top surfaces of the product. So I think values around 80 to 85 degrees work better. Finally, we can adjust the height of the camera using the z coordinate. I think 70 centimeters is fine for our product rendering. Now, let's check the render settings. For the final render output, we want a four key square resolution. So we set both weight and height values to 4,096 pixels. But for doing test renderings, we want to set this to only 25% of the final render. Essentially, this will make render only render at 10:24 square resolution. Later, after we are done with the test renderings, we can set this back to 100%. Okay. Next, we need to open render tab. For this scene, lights barely need to bounce around the wall to light our subject. So I don't think we need more than 512 samples. Later, for the final render, we can set this to 0.01. As for now for test renderings, we can set this to 0.04 or 0.05 to keep rendering time low. For the noisy, abusing optics, as my GPU is an Nvidia RTX card. Next, set both clamping values to zero, so no highlight colors get cut off. We don't want to use any I approximation for now, and we can leave all the settings to their defaults. For the pixel filter, we can set this to one. And because we want to have a transparent background, we need to turn this transparent option on. Next, in a performance step, we can set the compositor to use the GPU. Then turn on the persistent data option so that we have faster rendering time for the second and beyond test renderings. Finally, in color management category, we can use the AgxFeld transform with the Be contrast reset. Again, I will need to use white balance processing as our environment color is already neutral. All right. Let's press F 12 to see how it looks. So far, the rendering result looks nice. That we still don't have the contact of the ground shadow yet. For this, we first need to create a plane object to act as the shadow catcher. So press Shift A, then type plane, then enter. Let's make this ten meter square just to play safe. Every time we create a new to object in lender, the object will have this default material. As you can see, the color is white or off white to be precise. Personally, I don't mind this color. Just be aware that although this plain object leader becomes transparent, its color will show up in the reflection or glossy surface of the product, especially the ones that are facing downward. You can see this white or light gray color below the chair. If leader you mostly want to put rendering against white or bright colored background, then this is totally fine. But if leader, you want to paste this on top of a dark colored background, you may want to change the material color of the plain object to darker color. Or my preferred way to solve this issue is just to hide the floor object from the reflection. We'll see how we can do that in a moment. To turn on the shadow catcher feature, make sure you have the plane object selected. Then in the object tab, in a visibility category, you need to turn on this checkbox that says shadow catcher. Now, the plane object becomes transparent, but any shadows that fall on its surface will be visible in rendering result. To remove this white reflection I mentioned earlier, we can simply turn off this lossy jack boox. Essentially, this makes the plane object invisible in the reflection calculation. And so now all reflections come from SDR image. Now that we have everything set up correctly, we cannot perform the final render. We can increase the resolution back to 100%, and also makes the nose threshold smaller, such as 0.01. Press F 12 and wait for it to finish. After the rendering is done, you can save the image via the image menu and then use the Save As command. Make sure you save this in a format that supports of a channel and that you also save it using the RGB option. If you want to preview how this rendering looks against different background colors, you may be thinking of using Photoshop or Krita. Those are valid options. But you can do that also right inside vendor using the compositor. For this, you only need one node called the Alpha over. Essentially, the image or the color in the first slot will become the background, and the image or the color in the second slot will become the foreground. So in our case, we want to plug this rendering result into the second slot. You do not need to plug the Alpha channel as this Alpha over node automatically detects the Alpha. Let's press Shift Control and click on this node to preview it. With this setup, you can easily change the color in the first image slot to compare our product rendering against different background colors. I 28. 03-05 Project furniture product rendering Part 2: In this project lesson video, we will create two renderings. Basically, we will present the same log chair set we rendered before. But now with three environments, again, because we are focusing on lighting and rendering, I already prepared all these three models and textures of record. I even set the camera position and also the environment texture because at this point, I believe you already know how to do them. As a disclaimer, I downloaded some of the assets in the scene. I downloaded the HDR file for the environment lighting called evening sky 026 A from endncg.com. The textures for the three remodels are either from polyhaven.com or ambiencg.com. And for the three that you see outside, I download it from ndcd.com. All of them are free to download, so I'm sure I am not violating any commercial copyrights by providing them for you. Besides the hair products, you can see that I included a table lamp and a side table. I modeled them based on real products just like the chair. The side table is a product by NV italia called NIC, and the table lamp is a product by Arors home called the Adler lamp. I modeled them for the project about ten years ago. You can still find the link for the Nick side table, but I don't think Arterers still make the Adler lamp product, right? If you are curious about render settings, basically, I am just using a two key size for both the width and height values, but I set this percentage to 50%. Later, you can set this to 100% when doing the final rendering. As for the rest of the render settings, I am using the same settings from the previous veson only thing that is different is that I increase the samples count to 1024, as this scene is much more complex than the previous one. And you say before, because we will do a series of fast renderings, I am setting the noise threshold to 0.05. Leader for final rendering, you can set this to 0.01, okay? Now, if you activate the rendered mode, you can see that currently the scene is quite dark, and the only light source we have is the environment or the wood lighting. If we set this factorial value all the way to one, we'll get evening lighting with mostly bluish tone. But if you reduce the slider, the sunlight will appear. The light rays go through the window and the curtains and shine on the hair product and the floor. As you can see, with this environment setup, we can switch the lighting between day and night quite easily. Let's first focus on evening lighting. So set this slider to one to remove the sunlight, and let's switch back to the material preview mode to see the objects better. The first thing we are going to add are the ceiling lights. For this, we can make use of the niche shader. Select the sealing object and then press the fourth slash key on numpad to isolate the object from other objects. Go to phase mode, hold out, and click on one of these edges. So we have this phase loop selected, create a new material slot. Assign the selected phases to the slot, create a new material. Let's name this material glow dot sealing center. For gluing materials, we can just use the principle BSD of shader, but to make the rendering a bit faster, we can swap the shader type to the sion shader. It has fewer options, and so less processing is needed by cycles when doing it for the color, we want to use a black body node, so click on the color input slot and choose black body. We can set the color or the temperature to 6,000 Kelvin. This will make the light slightly warm. Next, we can set emissive strength to 50. If you are wondering how I know this number well, it is because I already tried different values before recording the video. In real project scenario, you may need to try different values until you find the best one that fits your needs. Okay. Next, let's select this phase. Then press Control L to select the whole structure, create a new material slot and assign the phases to this slot. Then create the new material. For this one, you can name it glow dot ceiling hidden. As before, we can swap the shader type to the mission shader and use the black body node for the color input because this is an accent light. We can make it quite warm, such as 4,500 Kelvin and then set the missive strength to 60. Again, I know this number because I have tried different values before. After you are done, you can press Tab to go to the object mode and then press reports k on the Numpad to exit the isolation mode. Press zero if you want to activate the camera view, activate the render view mode, or you can also press F 12 to create a preview rendering. And here is the current lighting condition. The next step is to create two light objects, one for a table lamp, and another one for simulating a spotlight or a down light to create sharp shadows of the products on the floor. Now, when I need to place light objects precisely in the scene, there are two methods that I usually use. The first method is using the line to active command, and the second one is using the TD cursor. To use the first method, the target object we want to align to needs to have the origin point correctly positioned. This method will not do us any good if the target object has the origin point located somewhere else. For our tablem model, notice that the origin point is already positioned at the center pole where the light bulb should be. At least it is already correct in terms of the X and Y coordinates. You can easily move the light object in the coordinate leader. For this method, the t cursor can be placed anywhere. It does not have to be near the target object, press sat, A, then type, point, then enter. Currently, the point light object is selected and located at the t dcursor location. It is okay if it is not visible in our view directly. Be careful not to click on anything as that will change the selection. While this condition, hold Shift and click on the target object and then press Shift to open the Snap Pot menu. Next, you need to use selection to active. As you can see, the point let object just move to the original location of the table lamp object. We can move this up until it is roughly at the center of the shed. For light settings, let's set the radius bigger so it better simulates an LED light bulb. I think 6 centimeters should be enough. We also want to use the body node to control the color. So click on this use Nodes button. The black body node, set this to 4,500 kelvin to make it warm and set the missive strength to 15. You want to fully control the light intensity using the slider, so we should set this to just one. Okay. Let's preview the current lighting condition because the video duration is already quite long, we will continue the project in the next lesson. 29. 03-06 Project furniture product rendering Part 3: In this lesson video, we will finish up the product rendering project that we started in the previous lesson. I explained before that there are two methods I usually use for placing light objects. The first is using the line to active command, and the second one is using the Tre cursor. We have covered the first method. Now we are going to use the second method. Let's say we want to create a spotlight just above this point on left arm rest. Hold shift and right click at that location to move the tri cursor. Now, you can create a spotlight object for this, but because we will be using an IS file, it would be better if you use a point light. So press Shift A and then type point then enter. Currently, the point light object is located at the armrest of the chair. We want it to be higher. So let's make Z coordinate larger like 220 centimeters. The light will be off screen, so we don't really need to place it exactly on ceiling. Let's set the lighting parameters. Change this power field to one watt with dice value to zero, as we want to have sharp shadows cast from the light object. Use a black body node for controlling the color. I think 5,000 Kelvin is enough for this light. To make the light more realistic and interesting, you can use an IS file to control its distribution. So click on a strength slot and choose IS texture. Joos the external type, and then for the file, you can use the one I provided called X ERO IS. Finally, for the strength, we can set this to two. Before moving on, I need to mention that although we have been using only the properties editor, all that we have done here actually reflects on the shedded nodes automatically. The resulting nodes may not be tidy, but they function the same. Essentially, it is up to you whether you want to use the shaded node editor or just use the properties editor. All right? Let's go back to the camera view and render the scene by pressing F 12. Notice that now we have these nice sharp shadows on the floor. The rendering result looks nice, but I want to add more bluish stone outside the room. For this, we can add an area light, Shift and right click on a window glass near the center million, then shift A N type area, and then enter, move this area light so it is outside the balcony and also move it up to make it look like it is coming from the sky. Let's change the type to rectangle so we can set different values for weight and height. Let's make the weight for meters and make the height to miles. Go back to our camera view by pressing zero and then drag light target node and place it roughly near the foot of the Oto man. Okay? Now, for this area light, we want to use a custom blue color that does not exist in the black body spectrum. So for this light, we do not need to use the nodes. Simply change the color up here to strong blue color. And let's set the intensity to around 100 watt. Now we have this strong blue color just outside the window. But notice that currently the shape of the area light is visible. Why is that? Well, this is because by default, blender does not hide light objects when they are viewed through transmissive materials. In our case, the window glasses are transmissive. If we hide window glasses, the light object becomes invisible. We can fix this easily by selecting the area light, and then in the properties editor open the object tab in the visibility setting at the way visibility category, you need to turn off the transmission option. Now the shape of the area light does not show up even if it is behind a glass material. Let's render a preview again and see the result. After looking at the rendering, I think I want to make the left handbr and the right and bar to be missive. Yes, you will see the right bar directly, but it will still contribute lighting to the right surface of the chair. So select the bars object, isolate the object. Go to phase mode, press A twice just to make sure none is selected. Then hover over the left one and then press L on the keyboard, select the right bar also using the L shortcut. Then create a new material slot, assign the faces to this slot now to save time, instead of creating new material, let's use the previous glow material and then duplicate it by pressing this button name this material glued side bars. For the color, let's make it 3,000 Kelvin so it emits a strong yellow color. But turn down the strength to only ten. Let's go back out from the isolation mode and then do a preview render. Now, I think the blue area light is too strong. Let's change its power to 50 watt and do another render preview. Okay, I think the night scene is done. Next, let's work on a day scene. For this, we can open the node for word lighting and simply decrease the factorial value in mix shade or node. One that if you said it is too low, the sunlight becomes very bright. I prefer dimmer sunlight, so I think 0.6 to 0.7 is enough. Next, we want to make the lighting, tell more stories about the surroundings. Essentially, we want to add some shadows on the floor and a chair. This will give the impression to the viewers that the room is surrounded by large trees. For this effect, you can just copy the three tree we have outside and place it near the balcony. There is one way to go about it. But in this video, I want to show you another approach, and that is using gobo textures. Essentially, we create a plain object with a three silhouette texture to block the light. Note that this technique of blocking light to create fake shadows is very common in photography. The term gobo actually stands for the words go between optics. Photographers usually use small disks made of steel or glass to contain the shadow pattern. And then place them within lighting fixture. Again, the term Gbo or go between optics actually describes the location of the disk within the light pad of the fixture. When using blender or TD in general, we can apply Gbotextures in several different ways. In this video, I'll be showing you what I think is the easiest. We will be using this image as the texture. Notice that it is in PNG format and has an Alpha channel. You can have colors in the image, but the important part of it is the Alpha information, not the color. If you are wondering, I created this image using blender from a three Tree model. Okay? First shift and right click on a balcony wall to place the T cursor. Next, you can create an ordinary plane object and set all the shading and scale manually. But you don't want to do that, as vendor already provides a special feature to create a plane object based on an image. You can find that in the image menu and then mesh plane. Notice so Blender does not create the plane right away. Instead, it prompts us to pick the image file, just like the Global texture file I provided, and then click the import Image button. As you can see, we have this plane object with the Gbo texture applied to it. The nice thing about this method is that the plane object automatically has the correct aspect ratio and the Alpha channel is set up to affect the opacity. It will take quite some time if we had to do everything manually. Let's rotate the plane object by pressing R, then Z, then 90, then enter. After that, you can try scaling it and then moving it so it blocks the light that is going into the room. If you are in camera view mode, you can make use of the transformation shortcuts such as S and G. Or you can also use the transformation fields at the right panel. If you need more shadows, you can duplicate the plane object using the output shortcut and just position or scale the new plane object until you really like how the shadows look. After several minutes, I finally settled with this do formation, and that's it, we are done. Now we can perform the final render. As a reminder, don't forget to increase the percentage value of the output size to 100% and also set the noise threshold to 0.01, Alright. Here is the final render for the evening version, and here is the final render for the day version.