Blender Lighting & Compositing for Beginners

1. Introduction - Blender Lighting & Compositing for Beginners: Are you a budding artist or a hobbyist who's been dabbling in blender? Find yourself lost amidst the mirad of lighting and compositing options. You have the creative vision, but the technical aspects of achieving realistic or stylized lighting feel overwhelming. You might have stumbled upon numerous tutorials online, or they either scratch the surface are too complex to follow. Your projects deserve to shine in the best light, but the lack of structured guidance has left your renders looking flat and lifeless. You may see other artists work where the lighting makes the scene pop and the compositing adds a professional finish. You wonder how they achieved such realism or stylized beauty in their renders. Welcome to our boot camp style crafted course, blend the lighting and compositing for beginners. This course is designed to be a comprehensive guide taking you from the foundational concepts of lighting to the advanced techniques of compositing With engaging step by step tutorials, you'll unravel the mysteries of lighting, explore the wonders of HDRI, sky textures, and delve into the heart of compositing, whether it's mastering that tune style, achieving the Erie aura in dark scenes, or unveiling the secrets of cycles Compositing this course is your gateway to unlocking a new realm of creativity. The instructions are clear, the process is fun, and the transformation in your skills will be nothing short of dramatic. This isn't just a course but a go to reference for lighting your future projects. Making rendering less daunting and more exciting. And don't think we'll just be using cycles to achieve all this. As you'll see, we'll be using both render engines showing you their strengths and weaknesses along the way. So stay till the end of the introduction, and let me show you why Every project you create from now on will have that professional look and feel. First up, is lighting basic? Starting at the very beginning, we'll be going through the very basics of lighting. This is the best place to start if you're new to blender. As here we go through all the different light sources, how they are used within scenes, as well as in depth demonstrations. Next up is HDRI lighting. First chance to jump in and follow along with a pre set up scene. He'll be tasked with bringing your own lighting source, how to integrate them into your scene, and what to watch out for when finding your own HDRIs. Let me have sky Texture, this is where you'll be learning that blender has some awesome tools built right into the software, one of which is the sky texture. Learn how to light your scene in either a pixel style light or realistic sunset, without the need to download anything outside of blender. What about if you want to render in a tune style? Well, we've got that covered in the course as well. You'll learn how to take any scene and create that classic comic book look and feel with just a few clicks. We couldn't have a lighting course without covering dark and horror scenes. This part is where we really start to take it up notch. You'll be introduced to how to use emission and volume metrics. And how to really create night and dark scenes. If you're a fan of the Resident Evil franchise and want to emulate that dark, yet amazing style, then this is perhaps the section for you, you've opped onto Youtube in the past few years. You're bound to cross those amazing, isometric, stylized yet simple models that someone creates in an hour, yet still look mindblownly good. Well, this is mostly down to three point lighting and we'll be laying out the full foundation of getting this spot on. Regardless of the model, you'll be able to render out a beautiful scene. And now we really start getting to the nitty gritty of the course with basic compositing. This will be your first introduction to the blender compositor. Quite simply, it is a game changer and it actually took me years before even looking into this part of blender. And my work suffered because of it. No scene will ever look as good as it can do without the help of composite. The compositor also brings a wealth of complexity and this is why this section will be just the lightest touch for beginners. We couldn't have a lighting and rendering course without covering interiors and god rays. I mean, really these are a staple of three D modeling. And I see so many rendered scenes of bedrooms or living spaces that just look flat, sterile, and uninspiring. Well, that won't happen anymore, as this part will really change the way you approach these scenes. What's more we cover sunshafts and how to set your own interior rooms ablaze with realistic lighting. The next part of the course dives into studio lighting. A crucial aspect of rendering in blender. Especially using the EV render engine known for quick and impressive results if you're looking to render products or cars for clients, or just aiming for a realistic look to showcase your assets. This section is designed for you. We'll start with the basics and gradually move to more advanced techniques. All the while keeping it engaging and easy to follow. The EV engine is a great tool for achieving good quality renders quickly. And this section will guide you on how to make the most out of it. This module aims to take you beyond the basics, helping you to add a professional touch to your renders. By the end of the section, you'll have a better grasp of studio lighting, equipping you with the knowledge to enhance your rendering projects in blender. Finally, moving on to the last part of V, compositing this part of the course is the pinnacle of our journey with EV aiming to bring together all what you've learned into a professional and eye catching resort. That will be the gem in your portfolio resembling the work of a skilled artist. He will take everything we've gathered so far and merge it into a complete hole. We'll explore lighting, rendering, compositing, and more importantly, laying down the foundation for some truly excellent renders. This section is crafted to provide you with the tools to excel in the V render engine, demonstrating how to blend those various elements seamlessly. The objective is to set the stage for impressive renders and to finish you with necessary skills to master the EV engine, making this section a vital junction in our learning pathway. By the end of this module, the aim is to have a well rounded understanding, enabling you to handle different projects with that professional touch. The final part of the course will be covering cycles compositing. This will set the stage for future projects. Teaching you in the right hands how any project can become a masterpiece. Covering, layering like ambient occlusion as well as other channels like diffuse. This part of the course really lays the groundwork of just what's possible in blender as we bring all of those note trees together with sky Chet nodes, layers and compositing to finish with a night and day difference between amateur to professional renders. Looking back on my early days of blender, which was over ten years ago now, I wish this course was available, It would have saved me a lot of time speeding up my progress in a significant way. This course is designed to help you move from creating plan scenes to rendering eye catching projects. It's a chance to light up your blender journey, turning your creative dreams into reality. By enrolling in this course. You're taking a step towards becoming a better blender artist. Don't let this course pass you by. Save yourself years of trial and error with this course, you'll look back and be glad you made that decision to join us. So take that leap, become over a blender artist and start rendering your dreams into reality. Thanks a lot of everyone. 2. Blender Lighting Essentials Area, Point, Spot, and Sun Sources: Welcome everyone to Blender Lightning and Compositing for beginners. And this will be your one stop guide for lighting scenes within Blender Concreted course. Which I would have wanted back in the day, not even just when I first started out, but even years down the line when I still hadn't got to grips with how to light a scene properly. I must admit back then it was pretty basic lighting and it really showed within my scenes. We not anymore as you'll see throughout this course. So a few things before getting started. We'll be using Blender 3.6 But honestly, whether it's any blender from three years ago or you're taking this course in the future, it'll still come down to the same set ups and same techniques as these have been used for decades, not years, lit the course out into progressively harder sections. Although harder isn't the right word, it's basically taking what you've learned and laying more depth on top to give you a better result. When you first open blender, you'll see there's a point light and most people who are new to lighting will just swap this out for a sun, which is good for a very basic scene to check out how things are looking, but not good for anything else really. But all that, the boat to change in these few short hours. And quite honestly, by the end of this course, your own scenes will never be the same again. You'll also be sure that your renders will look a lot more professional and stand out wherever you put your own artwork. Now, before jumping right in, I have supplied an amazing download pack. And don't worry if this looks a little bit different to what you have, because things may be added on top of this. I'm hoping to also get some studio lighting in there as well. So the final version will have that in there. Now, this download pack is pretty big in terms of file size, but oh boy, it's packed with some amazing stuff that you can use. In each part, there'll be a pack. And within that pack there will be an example file. As I click on, let's say this one here, but click on this, you'll see there's an example file. There's also a project file and there's resources. Now the example file will be what we're actually trying to aim for, so in this case, it'll be a freestyle render. The project file will actually give you the complete project minus or the lighting rendering and compositing. Now our job is actually to get the project file up to the example file, thereby you'll have real hands on experience once you get a model, or your own model of how to set it up and light it in various ways. Now, within the resources there will only be a few resources, and most of the time the resources will be a HDRI for instance. So real time lighting texture. Now you'll notice the download pack is actually numbered. And this is because, rather than throw you in at the pen, I've broken the course up with the first sections covering basics, two more complex lighting, and the latter sections covering rendering, laying and compositing. You see To truly understand how to make a great render, you need to understand that it isn't just lighting, it's actually three things really that come together to make an amazing resort. This is how all movie studios and games work stone to more or less a degree. If we take movies, we have a main shot, which is then rendered out frame by frame, allowing for the use of lighting, going over the top of it, compositing and then finally lying. Whereas in games normally have some level of lighting and laring and a little less compositing as they're being rendered in real time. Beyond the no illusion though, lighting in all these mediums is a line and would not be lit this way in real life. And once you start to understand this, you'll really see your own renders and games improve. So one quick example before moving on would be, in a game you created, you'd have a Su, then perhaps a HDRI, which is actually two light sources. Then you perhaps have some compositing on the level of contrast or brightness within the game. Finally, you'd have some normal maps and ambient occlusion on your textures, or perhaps some baking, direct lighting on your models. All of this comes together to form a visual of your own making. This is the power of lighting, far from a simple point light. Okay, so finally, after that introduction, which I hope you learn something and if nothing else hypes you up to start the course, let's jump right in on the first one. I'm going to click on Lighting Basics. And you'll notice that in this one there's only a project. Now if we click on the project and double click the blend file, let's get that open. I'll drag it over, and this is what we're actually met with. So first of all, let's come over and just hide these out. Now as you can see, this is just a basic scene. We've got a plane that's been pulled out and then just lifted up on each of the sides. Now at the moment, as you can see over here, this is on the EV render engine. So we can just actually click this onto Render Options and you'll end up with something like this where there's no light source. Now let's come over and the first one we'll look at is the Sun. So this is the most time. The sun is what everyone will be using. Now, the moment you can see that over here, here's my sun. And no matter where I move this, so if I press, you will see that the lighting doesn't change. The only way that the lighting actually changes if a press R Z, And you can see now that actually starts to change. Now this is because the sun is actually an infinite light source. Which means no matter where I put it, like in real life, you're going to end up with sunshine everywhere. So in other words, even though the sun is not actually shining into your room, where you are, and it's daytime, there will still be light there. And this is because the sun's power is bouncing off of everything, basically. So this is why everything is lit up in the daytime. And you actually have a hard job of blocking out that sunshine. Now contrast this to something like a candle, which is not an infinite light source. It has a range of how far the actual light goes. Then you talk about something like something like a spotlight. And the more powerful spotlight is, the further it will go. But none of them are actually like the Sun, which is, as I said, an infinite light source. So this is the basics of lighting. This is the first light that most people actually use. And you can see, even though I put it behind this wall, it actually does nothing to actually dampen how bright it is or how it's actually lit. You'll also see as well that it does actually come with some problems. All lightning comes with some problems. And until you actually know how to actually, you know, fix these things, which you're going to find that a little bit more in depth as we move through the course. Now before carrying on, let's actually come to the sun then. And over the right hand side, what you're going to find is the option normally under a light bulb. So as soon as you've clicked on your light sauce, you'll have a light bulb over the right hand side. Now this is where all your options are going to be. So you're going to have all the options of basically what the light source gives you. So on the sun, for example, we can change the color, so we can mess around with the color. We can also make it darker, as you can see. Now generally on light sauces, when you make something darker, it doesn't really darken the color. What it does is it just dampens how bright the light actually is. But we've also got on there also the strength, so we can really turn the strength up. I'm going to explain these just for the sun, as pretty much all of the light sources have this kind of set up. So when we look at diffuse, now what the diffuse does, it actually affects the reflection of light from a surface, such that an incident ray is reflected at many angles rather than just one angle as in the case of specular reflection. In other words, this is actually coming down and it's balanced in many ways to form the shadows and the material. So let's say this was a metal material, you'd see it bounce off it in a realistic way. Now we can actually alter the way that the lighting works over here. So what this will do is it'll affect the whole scene. Now generally we don't really want to do this. What we want to do is we want to affect a material on a material basis. Unless you've got a game where you want it actually to work in a certain way. In other words, if I turn this down, the lower turn it down, you can see the less actual reflective the material becomes. Now the specular, this one here, this actually is water. If I bring over my light source, you can see if I point this a little bit more down like so, you can see that this is actually water. Now at the moment, water is actually pretty difficult actually to do. If I actually bring this over, you can see it makes no difference. If I bring this down, it still really doesn't look like water. And actually water needs a lot more than just a single light source to actually work. You can also see that in something like blender, things don't work the same way as they do in real life. In other words, this is light in this supposed water. But you've got no caustics, you've got no light rays passing through there. And the reason is because it isn't actually a solid object. It's just a plane. It's a plane with another plane going around the side and plane underneath. Now the speculate is what actually you need if you want to control how your actual water looks within the scene rather than in a, you know, one on one material basis. In other words, if you want to change the material of the whole scene there, this is where you will actually mess around with the actual speculate. I don't recommend using any of these actually, unless you really, really want to go in depth, actually lighting a scene and being as this is for beginners and we won't actually be doing that. The volume is for when you set things like fog and this is how the light would travel for those. Now, we haven't got a volume set up in this scene, but that is what you would use if you want to have control over the whole scene when it comes to, you know, volume or clouds. Now, what the angle is for this is for if you want an actual softer, actual shadow on here, you can see if I bring this up, we end up with much, much softer shadows. And actually this is the one that's probably the most handy within an overall scene basis. Sometimes you might not want really, really hard shadows like this. And sometimes you might just want to soften them out a little bit so you can play around with this and see the actual difference. Now in the next lesson, what we'll do is we'll just talk quickly about the shadow bias. And then what we'll do is we'll move on and discuss these other lighting points. All right, everyone. So I hope you enjoyed the first lesson. I hope you're ready to learn a lot and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 3. Lighting Properties in Blender Techniques and Applications: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this is where we left off. Now let's move down and look at shadows. So basically shadows, we can click them on or click them off. So if you don't want your actual light source to create shadows, but still have the light, you can actually turn this off. The shadow bias is an interesting one and should be used sparingly all of these options. Now, they're not actually used really that much unless you really, really want to refine tiny, tiny little things within your scene or within your game, or something like that. And basically the bias is basically how far this actual shadow comes out. So we have a certain level of control of how far this shadow comes out. So let's say I put this on 50. You can see that it actually pulls it out further along here. Let's say if I put it on 100, like so, you can see it's got a tiny, tiny line. Completely unrealistic, but you may want this in some certain cases, so let's put this back on one. Now let's look at the cascading shadow map. Again, probably not something that you're going to use, but I will explain what it is. So the cascading shadow maps, it's a technique used to render shadows more efficiently in large outdoor scenes or scenes in where there's significant variation in depth. So this could be a mountain, for instance, going all the way down to the bottom. And what it does is divides the portion of the scene visible to the camera into several cascades. So if I actually come and put this on, a simple way to see this in action is if you come to the distribution and you drop this down all the way down. You can see now that as it comes down, it actually brings this shadow closer to this edge of the actual wall. Again, we're not going to be using that, It's just explaining what these features are. Now, contact shadows, they're actually could be important. So for instance, if you really want some realistic shadows, for instance, it is performance heady. If we put contact shadows on, you will see now that we're actually getting some shadows off the actual water. So you can see on the back of here these actual shadows. And again, we've got pretty much some of the same options as what we've got before. Again, we're not actually going to be using that. So these are pretty much, as you'll see, the actual options of all of the light sources. Now let's move on and what we'll do is we'll hide this sun out the way and we'll come to our next light source, which we'll discuss the point light now. Now, point lights, these are actually important because we can actually use these to create things like candles, or we can also very easily have these flickering along. So you can see, again, we've got shadows, we've got contact shadows which we can turn on. Again, they're not going to be as powerful as the actual sun, which is an infinite light source. And again, we've got pretty much the same options. We can also turn up the power on these, and we've got the radius here. Now the radius, once we turn that up, as you can see, what it does is it actually affects the radius of the light source. And it also brightens it up again. Actually, if we turn this off, these two interlock in balls here, you will see that this is what the light source would actually look like. Now, you can't see a light there on the point light, but what you can see is the reflections and the actual light. So it's not like it's a candle flickering where you actually see a light source. These actual point lights are used more for illusion rather than an actual lit object, if you can understand that. So in other words, in a candle you'd have a light source which would probably be some type of emission. And then around that light source you would actually have something like a point light. And then you would turn up the radius depending. So let's say this is a candle. Let's turn this to orange like so. And now you can see that that is what it would actually look like. Now of course, this material as well, it's got a lot of, if we go to material on this part, you can also see that if you mess around with the actual reflection on this, you can see the roughness is turned up pretty high and that is actually having this effect on the actual walls. For the moment I turn it up, you can see it looks a lot more realistic. Now the other thing you'll see if we click this back on, go back to our light source, is that when we actually turn this up or down, you will see that we actually get flicker on here. Now with these actual light sources, we can actually go in and give it some noise. In other words, what it will do is it'll turn the power up and down, up and down, up and down, making it actually flickers like an actual candle. So that's what mainly we use these light sources for. The other way we use these light sources is in places where we want to give it a little bit more light. So for instance, if we bring back our sun. So if it bring back my son. Now I want a little bit more. Let's say it's a really dark place in this corner somewhere, and I want to light it up a little bit more then I can simply turn this up and give a little bit more light on that certain area rather than using the contrast or the brightness of the overall scene. So it might be an alleyway somewhere where you've got a light source, but it just isn't bright enough and you don't want to brighten up the scene anymore, then bringing in point lights is probably a good idea for something like that. All right, so let's move on now. We'll turn off our sun, we'll turn off our point light, and then we'll come to our spot light. Now our spotlight is, as you've probably seen on the Pixar movie, where there is the actual spotlight, Exactly what you'd expect. So it's really, really nice if you want to You put some really nice lighting into a scene where it's focusing on something, let's say like our Indiana Jones scene where it was the pillar and on top of that was the actual idol. Then this is the lighting they will use, they'll focus the light down onto that actual idol. And they'll probably use some volume metrics around here to give some actual God rays or even some dust particles that are glinting in the light from the spot light. So this is where they're used actually. This is probably the least used light because it is a very specialized light. It's not something that you're going to use in a lot of places and normally, at least for me, I'm going to turn to a point light or an area light rather than this sort of lighting. Okay. So moving on, we've actually got our area light. This is actually my favorite light source because just what you can do with it, you can see it's not an infinite light source. So when I move it down, it works in real time with EV. And you can also see this is the main thing that you'll use, three point lighting, so this is like your isommetric scenes and buildings, you will be using this also. I like this light because we have a lot of control over the actual how the light looks. In other words, you can see at the moment it's on square. But I can actually simply come and change that to a disc. And then if I bring it down, as you can see, this is the kind of effect. If I change that back then to ellipse, ellipse, let's change it to square and move this across so we can grab it. There we go. We can see that if then I turn down the power of this, or let's put it down to let's say 2020. That seems a bit low, say 100. Let's try that. And there we go. That's the sort of effect we can get, which is really, really soft lighting. The other good thing about these is you can actually have a much more powerful way of controlling how soft the actual lighting is. So in other words, if I make this square smaller, as you can see, this now becomes bring this down much, much harder of an edge. And if I bring this up and make this bigger, you can see now that the light becomes much, much softer shadows. And this is why it's the perfect light actually for three point lighting, because you've got so much control over the actual shadows. So now let's just bring it down. So let's pull it back. So let's make it much brighter. Let's put onto maybe 5,000 Let's make it really bright. So, and let's move the cube over here. So you can see that the cube has got this lighting coming off of here in these directions. And now we can see that if I was to bring it closer, G, bring it closer. And then if I was to make it smaller like, so now you can see we have control over that shadow and bring it out a little bit and make it much, much softer if we want to. And that is the power of actual area lights and that's why they're so important within stems. Now on the next lesson, we're going to actually be moving on to our first scene where we're actually be putting all of these things we've just learned into practice. So I really hope you enjoyed this lesson and I'll see you in the next one. I hope you're really looking forward again. Start within an actual scene. Alright everyone, So I hope you enjoyed that. See on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 4. HDRI Skybox Lighting Mastery in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. Now let's move on and go to lighting. And we're going to look at the first actual main part of the course, which is HDR lighting. So let's open this up. We have a project, and we have an example. The project, what I'll be doing is I will be working on the project. And at the side of me on my other screen I'll actually the actual main example. But you can open up the example and see where it's going to take you. So let's actually open up both of these just so you have an idea before we start. So let's open up the project. I'm going to bring this over and this is the actual scene you're going to get. And of course you can see when we put it onto render, there's enough in there. And that's basically what you're going to get with most of the scenes that you're going to come across. And your job is to actually fix the lighting in these. This is great, not only in case you have your own scenes which you've actually created, but also in case you're actually working for a studio or you may be working on a game and you want to bring in your own lighting. It's great because you'll have lots and lots of options available to you to really show off your own models or games. Now let's open up the actual example. If open up the example, this is the example. So this is what we're going to achieve if I bring this over, if I put on lighting, and let's go to modeling, this is what we're actually going to achieve with this one. You can see we've got some really, really nice lighting coming down over here shining through these steps. And it actually looks like an early morning desert style themed steam, which is what we actually went for in here. Nothing too complex or anything like that. The main point here is to show you how H lighting actually works. All right, so let's put that on my other screen now. What we'll do is we'll not make a start yet, because I want to show you something else inside this one as well. You'll also have a resource pack. And in the resource pack there's going to be the actual HD's. There's also going to be a HDRI set up. Now this one is really important. So this is the one I want you to open up first. So if I open this up, you will see nothing. And that's good. That's what you're supposed to see. Now if you go over to shading and in the shading panel, you're going to have your objects where you do all your materials. Hopefully you're aware of all that. And if you come over to where it says Wild, so if we click on Wild and zoom out a little bit, you will see that in here we actually have a HDRI set up which is going to be free with the actual course. Now what this enables you to do is it enables you to control your HDRI, so the rotation of it, it enables you to bring in your HDRI. And then we've got a few options which we're going to go through as we work on our desert scene. Now at the moment, you won't be able to just grab this and press C and then just put it into your other scene. That's not actually how it works, So what we're going to do is I'm going to close that down. You're going to make sure that you've got this on your computer somewhere. So let's close that down. So don't say. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put this down and go to my desert scene. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to file and 'n go over to append. And now I just want to find that HDRI project. So you can see in here resources, we have HDRI set up blend. And then in here you're going to have one that says world now in the world, that is this one here. So world as you can see. And if I click on world, you can see that at the moment this is what's in the scene. But if I come in, I can actually take the world from that project that I've just showed you. So double click it. And now within this scene, if I come over to the right hand side click down the world. I've actually got HDRI set up. And if I bring that in now you'll see a complete change in our actual scene. Now, what have we actually done that we've actually bought that HDRI set up into our project, so you can do this within all of your own projects. Now you've got the power to actually come in, go to world, and then you'll have this set up in here. Which this set up, by the way, is pretty amazing really. I mean, it's so easy and handy. And I'll show you now why that is the case. So if we come over to the right hand side and put this on our rendered view, you can see at the moment that we've got a view like this. And you can see that if I come in and turn the strength up. So if I turn the strength up, you can see that the strength actually get turns up. Now at the moment you can't actually see any sky. And the reason for that is because this actually comes in with a gradient, a color, and a HDRI. So let's come to the color first and plug that into the surface. So what happens, this actually then is this BG color. So what I can do is for your own scenes and models, you can actually come in and change the backdrop behind your actual model or scene while keeping the real time HDR lighting. So I've turned this up even more. You can see that we've got HDR lighting in here, but we've also got a color gradient behind it as well. Now let's put a color or gradient. Let's put it on gradient now. And let's come in and turn this up to a reddish color. You can see now we've also got a actual gradient now let's come over as well. And what I want to do is I want to turn this over. Turn this around as you can see. What it's doing is it's a altering how our actual lighting is set up. Now let me just turn this down a little bit because I think it's a little bit too high at the moment. So something like that. In fact, let's turn it up just we'll put it on too. And there we go. Now you will notice that it basically lights the whole thing. And this is the thing with HDRI lighting. We haven't really got any shadows or anything like that, so we actually have to fake those on top as well. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you, let's put it onto HD Surface lighting. Let it load up, and this is what you're going to get Now let's look at the sky. So if I come round, I can see that my son is right over here. Now generally, wherever your sun is going to be, that is where you want to put your actual rotation of the sun, of the HDRI. So in other words, we rotate this round to get it to where we want the Sun to be. And then we also put a sun in place. So if I come round here and just rotate it, so if I bring it this way and if you want to rotate it slowly, just press the shift button. And that will rotate it much slower. So I'm going to bring it this way till my sun appears. So I'm holding the shift burn and there's my sun. And now you can see that beautiful lighting. We actually get on there. And now what you want to do is you can see the light rays coming down. Now actually you want to bring in the sun. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to press shift day. Let's come down to light source and let's bring in an actual sun. And let's put our sun in line. So in line with this actual light source over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press G, so seven to go over the top. Press G then, and I'm going to put my light source in here, like so. Now I want to do is I want to lift it up. So all I'm going to do is press shift space part. Bring the move tool. I'm going to bring it up like so. And then what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to rotate this now. So if I come in and rotate this, so X, let's rotate it round. Just making sure that's on the wrong way. So controls A. Oh y. Let's rotate it round like so. And then Art. And let's rotate it a little bit like so. And now let's have a look at what we've got there. So now you can see we've got some beautiful shadows coming down here. And you can see that this scene is lit up pretty nicely. Now thing is, most people will rely on a HDRI to do all the work for them. Never do that, it's not going to do all the work for you. You're still going to have to come in and actually mess around with the lighting. I'm just going to rotate this around a little bit, just so it's coming straight down those steps, near enough. And then I'm just going to look and see. You can see here my lighting of my HDRI doesn't quite line up. So I'm going to do is I'm just going to press Shift and move it over slightly, so Okay. I'm happy with that. I can see it's lined up now. Now what I need to do is just go over now to my son. So my son is here. Come over to where the little bulb here. Let's put this first of all on two. So we'll put it on two. Let me, let's put it on two so you can see it lights up a lot more. Let's also make it a little bit warmer in other ways, a little bit more yellow. And as you see as we bring that down, it starts to make it a little bit more yellow. And that is what we're actually looking for as well. We can come in and actually turn these shadows down just a tad as you can see. So it can make them less sharp or more sharp, whichever you want. And that's the way you have control of how sharp these actual shadows are going to be. It's very refined when you do that, by the way. But you can see now this is what we've got and already it's looking like pretty nice scene. Now, the other thing is that in that pack you will notice that I also put two more scenes in, two more HDRIs in. And the reason for this is because I want you to be careful when you're getting your own HDRIs. First of all, all HDRIs are very high quality and second of all, the lighting is not always HDRI lit. In other words, it's just fake lighting put in there and they're not true. Now this one here this day, EXR is the true HDRI. It was actually taken out somewhere in the open where all of the lighting was actually mapped. Now some of them like this night scene. So let's bring in the night scene so I can show you. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to move that to the side. I'm going to come in to where my day EXR is. Close that down. And then I'm going to open it up. Oh. Before we do that, by the way, just in case if your model's ever pink or anything like that, what it means is generally that the HDRI has not been brought in. So you need to just make sure you bring it in. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click open. I'm going to go now to my resources. I'm going to bring in the night scene. Now once I brought in the night scene, you'll see we actually have a little bit of difference if I actually come to this light now. So come over to the right and side, press the little dot button, and then what you'll be able to do is go to where the sun is. The dot button on the number pad next to the zero, close down the light. And you can see from this night scene, there's really no light source coming from there. The worst thing is as well, is that you can see that this behind is really, really low resolution, really, really low quality and simply isn't worth using. So just make sure if you get in a scene HDRI, you know, to light the scene, make sure it is of high quality, and make sure it's actually got proper light sources. Now let's go to the final one, which will be Wicher. So let's open it up. Let's go back resources, which let's bring it in. Now you can see that this does have actually some light source, but if we turn this down, you can see it's not very realistic. In other words, it looks great behind. It really does look a nice light source. But of course, you already know that this is not a real HDRI because it's actually made in Photoshop. It's one that actually we made in Photoshop and it's just there to look nice. It's not really there to light the seams, so we can bring it in as a HDRI, which is, in other words, we're using it for the actual sky, so we're using it as a sky texture rather than getting real world lighting from it. So they're actually the few types of HDRI that you might come across and just be aware that you want to actually get realistic ones. So let's close that down. Let's open up the final one, which will be, again, our day. So let's bring that in. And now you can see the actual difference. All right, now if you want to save out everything in a pack as well, we'll just quickly go through that. So in other words, if you want to save this out so everything goes together. In other words, if I send this file, so if I got to file and save now and then send this through to someone else, they are not going to get this day X R in there. They're going to end up with a pink scene. And the reason is, before sending it to anyone, what you want to do is you want to go to external data and automatically pack the resources in your scene. And the reason you want to do that then is because what it'll do is it'll pack not only all of the textures, it will also pack all the lighting data as well. So you save it out. So once you've done, click this on, click this on, and then come to file, save it out. And then you'll be able to send that through to wherever you like. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed the first actual project. An example, I hope you learned something from it. And I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 5. Ambient Occlusion and Bloom Effects in Blender's Eevee Renderer: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this where left off, now we've done that one. Let's actually close that one down. And what we're going to do is we're going to open up our next scene. So let's come in and open up our next scene, which is going to be here. So let me pull this over like, so it's going to be simple background to sky texture. So let's open up that. What I want you to do is just if you open up the example, you can put that then over the right hand side of your second monitor or something. Or you can open up, have a quick look and then open up the project. But the one way we're going to open up, we're going to open up the example. First, I'm going to put that over the right hand side just so I can keep track of what I'm actually doing within this scene. Because everything has been set up, you know, beforehand to make sure that we keep on track and there's no fluff around this course. Now let's open up the project. So I'm going to open up the project. I'm then going to put this down. I'm going to bring the project in now on this actual part of the course, what I'm going to be doing it as well as doing something with the lighting within this part, I'm also going to be going through the EV and the cycles render engines. And there are different types of options because I feel like it's pretty important to go through those. If we want to, you know, get to grips with lighting, compositing, and rendering, we really need to know what choices we've actually got. So let's first of all come in and what we'll do on the right hand side here, you'll see at the moment this is on cycles. Let's put this to EV, and then let's turn on the render option up here, which means that this now will be rendered within V and in a minute everything will light up. Or I'm hoping it will light up. It might be a little bit slow. There we go. Now at the moment, this is real time rendering. That's what V is. Real time rendering as I move around, the scene is just staying the same, basically, if I move this some, so if I press Art and Z and move it around, you'll see that it has real time shadows, real time lighting. And it's pretty nice, although it will never look as good, you know, straight off the bat as blender cycles. Now you can actually get ev, up to when you render it out into being really, really good and looking a lot like blender cycles. And it will be one hell of a lot faster than cycles as well. Cycles is much slower than V, so before we carry on, let's actually put this on cycles. And you will see now it takes a while to actually render over the left hand side. Now it's rendering all these samples. If I move it around, these samples will start again. And the reason is that this is not real time rendering. It has to take a while before it's actually going to get you some details. As you can see there, the longer I give it, the more details will come in up to a certain point. It won't go all the way to 500 and we'll talk about that in just a minute. So why is this happening? Well, this is using a V ray is what cycles is using, which is the type used in things like substance painter and it needs to have time to render things out. In other words, basically all of this that we see at the moment is made up of little squares. And each of those squares has lighting information. And as the lights bouncing off, those cycles has to calculate how the light is bouncing off what it's interacting with. It's mainly down to the lighting. And sometimes if you have large textures, a lot of that will be taken up with textures. But in most scenes it's mainly down to lighting. That's taking most of the time because that is the thing that's going to give it actual depth. Now the other thing on the right hand side, you'll notice now pointing on cycles is something called denoising. And this has been in blender now probably for a year or more, but it isn't in some of the older versions of blender. What this does is it uses a certain trick where it gets you up to a certain sample and then you just guess as the rest. And it basically, it stops it from looking really, really grainy like this. So if we were to leave this now, it would take a lot of samples before this starts to look less grainy. But clicking this on speeds up that process no end. And we can actually use this as well when we're actually rendering, rendering things out in cycles. And it saves us a ton of time. Now let's quickly, before we carry on, so I'll just show you the difference between cycles and V. Now the reason is as well that V is using real time lighting, which means that when you're rendering something out, it's going to be much, much quicker. So I'm just going to give you a quick show of that just while we've got these options on. So if I press Shift date, let's bring in a camera. So we're going to bring in a camera. And then what I'm going to do is we're going to press control Alt and zero, just to put the camera where I want it. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to press zero just to go into camera view. And then I'm going to come over here to where it sees view. Want to click camera to view on. This means that wherever now I move my mouse, the camera is going to move. So I'm just going to press shift middle mouse just to get us into a shot. Now what you'll see is we've got our shot. Let's put this onto cycles without touching anything. At the moment, we're not going to touch anything. This is based of what it comes in with, Sorry, not cycles onto Eve. There we go. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to turn off the ambient occlusion and the bloom and screen space reflection because we're going to talk about those in a minute. Now, before you render this out, the first thing you always want to do is you just want to make sure that you're on wire frame. So just put that on wire frame and then we're just going to go to render Render image. And there you go. It's already rendered out. That's how fast it is, but you can see it's not very good. It doesn't look very good at all. And this is the problem I see on a lot of Facebook and things like that, where people have rendered things out without no clue about the lighting or the rendering options. Now let's close that down. And then what we're going to do is we're going to come to cycles and we're going to go to render and do the same thing. Now you can see that it's rendering out. You can see that it's got all the way, don't worry, we're not going to render this out to 4,000 either. You can see that it's got all of these samples to go to 4,096 But what you can see already is that it's looking a lot better than what Eve was doing straight off the bat. All right, so let's close that down before it finishes rendering. Now let's come to the EV option. So we're going to put this back on V over here. And then what we're going to do is, first of all, we're going to turn up the number of samples. This basically this is the viewport samples and this is the rendering samples. The higher this is, what it's doing is it's allowing more time per actual pixel to work out where the lighting is. So that the higher this is, the better it's actually going to look up to a certain point. If this is set really low, you're going to get a really greeny image because the lender won't have had time to work out all of the texture details, all of the lighting details, and anything else in the scene. So saying this low, we'll give you a really fast render, but not a very good job. Now, let's set this to 250. I feel like 250 is a level where you're going to get enough detail. Use this for animation, basically. It's going to be really quick to animate things. It's not going to take all day. They're not going to look nowhere near as good as cycles, but you're going to get a quick animation out of it. So it might be good for something like this scene, which has some really, really kind of nice basic stylized textures, but something that's looking realistic. We've got a lot of light sources, it's not going to look too good. Now the next thing I want to do is I just want to turn off my camera to view, because I don't want that on there. I just want to zoom in now to here. And what I want to talk about is first of all, ambient inclusion. If I turn ambient inclusion on, you can see that we get a big difference between these leaves. This is why I've used this scene because it's really easy to see down on here. You'll see there is a little bit of difference, but we can't really see much. Now what we can do though if we turn this up, is we can have a lot more darkness down there. We can turn down this factor and control exactly how dark something is. So what is this doing? Well, ambient occlusion is used within texture maps and within render engines. And what it's doing is it's faking shadows is what it's doing. A lot of the time you'll have baiting ambient occlusion, so you might bring in the texture map where all the ambient occlusion is done anyway. And then you'll also add in your own ambient occlusion, making things really pop out to you. Or controlling how dark certain areas are. Or especially controlling how dark contact shadows are like this. If you see, if I bring this down, I'll bring it up. You can see the contact shadows down here as well are actually going up and down, depending on how actually I want it. So you can see contact shadows off up here are going up and down. That's basically what we want to control now in cycles, we can't actually do that. We don't have this option of ambient occlusion. We have to do a lot more things to actually get the ambient occlusion out because it's not real time rendering. That's something to take into account. Now, the next one we're going to discuss is Bloom. When I click on Bloom, you can see click this off, go onto Bloom. And turn this down. There we go. Now, why is it going Lava? It just looks like it's a gray fog. Well, the reason is mainly is because we're using an actual light source, which is a sun, which is an infinite light source. So when it's bringing in the bloom, what it's doing is, as you can see, if I just turn this to red, it's making bloom over the whole scene as you can see, because this light source is everywhere. Now, if we just get rid of this sun, so get rid of the sun. Let's bring in another light source. So we'll bring, let's bring in a point light. That's probably the easiest to work with. Let's put the point light down here. Let's put it into this hole here like so. Now if we mess around with the bloom, you'll see if I bring this up or bring it down. Let's bring it up a little bit. We actually have control now, how much bloom we have now. You can see if I zoom out, we haven't got any of that red there now. But if I bring up the radius of it now, you can see we can bring it down or bring it back. What this is doing is it's actually controlling how much bloom we actually have in the actual scene. Now if I bring this back in, like so you can see now I've only bloom around this area here. Let's actually bring this down. Yours a little bit more, something like that. Bring up the keel a bit and let's bring down, we'll keep the intensity pacture, we'll just bring that down a little bit, so let's put this on 0.1 and there we go. We've only got that redness just very sly round here. Now this is really important to bloom, especially when you're using volume metrics and they say volumetrics, what they're going to do is they're going to add depth to the air. So in other words, when you're out at night and there's a lot of moisture in the air. The reason why, when you look up at a lamp and you see this kind of foggy glow around it, is because of bloom. And this is what we're trying to replicate. Now of course in the scene like this, we haven't got any volumetrics or anything, but you can see that we still have a fair amount of control over and to actually bring Bloom into our actual scene. Now what we're going to do on the next lesson is we're going to carry on talking about these different options and why they're important. And basically what we need to do to get the most out of both EV or cycles, depending on which one you want to use. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 6. Enhancing Blender Renders with Real Time Rendering Options: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this is where we left it off. All right, so now we've done that scene. Let's close that down. And then what we're going to do is we're going to go now to our next one. I'll go and come over here. And the one that I want to go to now is the third one down, simple background to sky texture. Let's double click that. I'm not going to actually open up the example. You can open that up if you want to see it. Put it on your other screen. I'm going to open up the projects. So I'm going to open up this one. I'm going to pull this over like so. And you'll end up with something like this. Now on this actual lesson, or lessons, what I'm hoping to do is actually change this what's in it at the moment. So you might get a scene with just some basic background lightning with the diffused color. And we want to change it into something much better, but really easily without the use of a HDRI. This is something called sky texturing and we're going to go through that as well as in these probably a couple of lessons. We're also going to go over all of the cycles and Navy rendering options because they are very numerous and you need to know something about that if you're going to get the most out of your renders. So let's move on. So let's come over, first of all and put this onto, let's put it on V because the moment it's on cycles. And then what we'll do is we'll just come over and click on our rendering. Now let's discuss, first of all, what the difference is. So at the moment we're on V, V is a real time render engine, a little bit like a Games engine, like on real or Unity. It's basically rendering lighting in real time. In other words, wherever I move this lights or if I move it round as you can see our Z, you can see it's instantaneous. There's nothing, you know, you're not waiting on lighting or anything like that. Now in the past, blend the cycles so if we put this on, cycles used to be take a long time within the viewport, but as we've actually got better and faster and more powerful graphics cards and actual CPUs, it's taking a lot less time. So we'll reach a point where it's actual instantaneous. So it's like real time rendering but with ray tracing, because the actual cycles uses raytracing, whereas V doesn't use that, uses real time lighting. So that's the difference between them. You'll notice that when I turn round, that the number of samples within cycles actually starts to go to a certain point and then it will stop. And the reason for that is you can see over here in the viewport it says maximum samples. And then it says minimum samples. And then we've got this noise clicked on. If we click off this noise, you'll see it looks really, really grainy until it actually starts to add up the samples. Now what this is, it's a little bit of a cheat within blender where it basically starts to denoise your actual scene in real time. This is pretty much where it's doing. It's not calculating all of the lighting, it's basically calculating up to a point and then guessing the rest of it. And that is how the denoising works and it gets rid of all the fireflies and all the noise that you'll see in the scene. So it's really handy to make sure that this is clicked on. Now, the noise threshold is basically how much, how less of a noise it wants to get to before it actually finishes with the sample. So you'll notice over here, it'll only count up to so much. And then it'll say rendering done. It doesn't actually get to the 500. It gets to a place where you should be happy with actually the view in the Viewport. Now, before moving on, let's actually go back to V, because V is a lot different from the render engine. You can render it in either V or you can render in cycles. The EV is going to be much, much quicker no matter what. You might have a low spec computer and you mightn't want to be rendering an EV because even the animations are going to be much, much quicker. So you also have some other options as well in V which you don't have in cycles. So for instance, let's just turn off this Bloom and this screen space reflection. And then let's go through these. So the first one we have is ambient occlusion. Now I'm going to explain the cycles part of it after, but I will just explain the amment inclusion at the moment. You can see when I turn this on how all this darkness actually comes in. So this is real time ambient occlusion. That's something you don't actually get in cycles. You actually have to go in and fix that. Now we can also see as we turn this up, you can see those darker parts become more defined now. And we can mess around with these and really control how dark somewhere is or how the contact shadows are actually interacting with the actual scene. Now a lot of the time, if you're actually painting this in something like substance painter, substance painter will add in a lot of contact shadows for you. So this ambient occlusion is like ambient occlusion on top of ambient occlusion. Now if you've using seamless textures, I'll put the difference actually down to the bottom right hand side. The difference between seamless textures and UV map. Texture map. What the differences and why they're important. For instance, the Ambien inclusion is really important if you're using seamless textures which were not in this case, but if you were, then you would be able to actually fake a lot of the lighting within here. In other words, the contact shadow as you can see, if I turn that off, it looks really, really flat as you can see. And that's not something we want. So let's turn that back on. The next one is Bloom, and at the moment we can't see a lot. And the reason is because maybe I need to turn this up. Let's just turn that up or down. And there we go. Now you can see at the moment that with the bloom, it just makes the whole of the scene look really, really gray. So why is that? The reason is that V has a built in processing to actually deal with Bloom. But it doesn't work very well for something like a sun, which is an infinite light source. So what it's basically trying to do is it's trying to add Bloom to an infinite light source, which is the whole scene basically. And that's not what we want, so let's actually get rid of the sun. Let's actually bring in another light source. So let's bring in something like a point light. Let's put the point light over here. So now let's come in and actually turn off or actual seen lighting. So if we come over to the world and we put this on zero, we'll end up then with something lit like that. And you can see, why does that happen? Why is it so blurry? That is because we're actually using bloom. If I come in and turn off my bloom now you'll see exactly what happens. Now We have control over now over how much Bloom this is actually going to have. So you can see that. Which one is it? Mess around with these? I think I'll have to turn up the lighting first. So I'm going to come over to my actual lighting. I want to turn this up to, let's say 200. And then what I'm going to do is go back to my bloom now, which is over here. Then if I come in and I turn up the threshold, and then I think, which one is it, one of these that I need to turn up and mess around with? Yeah, there we go. Let's put it down to something like that. Let's then turn up this. Let's turn up the radius, and let's turn down the intensity. I'm just going to turn the intensity up actually, and bring this down now we can see the bloom is coming off of here. Let's just see if I can actually accelerate that a little bit. Then what I'll also do is I'll just turn the threshold up tiny bit. I'll come over to my light and I'll put it onto yellow light, or let's put it on a red light instead. And then we might actually be able to see this a lot there. Let's turn down now the strength of this, just to get an idea of what this Bloom is going to do, let's come back then. I'm going to turn up this, I think going a little bit too low. So I'm just going to turn this up to let's say 100. And let's put it down here more here, so then we'll go back. Now if we turn down this threshold, now we can see that we've got something where it goes all the way out. Basically it's leaving us no threshold, so I'll just go out infinitely. But we can't actually control now the radius of that. And we can start turning this down now and getting some proper bloom out of it. Like you can see, it's slightly by look slightly different from the rest of it. You can see the rest of it up here, it's pretty sharp. Down here is a little bit blury as we look at this actual bloom. So this is really good for foggy environments to really light your seen and have that kind of glow coming off of light, you know, when you're looking up and the actual moisture in the air is, you know, relatively thick. It'll make the actual light look as though it's actually larger than what it is blooming out. That's what this is for. But the actual scene now, we actually want to change this. So at the moment as you can see, we've got in a background surface texture which is diffused. So if I just close this down a minute, just close this light here, come back then to the strength of this one, put it back to one. This is what we'll end up with. You can see it's pretty flat at the moment. And that's why we're going to actually change this into another actual light source. So basically what we're relying on here is just the world. So just the world lighting. And this is something you really don't want to rely on much because you don't have a lot of control over it. All right. Going back then to the EV options now, let's actually turn off that Bloom, because I don't actually want Bloom in there. So I'm going to turn this off and then what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to get rid of this point light. And then what you'll have left is without the sun, this is just the basic light in which the seam went, came in with. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bring a sun in just for now, just so I can show you the different styles of lighting. So I'm just going to bring a sun in. I'm going to point it back at the tree and just get in some lighting light. So just some basic lighting. Now let's go through the other things that we've got. We've got something called screen space reflections here. This is very important for any kind of metal that you actually got. I'm just wondering if I can actually see it on there. Yes, we can. Now, you can see just on this little bit, if I turn this on, I'll turn it off. You can see that we're now actually getting some actual reflections off of the ground. In other words, this is bouncing up onto this metal work and creating shadows. As you can see, this actually is better when you've got like armor in the scene or you've got water, for instance, if you don't have this with water. Let's actually do that now. So what we'll do is we'll bring in a plane, just a quick plane. Where's the plane? Peer it, Let's just bring it in. Bring it up so we can say that this was a water sauce in here. Let's come over and actually give it a new material. So just give it a new material. Let's actually bring down the roughness or up the roughness, let's bring up the metallic like so. And let's come back now to our options. 7. Accelerating Render Times in Blender: Now let's come in and turn this down a little bit. So I've turned down my roughness. So we'll see that we've actually started to get some reflections. Let's have a look at this. Melts, let's keep it maybe down a little bit. All right, looking a little bit more light water. Let's go over them. Back to the EV options. And let's turn off screen space reflection. And you can see that's the difference. And what is this used for then? It's used for things like armor in scenes, it's used for things like water, it's used for anything that's basically reflective. So we really, really want to have this ticked on because even though you won't be able to, it'll be tiny, tiny little differences like in this over here that I showed you. It actually really adds up to bringing your scene to life. So you really actually want this on. The other thing I tend to do as well is I turn off half res trace and turn it on, sorry. And turn off refraction. And the reason I do that is normally refraction. We're not going to be using it in a scene unless we're dealing with water and we're actually looking in the water. In other words, when you see a straw and you put it in a glass and it moves slightly to the side, That is what refraction is. In other words, it's refracting light. And I don't really use this unless I've actually got a scene with a lot of water. All right, so moving down, if you are using anything like animation, you'll probably want to put or mess around with motion blur. We're not actually going to be dealing with that in this course. Volumetrics, We will be dealing with some volumetrics in this course, but we're going to be using cycles with it. But there is that option there in case you want to use V. Now, performance is now the next two options you're not really going to be using much, especially if you're a beginner. So we'll leave those for now. The next one is shadows. Now, shadows actually is important if we can put this on, let's say 64. And what it'll do is it will really turn down the actual quality of the shadows. In other words, how do the shadows look? Are they going to look bleary? Are they going to look really sharp? So I tend to put this on a minimum of 1024, but if I am I seeing to look at that a little bit better, Again, it's going to be really, really slight. The notice that you'll actually get out of this again with the screen space reflections and again adding on the ambient occlusion and the bloom. It's all of these things that come in together to make it a really, really nice looking scene. Now moving on down, we've got something called indirect lighting. This is where you will bake out lighting. In other words, it will already be baked out, which will save you a ton of time when you're bringing in more lighting. So in other words, it will bake out all of the ambient occlusion and things like that. So it's already baked out for you. And then it'll be actually baked onto these actual models. So we're going to discuss that a little bit later on. The next one we're going to look at is film. And inside here, there is something that's actually really im point. Let me just double tap the. And the one that's really in point is the transparency. This is how you get a transparent background, a new image. Now this is really, really great when you want to take, you know, a shot of a model and then you want to put something behind the background, whether it's a gradient coming out to really shot off that model. Or if you're putting that plan on putting that model, you know, into a real scene or something, you just basically have to get the lighting right, do it with a transparent background, render it out, and then you can put it within that scene. So this is really, you can do things really in depth with this. Now I'm just going to turn that off, but now I'm going to close up a film and simplify. We're going to go through that a little bit later on, so I'm not going to go through that right now. Same as freestyle and the final one is color management. What these do is they have an option to actually really change the way that the actual scene looks. So for instance, if I come down to look and put it in very high contrast, you can see it really, really desaturates. Everything just brings out all that color. And this is something that you might want to actually work with. Now, exposure will change the whole of the lighting for the whole scene. So you can see, I can really bring that down, bring it up. And it gives me a lot of control over how to light my scene. So for instance, I can really bring those shadows out, then bring up the exposure and we can see how it looks really dark in contrast to really light scene. All right, so now we've done that. What we want to do now, I just want to put this on something like medium contrast. You can see now brought that down and you can also see that, I always think this, that when you've actually grow it on non, so let's put it onto non. You can see that the difference is really, really tiny on medium and high, like it's basically nothing. But the difference between very high is so different that you barely notice it once you grow a medium high contrast. But I'm going to set on that anyway because I think for this scene it's a little bit too high. All right, so now if we move back up, that is the EV options, that is how you know will render this out. So now set this to 250. If I render this out, it's going to take a little bit longer, but I'm going to show you. I'll just put this again onto wire frame just so I can render it out, surrender, render image. And you will see that even on my machine it's quite a powerful machine actually. But it renders out near enough straight away. And it still looks pretty good, you know, for a real time render. But you're going to see the difference between this and actual cycles now. Let's close that down. Now, before using cycles, what you want to do is you want to put it on cycles. And you'll notice at the moment that we've got a CPU and a GPU. So one's using your processor and the other one is using your graphics card. It will always be faster on your graphics cards, so just bear that in mind. The thing is though, not all graphics cards can actually work with cut or optics X. Let's go over those now. If I come to edit, go to preferences. What I'll do is I'll go to system within system here. You'll see non, you'll see cut optics hip one API. Now I don't know about these two, so I'm not sure about those two. But the ones you'll want to use is either cut or optics X. Some graphics cards allow cut and the optics X is basically like cycles X. Which means that if you use this, it's going to speed up everything a lot. Scott, the new cycles X was much bigger and much faster than the previous, just blender cycles. The other thing is click on your graphics card, click on your processor. Now, I'm not sure if, when you click both of these on, if it's using both of them, I still don't think so. I think it's using whichever one you set over here. So whether it be CPU or GPU, I'd like to see an option here that says combined. So we can use them both at the same time perhaps. I don't know if that's possible, but I would like to see that. All right. So once we've set those both on, unfortunately if you've gotten on, I could really help you. It means you're using, you know, a low level laptop or something and it's going to be a long haul rendering things out just using nothing basically. So the more options in Cliconire, the faster the renders are going to be. And I would say that rendering out is kind of your ticket into getting better. The faster you can render things, the better you're going to get. And the reason is for that is of course you're just going to get more renders out which means it's going to speed up your progress. All right, so let's close that down. Let's then go back to cycles. And as I said, let's first of all put this onto GPU. Compute now at the moment we've got maximum samples at 4,096 and we've got noise on Now let's turn this down something like 500. We've got the camera set up in the same place. And let's just go down now for the rest of the actual settings. Now all of these settings have an impact on your scene of course. But again, this is a blender and lighting for beginners. So a lot of these things you're not going to be used to way in the future. And normally these are only used for very, you know, they're used differently for different scenes. They're going to be very small differences and they're not going to be the same in all scenes. So the thing is with lights, we've got where is it not advanced? There it is. Light paths, for instance, we have all of these options here. So the first one we've got is the maximum number of light bouncers. And if you hover over this, it will also tell your total maximum number of light bouncers, how many light bouncers are coming off of each sample that it's actually rendering. Then we've got to diffuse. So this the maximum number of bouncers a light ray can make in a scene, irrespective of the type of surface it interacts with. In other words, you're limiting the amount of light bouncers that it can bounce off, even if it's something like a mirror. So if you leave this at four, even if it's a mirror, it will still reduce it down to four light bouncers. In other words, if you want, you seem to look bare, put the actual diffuse up. It will make more light bounces off of things. If it's something like a mirror, it will basically increase it to, let's say we put this on 16, it will make more light bounces off of that actual material. All right. The next one we've got is glossy. And these are the bouncers light makes of non glossy, non reflective surfaces. And they scatter in many directions when they hit such surface. The diffuse setting controls how many of these types of bounces a light rate can make, if ending, or it's called being terminated. All right, so the next one we've got is transmission, and this is about glossy Bouncers occur on reflective or shiny surfaces. The glossy setting controls the number of bouncers a light ray can make off of each surface. Next of all we've got volume. And this setting controls how many transparent surfaces a light ray can pass through without being terminated. This is useful in scenes with multiple layers of glass, or water, or leaves for that example, And used with the transparency, you can see exactly what this does. So the moment we've got it transparent on 88, if I set this to zero, then we've got no transparency within the scene whatsoever if I set this to five. You can see. Now we're starting to get some transparency. But the light's not passing all the way through and we're still getting a lot of darkness within there. This is useful actually, if you've got a load of hay sat on top of each other, and you'll find out that when you actually come to render it, you'll have a lot of blackness in there. Now, if you turn this up to, let's say ten, let's turn it up to ten, we can see now we've got darkness in here. We've still got some darkness around here, but we're starting to get somewhere. Let's turn it up to 20 like so. And now we can see this is the problem that you'll most likely have because I think the standard is 20 where you can see through the tree only slightly. But you can see that we've got some dark patches in there, it just doesn't look right. We turn this up to 90, we can see we get rid of those. We can see all the way through the tree and yeah, that's looking pretty good. All right. So let's move on down now because the other things we've already touched upon, you know, Ric lighting and things like that, we can come down and look at reflective and refractive. These are the things that we had on the V one as well. Let's close that down and let's again, we'll be looking at volumes and simplify a little bit later in the course. We're not going to be touching film with exposure. It's basically how blurry you want something, whether it's the forefront or the background. And sometimes people play around a lot with that. But again, this is a beginners course, so we're not going to touch that. Again, we've got the transparent here, which is the same thing as what we had in V. So very important that part. And now we're moving on to the actual good stuff. So performance, this is the one that you want to actually have a focus on. Now you want to be testing this out because it's pretty skewed the data on whether it's good to use a small tile size or a large tile size depending on if you're using your CPU or your GPU. Now I tend to go with 64 tile sizes. So I'm just going to put that in on my graphics card because I feel that's the quickest for me. But quite honestly, you know it could be a lot quicker at 256, You want to basically be going up in double, so the next one is 128. You always want to make sure you don't put this at 200, and the reason is because it actually works quicker in pairs. So just keep that in mind when you're putting this on, but give it a test. The way I would give it a test is I would try something really low, like 32, and then try 124, sorry, 1024. And see what the differences between the speed. And then you're going to get an idea whether to use a smaller sample size or a larger sample size. And what does it actually mean? Well, when we're actually rendering this out, if I just quickly hit the render board, now succumb to render render image and start rendering. Each one of these is actually a tile as you can see. So it's rendering out each one of these tiles. And you can see exactly how quick it is now. The higher the sample level, the longer it'll take for each of these. Because you can see here, there's a lot more light passing through, so it's taken much, much longer to actually render that out. As soon as it gets there, it flicks through. So what we're actually looking at here is the actual tile size. If I close this down and I come back to it and let's say I set this on a much higher tile size. So I've come back and I put this on 1024. So you will see now when I come to render, it's actually going to be slices like so. And you can see now it has to render them out again, I don't know which is the quickest because the data is all over the place, to be honest. But for me, I'm finding a 64 tile size is good for my actual system. All right, so let's close that down. And what we're going to do is then on the next lesson is we're going to finish up going through these auctions, and finally then we're going to actually alter this scene. All right Ron. So hope you enjoyed that. I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 8. Sky Texture Node Illuminating the World in Blender: Welcome back everyone to Blender Lighting and Compositing four beginners. And this is where we left the art. All right, as you can see, the tile size, I'm just going to set that back to 64. And now we're going to look at these parts here. Now these are very important, they will speed it up dramatically. So you can see here this user spatial split, which means it's longer build times faster render. So on the front part of it, it's going to take a little bit longer just to decide how it's, whatever it's doing render things out. But on the back end, when it actually starts rendering, it's actually going to be quicker. So I always actually turn this one on, so let's just turn it on. And then using curves, use more Ram, render faster. So I always normally turn this on and you can see that this one uses less Ram but renders slower. So I'm definitely not going to turn that on. You might want to turn this on if you've got a lower amount of Ram in your machine and persistent data. I always turn this on. It's going to add, you know, memory up front into the actual blender file. But I always turn this on because then when I come to rerender, it already has all of the information. Now the next thing we're going to look at again is just the color management. So we do have the same action and the same exposure in gamma as we had in actual V. So now if I put all those on, if I come up to render, now this is how you'd render out your image. So just render image and you can see now it's dealing with tiny, tiny little samples. So you can see here, still take a fair amount of time on these, but if I come in now, you can see at the moment it's going up to 500 samples, as you can see. And this is directly tied to how many samples we actually set this to. So you can see up here going to 500. If I were to set this on 10,000 it's going to take much, much longer up to a certain point. And I'll show you what happens. So if I go to render image, we can see it's rendering now, but it's not going up to 10,000 And why is that now? It's only going up to a certain amount before he decides, hey, ho, this is okay. I'm just going to carry on rendering. If you want to stop that, what you need to do is you need to come back. I'm going to close that down. And what we need to do is change this threshold on the render so you can see this noise threshold here. Let's say put this to one or something like that. Come back to render render image and now you can see, oh, it's even quicker. Why is that? Well, the reason is because I need to put it the other way. So if I was to put this to 0.5 like so, go to render render image, still got the same thing. Mm, Why is that? That's the reason is because we have a noise threshold on here. If we don't take the noise threshold and then go to render, render image, now you're going to see it's going to take much, much longer for actual each sample it's actually going to take you up to the 10,000 samples. You can see though that these samples are looking amazing. And that's because it's actually sampling every single bit, up to 10,000 Now of course, 10,000 is going to be way too high for most actual scenes, but you can see the reason, especially when it gets to the leaves, it's going to take forever. You can see now you know somewhere one like Pixar, why they need 100 different machines and they still take 70 days to render out their films or something. This is the reason why, because they're rendering with very high quality. And what does that actually mean? It means, as we've discussed, that it's rendering out all of this little detail within this texture map to as high as it'll go. It means that it's rendering out all the light bounces. You can see we've got some really beautiful soft light on here, and this is because we're rendering out a much higher sample. All right, close that down. What I'm going to do is I'm going to reset that now. Because I think that, you know, until you're actually ready to really render something out. So here's the trick that I do. First of all, turn the noise threshold on. Then I turn this down to 100. And then what I'll basically do is I'll be, when I render a scene out, I'll be going to a very, very low sample rate. I'll even sometimes render out just an EV just to get an idea of what something looks like because it is so fast. So if I go to render out render image, you can see just how fast that is. Within a few seconds, I've actually got an image that I can actually view and, you know, get an idea of what the actual scene is going to look like. You can see here, the lighting is nowhere near as smooth. You can see here that the image is kind of blocky. Now, you will see though that also we have a lot of noise in here, but we have turned on the actual cycles. Noise which should, at the end of this noise, this for us. And then we'll have a good idea of what this scene is going to look like. Now, I do recommend always doing this. So what I tend to do is I'll do it on a very, very low sample rate. Then when I'm happy I'll do that on, you know, perhaps 500 samples, and then in the end I'll do my final render. There might be five or six transitions between all those. Now you can see it's denoising on there, and then it's finished. And now you can see we haven't got all of that kind of noise, or fireflies or grain or anything like that, but you can see that it's not going to be the same league as 10,000 samples. This is basically to get an idea. All right, let's close that down. So we've basically gone through all of the V options, all of the cycles options. And these are really important when you want to learn how to render things out, especially when you come into compositing. And lighting, they all go hand in hand actually. So that's pretty much the rendering part of it done. You've learnt as much as you're probably going to on this actual course. There will be a few of these options that we will be going into, but that is the main bulk of that actually covered. So now let's go back to actually lighting this scene. Now, as I said, when we brought in this scene, all we had was a very, very basic background lighting with a color and with a strength. And we can turn the strength up, for instance. Not a lot to actually work on, so you might get a lot of scenes that actually come in like this, or this is where you're probably going to start. What I tend to do is I'll tend to come over here, I'll click on a new world. I'll call this world sky texture, and we'll call it day. An actual sky texture is probably, you go to other than HDRI, it's very, very powerful. So now let's come over to shading panel. Let's open up, make sure on world over here. And this is the sound we've got at the moment. Let's actually get rid of this background and let's actually also put it onto the render engine. Now remember if your machine is a bit slower, just put this on EV, you're still going to get everything that you need out of this. Now the moment we've also got a sun in here, let's actually delete that sun. We're not going to have a sun in here. And then what we're going to do is we're going to come in, press delete. And then what we're going to do is we're going to add in, so we're going to press Shift a search for sky texture. Let's bring that in, and let's plug it in to the surface. And this is what we actually get. Now straight away you can see this is looking pretty nice if we come over as well to our options over here, down to where the film is and let's just put it on transparent background, we can see. Now this is looking really, really nice already. Just from a sky texture. Well, we can go way, way further than this actually. So what we can actually do here is we can turn that into the sun intensity first of all. So you can see it's kind of subtle. So from a really bright day, we can also turn up the sun elevation. So you can see now where is the sun going to be in the sky? We can also turn the sun rotation round, which is also really handy. And then what we can also do is turn up the altitude of the sun. Now the altitude of the sun isn't so important unless you've actually messed around with the air, dust, and ozone. We can see if we can turn these down, all of them down like so. Now we can actually start work on this. Now the other thing is of course that I want to turn back on my transparency just so I can see where my sun is. Now you can see, let's turn the ozone on first. So we're going to put the ozone up. Let's turn the dust up a little bit. Now we're actually starting to see something. Let's turn the air up and get the, let's all shift as well when we turn this air up. So we're just going to turn up the sun elevation a bit. What do we get here as we come up? We get it going all the way over the top, all the way back down the bottom. What's happening here is the sun is going all the way up to the top of the sky and all the way back down the bottom. If we turn this, let's go the other way actually. And what we're going to do is I'm going to get drop down, Drop down, Drop down. The sun is coming from this direction of the moment, it's over here somewhere. Do drop down all the way into the top. Now up to here. As you can see, this is a morning sun. That is what that's actually doing. Now the other thing is what we didn't do is we can actually make the sun size. Where is the sun, much bigger or smaller? So you can see now this is where the sun is. If I bring that sun elevation up, let's see, it goes down into the night or comes up. Now what I tend to do is I'll tend to bring my sun here like so. And then I'll bring the sun size down, something like it. Because it's a good visual of what I'm actually trying to do. If I bring it down, bring it down, bring it down. Then what you can do is you can bring the ozone, or down the ozone, whichever one you want to do, bring down the dust. And then you can really see your sun or bring up the dust and just play around with these. Bring up the air as you see now we've actually got something very nice now. The other thing is we can also set the intensity to how bright you want it. So what I'm going to do now is we're just going to rotate the sun round now. Just going to have it right now and here. And give me some really nice shadows. I'm going to turn down the sun intensity, but I'm going to hold shift, turn it down. Let's so, and this is a morning scene now, as you can see. Now let's come on and just come down to transparency. So let's put transparent on, and this is now a really, really nice little scene as you can see. Now the other thing is we want to actually have one day, for instance, or one morning and one actual night scene. So we can also do that. So how are we going to do that? First thing is I'm going to come over to my world again. I'm going to click this button here, Sky Textra Day. And I'm actually going to pull it sky texture. So now when I come into this, now when I change something, I can actually swap between them. Because if I click this down I've got world sky texture night and sky texture day. Now these will be the exactly the same. So let's bring sky text tonight and then what we'll do on the next part is we'll actually turn this into a night scene. All right everyone. So hope you enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 9. Cell Shading Techniques in Blender Using Freestyle: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lightning composite in four beginners and this is where we left it up. All right, so now we've got our night texture actually picked. Let's come down and we'll leave the sun intensity, we'll leave the sun size. What we want to mess around with is the sun elevation. Now of course, the lower we put this, the lower down the sky, the sun's going to go. So let's put this on something like minus four. And there we go now we can still see we've got some sun shining round here, so we need to rotate this a little bit. So let's just rotate it to 450. And then we've rotated it round, and then finally we can mess around now with the air and the dust, and the actual ozone. Ozone. Let's set to zero. Let's put the dust on 2.3 and let's actually put the air on something, not something like that. And there we go. Now we actually have a moonlit scene as well as a so we have a day so we can go back to and then we can go back to night. So day and night, we've got both of those there now. And you can see it's really easy to swap between them. So basically what you can do is you can layer up as well world lighting, because we can also go back as well to our world lighting that we had in the beginning. Now of course, none of these work too well on their own. So in other words, if we're doing a sky night texture for instance, what I certainly would do is I would probably bring in a point light. So let's bring in that point light. Let's just find where our point light was, put it on materials instead. And then I'm just going to let it work and find my point light where I put it. All right, I'm going to find it over here. Here's my point light. So all I going to do is press Shift in Space Bar to bring in the move tool. And now I can see it's stuck in the tree. I'm going to bring it over here like so. And then we're just going to go back now to the render and we'll end up with our point light here. So what I want to do with this point light is first of all, I want to put it on a blue, blue color. And now you can see we've actually got a bit of a moonlight on there. The other thing is now as well, we can bring down the sun intensity or to tad like so. And then we can really bring out the radius of this moonlight. Turn it up a little bit, and there we go. If I actually turn this off, now there is our moonlight. Now, of course the only problem with this is that you're not going to have them. So in other words, if I come in and put this on to date texture for instance, we're still going to have that there. So what I tend to do that in that point is I'll set up a new collection. So if I close this up, I'll set up a new collection which is gone in there. So this one here, let's pull it out, we'll call it night light. So, and then what I'll do is I'll come now and get my point light, put that into the night light. And now I've got that on or off. Because I can basically come over and now and click this on and off. Now it's important that you remember that one of them disables it in the viewport, which we're looking at now, and one of them disables it in the actual render. So you can actually have it on in the viewport, but just disable it in the render, it means it just won't render out. So now what we can do is we can go back to the night cycle and now we can just turn on night light on. So and I'll turn all of those lights on or off that you've actually going the scene. So again, really, really handy. All right everyone. So that's that part. Now let's move on to another project. Now we've learned about the blender cycles, the EV render engine, and we've learned about sky textures. We've learned about HDRI. Now it's time to learn about something completely different. So let's close this down. Let's go now and open up the next one, which is going to be under freestyle. And let's go and look. I'm going to open, well then I'm going to open up the example. I'm going to put that over the right hand side again. So open yours up if you want to look what could do, make sure you put it onto render. And then what you'll do is you'll open the project up like so let's bring that over. So we'll notice now that we've got a Star Wars AT and T Walker and if we put it on to render, we're not going to see that much. You know, it's going to load up, but it's not going to be anything special. It's going to look like that. Now, the first thing we want to do is we want to actually come over to the cycles. So I'm going to come over here and I'm going to make sure that I'm on cycles. So at the moment it's on B, let's put it on cycles. So let's make sure the noise is on. It's the first thing you should always turn on. And then what we're going to do now is just bring in a light source. So let's bring in a area light. So I'm going to press Shift Day. Let's come to light. Bring in area light. Let's press Shift Space bar. So we go move Gizmo. And let's bring it up and set it in some sort of place. So I'm going to set, so I'm going to rotate a little bit, so I'm going to make this a little bit bigger with the S born. So and then of course what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it brighter. But I want it really shining down here somewhere. So I'm going to come over and just make it a little bit bright. So I'm going to put on something like 400 like so. And then I'm just going to move it over to the side just to get some relatively nice lighting on there. Bring it over like so, and then R and X like so. And I think that's looking pretty nice already. Now we want to also do something else. What we want to do is we want to come over to these parts here because we haven't discussed the actual emission emission shady yet. So that's what we're going to discuss now. So if you come over to material, we will see that these bolts, they have a principal BSDF and they also have within them, so most of these have within them an emission. So you can see here the emission with emission strength. So if I double tap the age together off and then one we're going to do is we're going to put this on something like ten. And now you'll see it actually brightens them up. Now we can put these even higher, so let's bring them on 100 or 1,000 And you can see really, really bright now, actually reflecting off of there, bouncing back onto the actual walker. So probably a little bit too high at that point. So let's put 500. We just want a little bit of light coming off there. And you can also see that we're starting to lose a little bit of the color as well. So the higher you turn this up, the more bounce you're going to get off there. So if you turn this down, let's say 100, you can see less bounce off there. We're starting to gain a little bit of color. So there is just that to think about now What we want to do is we want to also because the emission is not something that I'm, you know, too concerned with in this actual project. The main thing about this project is to show you another way of rendering things out. So what I'm going to do is, first of all, I'm going to set up my camera again. So shift, let's bring in the camera, Let's put our camera roundabout here, so control Alt and zero. Let's put our camera in here. And also let's change the size of our render because we haven't done that yet. So what we're going to do is we're going to select our camera, so our camera selected here. We're going to come over to this little printer here. And what we're going to do is we're going to change the resolution. So we're going to change it to 2048 by 2048 and giving us eight square image. Then we're going to do is I'm just going to come over press to open up this panel view and then camera to view and just move it to the side slightly, getting a nice view of our image. Next of all, I'm just going to untick that and now move my camera away. Settle. Now the thing you'll notice about this is these textures are pretty high, as you can see, they're really, really nice textures. But what we want to do though, you might not want the textures as high. In other words, you might want this to be a little bit lower on the textures. Now, how do you do that? We don't want to go in and change these textures, but we want a way of actually fixing that ourselves. So what we want to do is you want to come in and you want to go down to cycles, come down, and you've got one that says simplify. Open this up, click it on, and then you'll notice under the Viewport and under the render, we have a texture limit. Now let's go into the viewport first and set the text limit to 128. And let's wait, look what happens. The text now has been brought down to 128 and we can also, let's set it up a little bit higher, so let's say 512. And now we're starting to get a little bit more detailing. Now I think this is right for what we're going to do. Because what we're going to do is we're actually going to come in now and come down to where it says, where is it look Freestyle. We're going to come down to freestyle, and I'm going to click that on. And then what I'm going to do now is render it out. So for this I'm just going to make sure that I've got this set onto Y frame and then I'm going to come up to my cycles. I'm going to make sure that in edit because it is a new project. So just make sure that everything's on so everything should be on for you. And then come down and we want maximum samples, let's say to be on 500. And then what we're going to do is we're going to come over to the render born hit render and let it render it out. Now the only thing I didn't do here, as you can see, I don't think I put it on GPU. So let's close that down for 1 second. And then also there's another mistake I made under render here. I didn't put the text limit on 512, so I'm going to do that. I'm also going to make sure that I've got my GPU on, so GPU compute on. And then finally I'm also going to make sure, as you should always do that under performance, we're going to put this to the right tile site, we're going to make sure you spatial splits is on and we're going to make sure persistent data is on. Now finally, let's go over to Rendnder image and again with very, very basic lighting, let's see what we actually get out of this. So at the moment we can see just the standard, you know, render that's going to come out. You can see that the actual, the textures have been reduced down to 512. I think we put them on something like that and you can see we've not got a lot of detail in there. That's exactly what we want. So now let's this actual finish and render. The other thing you'll notice as well that this is taking much, much longer to render and the reason for that is because it's a much larger render. It's 2048, so it's a square image, it's not 1920. By 1080, we've near enough doubled one side of them, which is, you know, the top part going over here, this part was 1080 and now it's been doubled to 2048. So we've nearly finished now. So let's just let that finish out. And then you're going to see some magic happen, which is probably going to change the way that you think about rendering because it actually opens up the doorway to things like comic book or, you know, other styles of rendering. And the top bit should be pretty fast because it's basically empty al right now it's finished. It's denoising the scene, which it will always do because we've got that tied on going to save us a lot of time. And now it's going Freestyle map loading, Stroke rendering. What does this all mean? Now we just wait, that finish this bit does take a little bit of time. It has a lot of things to compute. And there we go. Now that is looking really, really nice. As you can see. It actually looks as though it's been hand drawn with some color. And you can see that's really, really nice. Now on the next lesson, what we'll do is we'll just have a look at a few more options. I'll show you how to do this on V as well, and we'll carry on from there. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed that. I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 10. Nighttime 3D Environment Lighting with Emission in Blender: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this is where we left the ar. All right, so now let's come in, let's actually close that down. And then what we're going to do now is Joe's going to put this on render again and now we're going to go over to V. Now the moment we put this on V, I think if we put this on V, now the textures should be back, which they are, as we can see. Now let's see if we can come to simplify, and I want to see if I can put, yea, we don't have a maximum amount on here, unfortunately, on how large the textures can be. Let's actually go out though and render this. Let's just check though. First run 64, so that should be fine. Let's put it on wire frame. Let's put it on Render. Let's have a look. There we go. Stroke Rendering. And there we go. Pretty much the same thing. We can see probably on V, needs a little bit lower textures on there. Now I think also we can go to Preferences and do that as well. To do that on V, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put this onto the render engine. And then what I'm going to do when this loads up is I'm going to go to edit this time. So we can see, I'm just wondering how that's changed now. So I'm just going to go to edit. What we're going to do instead, because we haven't got simplifier over here, we're just going to go to Edit Preferences. And what we're going to do is we're going to go to Viewport and set the limit here. So this should be off at the moment. But if you set this on to let's say 512, close that down, then come back over to rendering. It should now have brought those actual textures down. So we can also do this in EB pretty easily. So lay it, load up, and then we go, we can see the textures come down. Now, why might you want to use V for this? Well, of course, first of all we're going to have bloom. So if we go over to the EV options, bring you ambient occlusion, we can see now if we open up the ambient occlusion, burn that up, we get much, much better contact shadows down at the bottom. So let's just turn that up. So let's turn this up like so. And you can see now much, much nicer shadows. The other thing is if we turn Bloom on, whoa, now we can see we get somewhere. This is why we want to use that Bloom, because we can really turn it up and make it look really, really cool effect. And now we can go over, put it onto wire frame, go to render, go to Render Image and let it render out once it's finished. You'll see not only now have we've got nice, nice shadows. We've got a low actual texture map on there, but we've also got some really, really nice actual lights in the scene as well. So that's looking really nice. All right, so as I said, this way of rendering now might change the whole way that you think about things or how you think about putting a scene together, or what you can even do with the scene. So now we're going to move on to something much more complex, where we're going to try and put all of the things that we've learned so far into one actual project. So let's close down our store was like, so let's go to open up a new file. So we're going to go to open and this time we're going to go to number five, which is graveyard emission lighting. Now I think you can have a look at the example again, but it's probably better off if you just open up the project and follow along. Because I think you're going to be blown away by what you're going to see on the actual example. So up to you whether you open it, but you're going to find out how to actually light a scene, a night scene, or a Halloween scene really, really nicely. So I'm going to open up my example like, so now I'm actually going to open up the project. So let's open up the project. Let's put this down, let's bring this over now. So I'm going to bring this over and this is the scene that we've got to work with. So the moment if we put this onto V, which it should be on, let's actually put this on rendered view and you will see it's basically nothing but a night scene. So let's just let this load up. There's a lot of information here, so it might take a lot of time. I just want to show you what it looks like before actually doing anything, and then how we can bring this to live. So you might have a scene like this looking pretty nice, but it really, really needs some work on the lighting. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to come over to these so you can see that these are lit, but these are not. And how do we get those lit if we click on this. So let's just hide those out of the way with H. Let's click on this part here. Come over to the right hand side. You can see all it is, is emission strength is to five. Now if we come over to this one here, so this will be this material here and put our emission strength to five. That then we'll bring them all up and make them glow exactly the same way as the others. Now the other thing is if you press Space Bar on here, you will also see that why aren't they working? Yes, they are. There we go. You can also see that these are rocking very slightly. And you can see the end there. I don't know, Let me just have a look on the. Let's go to the layout a minute and let's come round to these here. So let's go to this. And we can see that it's only going 80-160 so it's going from naught to 160. So let's just put this first of all on 160. Like so. And now we should end up with them just rocking backwards and forwards. So I just forgot to do that. And it should actually go back and restart again. All right, perfect. Now we've got that. We can see we've got a scene with animation with lights in there. And the first thing that we want to do is we want to come in and bring in a moon to give us some actual light. So what we're going to do is we're going to come to our plane over here. All this is, is a simple plane and we want to give it a material. So let's come in and bring in a material. So I'm going to click new. I'm going to call this Moon like so. And then what I want to do is I want to come over to the shading panel and we've got something like this. At the moment, it's called Moon. As you can see now within the resource pack in here, you will see. Go back. We've got one that says moon texture. Okay, let's just open that. I'm just going to move that to the side and I just want to drag this in. Just drop this right in there. So let's put that down now. I'm going to actually plug this in to the color base like, so we should end up with something like this. Now you will see that this is unwrapped. Now when you're bringing in your own moon, just make sure that in the view editing you can see that this is this. So this is unwrapped here for press A. You can see that this is going around here. Just make sure it's actually fitting in. You can see it's a little bit out of place, but it doesn't matter because it's covering up most of the moon. Let's now go back to shading and then what we want to do is we also want to plug the color of this into the emission. So you know, to the moment the emissions black, plug this in and now we can see, oh, it's slightly lit. Now the other thing we've got, the other problem is if I go to here, is that this is not lit properly, sorry, this is black. And we don't really want that. So what we want to do is I want to actually plug the alpha also into here. Nothing happens. And the reason nothing's happened is we just need to edit one more option. So if we go over to our material, scroll all the way down, you'll have one that says blend mode, which will be on opaque. And you just want to put this onto alpha blend. There we go, We've got a moon now we just need to come in and put the strength of the emission up. So let's come in, put the strength of the emission up to ten, and that's the transmission. The emissions strength up to ten and there we go. Alright, so now we're actually getting somewhere. Now we can just see the actual little details of the moon. You might want to lower this down, but I wouldn't do that right yet because you're going to actually edit some other things and then we're really going to start to bring this together so I wouldn't mess around with anything right now. What I would do is just try and just follow along and then we can actually do more things with it. Alright, so the next thing I want to do is I want to actually bring in some volume. Now the way we're going to bring in volume is we're simply going to come to this landscape here. So we can see we've got this landscape here. Now at the moment, if I go to object mode, we can see that if I press Tab, this is really, really high on the amount of polygons. If I come down here, I can see that we have 30,000 polygons in here. A little bit too high for what we need. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab it all with L, so just select it all. And then I'm going to press Shift D like. So press Shift Space Bar to bring in the move tool. And now what I should have is I should have another version of this actual brand. So I'm just going to leave that down there. And then I'm going to press and bring it up, so just below this roof lying here. And now we're going to do is I'm going to press L on it all. Press Selection. And now I've got basically this and a half. If I press H, the ground, pray underneath, Let's press all H to bring that back then. And now we actually want to do a little bit of work on this, which we're going to do in the next lesson. We're basically going to take this and we're going to use it as the actual volume. But for the volume we don't need it to be this high polya all. So we're going to sort that out on the next lesson. Alright, let's just press control all transforms right click, set origin to geometry. And I'll see on the next. And everyone, thanks a lot. Bye bye. 11. Creating Volumetric Fog Effects in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend the lightning, compositing four beginners and this is where we left off. Okay, so now we've actually doubled up this, so you can see we have a lot of polygons here. Let's actually fix that. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to press control and bring in a few more edge loops adding more polygons to it, believe it or not. But then we're going to press light, left click, right click. Drop those in place now to come out of there. And now what I want to do is I basically want to change this. So what I recommend doing is, first of all, save out your file before doing this, because it might actually crash. Because when you're using a modifier like this, sometimes that happens. So the first thing we're going to do is add modifier. And I'm going to come down to where it says, where does it say remesh? Let's click on remesh. And now you'll notice it's actually smoothed off these edges. Now what it's actually done is it's actually remeshed it to be a much better mesh. So if I press control A over there now, so apply it, press the tab burn, you'll see now we have, although it's a lot more dense and mesh, it's actually a lot more. It's distributed with even topology, which is what we wanted. Now, because this is a volume, we really don't need all of those polygons. So I'm going to come in now. I'm going to come down to decimate. And when you come to decimate, you can see the issue. 571,000 polygons. We really don't want that. Now suggest doing this in stages because what it'll do is it'll enable you to actually bring this down. So if you decimate anything this high, bring it down in stages and then you're not going to have so many issues with it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put not 0.5 like so. And you'll see I'll bring it down to 250 odd thousand polygons or something like that. All right, 384. Let's press control to apply that. And then what we're going to do now is we're going to bring in another decimate. Again, I'm making sure I'm doing this slowly. So decimate not 0.5 What we want to bring this down to is round about 20,000 Control A, Let's supply that. And it will start speed up as we're actually working through these. Now decimate it again. I'm going to put it on not 0.5 again, 123,000 Press control A, and then decimate. Now we want to bring this down to round about 20,000 So if we put this on not 0.5 you can see it's going to be much faster. Let's keep bringing it down then. The round about, as I said, 20,000 something around. There's absolutely fine. Let's press control to apply that. And then what we're going to do is just going to right click, go in and shave auto smooth. And there we go, we've got our actual volume metrics that we're actually going to be using. Doesn't not like at the moment, but you'll see. Let's put render on now. Now let's go over to the right hand side under Material. And what we're going to do is we're just going to click on this principled here and you're going to remove. And then what you're going to do is open up the volume and you're going to click on here. And you're going to click Principled Volume. Click on. You can see already something's actually happening, albeit doesn't look right at the moment. All right. So we have a little bit of work to do now now. The one problem I have is that I messed up there. I'm going to go back and before doing that, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually copy, sorry, minus off this terrain off of this part. So at the moment you'll see that underneath we have terrain, so I can click on here terrain and on the volume we also have terrain. Now if I minus off the terrain of the volume, I'm going to us. Or if I change the terrain on the volume, I'm going to also change the terrain on the terrain as well, if that makes sense. So what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to put plus new. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to put volume. So when they then copy this, copy material, paste material like so. And then I'm just going to minus off terrain. So you can see now they're both the same. Now if we come down, once this gets minus off, now we've just got volume. Now I can do is then come in Remove and then come to volume, and then put in principled volume. Now you'll see that we actually start to get somewhere, albeit it doesn't look that great at the moment. So now we're going to do is we're actually going to go in, we're going to go into the material and actually mess around a little bit with this. First of, although I'm going to delete these because I'm nearly not going to need them, so delete. Click on this one, Delete, and then we'll go in and we just have our principal volume here, which we're going to do some other things with as well. So the first thing I want to do is with the principal volume, is we want to come in and sort out the color. So I'm going to make it just a little bit darker, so maybe something like this. And then what I'm going to do now, I'm going to come down and set, I'm not going to actually set an amount for density because I'm going to actually do that with some more nodes that I'm going to put in place. So everything else on here pretty much can stay the same apart from where is it the. Yeah, I think everything else will stay the same on here. All right, so what we're going to do now is we'll first of all bring in a texture coordinate. So let's zoom our a little bit. Let's come over here, shift texture texture coordinates. This one here. Let's drop that in there. Now I want this to be generated, we don't want it based on the UV map or anything like that. Let's now press Shift and look for Mapping. Now what we're going to do is we're going to plug in our generated into the top of the vector of the mapping. And the one we're just going to change is the y value on the rotation. And we're just going to put that to 90, not 90090. All right, let's move on now. And then we're going to put in a gradient texture shift, a search texture. Let's plug in the vector from the map into the gradient. And then we're going to bring in a colorramp. What we're actually doing here is we're actually having control over how the actual fog is going to lift up color. Let's plug the into the color. Let's plug, we'll plug this straight in to our density density. Let's plug that in. And we should end up with not a lot at the moment. Now we're going to do is we're actually going to mess around with these. If I bring this this way, bring this this way, all this all the way over here. And then what I'm going to do is now bring in one more. So I'm going to bring this down to here. Now we can start seeing something happening like so let's press control and click. And then what we can do is we can bring another one in on that one as well. We can just wondering if we need to make it a little bit darker. I think we do. So let's just make sure that this is going to be actually, I think that's right in the right place. Something like that, I think looks absolutely fine. Let's just double tap the A. All right, that's looking pretty nice. Now, the one problem we've got, of course, is that the density is now changed because we're actually controlling the density through here. But what we want to do now, this is basically the most dense it's going to be. The problem we've got though, is that we don't have any control yet over how the fog is actually going to look. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab both of these and I'm going to press Shift to duplicate them. Drag them up. Then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring in a musgrave texture. We'll come in shift A, let's bring in musgrave texture like so. And then going to plug in the vector over here. And then we're going to do this, now I'm going to bring in another color, ramp shift color. So now let's just bring this white all the way down just to under here, you won't see anything happening. And then we're going to do is I'm just going to set the musgrave in a minute. So I'm going to put the height to here. And now I need some way to plug everything in. So we need to use now a math note. So I'm going to do is I'm going to press Shift, bring in a math, so I'm going to drop that in here. So now we'll end up with something like this. And then what I want to do is now we want to set this math two multiply, so if I zoom in, set this now to multiply. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in this color from this color ramp into the bottom of here, like so. Now we just want to control how this actually looks. So I'm going to do is zoom in again. I'm going to go and put my Musgrave onto four D, and then I'm going to go to W, and I'm going to put this on, 51.3 And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and put the scale on -45.6 I know this because I've already been messing around with this. Then I'm going to put the detail on 4.8 and I'm going to put the dimensions on 37.5 and the Lou left, I can't even say that. I'm going to put it on one. And there we go. Now we're actually starting to get somewhere, albeit we can still see it over here. I'm just wondering actually if I can put it onto here and then put it back. Yeah, let me just check, see if we're growing V, which I have. Okay. So now we've got this in place, doesn't still look like much. And the reason is, at the moment, we're not actually using this properly as a volume. It's a little bit too dense at the moment, so let's actually take away some of the denness and the way that you do that is going to be through actual light. So what we're going to do is we're going to press shift and we're going to bring in a sun. And why would you need a sun in a night scene? But I'm going to show you what we're going to do with that. So I'm going to press Shift space bar, Go to move. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna drag my son seventh go over the top. Just next to this tree, somewhere around there. Remember it's an infinite light source, so it doesn't really matter too much where you actually put it. And then what I'm going to do is just drag it up into the scene, so now we can see it's very, very well lit. Not really correct at the moment. What I'm going to do now is go over to my little light bulb. I'm going to put my son on 0.250 Turn that down a lot. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come over now to my world and I'm going to set my world down to black like so. All right, so now we seem to be getting somewhere. It's looking a little bit better than where it is. Of course, we've still got this volume metric that's not actually working properly. And the reason is because for me I actually have, if we look here, I've got actually two of these. For some reason. I don't know why, I'm just going to hide that one out of the way. Come back to this one, delete that one out of the way age, and finally I'm starting to actually get somewhere. I was a little bit worried that wasn't gonna work for me. But anyway, that's looking pretty nice now. Alright, so on the next lesson what we'll do is we'll bring in our main light. And then we'll start to mess around with the EV options and really, really bring this scene to light. Alright everyone, So I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 12. Night Scene Rendering Techniques in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend Lighting, compositing four beginners, and this is where we're left are. All right, so now before we do anything else, let's actually mess around with the EV, ambient occlusion and let's get those options right first. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to come in, click ambient. And then one, we're going to put this at 9.3 I'm going to drop this down to 0.86 0.332 All right, let's just add a little bit. Ammunclusion's going to be very so as we've spoken about. Next of all though, the next one is very nice. Let's bring in some bloom. And there we go. It's time to double tap the eight, really, really bring this scene to light already. Now, we have not got a lot of bloom yet on these, so let's come in open, part Bloom. Let's put this on 1.14 Let's also drop the knee down to not 0.4 somewhere around there. Let's drop this down a little bit to 6.2 And also let's put the intensity of it up to not 0.1 so. All right, now the other thing is have we got this up high enough? Let's just have a look at our emission. So I'm just going to hide the other way at the moment. I'm just going to make sure that I'm happy with my emission. I'm going to go into here into materials and I'm just going to go to my emission strength on five of the moment. Let's bring it up a bit like so. Let's press al tage and bring back our volume. You can see a lot of the volume is washed out. Sorry, a lot of the bloom is washed out because of volume that's in there. Now what we want to do is we want to bring in another light source. So I'm going to come to my on first. I want to press shift A, bring in a light. And this is what we'll do. In fact, I need to press shift S, First shift S, cursor selected. There's our cursor shift A. Let's bring in a area, let's turn it around, R, Y. Spin it around so that it's point in right down there, into the center. And let's turn it around, s there, that's pointed down here. So then we'll make this bigger. Now we can just see it here. If I press, I can actually scale it up. And then what I can do is I can change it from a square to a disc. And what I really want to do is if I press three, I want to actually line this up. So now I press three on the number. Going to press G, and then I'm going to line it up to the same size as the sun, roughly. You're not going to get it perfectly all right. And now I'm going to do is I'm going to point it downwards, so I'm going to put it just in front. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to come over to the right hand side to these options here. And I'm going to put the strength of this up to 5,000 So there we go. Now we can see we've got some proper moonlight going on there. We can see we've got our volume in there. I'm just looking, if I'm happy with with my volume in there, maybe it's about right. I think actually that volume, yeah, it's about right. You just want to check one thing. Let's go back to our sun. I just want to make sure shadows are on. Everything is on there. I want to make sure that I can also turn contact shadows on as well. The one thing I want to do is I just want to mess around with this sun and just see if I can actually give it a blue tinge to it. Not too much. Just a little bit of a blue tinge like. So, yes, and I think that's looking more like a moonlight. All right. Now, let's deal with the actual fog. So we can actually make this darker now by coming in. You don't want to really mess around with the musgrave. You can do. What it'll do is it'll create patches of fog. What you want to do though is come in and this is the part where the density is. So you can see if I turn this down or turn it up, I can also bring this back. So this is where all the power lies in the actual double tap, the and see what I'm doing in the actual scene. Okay, I think I'm very happy with how that looks. Let's turn off this so we can actually see what it looks like now. And you can see that's really, really nice Now, the other thing is you can actually come in and you can see here, the strength on here. If we turn this up a bit, it's not actually really going to do anything. What we'd need to do in this case is either turn the light and jaws down a slight bit. So you can see here a little bit, put it a little bit on, more blue and now we can see we've got a little bit more light there. And what else you might want to do is you might want to turn up this sun a little bit. If we go to this sun, grab it and turn up the strength of it as we turn it up. We'll start out to get a bit more lighting on the scene like so. I'm not going to turn it up that high, I'm going to bring it down like this. And now finally, this is where we can come in now and go to our EV options. Come down to where it says lock is on the color management. And this is where we can mess around with either the look, so we can put it on the, you know, high contrast or medium contrast. And what we can also do is we can bring up the gamma a little bit. So if we bring this up, we see now it just brightens up the whole scene like so. Okay, that's looking pretty nice. And now we can do is we can set up our camera. So let's put our camera here. So I'm going to go into modeling actually, and do it from there. So I'm going to come round to here, put it on Material. So let's press shift A, Bring in a camera control Alt and zero to bring in my camera. Zoom in a little bit and then we'll go to open up this panel. View camera to view. And then I'm going to zoom out a little bit. Press control shift and middle mouse, and you can really, actually play around now with that, let's press, just to close that Almonte, just to get the perfect view of what I'm looking for. Something like that. And then I'm going to just put it on rendered view, making sure I'm happy with it. And then what I'm going to do is press close that down, to close that down. And finally, now let's do, as I said, a pre render. So you want to do a pre render, so if you come up to put it on wave frame, you're going to go to render, then render image and there's our beautiful image as you can see. Really happy with how that looks. And now all I want to do is this is a little bit too reddish, I would say. Let's make sure that we've got that on blue. So I'm going to go over to my world. Let's have a look. You can see it's on slight red. What we want it on is slight blue. Let's put it on rendered view like now, it's a little bit more blue. And the other thing is now I've got that. Let's once again, before we finish this, go to rendered. So over to our render, let's look actually what would happen now if we put this on cycles. And this is why it's important to follow the whole course through because you're going to learn how we can have this effect in cycles. On this one though, all we're going to do is use the EV render engine just to show you the power of V. We also want on screen space reflections to get some of that reflections off of the fences and things that are those very small things that we spoke about. And also now we can come to volumetrics and just make sure that the size are on 16. Just to give us a little bit more, let's put the samples on 128. Then we've got volumetric lighting on volumetric shadows. Let's put those on. We can see we've got a little bit of difference there as well that's adding to the scene. Now finally, let's put this on 200. Now the other thing is I'll just show you what this looks like as well on cycles. So if I drop this down to cycles, let's actually put this on GPU compute. So make sure it's on that. Let's make sure denoising is on. Just make sure the noise is on, but you will see that we've lost a lot of that depth and feel to this scene that we had with V. But as we go on in the course, your work, you'll find out how to actually bring all that bloom back and actually probably have a better render than what you had with V as well. So let's put this on the cycle, sorry V once more. Let's actually put up the render value 2200. And now finally, let's put it on wire frame. And let's take our rendered image. And there we go. You can see how nice that image looks. You can see how nice these are, just visible when we're doing a scene like this. It's really hard to actually, um, you know, dictate how much fog you really want on here. But I think this is near enough, the perfect amount. You can see that this bit is a little bit choppy down here. I'd probably zoom the camera in a little bit more to get rid of this part here, but I think this is a really, really nice image now. Alright, so what we'll do is we'll close that down and then we'll move on the next lesson onto the next one, which will be three point lighting. Alright everyone, so I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you're learning tons. And I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 13. Point Lighting Setups in Blender: Welcome back everyone. To plan the lighting and composite in four beginners and this is where we left off. All right. Let's close that one down. Let's move to the next one. So I'm going to move now to my next one, which is that going to be three point lighting. Again, as always, we have examples and we also have the main project file. So I'm going to open up my example. You can open up on that as well and have a good look at what that actually looks like. And then I'm going to open up my project file, which is this one here. Let's open this up, let's pull it over like so. And here we are at the moment, we don't have anything in the scene, but you will see that the whole scene is pretty much animated. You can have a look how we've actually done all that. Really, really interesting. Once we actually put this onto V, you'll see it's very dark, but there are some lit places, there's a lot of emission in here, for instance. And they are the first things that we might actually want to look at. Now, three point line is actually really, really good for V because it's a really simple, nice technique to get some really nice lighting really, really quickly. And the thing is about three point line as well, unlike, you know, the bloom and ambient occlusion and all that other stuff, it really actually translates well over to blender cycle. So you know, like the scene we've just done, it's pretty hard to actually get that sort of lighting effect in cycles. We have to do a lot more work, whereas three point lining is a lot easier. All right, So now we've said that let's actually bring out the first part which will be a ground plane. And the reason is you can't really, if you three point light, this part here, you're not really going to have anything for the light to bounce off. So I think it's important on this one actually to bring in a actual ground plane. So we'll do that now. We've got a cursor right in the center, so let's press shift day. We'll bring in a plane. We'll make this plane really, really big. Like so it doesn't matter really how big you want it is. And then what we'll do is we'll start now bringing in some light sources. So what I'll do is I'll bring in actually before we do that, let's just make sure that the actual ground plane, let's just go to materials and give it a material. So I'm going to give you a material just to give you an actual principle. So, so it has some material because from that material then we can actually change it if we want to. In other words, we can make it a little bit more reflective, which sometimes makes the scene actually look a little bit nicer. Let's also make sure that we're actually on V at the moment. Let's also make sure that we've got some bloom on. Let's also make sure we've got our ambient occlusion on and we can come and mess around with that in a bit. Let's make sure we've got screen space reflections on. And especially on this scene, you can really, really see the difference of what screen space reflections does. Really, really brings it out and makes it look nice already. Okay, so let's bring in our first light. And our first light is going to be a sun. So let's bring in a sun. So I'm going to press Shift A. I'm going to come to bring in a light. Bring in a sun, way way too bright as you can see. I'm also going to press Space Bar. Don't need this all moving. It's just making it a little bit more difficult in the long run to actually compute everything in the view pots. I'm just going to press Space Bar. I'm going to press Shift and Spacebar. Then bring in a move tall to bring in my son. And I'm going to bring my son in and put it just to probably level with this part on here. So I'm just going to bring it up. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to press R and Y and just bring it and point it round about pretty much at the door. So dead's point over the door like so. All right, so now we brought our first light source in. Let's come over now to bringing in our HDRI. Let's bring in the HDRI. So what we'll do is we'll go to file, we'll go to where is it, append? And then what we're going to do, like I showed you how to do, go to your HDRI lighting resources. Double click it. World, double click the HDRI and there we go. Now we can come over to our world, put it onto HDR set up, and there we go. You can see already that's looking really nice. Now let's go over to our shading panel. Let's saw out our HDR lighting. Before we do anything else, just going to put this on to render. And then one way to do it is gonna put this onto world Zouma a little bit and this is what we actually have. So I'm actually probably going to move round the rotation because as I spin this round, you'll see the shadows don't move because the shadows are nowhere near. They're not going to be as strong from the HDRI as what they are going to be from our actual sun. Now the reason why I want this HDRI in Is not to use it, so I'm going to turn it down to nothing but to have the actual gradient in the background. That's why I brought it in, so you can do it both ways as well. So we want to actually bring this in with a gradient. And then what I want to do is I want the bottom part. I want it to be pretty dark, so maybe not just 100% but pretty dark. And then the top part, let's put it on a little bit lighter, so something like that. I think it's going to give us a nice effect there. Okay, So now we can actually come back to our sum and what we can do is we can mess around with the strength of it. So I'm going to actually the sum which is here, I'm going to put this on 1.620 Now I'm going to do, I'm just going to turn this sun down a little bit. I'm just going to make sure you move. So I'm just going to turn the sun, which is a ball here, jaws down a little bit. You'll also notice as well as I contains the angle yours to bring those shadows down a little bit, so maybe not that high, but jaws a little bit less the angles of the sun that because we are going to have another light source in. So I'm just going to make them a little bit softer. And of course I can play around with this as well. Not going to play around with those at the moment. Okay, so let's now bring in our first three point lines. I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my son pressure desks selected and then bring in a light. And this time it's going to be an area light. Three point line always best. Start using these area lights like so I'm going to make it bigger. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over now and change the color of this one. Well, first of all, let's give it some power. So 450. There we go. Let's also change the actual color. So I'm going to bring down the color, so to a nice orange or something. Let's also leave it on square this time. The size, I'm just going to bring it up to Yeah, probably something like that. You can see how soft now all the shadows are. That's looking pretty nice. The one thing I think is that it's a little bit, probably too close. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to press G and just bring it back just so it's coming on there. Now I'm going to do is I'm also going to bring in another one, and I'll bring this to this back corner. And then finally one more, which I'll bring this way. So I'm going to press seven to go over the top. I'm going to press shift, shift spacebar to bring in the move to all, let's bring it out. Press Art and Z and move it round to the back. And then on this one, instead of it being orange, I'm going to just set it to a nice bluey type of color. I'm going to bring it in because I think it's a little bit too strong that bring it down. Then what we're going to do is we're going to bring in one more line. So I'm going to press seven to go over the top shift, bring it round and then spin it round into this one here. And then with this one, I'm actually going to keep the pretty much the same color, I think. All right, now we've got a little bit of three point line. Now what we can do now as well, we can actually, as we can actually, where is it, the bloom? So we can bring up the bloom of this or bring it down. We can bring it up. This would be a good scene, probably to use some of those volume metrics which we've been learned about, or we can simply turn up the bloom like so. And you can see already this is looking pretty nice. If I turn off this now that is what our scene is going to look like and it's looking pretty good. Now let's come in and put it onto cycles as well. So we can do both of these. We're going to lose the Bloom. Let's put it on the GPU. So GPU, compute, let's turn down the noise. And then let's also press Lth and come back, sorry, not lth. Let's turn those back on. And now let's come and brighten up everything, as well as turning this a little bit reflective. So if we come to this first come to material, Let's come in and bring down, make it a little bit more reflective like. So now let's come in and actually turn down this color. If I put this on a slight blue color, let's start to bring that down a little bit. And now you can see we're actually going somewhere with our three point line. All right, so now let's bring in a camera first. Let's bring in a camera. And then what we're going to do is control zero. Put my camera there and zoom in a little bit. Press the end bond, open up this panel view camera to view. Let's get it in the perfect view shot. We want it now. We want to get in that wind hen I think it's called. And there we go. All right, so now we've got this. We can actually start working on just making sure all of this is right. Because you can see at the moment that this is actually reflecting down here. And we don't really want that. So what I want to do is I want to turn my camera to your off, close down this panel, come round and then we can see this here. We don't really want this, so what I want to do is I just want to turn down the spread. Let it down a little bit, so it's shining over there. Let's also do the same with this one. So we're going to turn down the spread. So let's then turn down this one as well. That one might be a little bit of an issue because where it's set, it might be a little bit too close. Let's just pull that one of a look. I'm just going to look with my camera just to see where it's at. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to press, try and pick it up a little bit just to get some nicer lighting for it. Now we can see that is a bit better than where it was looking before. We still have this on here, and I think we need to either move this back a little bit, it's a little bit too long, so I think I'm going to pick my son up a little bit. So what I'll do is I'll come round, pick this off, come to my son. And then what I want to do is I just want to point it down a little bit. Why? Let's point it down more like this then. What we'll do is we'll just turn this down a little bit. We've still got those little bit of a shadows now. Let's press zero again, and there we go. That's looking pretty nice. All right, so I'm really happy with how that looks at the moment, and we've got it on cycles. Now if we put this on Eve, where it looks like we can see, it just looks as nice. I think it looks bear on cycles where you can see as well, that using the techniques that I showed you before where you can put your lights into different files so you could have a collection for V and a collection for cycles, and then you can render the mouth. Because again, until we move on to, you know, looking at layers and compositing, this is probably as good as you're going to get at the moment. So let's on the next lesson, we'll render the mouth out, you can see what they both look like. And then we'll move on to the next project. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed that. And I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 14. Gradient Backgrounds Scene Setup in Blender: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lightning and compositing four beginners. And this where we left off. All right. We're on V at the moment, We might as well go with V, so let's put V on 250. We know we'll render out fast anyway. Let's go to render, and we're going to render the image out and let's see what we actually get. So here is our image. Now we can see that straightway, probably a little bit too. Maybe we want to brighten this up a little bit. We can either do that with the sun or we can come over to the options on the color management. So let's actually go in, let's zoom in a little bit and let's just bring up the exposure just a little bit like so. And now let's put it onto wire frame. Let's do a quick render again. And there we go. That is what we're gaining with V. Now let's come over too. We can see that we need to bring out our plane a little bit, a little bit in the wrong place at the moment. I think it should be a little bit further over here. You can see that we're losing a lot of details as well in this. I think with V probably going to have to turn it up a little bit. So we'll actually bring out our plane first. So I'm just going to press zero to go to my camera view. Do that a little bit and then what I'm going to do is grab this bomb plane. So I'm just going to put on material, grab this bomb plane, press the S, just to bring it out a little bit like so. And then I'm just going to come now wire frame, go back to EV and I'm going to put it on. Let's put it onto, let's try 1,000 It will take a lot longer of course, so render, but we should get a little more detail out of it once we do that. So with V as well, you have no idea actually what's computing or anything. Well, the other thing is with B, you can see now we're getting a little bit more details out of it. It is looking pretty nice. Maybe we've gone a little bit over on the Bloom. Maybe we should drop that back a little bit. All depends really what you want. Okay, I'm happy with that. Let's go now to cycles. So we're going to go to cycles. Gpu. Compute. Just make sure that under edit you've got your options on. So if we go to system, make sure these are on and then what we'll do now is we'll keep it. Let's do 500 maximum samples. Let's also have a look, I'm just looking. Before I go on the, let's put it on medium contrast. See what that looks like? Very higher? Yeah, I think we'll have medium to high contrast. I think that's going to look better. And then what we're going to do now is we're going to put it onto wire frame. We're going to come down to performance. We're going to make sure this is on 64 or whatever yours is, spatial split, persistent data and let's go to render image, and now let's see what this is going to render out like now the thing is when you've got a little bit of shine on surfaces, it's obviously going to take much, much longer to render out. So you do need to take that into account. The thing also with the cycles, we've not actually got any bloom effects on or anything like that, so we're just going to get pretty much a, you know, a straight image with no real volume metrics or anything in the scene, so it should look a lot sharper. So definitely going to get a completely different look from what look like. But, you know, both of those options are viable. It all depends really what you want to do. You can, of course, in cycles, turn up the emission on the larva or molten metal here. You can do things like that, of course. And Lisa said a little bit later on the course, you're going to learn how to actually do some layering and some compositing. And then I think you could probably go back to this scene and actually really enhance it much more than what we've done here. Because you will be able to, in cycles bring in things like ambient occlusion. You'll be able to, you change the color gradients on them. So this is basically just showing you how you can serve three point lighting with some really, really nice soft shadows. You can see we've got a bit of a mess here. We need to kind of pull that light back a little bit and then we will get perfectly. But you can see how soft, nice, it all looks, and that's the actual lighting that we're actually going for in here. Definitely think, though, with some layering, some ambient occlusion in this, it's going to be a really nice image. So I would save out this for yourself and then come back to it, as I said at the end of course, and see what you can actually do with it because it's going to look tons better once we've got everything in place. All right, so this is what we've actually got. Really, really nice image look really good on any portfolio. All right everyone, So let's close that down. Let's close this down because we've finished with this project now. So we can close that down. Let's look at our next project, which is going to be Basic compositing. I'm going to open up again. I'm going to open up my example, which is this one here, so the music hall. We're going to open that up over the right hand side. And then we're going to go to the project. So let's open up the project file. I'm going to bring this over. The basic idea of this is to get some lighting into the scene, but then to take it one step further where we're just going to add in a composite. So just touching on compositing, that's based of what we're doing, just introducing you to the power of compositing and what you can actually do with it. All right, so let's first of all see what we've actually got in the scene. So this is the scene that we've got nothing really or this shouldn't be anything. I'm not sure if I've actually put the HDRI lem in this one. If not, we can put that in. No, we've just got our will texture. So again, what we're going to do is we're going to click on New, we're going to call this Music See Night Lighting Like so now we can see that we've also, we've got some light sources in here, but they're not actually shining down or anything, they just kind of sat there. We can also see that we've got no real lights jumping off them or anything like that. So it looks really, really flat the moment. So first of all, let's come into our shading and we'll bring in some HDR lighting. So I'm going to go over to shading now and what I'm going to do is go to file and actually I made a little bit of a mess, but we'll actually fix that. So we'll go to happen, we're going to go now to the project. Hdr, lighting resources, bring it in world HDR. And there we go. Now we can see there's nothing in here. And the reason is because it's come under its own. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to go to world, grab all this control C and then go to music scene. Then what we're going to do is just delete both of these, press control. So now at the moment you can see that both of these are still here. But if we go to file and we go to clean up unused data blocks, click one. Let's see if we've still got those in and now you can see it's actually got rid of that data blow that we were used in. Now if we were to go to in the HDRI and just delete all these like so and then go to this one. And then what we're going to do is go to file clean up unused data blocks and then file clean up. Let's see if it's still there. It's still there but it's got up in here. So I managed to clean up one. I don't actually know how to clean up though, and I think we just have to go onto it, press the X one and now go to file, clean up unused. And there we go. Now we should have that in there. Hdri set up. It's the wrong one we actually got rid of. So let's see if I can actually go back. I don't actually think I can go, Oh, I can, we can go back. Not gonna mess around with the math. Oh, I can clean it up. It's a good way anyway to clean up. You know, you've got loads of materials in your scene and they're not being used. It's a good way to clean them all up. It's basically if something's not being used, he'll actually delete it. So there is that. All right, so let's put it onto our scene view. So let's also go over and what we're going to do is we're gonna put this on cycles. So we're going to put denoising on, we're going to make sure run our GPU. We're again going to go over to Edit Preferences. And what we're going to do is go to system, just make sure this is ticked on again. And then all you're going to do now is you're going to go to your shading panels, So you should have this. Then what we're going to do is we're going to turn the strength up to one. Then I'm just going to come in and change the color. It's on a gradient, so I want the color to be a reddish color. Something like this. Maybe look looking round. Yeah, I think this one now just needs to be a little bit darker. So let's put it on more blue. Let's make it a little bit darker. Yes, that's looking pretty nice. And you can see the gradient between them is also really nice. Okay, so now we've got that, let's actually sort out the light. So what we're going to do is with this one, we're going to actually bring in some light, but we're gonna bring in some spot lights, which is something I was telling you about, that you're going to use in certain places. So let's come into this part here and I'm going to come into this, I'm going to press L Shift S Sa selected. And then what I'm gonna do is bring in the spotlight. Shift A light spotlight. And there we go. Now we can see we've actually got some light there. I'm going to make this a little bit smaller and then I'm going to go over to Lil bulb. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this on 2000. I'm going to put the radius on one. There we go. Now we have some actual light. Now we can see that. The other thing with the spotlight is that the spot size, we can actually increase that you can see there. We can get a little bit more light down there. And we can also see that we can blend it to make the shadows less harsh or more harsh. So I'm just going to put mine, so. All right, so that's looking pretty nice already now. We might want to light, you know, these other bits up a bit, but I'm not going to actually do that yet. The only thing I'm going to do is I'm thinking, I'm just going to put it into place. I'm going to press shift space bar, bringing the move tool. And I'm just going to bring it down just below the actual light like. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go over the top. I'm going to press Shift to duplicate it. And all I'm going to do is just move it over to this light here. So, and now we've got a couple of lights in there that's looking really nice. All right, so what we'll do then on the next lesson is we'll get this light a little bit further out. So I wanted to kind of shine a little bit more on this part here. And then what we'll do is we'll actually get this rendered out and I'll show you how the actual layering works. Sorry, show you how the compositing works. All right everyone, So hope you enjoyed that. I'll see in the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 15. Render Compositing Basics Creating Glare Effects in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and composite in four beginners. And this where we left off. All right, so let's now make this light a little bit bigger. So if we go to this, you go over to the little bulb and more. We're going to do is we're going to increase the radius by 1.1 And then all I'm going to do then is increase, let's increase this to around 65 and drop the blend down to 1.5, something like that. And then what I want to do is I want to increase the size now. So I press, let's bring it back a little bit. Actually, book, I think I want to actually show the cone where it's going to be. I want to bring back the radius with and's head. Pull it, you into there. Now, let's hide that. Come, let's see how much light we're actually going on there. So if we're going to go over to the right hand side, we're going to just hide this. We can see we're not getting a lot of light in that bit. We are gaining some light now if I bring this up as you can see, let's bring it up probably round about there. We're going a little bit more lighting in there. I'm just looking at where it's bouncing on this bit here. I'm just thinking whether I want to bring in back the blend just a little bit. I think that's looking pretty nice on this. Now what we want to take, we're going to take an image of something like this. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go back to modeling now. Then I'm going to do now, I'm going to come round, you can put this on material mode if it's a little bit too heavy for your system. And what we're going to do now, we're just going to put on material then. And then I'll see about bringing in a camera shift date. Let's bring in a camera and then control a zero. Bring in our camera, open up the panel camera view. Now let's set it. We want it, so I'm going to zoom out a little bit out, right, So all right, that's looking pretty good. Now let's turn off camera to view off. And now what we want to do is let's give it a render. So first of all, I'm going to go to my render options, I'm going to go to GPU compute, I'm going to put it on. We don't want it to take too long because I'm just going to show you what you can do with it. So I think I'll put it on 1,000 samples. The other thing is we can also look, before we do anything, how bright this is. I think actually this is about right. You could always come down to your color management. You can put this on very low contrast or non if you want to, But I think I'm just going to put mine on, have a look at medium, medium, high contrast. It brings out that richness of those textures, which I really like. The other thing, of course, is you can turn up your exposure. Now bring up these lit areas here to make them a little bit more. You can see if I put this on zero, for instance, that's how it did look. I think it's a little bit too low, so I'm just going to turn it up. Maybe not that high, maybe North 0.3 something like that. I think that's looking a lot more natural light now. Okay, so I'm happy with that. Let's put it onto wire frame and what we'll do is we'll go to re render the image out. One thing I forgot to do. Yes, that's what I meant. So let's go to performance. And what I forgot to do, let's put this on 64 and use spatial splits this system data and then what I'm going to do now is go to render image. Let's just wait for this then to render out. Now we can see that it's going to be fairly quick. Again, if you want a much better image, turn up the amount of samples you've got. The aim of this is just to show you how to wit the composite. Once we've done this, then we're actually going to jump into the compositor and I'll show you how to change things within the compositor, which will drastically alter how your image looks, not only how it looks as in the lighting, the color balance, the sharpness you can alter near enough, Anything inside the compositor, including bringing in things like lens flare, camera flare, sun reflections, God rays, all kinds of things. A lot of things are best to be done within blender like volume metrics, things like that. But a lot of the stuff we can do on the back end with compositing, so you can turn a really flat image into a really, really high. Caliber, professional image with these few tricks that you're going to learn throughout this course and you've already learned. All right, so we've nearly finished. Once it's finished it'll be de noising. Now what we can do is close that out. We don't need savior or anything like that, so now we're going to do is hop on over to the compositor. Now the moment when you first click in the compositor it, we'll have all this other stuff. So the first thing I tend to do is get myself sell. I'll close this down with, I'll then come down to the bomb off here where there's a little kind of cursor like a shooting game or something. Let's close that down like so. And then what I'll do is I'll come over to this side and I'll drag it out to the right hand side like so. Now the moment this is the composite, we need to click, use nodes and then we're going to get this which is the image that we just take. But it's really hard to see the image. So what I tend to do is come over to this side. I'll go down to here image editor, and then under here we'll actually type in render. So render is all and here is our image. Okay, so basically this is the first part in the stage of using the Composerve. This is the most simple things you're going to learn here. So the first one we're going to bring in, it works a little bit like the shader node system. If I works exactly the same, you just bring nodes in, plug them in, mix them up, exactly the same thing. So let's do that first. So what we'll do is first we'll go to shift and we'll search for one called glare. I'm going to drop in the glare. So, there we go already. We've got glare on there, only on the light sources, which is really nice. Now, the best glare, you know, for lights like this is just to put this onto Fol. Now we've actually got some fog lawn there, and then you can just play around with this if you want to. Basically what I do is when I've got my fog lawn, I will come in, put the mix up to one, and now I'll mess around with these. So I've got high, I've got low. And I'm just going to see how nice I actually want this. I've got the size of them. There we go. And then what we can do is bring this threshold down because what you can do with this, when it loads up, you'll see as well. I've got to see there's a loading thing down here. If I turn this up, you'll see here it is, compositing. Now what I'm doing with this now is I'm just turning up to where I want it first. Let's bring on 0.3 That looks pretty nice. And then what I'll do is I'll drop the mix down now all the way back then you'll see we'll start to get our image in and now you can see that that's looking pretty nice. Okay, let's bring in one more. Let's do shift A, and what we'll look for here is filter. And the filter, you'll see it actually as soft, just going to make it all nice and soft, which you might actually want. I actually like that, but what main thing we want to use this for is for diamond sharpen. So bring in diamond sharpen. And there we go. Now we can see we've sharpened up all of this and now we can just drop this down something like No 0.3 and it's makes your image much, much sharper as you can see. Now, I'm not sure if we should use the sharpen before the glare, so I'm just going to grab it, shifty, drop it in. Delete this one out of the way. Plug this one in. And I'm just wondering if it'll make it look a little bit better. Can see because I put this in front, it's sharpened up after. So it's really important which order you put these in. So now we have a really, really nice sharp image without any of those black bits around. So I'll just quickly show you again. I'll just drop in there and you'll see. So as soon as that's loaded up with these dark images around there, that's not what we want. So that's why we've done it the other way around. Okay, so the last thing I want to show you on here actually is just going to be a quick color balance. So if I, no, we'll do brightness and contrast on this one search. Let's go to brightness, contrast. Drop that in. Now turn this up. We'll start to lighten up the whole scene. Let's bring down the contrast a little bit. That way we'll go up the other way. There we go up a little bit more. There we go. Now you can see really nice. What did it look like before? Well, if we plug in what it looked like before. This is our old one, this is our new one. What a difference it makes as you can see. All right everyone. That's that part of the course. Now, on the next part of the course, we will be working god raising interiors, which is a really, really important part, especially if you're dealing with interiors. It's always nice to actually know how to do those. Make some realistic lighting. So especially if you're dealing with things like kitchens or living rooms, you really want some realistic lighting in there. All right everyone. So hope you enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 16. Achieving Realistic Lighting in Isometric Scenes with Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this where we're left off now. Let's close that one down. And let's actually open up the next one, which is going to be, let's just bring this over. It's going to be this one here, so it's number eight, God raising interiors. Here is the project file. Let's open that up and let's take a look at that. So many of you will be doing kind of isommetric scenes. So inside interiors, basically something like this. Now, although this is not a full interior, it's still nice to actually know how to light up something like this, especially when it's made more difficult because of the fact that we've not grow a wall here, not grow a wall here, and we haven't grow a ceiling. And why is that more difficult is because you haven't got the light bouncing, you know, from here and bouncing against the wall and bouncing back down. So a lot of this has to actually be kind of made up. So that's what we're going to be doing. So if we turn on now the render, let's just have a look what the render set out. So I'm just going to turn that on, let it load up, and there we go, That's what we've grow at the moment. So if we go over to our cycles, I'm going to make sure that I'm on Edit Preferences and I'm going to go to System and just make sure, again, always make sure this is on. It should be on, but just make sure. All right, so we've got this at the moment now let's bring in a light source first. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to bring in a area light. So let's put the area light around here somewhere. Now, while I'm doing this, I might as well put this on material mode just to give it a bit more light and see what I'm doing. And I'll let load up, let all those materials load in. There's a fair view of them, so it might take a bit of time. The thing that you did see here as well is there is some emission coming off of these lights that are shining down. We're also going to put some lights on there just to get some nice shine on the piano. Okay? So now we've got this, let's come around to this side here. And what I'm going to do is I want to basically a sun that's going to be shining through this window down to the floor. And what we want to do is create some God rays going down, as well as having some really, really nice lighting on the floor. So the way we're going to do that first voice is we've just got a press shift day. We're going to bring in then a area light. And yes, you can do this with area lights, we're going to bring it up. And the first thing I want to do, I want to make this to a disc. So I'm going to come over here, I'm going to put this on. Where is it? Let's change the square and I'm going to put it to a disk. And then what we're going to do is we're going to rotate it round so and X, let's rotate it round so it's hitting that floor right about at the edge of the floor like so. And then the other thing is I want to make sure that it's actually going through the window, so I'm going to put it over this side like so. And then I want it just probably turning a little bit in the direction so if I come over the top like so I just want it turning so R, Z. Just turn it around like so. And now we can see that it's not quite peeping through the window. So let's have it Jaws coming through the window and there we go. So I think that's going to be fine. Now, the next thing I want to do is I just want to turn up the power of this. So I'm going to put it, let's put it on 100. What? 100? So make sure that cast a multiple important on which they should be. And then finally, let's make it a little bit of a yellow tint, so it might need to be a little bit brighter. Then let's put the rendering on and see what we've actually got now. So already we can see that we've actually got some really, really nice shining, if we come on the floor, some nice shining down there. But not quite what we actually want yet. So now let's move over and what we'll do is we'll go to the world set up. So if I come into my world cell, what I want to do is I want to bring in a sky texture. Let's do it with a sky texture. So I'm going to come over to shading, I'm going to come over to my world. I want to click New. And then what I'm going to do is I'll call this interior lighting. And now what I'll do is I'll come in and add in go to the world, sorry, another moment. We just have a plain background, let's put this on and now we can actually get a view of where we actually want, if we come to our view, I think something like that. And what we're trying to do at the moment is just see how we can actually light this. And that's why I'm just setting the camera where we actually want to. All right, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually come in, I'm going to delete this background out of the way. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a sky texture. So sky texture, let's bring that in, drop that in there. And then what I'm going to do now is we're going to plug the color into the actual surface like so. All right, so now we're actually seeing, we're really getting somewhere. You can already see that it's actually bringing us in some really, really nice lighting cascading down here. And that's really, really good for us, but we need to bring it back a little bit so that it looks a little bit more realistic. Also, I can see we've got a lot of noise on here. Is the noise on? Yes, it is. I'm thinking that this is probably a heavy scene due to all the materials and things like that. Now let's come into the sky texture. What I want to do is I want to set this sun intensity down a little bit, so I'm going to put it on something like. Not 0.3 and then we're going to put the sun elevation on 33.2 And there we go, now that's what we're looking for, this beautiful lighting coming in. And then we'll put the sun rotation on 6.1 so just move it over slightly so you can see. You can put this wherever you want. I wanted a bit of light bouncing on here. A bit bouncing on here. And then finally, we'll come down to these parts here. So the air, let's put that on. Not 0.5 turn it down really, really low. It's always going to be pretty low on this anyway. It's a big difference as you can see between parts. So let's put that on what? I add it on the dust. Let's put that on not 0.2 to give it a slightly blue tinge just to make sure it's not too yellow. And then the ozone will leave at one. And already we can see now we've got a pretty, pretty nice set up. All right, so now let's come in and add in the lights which are going to be around these lights here just to give us some nice shine on the bottoms of here. So what we're going to use for that is we're going to use some point lights. And the way I'm going to do this, the easiest way, again, I'm going to go back to Material mode. You can even go to object mode if you really want to. That might actually make it a little bit easier. Then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to come into the first one. I'm going to press old shift click just to grab it all around it. Shift S curse selected. So then what I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift and I'm going to bring in a point, light, light. Let's bring in the point, let's bring that down then to something like there. Let's come over to our little bulb. And then the radius. And I'm going to put on not 0.24 so I'm going to put this on not 0.24 Turn back my render on now. We can see if I actually turn this down, you can see it's very, very slight as you can see. Very slight, and that is what we want. So I'm going to leave this one on ten, so very, very slight. We can also see we've got our beautiful bouncing coming off of this piano. Now the thing is when you make your own scenes, this is what makes things look realistic. I see so many scenes where they just don't look realistic. And the reason they don't look realistic most of the time is down to the roughness maps or the metallic maps or the displacement normal things like that. They look too flat, they look too sterile. When you're dealing with something like this piano, you want a lot of imperfections in it. You want imperfections in most of the things that we're actually creating in this scene. So you can see there's a lot of imperfections in things like the violin in the pictures even you can see if I turn around, that there's a slight imperfection on there as you can see. And that is exactly what we're looking for when we're creating things like this. Because it's not in the light, you can actually see all the marks and things. Even though if we look without the light, they're very, very hard to see. That is what brings in actual realism. All right, so with that done, let's now come to our second lights. And the second lights, they're all basically going to be the same. The other thing as well is that I will show you is you can also, in cycles, not in V, you can actually use nodes. And with the nodes, what you can actually do is change this color to black body. So if you come down to black body and now you can see that we've actually got a temperature gauge. So you can actually change the temperature, not the color. Which actually helps a lot because it means that we can get a lot more thinness out of the actual light. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to change this to 5,500 like so. And then I'm also going to put this up to something like 4.1 like so. And there we go. Now we've got actually a really, really nice light coming out of there. Now let's just he, I think what we'll do is we're just going to object mode. I'm going to hide most of this, so I'm just going to box select with B. I'm going to press H to hide without the light selected. I don't want the light selected, so I'm going to press H for Hyde. And now I'm going to just press control And seven, just to go over the top. Now I'm going to do is I'm going to grab this light. I'm going to press shift D and drop that right in the center there, Shift D, drop that one right in the center there. And then shift D and drop that one right in the center there. Finally, then I'm just going to press, let's see if we can do it with one. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw up this one down just at the bottom of there, like the other two. Bring this one up and then I'm just going to work my way round and I've got to obviously bring this one up as well like, so. All right, the bring everything back. Let's have a look what we've got there. We can see we've got a big box around it and this, if I zoom in there, let's just hide that out the way, actually. So I'm just going to go over to the right hand side, press the dot, and this is, this is the volume. I'm not actually sure if this volume actually is on. Let me just check that. Okay, it looks like a left hand there by mistakes. What I'm gonna do is I'm just going to delete it. So I'm going to click and delete. Just delete that out of the way. All right, so we can see if we press Soltage, we haven't got anything else in the scene now. Again, it's really important if we actually have a floor in the scene, we definitely will need a floor. So let's come in and give a floor to this. So I've got my cursor here. It doesn't matter where we have it. So I'm just going to press shift A and I'm going to bring in a plane. I'm gonna drop my plane right down. And the reason, again, that we want the floor, is that we need something to bounce this light off of. It's gonna be a lot different lighting if we don't bring this floor in. So I'm just going to bring it in the floor. I'm gonna make it pretty big like so. And then all I'm going to do is just make sure that it's actually touching down here. So basically can see that this is only poking through there. Sofa, bring it or bring it, or bring it up just there. And then you can see that that's looking really nice. All right, so the next thing we want to do with the actual floor is we want to bring in a material. And the material for the floor I'm going to use, because that then is going to give us a lot of bouncing. It is going to take longer to render, but it will give us a lot more bounce on there, making it look a lot better. But we're going to do that on the next lesson anyway. All right everyone. So I hope you're excited to carry this one on, and I hope you're excited to see what results you're going to get. And you can use this, of course, in your own scenes. And I'll see you on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 17. Light Ray Techniques in Blender: Welcome back and run to Blend the Lightning and compositing four beginners. And this where we're left the off. Alright, so now let's come to our actual floor. Let's go over to our object mode. So this is our floor of the moment. Let's actually click New and we'll just call this floor or base, whichever one you want to call it. And then what we'll do is we'll put it onto render mode. I'm going to just get rid of this principle and you can see already how that lighting got affected as soon as I took that out, There's no bounce at all on it. If a press control is head, you can see if I bring it back, you've got all that bounce. This is why we're actually bringing the floor in. So let's actually delete that out of the way. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to press shift A. I'm going to bring in, first of all, a color ramp. So let's bring in the color ramp. And then what we're going to do is press shift A, and I'm going to bring in a glass, glass SDF, drop that in there. All right, so with the glass, I'm going to plug this into my surface, so we'll end up with something like this. And then what I'm going to do is I'm gonna plug in a color light. So. All right, so now let's turn, turn up the roughness. So not 0.35 so and also the IOR. We don't really want any IOR. We don't want any refraction. It's not going to be water. So we'll just set this to zero. So, okay, so now let's come over and what we'll do is we'll change a few of these. First of all, I'm just going to press control and click and bring in another one. I'm going to leave that into this gray. I'm going to put this one over here a little bit more gray. So a little bit more on the gray side. You can basically think of this as main color, mid tones, highlights. That's the way that you can think of it as. So let's now come to this part here and then I'm going to Not this one. This one. And let's make that much, much lighter. We can see what the difference is there. Very slight, but it does have an effect on the lighting. All right. I think also we'll make this one a little bit darker. Let's just come to this one. You can see already so much of a big difference, but let's make this a little bit darker like so. All right, I think that's going to be fine. Now we can see it's looking fairly realistic, but we've not actually done yet because we actually want to bring in a volume and then we want to also think about using the composite as well. This will also be the first time that we're also going to be using the ambient occlusion. So I'm going to show you how to actually set up a layer and then later on you'll see how we set up layers in V as well. But this is the cycles one, This is the basics. Later on, again in the course, I'm going to show you how to set up like sophisticated layers to do lots of different things as well. All right, so now let's come in and what we'll do is we'll grab our windows. We'll press Shift cursor selected. I'm going to press shift A. Then I'm going to bring in a cube. So I'm going to put my cube over my windows, like so. And you're like, well, what's going on here? Why are we actually doing this? Well, we're going to use this to create a God. So let's put this over. And we want to just put it in front of the window like so. And then what I'm going to do is now we're going to come face select, pull this one out. And I want it landing just around here like so. And then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to make it smaller so I'm going to press like, so just make it a little bit thinner. Maybe even a little bit thinner than that as well. So a little bit thinner like so. And then I'm going to press Sen's head and bring it down a little bit, so we should end up with something like this. And this base is going to determine where those God rays are going to fall. And the reason we want that volume like that is because the light, when it comes through the window, that you're going to have a bounce off of the particles in the air. And this is what's going to give you that effect. You don't want light bouncing off of all particles around it, because that's not true to life. You only get those God rays, which are caused by just little particles in the end, the light bouncing off them. So that's why we want to do it that way. So now what we're going to do is we're going to come to our actual volume. So I'm going to come to my volume, click New, and then I'm just going to call this volume. Then we're already over here and we can see at them. And we've got a principled in, so I'm going to move that over to the left hand side and just delete that out of the way. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in and bring in a principled volume. So I'm going to press Shift A Principle. This is the basic volume set up. If you want to be a bit more sophisticated, you can bring in things like volume scatter and add that into the mix That then we'll control how the light is actually scattered. So that's quite interesting. Let's bring in the volume first and plug it into our volume. And there we go. Now we're actually starting to get somewhere. All right, so the first thing I want to do is I want to change the color. So I'm going to change the color to a yellow. Let's change it a little bit more. So a yellow color. Let's pull this up a little bit, a bit more, something like this. And now we need to control how dense this is, because obviously at the moment, it looks like the cloud of gas. And we don't really want that. So what we want to do is let's put this on 0.1 and there we go. Let's double tap the a, and now we can see we've got those blue, beautiful god rays. That we're going for. Now, what we want to do is we want to change this ansotropy k, back back down to minus one or a little bit up. Now what does this do? This ansotropy, what it does is if it's set at zero light will be evenly scattered, going all around from these little particles that you see. If you set it to minus one or one, the closer to those it is, it actually gives it direction. So if set us to minus one to actually give the illusion that the light is actually coming this way, it just basically bounces off those actual particles differently, given the illusion of these actual God rays that we're actually looking for. All right, so the last thing then I'm going to do is the temperature. We can turn that up. Let's turn it up to 20, let's turn it up to 200,000 So 20,000 200,000 lights. So just makes it alert a little bit warmer. Not a lot of difference, but that's why I turned mine up too. So I think it actually gives a little bit of difference. I'm not actually sure as to how much. Alright, so now we've done that, I think we've pretty much done with our scene. What we need to do is now we need to bring in a camera. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna, first of all make sure that I've not grow a camera control zero and yes, there actually is a camera, so that's actually good for us. So I can actually see that my camera is lined up like this and I don't really want that. So we've got camera and let's come in then and go to view. Camera to view And let's just pull it up. So let's zoom out a little bit. So Lt. Shift, Cory control shift. And zoom out a little bit. So let's get it right in the middle there. Let's turn off our camera then. And now what we want to do is we actually want to go in and pick which actual layers we're going to be rendering out. So if we come over to the right hand side here, you will see an option which is this one here, View Layers. When you click on this, this is where you're going to pick all of the layers that you want to actually render out. Now you can see that we've got on at the moment, ambient occlusion. This is the one that you want on and you also want combined on because we've got a lot of these that we can pick on like a mission and things like that to change the way that everything looks. And what this basically does is it gives you a layer of, let's say you've got a mission. You'll end up with a kind of black and then just these lights. And from those lights then you can change the way they look independently of the rest of the scene. Now this is our places like Pixar movies, you'll probably have seen it where you've shown a video of them taking an image, sorry, a video of Harry Potter fighting Valdimore. And then you'll see all of these different layers going over the top and giving you that color scheme, which is kind of a greeny blue tint. And that's done on purpose as well. All of those layers that are added, including shadows, including lighting, including special effects, then on top of that to give you what you actually see on screen. And that's basically what you want to learn how to do, because all images just from a straight render won't look nowhere near as good as when they're done to a professional level I that we've got more layers stacked on top of each other. We've got more nodes in there, and we're basically controlling every single part of the scene. And that's what you actually want to get into. All right, so now that we've got that we've clicked on ambient occlusion, now all that's left to do is actually to render this out. So I'm just going to come to my render options, I'm going to make sure that everything is set on here. At the moment, you can see the maximum samples are 4,096 and this is something that I probably want to lower down because, you know it's for the course and I don't want it rendering out for weeks. So let's turn it down to 500 and then what we'll do is we'll make sure that our tile size on 64, which it is. And by the way, all these settings are set like this because on this actual one, I basically used this scene and just deleted all the other things out of it. So that's why the things are already set on here. They don't come in a standard like that. Make sure spatial splits is on. If you've loaded up this, you should have all these options. Just make sure that you're using the tile size that you actually want to use and the color management, as you see, it's actually set to none. Now normally on scenes like this, which is more realism, you don't really want to turn this on because if you turn this on, if I put this on very high, you can see it doesn't look nowhere near as real as on non because that is just more realistic lighting. Things aren't, you know, really stylized in real life unless you're at, you know, Disneyworld or something. All right, so now we've got that, let's put this on wire frame. And what we'll do then on the next lesson is we'll get this rendered out and we'll actually have a look at those layers. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed that. And I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 18. Post Processing Renders with Blender's Compositor: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this is where we're left off. All right, so now that's all that's left to do is come up, hit the render button. So render image and let this render out. Now, it is going to take a lot longer to build the scene because we have a lot of lights in here, we have a volume in here, we have, you know, a light shaft coming through here, and we also have a glass floor, which is also going to increase the amount of time that it takes to actually render. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to pause the video. I'm going to wait for this to render out and they'll be back when it's finished. But before I do that, I do want to show you one last thing in that, if you come up to where it says combined, now come down and you'll notice we have one that says AO. And this is because we tick that on. Now if I tick this on, you will see that it's actually rendering out all of the ambient occlusion. In other words, contact shadows and shadows within the actual scene. So what I'm tend to do is I'm tending to leave this on AO at the moment. I like seeing actually the shadows and things and I'm thinking in my head, okay, how am I going to, which parts are going to make darker and lighter? It's not as easy to see it, you know, on the actual main render, but when you've actually got this actual level layer, you can really see what you want to do with it. We can also see all of these little details within the actual model itself, which is also really important. All right everyone. So I'm going to pause it here and be back when this is rendered. Okay, so now it's finished rendering. What we can see is because we actually rendered this out on lower samples, you will see that there is a lot of grain actually in this scene. And that's going to happen because when you're dealing with volume metrics and lighting like this, you're going to need a lot of samples to make sure that it looks nice. Now, even though this is noise, we can see we've still got issues with this now. Let's not worry about that though, because we know that to just fix that, we just increase the samples to let's say 4,000 or something, and then we should be fine. So what we're going to do now is we're going to close this down. We're not going to save that again. We're going to go back over to the composite now. And we will notice a few things. Now what you'll notice is we have this set up here. We're actually going to delete this. So actually delete this other way. So I'm just going to come to this one, I'm going to click it. Delete all those out the way you like, so, and then we're going to go over to here. Now the first thing you're going to notice is we don't just have image, we also have AO on here, and we also have an Alpha. And we can also see that we've got our rendered layers here as well. Now we don't want to use those. What we want to use them is straight from this part here. And what I'm going to do, first of all, is I'm just going to pull this over. So my material output or composite output, pull in my image and plug it in. Now this set up is what we set up before as well, so I didn't mean to do with that. Let's put that back. Let's actually change that round to my compositor. So All right, got back where you want it. I want to pull it out like so. Okay, so this is what we've got at the moment. Now we want to actually plug in our AO. So AO controls all the shadows like you saw in V. And this is what we actually want to control, to really bring out the scene and make it look the way that we want it. All right, so starting with our AO, you will notice the first thing which will always happen is you'll have a load of grain and noise in the actual image. So the first thing you always want to do when you're bringing in an AO, you just go to search and bring in a noise. So Noise the main image is already always denoise the AO image. Ambient inclusion is never noise. Now you can see that looks so much better now we've actually denoised it. Now the next thing we want to do is we want to actually have some control over our ambient occlusion. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a color ramp. So shift a color ramp, let's bring that in, drop that in. Now, you'll notice if I turn this up, let this load up. And then you're going to see a huge difference there of how this can interact with the AO. Now if you want it to speed up how fast this is doing it, just plug your AO directly into the Ac. And now we can actually speed this up much, much easier before plugging it in. So I'm, I'm actually going to bring it down to that. I'm going to actually bring this down a little bit and then I'm also going to come in some midtones like, so I'm just darken up the scene a little bit. Now I've done that, what I want to do is I want to plug in my de noise and then that will get plugged in. It's going to think about it and now it's denoised as you can see. Now we want to do is we want to overlayeoth of these. So we're happy with our ambient occlusion. For now we've still got control over it. What we want to do now is bring these together. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a mix. So shift a search for mix and this is where you're going to find this little node here, which is really amazing because you can do so many things with it. Now I'm going to do is I'm going to plug in my image to the top. I'm going to plug my color ramp to the bottom. And what I'm going to hit is overlay on this. So I'm just going to hit overlay like so. And then plug it in, let it think about it, let the image load up. And there you go, you can see what a difference that actually makes. Now we can also put this on multiply, Instead of that, let it load up. And I think with multiply we're going to have a better amount of control. So let's turn this down. And the other thing is I might actually just plug in my O to my color ramp bypassing the noise. And then I should be able to turn this and have a lot more control over how it's going to look. So I'm going to bring it down like so. And then what I'm going to do is can increase. Now these shadows, there we go, very, very slightly as you can see. And that's looking really nice. Now, once I've done that, I'm not going to plug in my D noise or anything like that yet, because I want to actually do some other things. First of all, let's bring in a sharpen. So we're going to go to filter, here we are as our filter. We're going to put this on diamond sharpen. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to set this down in. Let's just plug it in first. This is what we've actually got. Let's set this to north 0.2 there. Now we can see we've got a much more clear, sharper image. Now as you can see, one of the problems we've got is all of this mist. Let's see if we can actually get rid of that by bringing in another filter. Filter. Let's put this on. Soften can start to actually get rid of that. Unfortunately though you can see that as we've started to get rid of that, we've we've still got some of the parts there. As you can see, I can actually bring it back jos to tad now. Bring it up. Bring it up. Bring it up. And now you can see probably gonna look a little bit better in that way. Now the one thing is that we don't actually want to do that. Remember when we render this out, we want it to be the best render that's available, and that's what we actually want to use. All right. So now let's try bringing in a glare. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift A. I'm going to search for a glare. So I'm going to bring a glare in, and then I'm going to set my glare onto fog. So let's put this on fog glow. And there we go. We can see we've got a huge difference in how this is actually looking. Let's unplug this and plug it into here. And there you can see what's happening in there. If you look at this part, press controls there. And there we go. Now we can see we're going, it looking like this. Let's set this to not 0.3 then. And then what we'll do is we'll set the threshold to not 0.3 as well. And then what we'll do is we'll bring down the size down to six like, so just tone that down a little bit and now you can see it's looking really realistic actually. All right, so now we're not done yet. Let's actually come in and bring in a color balance so we can actually really balance out all of the tones within our scene. So a five press shift day. And we're going to go to search, I'm going to go to pull, balance this one here, drop that in. And now what I can do is, as you'll see, what I tend to do with this is first of all, I'll grab this, pull it all the way over to see what it actually does. And you can see that this is the overall feel of the scene. So we don't really want this to be too much of a change, you can see now, made it a little bit warmer just by moving this over there. Now this one, let's overlook what this does. This seems to be the actual mid tones of the actual scene. So again, I'm going to put this over here and maybe something like a little bit of red just to bring out these parts of you. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to move over and I'm going to look at this one. I'm going to bring this down and these look like they're going to be the highlights. So what do I want? The highlights is probably going to be a little bit lighter like, so. All right, that's looking pretty nice. Now let's come over and bring in our final node, which is going to be RGB curves. And I'm nearly always putting on RGB curves in the end, and the reason is because then I have control over the whole scene. So RGB curves bring that in. Now what does this do? If I pull this up, as you can see, now we've got control over the whole scene. What I tend to do to get the mid tones and you know, main tones in is I'll put another one in. So control click. And I'll just make this into a kind of S and that generally does the trick. So I'm going to bring this back a little bit. Bring this back a little bit, and there you go. You can see that's looking pretty nice, so you can see it's like a small S. Now finally, let's come back and what we'll do is we'll plug in our noise back into our color ram. Let it think about what it's doing. It's got a lot of things to go through now, and there we go. All right, so that is our final scene. As I said, now you can actually come in and you can go back to modeling and we'll do this, and we'll see here on the next one. So what I'm going to do is before I go, I'm going to put this now on 4,000 samples. I'm going to put this onto wire frame. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to render, and I'm going to render this out. And I'll see you on the next lesson. And by that point this will actually be done. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed that and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 19. Studio Lighting Configurations in Blender: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lighting and compositing four beginners. And this is where we left it off. Well, this isn't where we left it off, but this is where I left it off, where I actually went in and I rendered this heart a much higher sample. You can see that we've got none of that noise in the scene. Now you can see that very, very subtly. We've actually got that beautiful sun shafts coming through there. And of course now we know how to actually turn those up. We can actually go into the volume, let's actually do that now. So we've got that. Let's go over to Compositing. Not compositing, Let's go over to Shading. Let's actually click on our volume. So I'm just going to go in 25 press Ol tag. Bring back my volume. We can see that if we want to increase this, oh, we need to increase the density. And then we'll get some much harsher sun shafts, you know, coming through the window. All right everyone. So I hope you enjoyed this part and I hope you learned a lot from this part. And now what we're going to do is we're going to move on two, let's actually pull this up to studio lighting, which is this one here. So let's close this down. And then what we'll do is we'll actually go up, we'll open the project. First of all, the project will be one that I'm sure a lot of you will enjoy doing. So here's the project and let's come in and let's also open up the example. And I'll put that on the other screen as per normal. So the idea here is to basically have a scene where this is lit really, really nicely, showing all the gleams of the cars. And then go into the compositing and show you what we can actually do with this because we can do a lot of things with this. All right, So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to actually, I'm going to actually put it on random mode like so. And this is what we've got to start with, totally gray black scene. What we want to do first of all, is want to bring in for studio lighting especially. We want to bring in a ground plane with a actual background. So let's do that now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in and put it on materials first, and then I'm going to come to the center of the actual curse in the center. So shift as cursor to world origin shift, let's bring in a plane. Let's make this plane much, much bigger. So I'm going to make it even bigger than that. Even bigger like so. And then what we're going to do now with the back, I'm going to bring it back. So I'm going to come to edge, select, grab this edge, press shift space bar. Bring in the move tool, bring it back. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to press and Z and pull it up like so. I'm going to grab this Bob part, then press control, pull it out for a bevel. And then what we're going to do is increase it with my mouse middle mouse burn like. So left click. And there we go. Now we will see that we've got some lines on there, we don't want those at all, so right click shade or too smooth. And then what we're going to do is we're going to come to this side now and really pull it out. And the reason is we're taking a camera view from over here. So we really need to make sure that this is pulled out, just so we can't see the edge of this. We don't want to see any edges of this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually come into this, I'm going to press Tab, grab this edge and then just pull it out. Next of all, what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up my camera. So I'm just going to set my camera up to something. Let's press Tab. Let's set up our camera to be somewhere around here. Let's press shift then and bring in our camera camera control at zero to bring it in, zoom in twice or three times. Just the gate, so it's on the outside to open the panel up where we can actually click camera to view. And again to close it. And now let's set our camera up to where we want it. So think for me, I'm going to have my camera set up, something like this. Make sure it's in the middle. And then what I'm doing is now I'm actually checking over the left hand side and I can see, look, we've got a little bit of this piece here. We don't actually want that. Now my camera cell I'm going to do is I'm going to press the end Bond. Take off camera to view Bond to close it, grab this part tab. And then I can actually move this now out of the way. So I'm just going to come back, Move it over further, tab zero. And there we go, still a little bit. Let's move it over even further, tab zero. And there we go, Now it's all actually in frame. All right, so with this actual material here, so this one here. I also want to make sure that we're on V, so just make sure that you're on V, let's change the render up to something like 200, something like that. Let's also change it up on the viewport as well to 200, and then we're going to get a good idea of what all of this is going to look like. Now let's just come into this ground plane. Let's go over to shading panel. Let's give it a new material. So you can actually do it here as well. Or you can do it over here. Let's call the ground plane ground plane, like. So. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go in and change the base color of this and turn the roughness up. So first of all let's put it onto V, so let's turn up the roughness. Actually there's no ware point brown V because we aren't going to light source in. Let's just turn the roughness up and let's put this onto gray. Now it's important to know that you're probably, when you're doing this yourself, you'll probably bring in the lights and not the ground plane material first, so there is that to consider. All right. So now we've done that, Let's Circe out here and what we're going to do is going to add in our first actual light source, so we're going to bring in an actual area light. So let's bring in an area light. So we're going to press shift A, bring in a area light. Let's press shift space bar, move. Let's bring it up. And then I want to point my area light. If I go over the top, first of all, I want to put it round about at the edge of here. So I'm going to press, move it round to the edge of there. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to rotate it. So I'm going to rotate it up. So r x rotate it this way and then z, rotate it this way and then go over the top. Z, where I want it pointing is right on this part here. This part here is where I want it pointing. So z, let's point it right on there. Now the other thing is I want it pointing at the top of it. So I want to bring this up a little bit. Now, you can do that by pressing R X and then X again. And you should be able to move it up like so. All right, that's looking about right now. The next thing I want to do is I want to change a few of these things on here. So for instance, the shape, I want to put it as a rectangle. And then what I want to do is I want to make this much, much bigger now, like so. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually bring in my light now. So let's put this on, let's put it on 1,000 so 11000 like so. And then what we'll do is we'll actually turn down, I'm just wondering actually, is this I turn that down? Yeah. I don't actually want to turn that down. I'm just going to have them on one. All right? So the other thing is I want shadows on. Just make sure my shadows are on. And then finally I'm also going to turn on contact shadows as well. All right? I'm going to leave these the way they are. I'm not going to alter these. Just going to make sure contact shadows are on. Now. The next thing I want to do is I want to make sure that I turn this into a slightly blue tint. So I'm going to turn this into a slightly blue tint like so. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to bring in another light. So I'm going to basically grab the same light. So this one here, I'm going to go over the top. So I'm going to pair a shift D like, so I'm going to then bring this one over and spin it round. So let's spin it around. And then I'm thinking, now I want to actually bend it down so that it's touching the floor round about here. So if we then press Look X X, bring it down and we want to touching the floor round about there. I'm just looking at that angle, whether I'm happy with it, I think I'm just going to pull it back a little bit. So let's pull it back. And then X, X and just have it touching the floor like so. Now with this one here, I want to actually make sure that this is a different color. I want to put this on a little bit of a reddish tingy color. So All right, and again, I want to make sure that contact shadows are on which they should be. Okay. So the one thing problem we've got here is that you can see at the moment that these for some reason haven't come in. And the reason is that I didn't save it out if we go to external data with it automatically packed. So I need to make sure that when you actually get this, it's going to be automatically packed for you. So when you bring this in, it should look like this. And that is what it should look like when you bring your own in. So just make sure all of that is actually done for us. All right. So now we've got that. Let's actually, as you can see now, that is looking pretty nice, but can we actually make it look better than that? And the answer to that question is yes? Of course we can. So what we're going to do now is we're going to come over to V. So let's come over to V, let's turn on ambient occlusion first, and let's actually open up the ambient occlusion. And we'll just turn some of these options up. So let's turn this distance up to four now. We've got some nice shadows going underneath. You can see as well, with the studio lighting that we have some really, really nice shadows in press Io on the background here as well. That's exactly what we're looking for. Let's also turn up this trace precision to one, and let's now go to bloom. So let's turn up the bloom. And we can see now we're getting some really, really nice lighting off of this. So let's open up that bloom then, and make sure everything should be like this. So you should have these all like this. Now of course, if we scroll down, the main thing that we want on is screen space reflection. If we don't have that on, we're really not going to make the most of the light bouncing off of here, especially being as this is metal work. So let's come in and turn screen space reflection on. And you can see, oh wow, it's actually starting to look pretty realistic now. Now the other thing I'd like to do is I also like to come down to shadows. At the moment, you can see that the shadows are 512. Now, what does this mean? This baseline means that the quality of the shadows is set pretty low. It's only going to be set onto a 512 resolution image. And we of course want it higher than that, so let's just put this to 4,096 Let's do the same thing with this as well. And now we should get much, much, much nicer shadows. And finally, now let's come down to the color management. And the last thing I want to do is I want to see if I can actually mess around with this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to my look, I'm going to put it onto high contrast. So high contrast like so. And it's up to you whether you want it on that you can see that there's a huge difference from non to high contrast. I'm thinking that it looks probably a little bit better with the high contrast on. And now I'm going to do is I'm going to change the exposure to Not 0.377 like so. And then I'm also going to bring the gamma Dan slightly to No 0.83 like so. And now think that is looking pretty good. All right, so just to reiterate then the main things that we are doing here because it is studio lighting, is we're making sure that we're having soft lighting. That's the main actual thing about this. The second thing that we are also doing with the lights is we're making sure that they're really, really showing off whatever object that we've got here. So you can see as well, the way the whole thing is built, it's actually tilted as well. So if you're actually trying to do studio lighting, let's see on the ring. Make sure you put the ring in a certain angle which is really going to show off all of those curves and make it sparkle. What you really want to make sure that you're doing this five press zero. Now we can see that we've got this gleam from this light, this gleam on here. And it really, really looks like it's got a lot of the, you know, metalwork and things like that in it. The other thing is that the background on studio lighting should always be set like this, so that we've got really, really soft lighting bouncing back off it. So you can see now that this would look good in an actual showroom. And when I took the red, if I take the render and remove the background and put a show room in the back, you could actually probably get this to look like it's actually in a show room. It's gonna look that actual good. All right, so now what we'll do then on the next listen is we'll come in and we'll set up our options to be the correct ones and then we're going to render it out, do a little bit compositing, and we'll finish with an actual studio lit car. Alright everyone, so hope you enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 20. The Art of Compositing and Rendering Cars in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blind the lightning composite in four beginners and this is where we left it off. All right, so what I want to do now is just go through and show you before we actually render this out, a couple more things. First of all, the camera options, so make sure your camera's ticked on. Come to your camera options. Now if you want to zoom in a part of this, like the badge or the wheel or anything like that, I would set my camera up and move it from here, so move the focal length like so. And then set it up so it's actually viewing on here. And the reason I do this is I actually think this gives you a much, much better image if we're taking small pieces of this car rather than moving the camera and actually setting in place. I think changing the focal len because it out distorts the image slightly, makes it look much better. The other thing I want to show you is this backdrop, you can actually take away this part. And the way that you do that is this is called clipping. Now what that does is the start clipping clips from where the camera is and the back clipping clips the back of it. So what you can do is you can bring this down, let's say to five. And you'll notice now we don't see anything. But as I bring this up, we can see now that we can actually start to clip certain parts of the image. And this might be what you actually want because then you can actually put in a background. In other words, then I can come over to my EV and come down to Film. And click on Transparent. And now I've got a beautiful background where it can actually put in this. Let's say you want to do it, you know, for you want to the show room and you want to show this off in a show room or you had a building and you want to put it in somewhere, this is exactly how you would do it. And the other thing is you, of course, doing it this way, you also keep all of that beautiful light bounces and things like that. All right, so now let's actually go back to our camera and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to set this back to 1,000 like so. And now let's actually come over and actually pick which ones you want so we don't actually want, I'm not going to bring in any ambient occlusion on this. This is basically just to show you where studio, where lighting, of course. The more of these that you bring into play, the more adjustments you can actually make. So in films and some really high end games, they might actually render out a lot of these actual layers. And then they can really play around with the effects and things like that, especially on cinematics. Now now that we're actually ready, all I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure that I've just got combined on. I'm going to come over there and hit that render bond. So render image shouldn't take long, It's on 200 samples I think, or something like that. And there is our image. Now you can see with V straight off the bat, that is looking really, really nice. We might want to make this a little bit more glossy, but actually I think I'm really happy with the actual lighting. But we're not done yet, of course, because now we want to go over to the compositor. So we're going to come over to the compositor, the same thing again. I'm going to pull this out like so I'm going to pull this down, pull it down over here, like so close this. So over over here press the end button. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to press Use Nodes over this side. Then I'm going to click on Image Editor. Put it on Render. So Render Result. And here is our result. Okay, so let's pull this over here and let's see what we can actually do with this. First of all, I'm going to bring in a box sharpen. I'm going to bring that in before my soften, so I'm going to sharpen it and then I'm going to soften it, so I'm going to press Shift A Search. It will be on the filter, so always on the filter, I'm going to drop that there. I'm going to press Shift and just duplicate that. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to put this in here and we'll see straight away all gets nice and softened out, but what I want this on is box shopping, so to really bring out those lines and things. So I'm going to put this on No. 0.267 You can see it's really brought those lines out as you can see now. And then what we're going to do is I'm gonna put my soften into play now like so. And soften them back up. Not quite to that level, but I'm going to soften them back up, Let's say to No 0.667 And there we go. Now we've got some beautiful lines here. And that's looking pretty good. So let's have a look at what the difference is. If I plug in this, now we can see that it before controls head, this is it after. It's very, very subtle, but it's still bringing those lines out and I think making it look a little bit better. All right. So now let's come in and what we're going to bring in is a glare. Because what I want to do is I really want to get some actual shine off of, you know, off of this light here. And make it look as though, you know, the light is really, really gleaming on here. The one thing is I might want to actually change my light source. Just have it a little bit more on the front of the here. You can see at the moment the glossiness, sorry, the mirrored effect isn't quite on the whole car. Let's have a look though and see what we get before we do that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in a glare. So shift a, bring in a glare, drop that in there. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to leave this on streets. Let's put this on medium. And the way that I normally work this is, so I will bring the threshold down to zero, Bring the mix up, so have a look. So now I can see where I'm going to get all of those types of gleams off of here. Then what I can do is I can turn down the color mode, and then I'll turn the mix up now to -0.2 Then what I'll do is I'll turn the threshold up to not 0.4. There we go. Now we're starting to actually get those gleams there that we're actually looking about. Let's turn the streaks up to five. There we go. Now we're starting to get some nice streaks, but way too high at the moment. Let's bring them back down a little bit. Drop them down way too gleamy at the moment, especially on this part here. This is the part that's way, way too much. We only want a little bit. In fact, on this one here, these are quite nice here. Let's bring it up a little bit more. All right, let's see if we can turn down those streaks just so they're not as bright as that. Let's turn down the iterations. We turn them up, actually yeah, there we go. Turn them up. Doing a better job I'm going to do is mix. We're going to bring this down a little bit. Let's bring up the color, the threshold. Let's bring them down now. Okay. So I think once I've got this gleam, I'm actually going to go in and alter my lighting because I'm not happy with how this is lit. I want the kind of lighting to be on here, not so much on the actual wheels. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put this on zero. I'm going to put this on X -0.2 I'm going to put the threshold on Ne 0.4 I'm going to put the streaks on five. And then I'm going to try and get this gleam when I'm actually using the render 892 like so. All right, so now let's actually go now and take another image of it. So I'm going to go back to modeling and this is my image that I've got at the moment. Let's put it on V. Now what I want to do is I want to move my lighting now. So we can see we've got this lighting, this one here. I can press Art and Z and hopefully move it around. It's actually a little bit more of a gleam on this part here, so I'm just having luck seven, go over the top. I'm just to think, Move this. So I'm going to press Art and Z. Let's have a look what that looks like. So I'm going to press zero again. It's looking a little bit. Be, but I still want it a little bit. I want it more like this, as you can see. So if I press, bring it over, press zero again. I'm thinking, can I actually bring this one in as well? This one. This one here. There we go. That's what I want. All right. X, X', see if I bring it Y, we're going to move it over a little bit. Move it over a little bit more. Let's press zero on the number pad. And this might be bad, this might be what I'm actually looking for. All right, let's go and render this out again and see what actually happens if we're actually happy more. So. There we go. All right. So now I think this is looking bad. I like this gleam coming off it. I've just got to actually go in and drop it down a little bit. I'm still not happy with this. I want to actually not have as much gleam on this part. Okay, So we're happy with that. Let's close that down and let's go back to our compositing and do a little bit more work on this. So let's bring down our mix first. Let's bring it up slightly, and then let's bring this mix. Bring this up now, 2.2 And then I'm going to bring up the mix now slowly, not, not that much. Keep locking it down there. And I think that looks perfect now. All right, let's bring the iterations. Can we bring those up anymore? I don't think so. Let's try the high as well. Let's try the low. Yeah, I think it needs to probably come down a little bit more. There we go. All right. That is what I'm looking for. Okay. I'm happy with how that is. Now, let's talk about, can we actually do anything else with this? What, yes, we can actually, we can come in, do a search for you in saturation, drop that in there. And what I can actually do with this is I can actually change the color of the entire car. And I'm going to show you how that works on the next lesson. All right everyone. So we enjoyed that and I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 21. Advanced Eevee Rendering Techniques in Blender: We'll come back. You run to blend the lighting and compositing four beginners, and this is where we left off. All right, so before I actually change the color of the car, one thing I do want to do is because these lights, they actually have emission. Let's actually go in first of all, before we do that and just turn on emission, so I'm just going to turn this emission on. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to re, render it out. Now you'll see at the moment we have emission here, but I don't think this will actually be working at the moment. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in to render image. So let's get that image rendered out now. We can close that down. And now we should have this emission. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to plug in this emission over here to my image. And you can see that's what we end up with. But we don't actually want that. What we want to do is we really want this to actually glow. So I'm going to grab a glare from here. Shift D, drop it in place. And hopefully if I turn this now to medium. So let's turn it to medium. Let's put it on three iterations. Let's put the color at zero. Let's put the mix at minus n 0.2 Let's put the threshold. I'm just looking if we can actually do anything else for this. There we go. That is what I'm looking for exactly that. All right, so now we've got some glow in there. We can actually set this. Can we set it a little bit high? Let's look. T's go this way. There we go. Now let's turn the mix down. Let's see if we can turn this up a little bit. So let's put the fade up. There we go. That is what I'm looking for, something like that. Now, let's actually combine these before in this UN saturation, let's now join them together. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press Shift. I'm going to do a search. Let's bring in a mix. So let's drop this in here, and let's put this I'm thinking, let's put this on to add. And then what we'll do is we'll, I think this one in the bottom and this one in the top, or maybe the other way around. Let's just see, let's add them in. I think these two. There we go. Let's actually switch these random minute and let's see what that looks like. Let's drop this in here. There we go. There is the actual shine that we're actually looking for. So again, some nice gleam off of this. If I now turn this down a little bit, and there we go, that is what we're looking for, some nice gleam off of that. All right. So that's looking pretty good. Finally, we've got our glare that we're actually looking for. So we've got some nice, beautiful glare up here. We've got glare off the emission here. And we've got some nice glare coming off of these. Now, let's grab this part. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to unplug this. I'm going to drop this then into here. And now what we can finally do is we can actually look at how to change this color. So all I need to do is come down, bring this down and hey, presto, we changed the color of the actual cart. Let's change it to a nice red. So not 0.5 so that's not, not 0.5 0.45 like so. And there we are. We've got a nice red car. Now you might want your range, you might want to yellow. Let's also bring down the saturation a little bit to north 0.983 just very slightly as you can see. Let's put the value up to 1.067 so lighting the whole scene up. And there we go. Now finally, the last one I want to bring in I think will be a brightness and contrast always though, when the last one that you should bring in is RGB curves, honestly that's the one you should always bring in last. Let's bring in brightness. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it up to north 0.6 And then what I'm going to do is the contrast. Let's put to one like so. Now we can see that is looking pretty nice. Now finally, as I said, the last one you want to bring in is an RGB curve. So search RGB curves. So again, we'll do the snakes bring in the S or the snake bring in two of them. Bring up the points or down the points. Let's bring it down a little bit and then let's mess around with this one. What we're looking at is this shadow on the floor here. As you can see, we're making it a little bit softer like, so. All right, there we go. Now, once you've got your image, you can just go up to image and save it out. And it will save it out as that you can see all the work that we've done in there to actually change this from the image we had. Let's finally go up and what we'll do is we'll just put this over here and then I'm going to just plug in the to here. That is what we started with. This is what we ended with, and you can see it looks a completely different image. All right everyone. So that's that part of the course. This is studio lighting. What we'll do now is we'll close this down and get our other project opened up. So let's just close that down, not going to save it out. Let's now go to our next project which is going to be this EV compositing. Which if we go to our example, let's open that up. Let's open that up on my other screen. So you'll be able to see exactly what we're going to do here. You won't be able to see much because it's just a cube. So we'll open up our project file and then we'll bring that over. You'll see it is a beautiful scene though, so let's bring that over. This is more of a stylized scene where we can actually do a lot of work on actually rendering this out in EV. This will be the last EV project that we're going to work on and the final project is going to be on cycles. So you can see through the course all about what you've learned right up to. We're actually now going to do like the highest point of V, what you can really do with it. And then we'll move on to the cycles and what we can really do there. But we can also see that, you can see the differences between V and cycles. V is much easier to use, it's much quicker. But you can see in the right hands, it's still extremely powerful. Although cycles, I feel, is certainly better some things than V, sort of straight out of the bat with blender cycles. It does look very nice straight away, but you will be able to see by the end of the course how much you can actually do with it, which is an incredible amount. All right, so saying all that, let's actually move on then to actually this scene here. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn on the EV, just to show you that there's pretty much nothing in the scene. You will see if I put this on materials though. Just how nice the materials are. So let's just let that load up. And you'll also see when we press Spacebar that there is some animation in this scene. So if I press Spacebar, you can see that it's moving around really nicely. All right, so now let's actually come in and I think the first thing we'll do is we'll go to our world. Now the moment we're using just the background, let's actually put this on there, Rendy, we can see just the background of the moment. So let's go to shading. And what we're going to do is we're going to go to object world. And I'm now going to go to file and we're going to end. So where is end? And we're going to go to our resources. Now in this one we're just going to go back and it's in a click on Name. It's under HDRI Lighting Resources. Bring in our HDRI set up. Come down to World HDRI set up. All right, so now I'll just click on this, go to HDRI set up, and this is what I have now put this on too. As you can see our HDRI. Now the one difference I want to do on this one is I want to change over this HDRI. We've been using the day one for quite a long time. Let's not actually use that. Let's close it down. And then what we'll do is we'll click open. And I'm then going to go to the file under V, compositing resources. And we have one that says sunset. Let's bring that in, let it load up. And you can see that's looking pretty nice already. Now we need to do a few things with this. First of all, let's put the strength on one. So let's come over then and alter the rotation. So put the rotation on -2.9 there we go. And that's looking a little bit better. Now, most of this scene is going to be lit through artificial lighting. That's exactly what we want. We just need some background lighting just to give it some kind of even soft lighting, especially on a stylized scene like this. All right. The next thing that I want to put in is make sure that this is on a gradium and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put this onto a gray color. So I'm going to bring this up, put it onto a grayish color, like so. And then the bottom one, I'm going to make a little bit darker, so I'm going to put it onto there and bring it down to be a little bit darker like so. And I think this is a good, nice part to work with. Now, you will see with the HDR lighting, we've also got some really nice lighting area over here and some gleams over here and things like that, and that's exactly what we're actually looking for. All right. So let's move on now and we'll bring in some actual light. So the first light I'm going to bring in, I think I'll bring in area light. So let's bring that in. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to move, I'll actually go back to modeling. I'll make it a little bit easier. Make sure that your actual cuts in the center, if not shift as cuts to world origin shift, let's bring in a light source and we're going to bring in an area light. Let's then bring it out. So I'm going to press Shift Spacebar. Move, bring it out. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to actually bring it up, rotate it around. So r x rotate it around. And I want it pointing basically at this book, so I want to move it across and have it pointing at this book. So all right, the size. Let's come over then to our lighting, and we'll put this on 1.41 And I'm thinking maybe that's a little bit small on my other one, actually it does look the right side. I'm thinking we're going to make it a little bit bigger, something like that. They never actually translate well with each other. All right, let's put this on 100. So now we can see we actually get somewhere. Let's not change any of the other things. Let's have a look. If we want shadows on. Yes, I think we want shadows on. Let's have contact shadows on as well. Just to actually make that look a little bit better. All right, I'm sorry, my blender just crashed, So let's actually make this a little bit bigger. So let's put this on 100. Let's put shadows on, let's make sure we're actually on the render engine. So let this load up. When it loads up, then what we can do is we can actually put our contact shadows on as well. So it's going to take a little bit of time because for me, my actual blender crashed. Now let's put contact shadows on. Can see a little bit of difference there, but that's looking pretty nice already. The one thing I do want to do is just put this on a nice blue color. So, all right, now let's bring in another light. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hover over the top. I'm going to press Shift D. I'm going to bring this over, so I'm going to rotate it around and just bring it over here. Something like that. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop this down and bring it a little bit closer. So I'm just going to press G, bring it down. So now with this light, I'm also going to put it on 100, so make sure that's on 100. Everything can pretty much stay the same, I'm thinking, yeah, even the size of it. I'm just wondering if I should just move it so it's moving slightly over like that and you can see the difference it's actually making. So yeah, I think that's looking a little bit bare light, so. All right, so now we've got our basic lighting in. We can see it. Now it's really started to bring this actual C now. Let's now bring in a volume. Now, again, whenever you're bringing in volumes, just make sure that you are saving this out. I'm going to actually save it As, into somewhere else. I don't actually want to save it on there, so I'm just going to save it on here. So. All right, now I've got that saved. I can bring in my volume. So again, make sure you costs in the center. What I'm going to do is express their shift day. I'm going to bring in a cue. I'm going to make that cue bigger than, and I'm going to cover the whole of the actual scene. So I'm just going to bring it in. So bring it up and just make sure everything is covered, so. All right, so now let's go over to our materials. Click New, and we'll call this volume. So I'm just going to click New. Call it volume. Let's also come down and wherever our cube is, which is this one here, let's also call it volume, just so we can find it and turn it off. Or turn it on, whichever we want to do. Let's then come in and turn this off. So we're just going to remove. And then what we're going to do for the surface is we're going to click on Principled volume, this one here. So then what I'm going to do now, I'm going to go over, actually that's wrong. Let's just go back. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to go to shading. Instead, I'll do it there wild into object. Put it on to render. Let's zoom out. Here is our material output shift. Let's do a search, go to volume. Volume. So plug this into volume, not surface. Just making sure you plug it in the right one, you'll end up with something like this. Now let's first of all turn down the density to 0.1 And now you can see we've got that kind of magical air or something like that. Let's turn this to 0.73 Let's also come in, and let's have a look at the color. First of all, we can come in, let's put it on a nice orangey color. Let's make it a little bit right. There we go. Let's see if we can turn this up, 0.3 So yes, and I think that looks actually much nicer now. All right, so I'm just wondering if I need to even turn this up a little bit more. Yeah, that's looking better, so. All right, so now we've got the main part of the scene. What we need to do now is we need to think about bringing in two more light sources. We've got a candle down here and a candle down here. So let's actually bring in a point light. And the reason we want to do that as well is because when we come to actually render this out, we want to have something to work with at the moment. We're not actually going to get too much to work with if we've just got an emission there. So we want a little bit more to work with. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in to my candle flame, so we can see this part here. I'm going to press Shift S curse the selected Shift A. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna bring in a light. I'm going to bring in a point light. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift space part. Bring in the move tool and just move that all, so. All right, so there's my actual point light, let's make it a little bit, oh, we can't make it a little bit bigger in that way. Let's come over this way. And then we can actually change the radius up to Point to four. Let's change the actual power of it to 50. So, and let's also change the color of it to a nice yellowish tone like so. All right, now let's come to our next candle. I'm going to just hide out the volume out of the way. I'm going to come to this candle, press shift cursor selected. Come to my light. Now I'm going to press Shift D to duplicate it. And then shift S selection to cursor key pot set. And that then is going to put my other light source there. I'm going to lift it up a tiny bit above this actual candle flame. And I'm thinking as well, I just want to check to make sure that my emission, I think. Yeah, I think that's high enough. I'm just wondering whether it's actually high enough for this. So the next thing now I want to do is I want to come in and mess around with a few of the EV settings. So I'm going to press all tag to bring back my actual volume now. And you can see this way it looks like if you want to have another really good look at it, you can see that's what it's going to look like at the moment. So now let's come over to our EV options. Let's set our EV first of all to 300. Let's also bring in some ambient occlusion so we can see the difference we're gaining there. Let's open it up and what we'll do is we'll set this to 6.8 and then we go much, much nicer. Now really starting to come together. Now the one thing we can see is we've got a bit of an edge on there. We just have to be careful that we're not going to see that edge. Because that, of course, that is coming from the actual volume. Now we can increase the volume like so. And then you can see it's going to look much, much better. So we'll just increase that. All right, going back to the ambient occlusion, let's actually save that, our work again. So I'm just going to save it out. And then what we'll do now is we'll just turn down the rate tracing down a little tiny bit to not 0.1 a two, making it not so many bounces. And then what we'll do is we'll now come to the bloom. So let's turn the bloom on. Let's open that up. And then with the bloom, I think I'm going to keep pretty much everything the same on there. I'm just going to turn it up and on, and we can see the difference there. Really, really bring those out. Let's close that down again. Let's turn it on and off again. There you go. That's the difference that you've got. Okay, so let's also bring in screen space reflections. And now we can see really, really starting to get some nice glints off of here, as you can see. Okay, let's open that up. And what I want to do is on this one, I want to actually turn refraction on and turn off res trace. Generally speaking, half res trays uses a lot more power for your computer than just refraction. So I normally turn that off because it's a really, really tiny detail which you're probably not going to see a lot of. All right, let's come down then and we'll go to volume metrics. Pretty much all of these are going to stay the same. You can of course turn this up, but the main one we want to do here, so you can turn up the number of samples, which will increase the render time, but it will also increase how good the actual volume looks. All right everyone, So that's it for this lesson on the next one. Then we'll actually carry on and work more on actually setting up this render all everyone I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 22. Post Processing for 3D Environments Final Render Touches in Blender: Welcome Mike. If you want to blend the lighting and compositing all beginners and this where we left off. All right, with the volume metrics here. I'll just reiterate, if you turn up the samples, you're going to get probably a better volume. Well you will, but it will be to a tiny amount, but it's going to cost a lot more in render times. So just bear that in mind. The one we want on is volumetric shadows. Once we turn that on, we can see there's a tiny, tiny, little bit of difference, but it does make it look that little bit sweeter. All right. So now I think that's pretty much everything. I don't think we need to change anything apart from the film, Not the film, sorry, the color management. Let's come down to that, and what we'll do is we'll set this on. Medium, high contrast, medium, high contrast. And now you can see it's really starting to come together. And this scene is already looking great without really doing anything else to it. Now let's go over to the panel where the layers are. And the layers that we want to pick is going to be shadows, ambient occlusion. And we'll also pick this mist like so, and we'll also pick the blue. That then will give us a lot of things to actually work with. So now once we've got all that, what we can actually do now is come in and mess around with all of those, even the shadows. And we'll just start adding them all together, building on top of each other and everything like that. First of all though, I'm going to go to save. And then what we're going to do now is going to come in, put it onto wire frame because there's a lot going to be rendered out here. And then let's hit that render button. So hit the render button and the image, no camera fan. All right, let's sell our camera first. That should be something that we always do. So what we'll do is we'll also come in, before we do that, we'll add in the camera shift date. Let's bring in a camera. So let's put the camera where we actually want it. Let's put this on just material more so I can see what I'm doing. Let's press control Alt and zero. Just to bring my camera. And what I'm going to do while I've got my camera selected, I'm going to come over and put it on 2048 by 2048. And then what I'm going to do now, I'm going to zoom in my camera a little bit. So I'm just going to get it where I want it go to view. Open it up. And now let's zoom in a little bit. So getting everything in the scene, something like that looks perfect. Turn this off, and now we can actually move it away. Now fine, we should be able to go to wireframe. Click on Wire Frame, and then click Render. And Render Image. And let's see what we end up with. All right, so you will see that I'll go through these in a minute. Let it actually render out here is, and it's actually rendered out like this. Now you might run into some problems here and the reason is we're using a lot of data to actually render this out. You can see here 3 gigabytes of data, pretty much to render this out. And you might have to actually come in and actually reduce the render. So if you put this on let's say 50 or something and then come to render image. And the reason, by the way, for this is why it's actually doing that is because basically it will just shut it down and it's because your computer, it's as though it's on hold and if something's on hold for so long it will actually shut down the render. So if you do have that, what you really want to do is you want to be going in and it's mainly this volume, you'll see if I come now to render image, sorry. Render image. Let that render out, let's put it on there, let's put it on 300. And let's see, we have the same thing. So render image, let's see if it actually renders. It'll get to a point, probably going to crash. There you go, Not responding crash didn't actually render it. Let's come in now to our volume on volume and actually turn that off. The render, turn it off in the viewport. Go to render render image and now let's see if we can actually render that out. There we go, it renders out and the reason is obviously because of the volume. So just bear that in mind. Now, the reason why the volume might be costing a lot if we go to our material, I think it's because we've got actually contact shadows on, on the light sources. I think that's what's happening. The light sources mix with the volume. So in other words, if you go over here, we've got contact shadows on that is costing a lot. I'm going to just try turning these off and see if that actually fixes it. Contact shadows of make sure my volume is ticked on, make sure run 300 and let's see if I can actually render it out now. See if that's any bear. And there we go. So that was costing us a lot with the contact shadows. So up to you whether you leave those on. The other thing is this is not a great image at the moment because we can see that this is like basically fixed in place. We don't really want that, so we're going to do one more. So I'm just going to close this down. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come now to my layout, and then I've got a timeline down here. I'm just going to hide my volume minute. And what I'm going to do is just move my timeline to a place where I want it that looks nice. So if I press zero, that looks a much better image. Let's go to render now. Render the image out. And it did the same thing. So let's have a look If I can reduce Yeah. My volumes on Let's put it onto wire frame as well that might help it. Let's go to render image and try that once more. The other thing is having it on wireframe or having it on material view does make a huge difference because it's actually using a lot more power to try and render it out. Also, I've got a few of these open as well, so I've got a few blender scenes open. And that's also costing a lot in computer power, so just bear that in mind as well, so your might actually be working fine, but they are the fixes that you can do to actually fix this as well. All right, so now we've got that, let's close that down. What we can now do is go over to our composite. I'm going to set this up now. I'm going to save it out again. So let's drop this down. So I'm going to close that panel over this side. And what I'm going to do is to come up to this side, drag it over. I'm going to use nodes and there's that. And you can see straight away we've got mist, shadow, O and Bloom. Now let's come over this side and what we'll do is we'll put this on image editor again. We'll put this on render like so, and this is what we've got to start with to work with. All right, so now we'll actually go over it and we'll actually really, really start to hone in on some of these. And the way that I do these, I do them individually. So first of all, I'll put this over this side and then what I'm going to do now is I'll work on the actual mist. So let's do the mist first. I'm going to come in, I'm going to bring in a color ramp search, drop that in there. And then what we're going to do is I'm going to copy this three times. So I'm going to press Shift D, drop it down, Shift D, drop it down. And this is based then set up to actually bring in all of these different nodes. So the first one I'm going to bring in is a mist and bring that down to there. Then we're going to drop the image over here, like so. Now what we're actually doing here is we are having control over how this mist is actually looking. So don't be afraid because this is, the mist is actually going over the top of this. So in other words, this is not the mist, this is just the outline of the mist. If I start turning this up, you can see that we have control now over how much that mist is going to affect it. We can also see that we can change this color to a blue or something and he'll put blue on the background, which I don't actually want. So I'm just going to bring this in like, so. Okay, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this mist up to something like that. And then what I'm going to do now, we'll deal with this one first. So what I'll do is I'll bring in a multiply. So I'm going to press Shift, bringing a mix. So we'll bring in a mix. I'm going to have three of these to begin with, so I'm just going to press shift D rather than me keep bringing them in. I'm going to put those two there. This one here. Then I'm going to actually put this onto multiply. So let's put it on multiply. And then what we'll do is we'll turn this down pretty low down, so I'll turn it down to No 0.258 So and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to drop this then into there. I'm going to put this on the bottom. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in now and drop my image into here like so. Now what has that done? If I turn this up, we can see now we've got power over the actual mist in our actual scene, how clear it's going to be. All right, so that's the first one. Let's put that out there then. And we'll put this one up here. And then the next one we'll deal with is let's look at our shadow now. So what we'll do is we'll drop this here, we'll go to our shadow, and we'll plug this in here. So now you can see it's a little bit different from ambient occlusion. It's actually all of the shadows and how dark they actually want to make them. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this over here. I'm going to bring this up. There we go. We can see our shadows there. What I'm actually going to do is just tone this down a little bit so the shadows aren't as harsh as what they were. Now I'm going to do is I'm also use the multiply again. I'm going to come in actually multiplier. Overlay. Yeah, I'll try overlay first. So let's come in, put it on overlay, it is, then what we'll do is we'll plug this into here again, put it down to the bomb. And then I'm going to grab the image, drop that in there. And there we go. And now let's see what we've actually done. There we go. Now I'm just going to put this back on black minute. Then I'm going to bring this up now and get it to where I want to. What I want is I want it to be shadows there, but not quite to this depth. So you can see if I bring this all the way up, can see just how dark those shadows are. Let's bring this down a little bit. Yeah, I think that's looking much, much better like that. All right, so now we've got both of these. So we can put this up here, put this here, put this one here, put this here. So now we've got our Bloom and we've also got our O to actually deal with. Alright everyone. So you can see we're really building something nice here. So I hope you're looking forward to the next lesson, and I'll see you on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 23. Comprehensive Guide to Blender's Compositing Tools: Welcome back everyone. To blend the lighting and compositing four beginnas. This part, well, it's really not actually for beginners, for advanced people. But because we've done the whole course, I guess you could say that you're pretty advanced now in all of this lightning and compositing. Now let's come to our ambient occlusion. So what I'm going to do is going to plug in ambient occlusion, then I'm going to plug it into my composite. And there you go. Now you can see the difference between the shadow and the Amin inclusion. The Amy inclusion is all of the shadows around here. So now we can see that if we bring this up, so we can really, really bring this in now, I think I'm actually going to leave that on there. I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to bring it back a little bit. I'm just wondering, maybe a little bit too bright, I think with this one actually, I might actually just tone this down a little bit to tone down the whole scene. Now what I'm going to do with this one is I'm going to use my overlay again. So I'm going to put this onto actually we'll try on there, multipliers that are overlay. There is a difference between overlay and multiply. The difference is the multiplier mode, it's quite straightforward. It multiplies the color value of the top layer with those of the bottom layer, resulting in a darker image. And this mode is often used to darken images or to add shadows, IE. With amen inclusion or our actual shadow over here. So I'm not going to go into the mass of that because that's quite complex. But then we've got the overlay, which is a combination of multiply and screen blend modes. And it applies the multiplier mode to the shadows, darker areas, and the screen mode to the highlights, lighter areas of the image. So that means it preserves the highlights and shadows of the bottom there while blending the colors of the top layer. So you can see why we might use one over the other. So I think that on this one, let's actually just use the overlay. So we'll use overlay and see what we get. And then we'll actually use, let's put it at the bottom. And then what we'll do is we'll try it on the multiplier as well. So let's bring that in and we can see this is what we're actually getting. Now if we bring this down, we can see now we can bring everything kind of back. Let's put this on multiplier now and have a look what the differences. So we're going to multiply multipliers down here, and there's the difference. And you can see how it did darken up that image. So let's now bring this back a little bit, or down a little bit. And I think actually that is going to look much, much nicer. All right. I'm happy with that. So far, that's looking pretty nice. Okay. So now finally, let's come onto our bloom again. We'll bring in a color ramp, or we could bring in an RGB curves, I guess, but let's just put in our bloom first. I'm going to put in our bloom into the image, and this is what you're going to get and then will do is I'll bring in a RGB first. Let's try with an RGB curves. So then what do is I'll plug this into the image, and then I'll plug this into the image here. I'll come in, bring this up, and you can see now the power of that. I don't think we actually need to really come in and use an actual color ramp for this part. All right, now we've got that, let's bring those together again. I'll come in, I'll press shift D on this. I'll drop this on the bottom. And then Wald is, I'll bring in my image again. Put that on the top. And now let's see if I can play around with this. We can see that darkening the hole of the scene. Instead of that, I think actually that's looking pretty nice now, don't worry, because a little bit further down the line, we are going to bring in some glare. Now if you want more control over these, what we could do is we can also add in if we go to our layers, we can also bring in emission as well. And that then we'll give you more control over this than what you've even got here. Let's save out our work because we've done actually a lot of work so far. And I'll also come in and I'll bring in now a color ramp on here just to see what we can get out of that color ramp. Drop that in, let's bring this up, and there we go, That is what we're doing now. We've got a bit of the ness over there, so it actually might be worth also bringing those in as well. So I think actually that's looking pretty nice, so. Okay, so now we've got all of these layers done and now we need to put them all together. So the way that we're going to put them all together is we need to add them all together. Let's again bring in this multiply. Let's press shift D. And then what we're going to do is we're going to put this onto add. So let's set this at one. And now let's, let's join in this one first. So we're going to bring in this one which is our mist. And then what we'll do is we'll bring in which ones? This, this is our shadow. So let's bring both of those in. Let's plug that in then. And this is what we'll get with those two. Now we can see that if for bringing this backwards and forwards, that's the kind of thing we're going to get. We're going to mess around with those in a minute. We're just going to join them altogether first. So now I'm going to press shift D. And then what I'm going to do now is I'm going to join these two together. So let's bring this one and this one. Now, this one is just our AO and our shadow. I'm just looking where that one's gone. I've got yes, I've got 412345. Actually, I'm just making sure I've got them all. I've got two to the image there. So I'm just going to plug this one in. Now there's that one. And now we'll shift and we'll bring in another ad. In fact, I'll just duplicate this. Duplicate this, drop, that one in there, and this one in the top. All right. Now let's bring it all the way back. Let's bring this down a little bit. So, yeah, at the moment I'm not actually happy with that. And the reason is I need to set this to multiply, we go, let's turn that up. Okay, Let's have a look at this one now. And turn this on, multiply as well. We don't want it that dark. I think we're going to turn it up a little bit. Put this on over and I'm also then going to drop these bag just a little bit. Okay? Okay, that's that one. And now where we've got this one here, let's bring this all the way up. Pull it back a little bit. Okay, that's looking pretty nice. I'm happy with how that looks. You can see completely different to how we add it. If I plug this in now into there. This is what we started off with just with this plugged in controls ad, and you can see what a difference that actually makes. But we've not done yet. So let's go even further. Now what we're going to do is we're going to bring in a glare. So let's bring in a glare. So shifts bring in a glare to really bring out these parts here. And what we'll put the glare on, we'll have it on streets. We'll put the number of iterations on five and there in mind we've got a lot of stuff to load in now, so we just have to take that into account. Now what you can do is instead of doing that, you can just basically plug this in and then what it's going to do is really speed up this part as you're actually going through it. So in other words, it's going to be much easier now. So if I put this on 0.575 you can see now loading much, much quicker than where it was before because it's not going through all that data. Now let's put the mix in minus n 0.9 And again, it's up to you. You need to play around with these a little bit. Generally speaking, even on printing these, they're going to be a little bit different from what I've got on the original that I did. But you can see they're looking quite nice. All right, let's turn up these streaks like so let it think about it, load up and there we go. You can see more streaks looking even nicer. Let's put the angle offset on 16.1 and we'll see now that this moves slightly. There we go. And let's also put the fade then at no 0.8 And there we go. We've toned it down so Jos got very, so Okay, so now let's plug this in. Let's see what the whole scene looks like. Let it load up. There we go. That's looking pretty nice. Okay, so now let's bring in a diamond sharpen. Again, I'll bring in a filter. So shift a search filter like so. And then what I want to do then is before doing anything else, again, I just want to plug in just this one here, Jose, into my image there. And then plug it into here. And then we've just got this. And then what I want to do is I just want to put it on diamond sharp. And there we go. And then tone this down to 0.5, something like that. All right, that's looking a little bit better. Need to tone, it might need to put a soften in before I think, but we'll actually do that on the next lesson. All right everyone. So I hope you're really enjoying this part. I hope you're really seeing the power of what you can do with all these compositing in layers. And I'll see on the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 24. Enhancing Render Details Sharpening Images in Blender: Well, come back if we want to blend the lightning and composite in four beginners, and this is where we left it off. All right, so now I want to show you just a couple more things we can actually do with this before we actually bring in a RGB curves and our urine saturation and all that sort of stuff. So let's first of all, we can see at the moment when we brought in our sharpen, this is what's happened. You can see here that when we do out, it looks a little bit like so we can actually bring in an anti lasing and bring that in. And you'll see that now smooths that off. What we can also bring in is we can bring this diamond sharpen shift D, drop it over here. You can see we've got the same problems, don't worry about that. And what we can do is we can come down to shadow. And now what we can do is we can actually turn this shadow down. And you'll see if I put this on zero, it looks like this. But if I turn it up, you can see over here, look on here. How we really, really start to bring out those shadows just a little bit, but it just makes things really just pop out that little bit. So I'm going to turn that down and lay it up tiny bit like so. And we can see now that that's smoothed off much nicer than it was before. And then finally, we could also, if we needed to use a, sorry, a soften pin, also use a soften. And if we turn that off, you'll see that it really starts to soften that off. The only problem with using the soften is that sometimes you get this where it just looks a little bit too plain when you're using it. You can see instead of making things pop out, it just starts to, you know, kind of all mush together. So just be careful when you're using that. All right. Now let's, well, we're going to bring in now the RGB curve. So we need to basically make sure everything is plugged in. So at the moment you can see that we've got all of these. What we need to do is we need to plug this glare in to this bottom and let everything load up. So all that information load up, and there we go. That is what we're left with. Really, really beautiful image. Now we can bring in our RGB curve, So shift a search RGB curves like so. And now we're going to have control over the actual whole of the image. It's going to take a while to load up, but you will see the difference. And now you can see we've brighten everything up. And generally as I say, I always bring another one in and I'll always play around with both sides, so the darker parts and the lighter parts like. So now let's see if I can just make this a little bit darker because I was happy with how dark actually looked. Let it all load up, and there we got a thing that looks really, really nice. Finally, then, before we do anything else, we should always also bring in a Uin saturation and a brightness and contrast. So let's press Shift, and we'll go to Uin saturation first. And the reason I bring this in is not to change the colors or anything like that. It's just whether I want to saturate our a little bit more. So you can see if I bring this value down when it's loaded up, you'll see the difference. So there we go, let's bring it up a tiny bit. Then finally what we can also do is we can really bring out back those colors. You can really bring them back. I'm just going to accentuate that a little bit. As you can see, we can really bring them back, or we can really bring them out. Now, obviously bringing them this far is going to be a little bit too ridiculous, but you can see that we can really bring them back. So what I'm going to do is I'll try this on 1.1 to start with 1.1 what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump between those. I'm going to put it on one, let it load up, and then press controls head and just see what the difference is. Like that. Like this, I think actually 1.1 looks a bit bare. Okay, so as I said, the last one we want to bring in is brightness and contrast. Normally, you might want to bring in before your GB curves, or you can bring in after just to mess around with the whole scene. So I'm going to do expression, and I'll bring in a brightness, brightness, and contrast, and drop that in. Now, do we want to turn up the contrast? So let's try to turn it up a little bit. Just tiny, tiny increments in this. And there we go, let's turn it up a little bit more, 0.6 And there we go. All right, now let's turn up brightness and yeah, I think that looks a very, very nice image as you can see. All right, so that is the final bit and now you need to do is image and save out so you can see. Let's go over what we've actually done. You can see that we started off in V. We've got a nice scene ready. We live the scene. We brought in the volume, we set all the settings up for V. You can see that we've got now the mist, the shadow, the air, and the bloom. You can see that you've got many, many other options that you can mess around with here. And then you can see how you plug all of these things in together and what you should do on the final parts to actually get that beautiful scene that you're actually looking for. The one thing I think I might finally do on the volume which is probably the missed. I'll probably come in and this missed part, I'll probably just turn that down a little bit and see what that actually looks like. So I'll let it load up and think about it. Let's bring this up. If it's not actually doing anything, I'll just press controls just to bring it back twice. And then what I'll do is this. And I'll turn this up. There we go. We can see is a little bit of a difference there, but we don't want those parts in. I'm just going to see what it looks like on here just to bring that missed up a little bit. I'm going to try And this on overlay as well. Let's see what happens with that. And actually turn that up. There we go. That's what effect we gain. And you can see as well that once we alter one thing, we're going to have to go in and alter the other things as is the case. But anyway, like I said, with the glare, I like it over here. I like this. It has a little bit more mist to it, which I'm happy with. It's just like glare. Now, I'd have to go in, bring down this glare a little bit. Let it load up. Think I've gone the wrong way. Actually, I know I didn't. It went the right way. So let's come in, it's up a tiny bit. So now, I think actually that looks better than what he did. It's got a little bit more miss there. All right everyone. So what we'll do then is we'll end this lesson now and then we'll move on to the last lesson, which is doing pretty much the same thing as what we've done here, but actually doing it in cycles. Because if you're gonna learn how to render things out in Blender, you really want to have all the toolkit available to you. And that does include cycles, which I believe is actually a nicer render. I enjoy using cycles more than V. I found with V, trying to get a nice image is a lot more hard work than it is in cycles. Alright everyone, So hope you enjoyed that. I'll see you the next one. Thanks a lot. Bye bye. 25. Lighting Techniques for Cycles Render Scenes in Blender: Welcome back everyone to Blender Lightning and compositing four beginners. And this is where we left off, we're on the final straight. Okay, let's close that down. Let's not save that. And then what we'll do is we'll go back to our resources. I'll pull that over. What we'll do is we'll open up the last one on here, which is the cycles laying and compositing. We'll open up our example, or open up your example. Put it on your screen like we've been doing all along. Lay that load up and you'll see exactly what we're going to achieve here. You can quickly go and have a look in, you know, in the compositor and things like that. And you'll see, actually, once I've opened up the project project, let's pull this over that. It's actually a pretty basic scene and if we put this on to render, we can see this is what we start with. And of course, we want to be in cycles for this. But if you actually, I won't actually open up the example. I want to save that actually. So you'll be able to see what we can actually do with this. Now with this one, we're not actually going to be lighting it with anything but a actual sky texture. So let's first of all go over to our shading panel and we'll see at the moment, if we go onto world, that all we're going to end up with is a background like we normally have. Now all we're going to do on this one is I'm going to actually keep my background and I'm actually going to bring in a sky texture. So if I press, let's first of all put this onto our render engine. I think also as well. Let's put this on a cycle. So if we come over here, let's put this on cycles. Let's make sure, as we always do on the preferences, that everything is as it should be. So on the system, make sure that this is all on. Let's also make sure we're on GPU because that's obviously going to give us a much cleaner result. And then going down, make sure that we've got noise on in the viewport and then we won't touch any of these other things at the moment. We just want something so we can actually see what we're doing. All right, so now let's come in and bring in the sky texture. So search sky texture, and I'm going to show you actually you can get amazing results without a HDRI, without any lighting, with just a sky texture, and just the blender composite. All from just that. All right, so let's come in and what we'll do is we'll plug in the sky texture to the color. And then what I'm going to do now, I'm going to change the strength down to not 0.3 like, so turn that down a little bit and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to come in, change the sun intensity to not 0.1 Now the sun intensity has a really, really limited effect on sky texture, just so you know. And the reason is, is of course that most of this is done through the elevation, the air and dust, and ozone and things like that. Okay, so let's put the sun elevation on 30. Let's also make it so that these shadows are really, really nice and what we're looking for, so sun rotation 120 and there we go, that's some nice shadows. Looks really, really flat at the moment. I know. But that's when you need to have faith in yourself that you can use a composite to really bring everything back out. Okay, so now let's put, sorry, the air on 1.2 let's put the ozone on 1.231 sorry, the ozone on two. All right, so I made a bit of a flop there. 1.21 0.2 31.2 All right, now we've got those. That's pretty much everything we're going to be doing here. And now what we need to do is we need to come over to the cycles options and just make sure all of those are correct. So let's first of all come over to light paths. And what I tend to do is I tend to put the transmission up a little bit when I'm working with things like this. So you can see here, we've got all of this. Hey, so I tend to come in, put the transmission up like so. And now we'll be able to see a little bit more in there. All right, so next what I want to do is I want to come down and look at this fast GI approximation. If you're over over there, it says approximate diffuse indirect light with background tinted ambient occlusion. This provides fast alternatives for global illumination, for interactive viewport rendering, or final renders with reduced quality. I don't think, I'm not sure whether I want to tick that on or not. I've not actually tried it, but you might want to actually give it a try. Now let's come down to performance. And what we want to do is, of course, I want to change this to 64 spatial split and persistent data, tick that on. Now finally, under color management, you might want to come in and change how this looks. So you might want to come in on the color management and change this. Now on this one, I don't actually know if I really want to. I think with the compositor it's going to do a lot of the work for us. I'm going to actually, I'll keep on high contrast and then have a look at what it looks like. It might turn out too dark because I'm going to do a lot of it. In fact, you know what, I'm going to put that on none. I'm going to show you how I can do it all with the compositor. Now, let's come in and what we'll do is we'll come and pick which we want now. So the ones I want, the main ones that I want for the cycles we, is I want to combine none, of course. I want to bring in my diffuse color and I also want to bring in ambient occlusion. Now with cycles, unlike B, you can't, there's only a couple of ways you can bring in ambient occlusion. One of them is through textures, so you can have a shader that set up with the ambient occlusion in there. And the other way that you can do this is through actually layering and compositing. All right, so we've pretty much got that on now I'm going to do is I'm going to set the render to maximum samples of 1,000 let's have a look, 4,096 and then I'm going to hit the render born. Before I do that, of course always go on wire brain. And then what we'll do is we'll hit render. It's a render image and it says no camera phone scene again. All right, let's set up a camera then. Did that last time. Let's do it again. Let's bring in the camera and then ship control zero and we'll have it on this size. Actually, how I want to set this camera up is just to make sure that I've got the whole scene in here. So I don't really want to see these edges on each side. Also, I want the top of the viking. Got to be in place. I'm just going to zoom in twice. Press the end. Born over in, over here. There we go. Back to my camera. Click it on view camera to view. Now let's bring it up. First of all, let's come in, bring it all, let's get a nice image of where we're going to take it. Something like that. I don't want this edge coming over here, nothing like that. I think that's going to look pretty nice. Now, the one thing when you're taking an image, just make sure that, you know, if you've got a nice chimney in there, do you want it in there? What you don't want to do though, you don't want like half a chimney in there. So if you're trying to get a nice image of the chimney, then just make sure we've got kind of the whole thing like that so we can actually, you know, differentiate between the wood and the chimney. So I don't actually want that, so I'm not too bothered about it being the chimney. I'm more concerned with actually getting a nice shot of this door because then I can actually mess around with the shadows in there as well. All right. So now we've got a Cameron. I can actually turn this off. I can go to wireframe mode. And then what I can do is now I can come over and hit that Render Be render image. It's building everything and you can see this is going to take quite a long time. Now, again, I wouldn't personally, with your first render render it out on this, I would render it a much lower sample level of 500. So I'm going to close that down because it is going to take a long time. And then we're just going to render it out at 500 and I'll show you the difference. In fact, we'll put it on 250 and then we'll render this out render image and now we can see just how fast that is. Now what I'm going to do is I want you to render it out on 250. We'll make sure that we've got all the lighting is perfect, then you'll make sure that you're happy with the scene and the angle of the camera and everything like that. And then what you should do is render it out on, you know, where 4,000 samples, not 4,000 sorry. Let's render it out on 1,000 samples, something like that. Then what we can do is we can go in, do all the compositing, and then finally render it out on a much higher sample level. So I'm going to use this, what I've got here, to actually use it in my compositor. And then what we'll do right at the end is we'll render it out at 4,000 samples, get a really, really nice render and see everything come together. All right everyone. So I'm going to let this finish, and when it's finished, I'll be back on the next lesson. Thanks a lot, seeing a bit. 26. Viking Hut Project Final Rendering Adjustments in Blender: Welcome back everyone to blend the lighting and compositing four beginnings. And this is what my scene rendered out. Let's actually close that down now. And we can see we rendered our 250 samples. So that's what it looked at like pretty good, straight off the bat with cycles as you can see. Let's put this down now and we'll set up this again. In fact, I'll show you one other way you can do this as well if you come up to this. And then what you can do is you can go down to General and what we're looking for is compositing. So we're going to click on a new one that says compositing or my compositing, let's call it that, compositing. So what we can do now is we can actually set this up and then you can actually open blender and you can set this up and then save it. So it's like that every single time you open up blender, which is going to make it far easier than keep going in with a compositor and moving these around. So let's bring this out now and then we'll do this one is use notes and there's my image. And then on this one again, we'll go down to image editor and then open and render result. Render result, and that is what we've got. Okay, so let's make a start on this. So you'll see first of all that we've got diffuse and we've got AO and we've got our noisy image. Let's first of all come to our ambient occlusion. Again, you'll see really noisy. We don't really want that, so we need to clean that up. So let's press shift a search noise, Bring that in, drop that in, and then it's going to clean all that up for us. Now let's bring in a color ramp. So we'll bring in a color ramp to actually get this ambient occlusion right. Shift a search color ramp, drop that in. And then what I'm going to do is now I'm going to press control click in the middle, like so. I'm going to move this down to between the R and the G. I'm going to move this down to the R. I'm going to let it load up then. And then I should be out a bear room idea of what this is going to look like. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring this black up just above the plus like so. And there we go. All right. Doesn't not much of the moment we can see we've got a lot more darker parts in here. And again, once we've actually done this, we can come in and mess around with this a little bit more. The one thing I think I want to change is I want to make this a little bit darker. So bring this down a little bit like, so let it think about it's going to take a now you can see just how much that brings everything out. So that's looking pretty nice. Now we've done that, let's come in and look at the diffuse. So the diffuse is just the basic color. So if I come in, plug this over here, over here like, so just the basic color, No shadows, no shininess, nothing else, just basic color. And this is basically, you're taking everything and really just dropping it all the way back to just that basic texture that's on here. You can't even see the water anymore. Why use this is I tend to actually put this over the top of an image that I've done, all the ambient inclusion and things like that. And that actually enables me then to bring back some of this texture if I actually want to. So what I'm going to do is, first of all though, I'm going to bring in D Noise. I'm going to grab this shift D, drop that on there. So let it think about it, let it smooth all that off. And that is because I feel like with the diffuse it does have a little bit of noise in there. Not as much as what you'd expect, but just a little bit Now I'm going to do is I'm going to actually mess around with the color. So I'm going to press Shift A, search RGB, curves. Drop that in, like so. And then I'm just going to grab the middle of it, pull it up, let it load up. And there we go. It just brightens everything up for us. And that's looking pretty nice. Now we've got those. Let's first of all join the Am inclusion up with the color. Just going to pull this down here. And the way I'm going to do it is I'll bring in a multiplier. So it'll be a mix. And then let's drop this into the bottom, and then the image into this one here. By the way, the alpha, you need to drop the alpha into the alpha over here. If you've got a transparent image, don't forget to do that. And then save it out as a PNG. So just a little tip there in case you are using that. All right, so the mix, let's put this onto multiply, let's put this on 0.9 then let's plug this into the image. Let it think about it, and there we go. We're already starting to get somewhere. You can see just how much this brought it out. If I plug this into here, we can see the differences. Night and day look so much nicer with what we've done. Now let it load up again and then you'll see the difference. All right, so now let's plug in our color, so the diffuse color over the top of this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to press shift, in fact, I'll just actually copy this. So press shift, bring this in. Now on this one, I'm going to plug this time into the top. I'm going to change this to the overlay. So overlay, and then what I'm going to do is bring down the RGB curves, plug it into the bottom. And now I'm going to plug this into our compositing, and let's see what that looks like. And there we go. Obviously we need to bring that back quite a bit. 0.9 is way, way too high for this. You can see all that color has been brought back, but just way, way too much. Let's bring it down to something like 0.2 Then what we'll have is the difference between the image we with the ambient inclusion and things like that and then the diffuse over the top. And you can see, now this is looking pretty realistic. It's looking pretty nice. Okay, now let's bring in a sharpen and then an RGB shifts bring in a filter and we'll put that onto diamond sharpen, like let it think about again, it's going to be way, way too sharp. Now let's turn this down to 0.2 Again with all of the things that you've learned now from doing the EV you can see now all of the things that you can add in. For instance, we haven't got any lights in here or anything like that, but if we did have we could be using using Bloom, if we had some Mel in the scene as well, we could have glints offer there, we could actually probably bring in some emission on the water. And then using the layering, we could actually have some glint coming off the water and all that sort of good stuff. So you can see just how powerful this is going to be. All right, so finally then let's bring in an RGB curves, shift search, RGB curves. So let's plug that in. Let's put it up here. Brighten up a little bit, let it load up. There we go. There is our actual scene. Now remember, we only rendered this out at 250. So let's pull this over here. What you also might want to do, as I always say, brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation. Let's bring in in saturation. We also learned about the color balance as well. So we might want to bring just saturation just a little bit so you can see now it's brought it out. All that color can also drop down the color a little bit. The value a little bit. Yeah, and I think that's looking pretty nice. All right, so finally then, what I'm going to do now is I'm actually going to go back to modeling. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put this on wine frame. And remember this scene is lit by nothing but the sky texture, nothing else. And then what we can do is we can go in now and render it out, but let's put it on 4,000 samples instead. And then we're going to do is I'm going to hit this render button, and then I'll see you on the other side and you'll see exactly what it looks like. So I'm going to come up now, hit the render button and I'll see you on the other side. So here is our final render. And you can see we, no lighting, no emission or anything like that. We've still ended up with a really, really nice realistic render. And that everyone brings us to the end of the course. And I truly believe this is one of the most comprehensive courses out there on lighting and rendering. I would have loved a course like this setting out, as it would have saved me so much trial and error and actually improve my blender skills by a long shot, as I would have been able to render out faster and nicer projects, which then would have motivated me to go further in my own artwork, we started from a simple sum and progressed all the different types of lighting, covering most of the blender options in both V and cycles. And finally, you learn how to render out in a professional way. I'm hoping your own renders will now improve, no end in every project you can look forward to to that key stage of lighting and rendering. And finally, compositing. I look forward to that part now, always because at the end of the day, you can have the best modeling skills in the world or be the best guy at shading. But without these key skills you learned here, it won't matter. Nothing will look as good as it could be in the right hands, and it certainly won't be popping out on any page. I really hope you enjoyed this course and if you did, please give us a review as it helps this course grow and get into more blender beginners ends as always, happy modeling everyone. And I'll see on the next one, Cheers.