Cinematic Lighting in Maya

1. Introduction: Hey guys, we want to improve the results of your 3D work. Would you like to learn how to create cinematic looking images for your portfolio? If that is the case, then I welcome you to the next. It's cinematic lining in mind. My name is Abraham Leo. I have 11 years of experience and throughout this course I will teach you all of the tips and techniques that I know in order to create amazing looking images for your portfolio. Throughout this course, I will share with you my tips, tricks and techniques to bite the different scenarios. For year three, the rappers will do interiors with all the objects, will do characters. I'm going to show you a lot of the needs that are gonna be very helpful for you to create amazing images for your portfolio. Throughout this course, we will cover are no lights, cameras, sentence composition, storytelling, using acids and post-production. If you want to improve your 3D renders that this is the course for you. In this course, we will explore different techniques so that you can utilize them and decide which one is best for the scene that you're gonna be prepared. The course is divided into six chapters. In the first few chapters, we're going to look at the basics of the rendering engine that we're gonna be using, which is going to be Arnold. In this case. We will explore all of the different techniques and useful tricks and tips that we have so that we can create amazing looking images. After that, we'll jump into real production techniques that we're gonna be using, degenerate, amazing cinematic looking images. This course is assigned for each intermediate level students. A basic understanding of the Maya interface and tools is required. However, if you're good enough, I'm sure you can follow along since we're gonna be showing every single step along the way. You also need to have a little bit of understanding of Photoshop since we're gonna be using that so far for our post-production. Leave all of those boring renders behind and join me to create amazing looking images for your portfolio. If you are up to the challenge, then start this course and become a master of light in no time. 2. Cinematography: Hello everyone and welcome to this very special series. Throughout this series, we're going to be exploring a lot of important concepts. And if you're watching this series, it's probably because you want to know how to create amazing looking renders for your portfolio, for your productions, for your shorts, even for your games. Like it doesn't really matter what kind of medium we're gonna be exploring. Cinematography is one of those things that we really, really need to understand and utilize to get the best possible results for our projects. So today I want to talk about the three pillars of cinematography. This very first video is just to give you a big overview of all the things that we're gonna be exploring throughout this series. I've tried to divide this USE into chapters and exercises that are going to teach you the basics and fundamentals of this pillars that we're gonna be talking about. And then we're going to do a final project where we're gonna take a character and we're going to place him on different setups. As I always mentioned on my videos, you probably already saw the final renders that we're gonna be using on the promo video. But we're going to get there throughout this series. So when we talk about cinematography, we need to talk about the history of film. Now, another film historian. It's not that I have been studying this for a long time, but once you are in the industry, you can get an idea of how things are evolving throughout the years. So just as a quick note, the way like cinematography was born. Thanks of course to photography and photography was War in the 1860s, I believe. I might be mistaken there on the dates, but it's, it's been a long time since we have photographs. Underworld. After a couple of years with photographs, people realized that if you were to present this photographs in a sequence, in the FASTA sequence, you could get the illusion of movement at the end of the day, film videos, everything we see, it's a lot of images that are running really, really fast and our brains can go caput. And they think that it's sort of like fluid movement, but it's actually like a visual trick. It's not actually like a video, like what we see normally with our eyes in real life. So if we go back to the history of B effects, one of the first proponents of using BFS and using cameras in a more interesting way. Where of course, the Lumiere brothers and the Lumiere brothers did this movie called a Trip to the Moon. If you have the chance, I strongly recommend you watch this little short film. I mean, it's technically considered to be a film, but it's really relatively short. It's free on YouTube. It was done in 1902, again by the Lumiere brothers, actually in, in Los Angeles. The B effects like yield or the union. They use this logo as their, as their main shape. And they reboot solution ice everything for all of us. It's thanks to them that we're doing all of this amazing stuff nowadays. Because thanks to the imagination and the, what's the word that creativity that they have. We are now able to use cameras and use 3D and use a lot of our stuff to bring people into so many different worlds. Nowadays, when we talked about cinematography, the one thing everyone thinks about these slides, right? That's seen them. Tomography. That's like the main concept that everyone thinks about. Like you will see this like a shot from Dunkirk and you think about how nice the contrast is, how the blues and the oranges play together. And yes, light and color are really, really important to cinematography. We're gonna take a look at that. But there's actually, as I mentioned before, the three main pillars that we're going to be exploring. This are as follows. First of all, we have the camera. We need to understand that the camera in a shot and in every sort of production, It's pretty much like an actor that we are telling the story through the eyes of the camera. So deciding what kind of camera we use, what kind of film resolution, what kind of focal length, what kind of even the grain that we're going to have on the camera. All of these decisions will impact in how our final look, our final image is going to, is gonna, it's gonna look into how we're going to be communicating the story or the elements that we want to communicate after the camera, we of course have the light, right? And this is probably one of the things that you are looking forward in this course. We're going to be exploring all the different kinds of lights and areas and light situations that we can use, the different types of lights that exist. We need a 3D world within Arnold and my m, so that we can get some very nice, interesting looks inside of our seats. And finally, this is something that not a lot of people think about. You might think about it subconsciously, but something that we're also going to be giving enough thought that throughout the scores and that of course its composition, I'm using the golden ratio here as an example because this is just one type of composition that we can use. But thanks to these three elements, like if you combine those three elements, that's when you're gonna be able to achieve this very cool looking cinematic effects. Now, the only reason why we call things cinematic is because this kind of composition contrast, uses of lights and shadows have been used several times and throughout a lot of years in the cinema, in the cinema industry, calling the shots cinematic only means that we are properly portraying are properly using this three elements that I just mentioned. Now, there's all the variations in cinematography and we're also going to be looking or taking a look at a lot of examples rather scores. For instance, there's this ejector a lot of you guys might be familiar with, whose name is Wes Anderson. The way he uses the camera is really different to the way someone like, I don't know, Michael Bay will use it, right? So if you take a look at the Anderson, he tends to go for very symmetrical compositions. He goes for really flat, soft, pastel colors. There's not a lot of contrast on his scenes. Likewise, there's no love like a main light source is usually very diffused, very nice. And that's his style. So you, as you get to control or not control, learn and the implement all of the different things about composition, light, and camera. You're gonna be able to create your own style in the cinematography concept. Okay, let's take a look at someone else. Like some of you guys might remember, Blade Runner, right? Like it's not a cult, classic, super, super iconic in our industry because of the revolutionary sci-fi things that they proposed back in the day. And if you take a look at most of the cinema cinematographer from the original Blade Runner, you're going to notice that there was really high contrast, like really bright lights, really harsh, like sharp shadows on the characters. There wasn't a lot of e1 BMD like fog and a lot of noise on the scenes. And that's what gave it its sort of personality to the film. If you are more of a medieval find like myself, and we take a look at the Lord of Rings for instance. You're gonna notice that the seminar cinematography, that they use this a little bit more like golden hour sort of stuff. Like really nice bright colors, soft shadows. There's not like super harsh shadows. Everything's in focus where we're just appreciating every single part of the world, right? And that's, that's pretty much the essence of cinematography. Knowing which camera to use, how to use it, knowing how to properly place lights, how to properly use those slides. And most importantly, I think this is the secret of cinematography. How are we going to tell a story using these three elements right here. By combining these three elements, we are going to tell our audience. We want them to focus on something specific on our scene. Thanks to this, we're gonna be able to transmit a feeling or share an idea. And that's what's going to allow our worst or a renders to connect with people, to connect with the audiences and make sure that they received something interesting and then they appreciate all the work that we've done. So again, this is just a very quick overview of what we're gonna be looking throughout this course. Now that we're done with this, there's a couple of softwares that we're gonna be using. So I just wanted to take the time to let you guys know which of these ones are gonna be. We're gonna be using, of course, Maya. I'm using Maya 2023, which is on the latest revision. We're gonna be using Photoshop as well. We'll probably use a little bit of after-effects throughout the way. I do want to show you a little bit of texturing some specific prompts later on. So if you have access to substance painter, that would be great. If you don t have or you're not familiar with the texturing processes, do not worry all of the assets are gonna be provided for you. So make sure to download the scene file for your project. And once you have downloaded, you're gonna go here into Maya. Let's just wait real quick for this one to open. And I want you guys to set up the scene. So we're gonna go into File Project Settings or project set, project, sorry. You're going to navigate to this NT underscore cinematics, underscore P, then they might be slightly different. I'm just going to set that project now. Every single scene, every single texture, every single asset that I'm gonna be using throughout this course is going to be there. And anytime we tell Maya to access a specific path or file, we're gonna be going straight there. Okay, So super, super important to set that up. And yet, now that we're ready, we're going to start working on our first little project. And we're going to start exploring some of the basics of our scene. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next video. Bye. 3. Rendering Fundamentals: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to start with the rendering fundamentals. And I need to take a couple of videos, a couple of, I'm going to use Chapter one basically to teach you all of the basic things about rendering because there's a lot of mysterious things and concepts that we normally just roll with them. We just click buttons and make sure we get a render. But some things we don't really understand what's going on. So I want to take this videos to show you some of the more technical side of things. It might be a little bit, I won't say boring, but it's a lot more technical. So just bear with me and there's going to be a lot of really interesting things I'm sure that you guys are going to learn through this. So first of all, we need to understand how a normal camera in the real-world works. Normally, we have something called the lens. We have the sensor and we have this thing called the shutter. The shutter is like a little window that opens and allows light to be refracted throughout the lenses of their camera and hit our sensor. Once the sensor is like it's impacted by all of this, light photons eat remembers that information they need, saves that information as a digital image. This is of course for modern cameras. Digital cameras in the old days when we had film stock, we still have film, but when there wasn't a lot more common, it's the very same process. The only difference is instead of being a digital sensor that detects the amount of light that's being received. It was a chemical thing or a chemical reaction that occurred. And then we will need to transform that chemical reaction through a process on the photo revelations side of things to make sure that we could see the image, right? So this is, this is the way a camera in the real-world works. However, in the digital world, it's a little bit different because in this one, we're presupposing that light is coming through the lens. And in the digital world, the way this works is the other way around. The camera will use a process called ray tracing, where it will shoot out thousands upon thousands upon thousands of race into the scene. And those race will start like analyzing, bouncing around, gathering information from the scene. And then they will come back through the same section like they will go out into the world gathering information and then returning the same sort of mathematical direction and like input that information into our final image through this pixel, pixel size or pixel resolution. So the reason why this is important is if we already mentioned in the last video, the camera was a super important actor or foreseen in the 3D world. It's even more important because it's going to be the one that's going to be shooting most of the race or all of the race into the scene. Article works with this ray tracing effect. And that's one of the first things that I want to talk about. You're gonna go into Maya and I want you guys to open the file. I'm actually going to save this as fruits start. There we go. You're going to open the fruit, start the scene in this route start. I've already set up several things for you. I've set up this very nice fruit bowl with this plate. There's this like a cloth element. We even have all of the materials and all of the textures like properly connected here on the Hypershade, we're using a substance node. I'll talk about this one a little bit later right now. I don't want to bother you guys would have technicalities, but I'll show you how all of this works later on. Yeah, everything is set up to be able to just hit Render and get the proper response. By the way, just as a heads up, this is not a model that I did myself. This is from a very old site called render challenges, where they used to provide very cool models for you to practice and share with the community. So this is one of them. I'm actually, let me give you the name of the artist because it's always important to credit whoever did this. There we go. So the name of the artist is the mean weight, among others. All the way back in 20078 or something like that. It's a really, really, really old scene. So yeah, I think it's 2006. So yup, that's That's it. So now that we have this, if we were to go into Arnold, I just hit Render, which is a very normal and natural instinct that we might have. We are not gonna get anything. It's gonna be an empty scene and it's not that it's an empty scene. The scene, it's actually there. Well, we're not seeing anything because we're missing the second component from our three pillars of cinematography, which is of course a light. Now, I did make one very quick change. I'll talk about this one a little bit more in the next video. Here under System, I change my render device, the GPU. If you are the proud owner of an NVIDIA graphics card that has CUDA cores, then you can change this to GPU with Arnold and it will use those to the course to give you faster render times. If by any, if you don't have one of those, don't worry, the system will automatically fall back into a CPU render and you're gonna be rendering normally with TPU. I do want to emphasize that I have this NVIDIA G-force 38 TI. So my render times will potentially be a little bit faster than most of you. Just be patient and wait for the time for the render to show. And that's pretty much it. On the other, on samples and things like that, that we haven't changed anything. So right now here on the billboard, we are just like moving around wearing the perspective view as you can see. And I just turned on to this little thing right here called the resolution gate. The resolution gate is going to tell you what's going to be rendering right now. I'm just going to be going for this very simple, like on the frame, like sort of fruit bowl. One thing that I do recommend is creating a new camera because usually you want to keep your perspective camera as the camera that you're gonna be like moving around your scene and you want to have a shot camp, it's going to be the main camera. So I'm going to go to the rendering tab right here. I'm going to click this little icon right here. And that's going to create here on my outliner a new camera. It's actually there on the world at the origin 000. So the only thing you need to do is select the camera. I'm just going to call this shot cam. And I'm going to say panels, look through selected. Once I do that, as you can see, I'm now navigating throughout that specific camera and I can just turn on the resolution gate and see a very similar thing to what I saw with the perspective view. But this allows me to of course, press Spacebar my perspective view and just go back to normal view. And of course, assuming that most of you have the basic knowledge of Maya if you need to get the refreshment. And unlike traditional movements, just remember Alt, click, middle mouse click and right-click. Those are the main movements here on the camera. Anyway. So now if I were to go again to Arnold and hit render once more, this is going to open the Arnold RenderView. This is our main window towards the world right up here we have a which camera we're rendering from. In this case, this is prospective shape. We want to change that to our new shot camera shape. When I do this, as you can see, we're still not going to see anything. And the reason why we're not gonna see anything, it's because we don't have lights in our scene. Not even like the basic myelinated. There's, there's absolutely nothing here. Now you don't need to have your textures turned on. I actually have them right now. You can press number five and go back to like a shaded mode or just wireframe or just shaded mode. If you want to go to number six to see the elements, that's fine. I'm going to keep it to five to have the magic happen on the render time. And I'm gonna go to Arnold lights and I'm going to use the very first slide, which is the area of life. Now, I'm gonna do a very simple thing right here. I'm just going to move the light up, scale it up a little bit, and rotate it so it's pointing downwards. Now we need to talk about some of the fundamental things with lights. I'm going to use this video to go over the basics of flight. If I were to render again, nothing's going to happen. There's nothing going on on the scene. And the reason why this is happening is because all of the Arnold lights work as if they were real world light. So the intensity and the amount of light that they're emitting is based on real-world scale. Meaning that even though I don't see anything here, there is something happening if I were to increase this like a lot. This is called the exposure. Let's go to exposure of ten. You can see that it's there like the image is there. However, it's completely underexposed, meaning that there's not enough light hitting my scene to give me the proper result that I want. Right. So I'm gonna go back to exposure of one, I believe was like see your exposure, just balanced exposure. And what we can do is we can select the light and overhear and exposure. Let's try exports of ten and hit Render. And now as you can see, we are gonna be seeing our objects. We see this very nice soft light going on top of our objects and illuminating the whole scene. Here's again where I mentioned we're gonna be talking about the fundamentals of a rendering. And there's three main things I want you to remember about lights. Right now we're gonna talk about lights. The first one is the shape of the light will change or will make a difference on the type of render that you're getting with. I mean by this is if you have a really, really small source of light like this, you're going to see that the shadows on your scene are gonna be really, really hard like this. Okay. I have not changed anything but the size. If I were to make this thing bigger and rounder. Now, what you're going to see is that the shadows are going to be soft and then have one thing turned on here, I'm going to remove. Okay. So again, if you have a big source of light or a light source, sorry, that's really big in size. Then since the amount of light that we're getting into the scene, it's, it's quite a lot. We're gonna be getting a really, really soft effect if we have a really small light source and we have the same amount of intensity, all of those rays are concentrated into a single point and they're going to make things a lot harsher, as you can see right here. That's very, very important and we're gonna be using this technique to our advantage as we move forward, having Either soft or hard shadows depending on the size of our elements. The second one, of course, is the intensity and the exposure. This is the basis or the basic values that we have to control the light inside of Maya and inside of R naught. And they work in these very interested in weight intensity is a linear, like a, like a linear variable. And exposure is a, an exponential variable, meaning that if I were to bring this exposure back to 0, right now we have an intensity of one. If I put this into intensity of ten, I still have not going to see anything. If I do a 100, I'm going to start seeing something. If I go to a thousand, then we're getting closer to what we were expecting, right? And the reason why this happens is because intensity again, it's linear. So every, every, every new number, like we go from one to two to three, every incremental option is going to be just a slightly more than the one before it. However, in the exposure side of things, it's actually exponential. So we're gonna be multiplying against itself. So exposure at 0 is 0, exposure at one is one. You're not going to see really anything. Exposure at two is for exposure at three, is nine, exposure at four is 16, and so on and so forth. Like this is exponential. So with each number we're getting closer and closer. So we go exposure to ten, which is the one that we had before, is ten to the tenth. And it's gonna give us a very, very big number. I suck at math. The one that say a harder though, it's at a 100. I don't think it's a 100. That sounds like ten by ten. I think it's supposed to be like 1000 or something. But anyway, the point is that if you work with exposure, you're gonna work with lower numbers. However, do keep in mind that if you want to work with exposure, you need to talk or do you need to keep the intensity is set to one because the intensity works as a multiplier. And if we set this to 0, thinking that the exposure is going to do all the work, then it's like we know anything that we multiply by series is gonna be 0, so we lose all of the light intensity. One is what we need. Now, one thing we definitely want to check is edematous right now they look at lead with weird, Let me see if they're like shiny enough. It look a little bit shiny or not as shiny as I would've thought. So let me just make sure that we have everything set up here. The way you want to check a material. Anytime we check a material, we want to check the reflections and stuff like that. You will need to check the roughness. It should be said to our rock, which in this case it is o, but we need to set alpha is luminance. That's one of the, that's one of the things that we weren't missing. And whenever you're using roughness, we want to use Alpha's luminance because as you can see, we're outputting the Alpha value. So we want to make sure that it understands that same for all men unless we really don't need, but let me just turn it on. Those are one of the basic things that you need to do. Now, let me say one copy so that you can see the difference. There we go. See that now it looks a little bit more like an orange, a little bit more natural. And that's the reason why none of the fruits are working. Very, very easy fix. We're just gonna go to, oh, no, Maya, really, we're just starting the course and you're already doing this. Well, it's part of, it's part of, I think it's because I kept the, the renderer, the interactive preview render open. You definitely want to stop the render every time you stop or you are going to make a change to material because it could overload it like what you just saw. Let me pause real quick, guys. I'm going to fix the thing for all of them to us and I'm going to save again as the fruit starts with, you're going to have to do it. And then I'll continue talking about the lights. Give me just 1 second. There we go. So now all of our fruits are shining in a word like natural way. They're supposed to be there sort of like a still life effect. Right. So yeah. As I was mentioning, I'm just going to very quickly save this as your fruits start. So you're going to have a basic life, a basic camera, and the basic setup. Now, that's what we're talking about, delights of the size of the light and the shape of the light will change the way the shadow works, and the exposure and the intensity will change the way that light is being thrown into the scene. The next thing we want to take a look at is the color temperature. This is super, super, super important. If there's one thing I want you guys to not forget about this video is the fact that, that light has temperature by default or not by default, by normal life. If you go outside and are on the midday sun, as you can see right here, you're gonna get a very bluish, whitish look, right? It's a very flat, very neutral light. But we know that as the sun is coming up or as, as the, as the sun is going down, the light changes. And the reason why it changes is due to a refraction in the atmosphere. There's more particles in wavelengths are absorbed and therefore we only get the red hues on the lights. This is something that very recently I would say maybe in the past ten years, people have been able to control on their houses as well. Back in the day, if you remember, whenever you saw inside of a house at night, all of the lights would be either warm like really, really orange, really reddish, or super blue and white at the bending on there, we're using traditional incandescent bulbs or the fluorescent lights. Nowadays, thanks to the LED technology, we can actually create a lot of different variations on the kind of temperature and even color that we want for the lights. And there is a very basic principle. The higher you go, the bluer is gonna be, okay, So the higher the temperature, the blue or is going to be, we measured this in Kelvin, in the Kelvin scale. So the higher the Kelvin's, the blue is going to be. And it's a little bit counter-intuitive because it's more energy. We're actually releasing more energy, but it looks colder to us. But this is more of a human perceptual rather than the width science works. I remember once listening to a, an astrophysicist and he said, If you see a blue fire run like just rug because it's the heat and the burn that you're gonna get from that blue fire is gonna be so much more intense. Than the ones that you're going to get from a, from a red fire because blue flames are burning. So, so much hotter than like white or warm flips. Don't quote me or don't quote me on that though. I'm pretty sure that was the proper thing that he said. But for us, the most important thing is that we can change the way lights look depending on what kind of Kelvin temperature we use. So I always, always, always, always going to be using a little bit of color temperature. Even if I don't want to use color temperature, I'm still going to turn this on and I'm just going to keep it at a very basic one. I'm going to save this one right here. I'm just going to render. I'm going to use this little button here to save. And you can see it's a very subtle difference. It's a super, super subtle difference. This is no temperature and this temperature, and this one, even though I might seem to be exaggerating, but this one already looks a little bit more natural than this one. And the reason is there is no perfectly white light source on earth. There's always gonna be a little bit of a tint. I mean, you can have like a super, super wildlife, but the fact is that if you want to have a little bit more of a cinematic look to your things, always use temperature, even if you're going to keep it like a super traditional, like a 6500, we can even go to 5500. It's gonna be really, really white. As you can see. Well, this one's getting a little bit warmer, but see how much nicer this looks. It looks way, way, way, way better because we're able to give a little bit of that color and, and depth to the image itself. Having a very flat white image, we're actually adding a little bit of something. Now, if we go really low, like, I don't know, 335 hundredths, then this is going to be really warm. It looks like we're in the island. I like enough photos to the right of that full revelation is to do if Google really high, like 7 thousand for instance, it's gonna be really cool. It's looks like we're in a lab or something. So again, depending on the kind of field that you want to go for, temperature is going to be a super, super important factor in the way we change our scenes. I'm going to go for 5 thousand. I think this looks very nice and very warm. And I really liked the fact or the way this works. Now, take a look at the reflection of the objects. See this little square that we have right here. That's the shape of our object. We're actually seeing the shape of our light being reflected on the objects. And this is important because we can change that shape. We can change it from a quad shape to a disc shaped. For instance, it's gonna be a little bit rounder. You can see it right there. Let's go back. So that's the cloth and you can see the quad right there. And we can change this to a at this. And it's gonna be a little bit more like a spotlight. And we can also change it to a cylinder. The cylinder is going to actually be bringing light at 360 degrees. So we're getting a lot of lost erase going upwards. But it will give us a nice way to control other things. So as you can see, the shape looks interesting as well. Right now I'm going to set this to eat this. I think this one works really, really well and you can see how we get this very nice effect. I'm using this thing called an imager, which is a removing some of the noise. I'll explain this one in the next video when we talk about samples. But right now, this is what you would probably normally get. So those are like two or three of the principles that we have. We'd like to, we have a density and exposure which control how much light goes into the scene. We have the shape with the disc and the size of the light. We've already talked about that to get different kinds of shadows. And we also have a d temperature. Finally, I want to talk about this one because this is actually one that it took me a while to discover, if you wish, um, and it's called the spread. The spread is the way in which we are going to be, well, as the name implies, spreading the light throughout our scene. I'm gonna be doing a lot of like weird sketches as we, as we move forward here with the series. Imagine that we have this sort of like light. And this is the direction that it's pointing, right? Well, all of the light rays right now, they're going in like a 360 degree angle. Kind of like this. Like if you imagine like a fan. Like creating the elements or the race are being shot in every single direction. So if I were to place an object right here, I would see all of these areas being illuminated, which is a very physically accurate, That's how light works. It will just spread everywhere. However, you guys have seen in cinema and in films that we have something called a spotlight where we have this little like barn doors. Hopefully everyone has heard about those and if not, don't worry, googled got us covered. Barn door light. If you've ever gone to a theater to see a play, you probably have seen this little lights right here. And the barn doors are literal physical barriers that we use to direct the light to a specific point. We're not letting the photons go anywhere else, but the direction that we want to focus them on. And in the traditional Maya lights right here, if we go to rendering this, There's this a spotlight, spotlight. It actually has a couple of ways to control that. And I've always missed those when I was using other renderers because they use like other weird stuff. But actually the spread works exactly like what we would intend if I were to, let's stop this and save a copy in there. Remember this one is a snapshot. So we say one copy of the image. If we were to bring the spread really, really low, Let's try 0.2 and we render. What's going to happen is now we're going to get this spotlight effect. See how we were not seeing as much of the what's the word, as much of the back part of the clauses as we once were. The other thing that's going to happen, and this is very important, is that we're going to have more likely to see because we're focusing all of the energy, all of the exposure and all of the rays. We're focusing them on a smaller area. We're not letting that area spread as much. So if you want to have this sort of like very dramatic intense effect on one specific point. We're gonna be playing around with the spread of our light right here. Again, if we move this up, you can see the spread softens up. And if we move this down at the spread, becomes like a really, really, really intense, we can do some really crazy stuff like this one right here. Just keep in mind that since we're focusing all of the libraries here, we definitely need to bring the exposure down a little bit to compensate because otherwise we're going to burn the image quite heavily. So, yeah, that's the that's the other setup that I want to make sure you guys understand about the lights. We have, the color, we have exposure will have temperature, we have the shape, we have this breadth. And then this is very important. We have also the shadow densities and colors and divisibility. This is a concept that I want to make sure it's also very clear. I know we're running a little bit long on this video, but such important fundamentals, I wanted to keep them in the same one. We are not obligated as storytellers, as filmmakers, as artists. We're not obligated to always follow the physical rules of the world. We're not like there's no one with a gun pointing or head. Say if you don't follow the rules, I'll end you, right? That's not what's happening. So we're completely free to break the physicality or the reality of things in the benefit of the story or in benefit of the final render that we want to get. So for instance, if you say, Hey, I love this look, but the shadow on the Cloud is way, way too much I would love. The show was a little bit less intense, but I don't want to add any more lights. Just go to the shadow density and bring the shadow density down. And if this is what you like, if this is what you feel like it's going to help your scene, then that's fine. That's perfectly fine. It's it's completely valid. It's not physically accurate anymore because the shallow density at one, this is the physically accurate results we're getting. But this is going to look, okay. Okay. It's going to look the way that you're intending it to look same for the shadow color. If you say, Hey, I want blue shadows, go for it. Again, no one is stopping you from doing this. I want pink shadows. That's fine. Go for it. Maybe we're going to go for a dark pink color, like, let's say something like this. And maybe we do wonderful density. And then we go, we have this very nice interesting like pink shadow. Is that good for short? Is that good for a shock? If it is amazing, even though we're not doing physically correct things. So don't get don't get, don t think that we always need to follow physically correct things. There's a lot of cinematography tricks and things that they do in films and in shorts, where it's just for the benefit of the shed. You will never find that specific light setup on the world ever, but it just looks amazing, right? So feel free to experiment. Feel free to break a couple of things here and there and get amazing results. Finally, we have this thing right here, which is the visibility of the light itself. And we can change where we want this to be visible if we turn off the diffuse, what's going to happen is that this light is only going to be contributing to the specularity of the object, is going to only going to see the reflection of the object. We're only going to see the light on the reflections, not on the colors. So usually you want that it used to be all the way up. But here's where we can do a little bit of tweaking. Again, we're going against the traditional physically correct things. But you just say, Hey, you know what? I think I loved the light. But this peculiarity of the objects is a little bit too high and they don't want to go to each specific material. I just want to overall bring the specularity down. Just bring it down. Just bring it down. And as you can see, what's going to happen is we're going to have a more reduced a shininess on our objects. They're not going to shine as much. Again, this breaks the physical weight, the light work or the way the light works. But it makes, it might make it look a little bit better. Okay, so all of the settings that we just talked about guys here on the lights, that's just the very basic fundamentals of the lights that we need to understand. Now we're going to talk about the samples because as you can see here, our image is not clean at all. And that's another part of the technical things that we need to make sure we properly understand to get the best possible renders. So hang tight and I'll see you back onto the next one. Bye bye. 4. Samples: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with samples. And this is one of those things that a lot of people struggle with. It's one of the biggest enemies who, whoever is trying to render a scene, which is samples, we want to get the fastest rendered possible with the least amount of noise possible. And the way the samples work, if we go back to the level where it says right here, the way the sample works is as follows. Every time you shoot a render, the camera is going to shoot a race at the scene. The more race we should or the more times we analyze each ray, the more accurate the elements is going to be. However, as you might imagine, the more race, the more time it's going to take to analyze all of those rays and the longer the render is gonna be. So the, the samplings are pretty much all of the race each pixel competing against each other to, to find out who has the truest color to what we have on the scene. So if I hit render right now, you're going to see this little dance of the parent particles. And then we find this. And the reason it stops at almost a second in my case is because on my options right here, on the render options, I have my samples set to three. So we're going to shoot a three rays that are, those three rays are each going to analyze onetime, did it use the speculators mentioned the subsurface like all of the elements here on our materials. You can see up here that the camera has a AAA temples nine because I believe this number gets again exponentially multiply. So as you can see, the total samples are we going to get on our scene after everything is calculated is a 117 samples. Okay? So there's 117 like mathematical operations that we need to calculate. And since we're using GPU, which is more of a brute force way to do it. We only take like a 2.5th. However, one thing that you're going to notice is that even though GPU is really fast, is not as exact. So if we were to do CPU with the same amount of samples, you're going to see that again after a couple of seconds. It's going to take a little bit longer as you can see, instead of taking like literally 1 second, it's thinking the bottom fiber, or six seconds. We'll probably a little bit more than that, like 1015, maybe 20 seconds I'm recording. So since I'm recording, my processor is trying to do a lot of things at the same time. So 17 seconds, which is still not a long time. But you can see that at 17 seconds, our image is way, way, way cleaner than what we had right here with the GPU. I really like using GPU because it's fast. And one thing that we can do is we can calibrate the samples so that the GPU is faster and we get a better result. But this is the art of the sampling part of the topics are of this lesson. How we change the way samples work is gonna give us a better render time. It's going to allow us to get to that final image that we want. So let's start right here and let's go back to a GPU real quick. And let's say instead of three, we want like four times that 12th. So as you can see now, the amount of rice that we're gonna be shooting is 1872. Race, right? So if we do writer again, it's going to take a little bit longer. You can see the progress bar over here. It's going to take probably about 1015 seconds, 17 seconds, but the image is going to be cleaner as well. So yes, the renderer will take longer, but again, the image will be cleaner. Now, I want you to notice something very important. There's gonna be a point I'm going to hit Render again and pay close attention to the dance of the pixels because there's gonna be a point where the dancing of the pixels becomes less intense. At first it's going to be super sprint that there's gonna be a lot of noise, and then that noise gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner. Take a look. There we go. So super noisy, super noisy, super noisy, super nice isoprenoids and now barely noticeable, barely, barely noticeable, as you can see, it's not really changing that much. And he was still doing, I would say, the final 30% of the rendering. So what does that tell us? Well, for instance, the first thing is that you can see that I'm assuming at this amount right here and it's a really, really assuming picture. You'd never gonna be seeing this picture at this resolution. The normal resolution is this one. This is a one-to-one resolution. If I hit Render again, there's gonna be a point where I really don't see the difference on the image which is right there. So it's about 50 per cent, right? Let's try again. We'll take a look at the bar. So at about 50% of the bar, which is right here, I'm not really seeing that much of a change that to you guys is gonna be the signal. It's gonna be like the little flag that says, Hey, this is roughly where you wouldn't have the best possible outcome. And adding more samples is not really going to help you anymore. It's just going to add more time. Yes, it's going to clean the scene. But the amount of time that it takes compared to the amount of cleanliness you get is no longer valuable. Like it's too much time spent on to Little cleanliness on your image. Pixels are not gonna be as clean and it's a lot of time that we're wasting. So if I'd set this back to six, for instance, which is half of what we have and we render. Now, the render time is going to be half what we have. It's only two seconds, in this case, two or three seconds, and it's already really, really clean. So that's whenever you're trying to balance out what, how many samples should my scene half? That's one very good way to do it. Another very good way to do it. Let's go back to three samples. It's down here with this thing called adaptive sampling. So adaptive sampling is a way for you to give more room to the render. It's not as efficient as like manually dialing in the amount of samples, but it's going to give you a nice like ballpark approximation. So adaptive sampling pretty much says, Hey, I'm going to start sampling the scene until I reach either 20 cameras samples, or my noise threshold is at 0.015. So the variation between one pixel and another one is at 0.015. So you're not going to see that much variation. This is a little bit too high for my, for my liking. I mean, it's gonna give you a really, really clean result that you can see. It's taking way longer than we have. It's probably going to take about 2025, maybe 30 seconds. And as we mentioned before, there's a point where I'm really not seeing that much of a change anymore. This thing is still calculating and I'm not really seeing anything, right? So I'd like to bring my samples all the way down to something like ten or sometimes even like six, like what we had before. We will do this. It's still going to clean the image quite a bit right now, for instance, I still see quite noisy, so I think we can probably bring this up a little bit more, let's say ten. And again, this is another very easy and fast way to calculate what the best possible sample is. I think ten is like the golden ballpark for me right now, because as you can see, when I start rendering at ten, there comes a point, right about 80 per cent, where the intensity of the points doesn't change as much. And that tells me that that's a great place to stop our rendering, which is this one right here. So now that we have this, I'm going to introduce to you guys a really, really amazing concept that we have. You're actually very lucky to be living in an age where this is available when I started through the ten years ago, 11 years ago, this was not available. There was no way to clean your images after the fact, after you are rendered them. So you had to dial in really, really high numbers and just wished for the best. Nowadays we have this things called the noises. And if you go here to low of cogwheel, you go to post-production. You can add an image, or images are filters that we add on top of the elements. And as you can see, we have this, uh, de-noise your optics. So I'm just going to add the denoise or optics. And immediately what the denominator is going to do is, as the name implies, it will remove the noise. It will just literally get rid of the most. Take a look at the difference. This is with noise and this is without noise. So all of those little grainy things that we had there, they are now gone. They are completely gone and we have a super clean, super sharp image on our hands. How does this do it? I wouldn't be able to tell. It's some sort of AI sort of like analysis of the photograph and he finds out what kind of colors are the most common. And it's just like averages amount. So it's just one of those like computer magic things that we have here on the Arnold setup. One cool thing about this one is that you can actually blend. So if you want to keep a little bit of noise to give this like filmic effect. Because sometimes one of the issues that I have with the noise here is if your samples are really low, It's gonna be very grainy and it looks like just blurts, blurs everything out and just jewelers. A lot of form like right here, we're not really seeing the division and we get rid of it. Well, it's actually not there anymore, but sometimes like some specific areas, you're not going to see the exact thing that you want. So you can actually blend this thing. If you blend this down, you're gonna get back a little bit of the noise. And sometimes it helps get this sort of, again, this film grain effect where things look a little bit better. So this is the noise is super, super, super handy. Now, again, as I've mentioned, the denoise your works with the actual image. So if you have a really, really low sample image, let's say we just have two samples, super noisy. And we tried to turn onto the nicer, I mean, it's going to try its best to solve the issues, but you're gonna get some really, as you can see here, really blurry splotches here and there. And especially if you render out a sequence like an animation sequence, you're going to see like things, just like moving them and destroying and really, really weird waste. So the ideal way to work with the noise is first dial in the amount of sampling that you want. And after you've dial that in, you're going to be able to utilize that the nicer to give you that extra little step so that we don't have to double the amount of samples here or the threshold here. We can just use that the inertia to get those final step of the way. Again, we can add our brain back a little bit of noise if that's something that you like, I actually do like having like about like 0.6 blend on buying interests that we have a little bit of grain and makes it look very, very interesting. And yeah, that's pretty much it for the nicer. Now, if you're not working with GPU, if you're working with CPU, one thing that you can do is you can turn on, you can also turn on the adaptive sampling, by the way, but you can turn on this thing called progressive render. This is another way to render things. It's not as fast. Well actually, it should be relatively fast, but it will just give you a really hard version of your element first and then we'll clean up the image like, as you can see, it does like passes on the image and you can see how every time it goes through the same pixels, we get a different effect than a different effect on a different effect. As you can see, the CPU is definitely, definitely slower. Gpus are just made to do the mathematics. Mathematical computation is a lot faster, but we're going to see later on a couple of examples where CPU works a lot better than GPU because it's more precise. So GPU won't be as fast, but it will be way, way, way more precise. Okay, let's stop there. Let's go back here to GPU. And let's go to everything is good here. So as you can see, this moves really, really fast and we get this super amazing render. Now, another thing that we need to mention when talking about samples is of course, a D size of your image, your resolution. And there's a couple of resolutions that you guys need to be familiar with. I often used to just like a glaze over this because I thought everyone knew about this, but sometimes we all learn new information, right? So traditionally HD AS refer as to any sort of image that's above seven p. So if you have a 1280 by 720 pixels image, you're going to have your traditional HD. Full HD is this 1920 by 1080, which at the time of this recording, I would say it's about 70% of the work we do, like most of the times, we're gonna be doing a full HD video render. Why? Because for k, as you can see, it's four times as much as ten ADP. So it's render times are going to be four times as long and not everyone has it for k setup. Today. I imagine there. I would imagine that the next couple of years, computers, like everyone under computer is going to happen for k display, Everyone's going to have four KTB and all of the content that we do is gonna be like render at forget. A lot of the movies nowadays are done at for K. I believe you're doing that. You're probably gonna be working in the studio that has enough, like powerful enough computers to do all of this render. Because again, trying to render it for k image, and then we can do it, but she's going to take way, way longer. Now, the cool thing about rendering really big images is if we go back to our example here, the web through which all of the pixels are gonna go, it's gonna be bigger. So it's going to be easier for the sampling to be or for the noise to be less noticeable when you have a really small image, the variation between each pixel is gonna be really, really big. And therefore, the noise that you're gonna get, this also gonna be quite big due to the sampling nature of how rendering works. However, if we go here to come in and let's say we're going to render at full HD right here and we render, this is going to take at least four times as long as what we had before. Because it's it's I think four times more. But again, the noise is gonna be so much smaller because the pixels are smaller compared to what we had before. Okay, You can see this image right now it's taking, I would say about 2025 seconds is going to take. We also might be able to lower the samples a little bit because since we have more pixels, they're not gonna be as impactful. It took 21 seconds while this one look like ten seconds for something. So 21 seconds. And you can see this looks really, really good. Again, no one's ever going to be analyzing your image at 8000% zoom, you're gonna see your image at the normal resolution, which is this one-to-one. And this is where you want that your noise to be as little as possible. Okay? Now, if we were to go for k, Let's save this as a point of reference. So I'm going to keep the width height ratio in for k is, I believe we change this to 2996. There we go. So this is for k. And as you can see, it's definitely taking way, way, way longer. But again, the size of the pixels is gonna be so, so small, like look at this, we have to go 800 per cent to start seeing the pixels. We can even go like more and more and no one again, it's going to analyze her pixels at that distance. And look at this. We get a super, super, super sharp image and we still haven't hit the noise part like once we move through this percentage are tremendous progress that the noise is going to kick in and all of these things are going to be gone. We can actually push this up and you can see it already working. There we go. That's the noise you're kicking in. So at this point we can definitely stop it. I don't know how long it took, but as you can see, it's super, super, super clean. And this is a four-page image. So if you wanted to print this and do like a billboard or something, this is like the size that you're gonna be working on. I always hate when my clients asked me to do for K renders because I know that you're going to take quite a bit of time. It's not something that I look forward to because right now I only have one computer. But one of the things that you can do is this. There's these things called render farms where you can upload this sort of things and render them on the Cloud and then you just get the images back. If you ever face Forky rendering, I would advice. I would probably suggest that you consider render farms and include the cost of the render front on the code that you're going to keep your client because they're usually a little bit expensive. So let's go back to our one K HD 1080, and let's render again just to get an image. And the other thing I want to talk about is, how are we gonna be doing tests, right? Because one of the worst things that you could do is if you're planning a scene or if you're blocking in the scene cinematography department, you don't want you don't want to wait an hour, 30 minutes, 20 minutes, ten minutes even to see how the image is gonna look, you'll want to see the changes as fast as possible to be able to iterate and create variations and find the perfect solution before you find the final render, right? So here's the best advice I can give you in regards to that. Tried to find the perfect sample setup. In this case, this is the one I know that my full frame image is going to take 20 seconds to render. And once you know your full-time and you're full-frame, you can go back to BYU, test resolution and bring this down as low as you can possibly work with. So for instance, in this case, I think a 10% is just fine. And if I do ten per cent, it's only taking a second. It's just a second and we already have the render. And with this random, I already know how things are going to look because I know that if I let this run at full resolution and that food samples, I'm going to get the final result in a very nice way. However, if I want to change the light, like maybe I say, Hey, you know what? Let me make this thing smaller. If I'm like, You know, what would happen if the light is not here, but rather like over here. As you can see, that the render changes very fast and I don't have to wait. I can very quickly. I trade and play around, show my art director, show my client. I like, Hey, I have this like sort of like solutions like just the small little thumbnails, right? Like it's just a it's just a previous realization of how things are going to work. Because I know that any point I can just bring this up and I'll have the final render ready to go. So whenever you're working with vendors and this is something that we're gonna be doing, we're going to be doing, or we're gonna be working at lower resolutions. And once we're happy with the results, will start increasing them and tweaking more and more and more until we've had the final resolution. That way we're going to save time and we're gonna be able to visualize how are things look before we're doing the full renders. Never ever do a full render when you're just trying things out because it's just a lot of times you're wasting and it's definitely not worth it. So yeah, that's pretty much it for now, guys. I'm going to stop the video right here and we're now going to jump onto, I'm going to show you one more type of light that's super, super important, so, well another, just want, we're going to explore the types of lights that we have here inside of Arnold. And you guys have all of the available tools. And then we're going to do the final exercise for this football. So yeah, hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 5. Light Fundamentals: Hi guys. Welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about the light fundamentals, the different lights that we have here inside of Arnold. Because yes, we have already explored samples and we know how to modify this particular light, which is one of the main building blocks of the rendering department. But there's a couple of other lights that are super, super, super important. We have air light. If we go here to our null, we can bring this menu back. I'm light-skinned, can actually bring this menu right here. We've got these six different lights and they all serve different purposes. I'm going to go through them real quick and I'm going to show you how we can utilize this to make our scenes even better. So the airlines we've already explored, we've already talked about this one and we already know how it works is just our traditional light. It's a panel, it has a shape. It can be a circle, a cylinder, or a square. Actually, I don't think you guys saw the cylinder. Let me show you real quick. There we go. So this is why I mentioned that there's one emits light in a 360-degree area outwards. So it's gonna be like emanating light industrial like cylindrical shape. And again we have the quad and we have the cylinder. Sorry, what cylinder and disc? Those are just the ones that we have. Now, one thing that I didn't mention about the light is that sometimes we're going to have specific lights that are becoming a little bit difficult for the render to properly evaluate. This is not the case right now because it's a very simple light, but we can actually increase the samples, samples of the specific light. If you're using like a really small light or a really big light and you see a lot of noise that it's coming from the light. One thing that you can change this, this thing right here, the samples just increase them and that will give more time to solve or try to solve that light and give you a better result. Now we need to talk about the sky dome light. And oh my God, is this a double-sided sort? So the sky dome light comes from a type of rendering technique that's called image-based lighting. Image base line. There we go. So this is a technique that was developed several years ago. I believe it was when we first started seeing a lot of CGI being introduced into the cinema or into film. We started seeing this sort of technique. And the way this works is as follows. You as the director of photography or someone in your team will go to the location where you're gonna be introducing a CGI elements such as like this forest right here. And you will capture using a 360-degree camera or a traditional camera and just taking a lot of picture and then stitching them together. You're going to capture this image called an HDR, high dynamic range image. And I need to explain to you what this is because again, this is one of those things that a lot of people use in an old people like know about, but they don't really understand how they work, right? So an HDR image is a high dynamic range image that's thinking at different levels of exposure. So if we look for exposure levels, we go back to the way cameras work. For camera. There we go. The way this works is when you open the shutter of your camera, you are letting light into the lens. The more light you let in, the more information you're gonna get, but also the more washed out several things are going to look. So there's times, especially when you're, for instance, in a low-level, low light type of scenario, you want the shutter to be open for longer so that you can capture more stuff. But there's gonna be other times where there's a lot of light on the scenario or under or on the environment. And you want the shutter to be open only a fraction of the time because you don't want the image to be overexposed. So this is what happened. This is a very good exercise, are example of how the same environment looks at different exposure times. Okay? This is actually using another thing. It's using the aperture to expose things and at the time. But we can, we'll explain this sort of things later on. So when you have a low exposure, you're not going to see as much. And we have a high exposure, you're going to look or see a lot of things. But again, certain times for certain scenarios you might want different kinds of elements. So the way the, the HDRI is words, the high dynamic range images work is the photographer will take pictures, 360-degree pictures at different exposures. And then they will combine those exposures into a single image so that they can have a really bright lights and really dark shadows. So you get the best of both worlds. This images are images that you can normally see on your display. You have a professional display. So most of the images we see here, the monitor that I'm using right now, it crunches all of those values into 0 to one values, but the information is there. And there's this site called poly haven, super famous site. We use it all the time. And this share with us a lot of free images of different setups in their setups, outdoor set of studio setups, just like general environment setup. So for instance, let's download this one. I really like this brown folders to do because it's a very neutral, nice effect for our scene. We're just going to download this. And as you can see, the type of image that we get this, this EX, our image which is a 32-bit float image, meaning that there hasn't, there's a lot of information here. I'm going to show you very easily how this works. So if I go to my brush right here and go to the colors, Let's go to the brush here. And I sample this color right here. And I take a look at the color sample, you're going to see that this is an eight bit image. If it says right here RGB eight. The colors go from 0 to 256, which is the maximum RGB icon that you can get. So for instance, in this case a white that's 250, right around 5255 on the three chances and RG and B. This is again, 99% of the images that you're gonna be working with are going to be in a traditional 8-bit sample size or a bit size. And that's where we're going to have. But the EX Rs, the images right here are going to look a little bit different to our eyes. This looks perfectly normal, right? Like I can see this in okay, this is perfect widen, this is perfect, dark for instance, or black. But if I were to sample this one right here, and if I go to the color swatch, you're going to see that the color swatch is actually different because it's telling me, Hey, this white that you see here. It's a white with a value of 2.2.62.6 on the RGB scale. And if I sample this one, this is a one-point, whatever they say, 2.5, like this other way that I see here, this is 1.7. There's one that they see right here, that's a 4.8. So that means that this one right here is wider. It's more, it's brighter than the one that we see right here. This image has information about how light is behaving inside of this environment. And all of this information can be, can be inputted here on instead of myelin, we can use that information by using this sky dome light. So I'm going to turn on the sky dome light. I'm going to create the sky dome light rather. I'm gonna go to the airline. I'm going to turn it off for now so we can see the difference. And on the sky dome light on the color options, we need to input an image. So to do this, one of the things that you're gonna do is you're going to grab the image that you are using. Let me just very quickly. You're going to navigate to your project and injured project. Anytime you're gonna be using an image from the outside world, you're going to have it on the source images. So I'm going to have it right here. Okay, so if I hit color and I hit File, I'm going to be directly brought to the source images folder, which again is that the root folder that mine is going to look for whenever we want to use an image. I'm just going to say open. There we go. So now as you can see, we get this very nice display of the image here, inside of, inside of Maya. One of the cool things about this HDRI is that we can actually move it around and we can position it to the light source, for instance, is coming from the, from the left, like this. So now if we go to our render element, I'm going to increase the the test render a little bit more. Let's go to like a 100% of the time. And when we render what's going to happen is we are going to be using the information from that image to bring light into the scene. And oh my god, does this look like realistic? This is why I mentioned that this is one of those double-edged sword. Because once I teach you guys how to use HDRI, no one ever wants to go back. There was like, Why am I gonna, Why am I supposed to use other lights when the HDR does this amazing job, like just look at the difference, Right? Like just look at how nice this render looks compared to this one right here. I mean, this doesn't look bad, right? But this one looks so much realistic. The reflections, the way light bounces on top of the elements, the way the soft shadows that we get. And yes, HDR eyes are really, really, really powerful. But if you only have your words illuminated by H2RAs, you're not gonna be able to bring that full cinematic potential to your scenes. If you're just going to be like an architect and you just wanna do clean renders, throwing an HDR, throwing clean materials like what I have right here. And you're good to go. You don't have to do anything else. But if you really want to bring this to the next level, then you definitely need to play around with how HDR work. Now, there's a couple of things that we need to take into account with HDR or HDRI is that it has several properties. First of all, we do have exposure. This is really important. A lot of people don't know about this, but they do have exposure. So if you, if you use this HDRI, like I love this one, but it's a little bit too bright. Maybe I want it to be a little bit less intense. Just go to the exposure and bring this down to something like minus two. You might be wondering why minus two y negative. Can we go negative intensity for instance? And the answer is no because this is linear. But since this is exponential, when we go negative two and we multiply, some math happens and it becomes a positive number, so it works. Okay, So if we do this now, what you're going to see is we're reducing the intensity of the HDRI without really killing it. And you can go really, really low like minus eight for instance. And you're still going to see something, especially if we increase the exposure over here. It's their information is being rendered. Even though the, the exposure is really, really low. This is a really good way to control the intensity of an HDR. For instance, this just a minus one. And this looks already a little bit more interesting, right? Like not as bright as well. We have a little bit more contrast on the shadows. Temperature does not work. I've tried this before, even if we go like really low and temperature is not really going to change. Why? Because the color that we're using overwrites the temperature. So we will need to get rid of the color and therefore all of the information that we have. And that's not what we want, right? So I'll color temperature one work on your HDR eyes. It will just use the color that we have right here. The resolution that we have right here, that's the resolution of the HDRI since we're not going to be using the HDRI as back plates like they're not going to be the background that we're gonna be seeing when we see them. You really don't need to worry about this one, but if you want to increase it, it will definitely increase a little bit. So if you see the reflections or something and look a little bit like a little bit wonky. You might be able to increase the resolution there. We can, we can turn off cast shadows if we want to. We can turn or change the shadow color, same as well with lights, we also have samples. If you see that the image is a little bit too noisy, you can increase the samples and I can see it right here on the preview. If we turn off the noise here, you can see that one of the disadvantages of the what's the word of the HRIS is that they do tend to be a little bit noisy. So if you find your image too noisy, you can play around with the samples, increase them a little bit, and that should give you a nice result as well. Let's turn this back on. There we go. Now, as we mentioned, as with the other lights, we can turn off where or whether we see or not this thing. It's like if I if I assume this out, let me go to the camera panels, look through selected and let's say we want to do a composition later on in Photoshop. If I bring this out, you're going to see that we are actually seeing the image on the back there. And maybe we don't want this image. We want another photograph that we took, or we want another, another image or whatever. Well, you can select the image right here and on the camera visibility, we can set this to 0. That way the image is still going to work. It's still going to do exactly what we did, but we're not going to see it on the alpha channel right here. So if we turn this on, which is the alpha channel, you're going to see that it knows that this is an empty area. So we can overlay this or overlap this on another image later on and will be perfectly fine. So usually, usually I always turn off my camera visibility because I don't want to see my HDRI on the images. Now, unfortunately, we're one of the bad sides about the, it's your eyes is if you wanted to, let's say take a picture on your house and have an object to be there like a 3D object, you would need to get a 360 HDRI folder of that specific area to get the most exact and the best possible reflections. However, if you can't do that or if it's a little bit too, if it's too difficult, as long as you get an HDR that matches or is as close as possible to the environment that you want to match and you don't have perfect reflections, you should be able to get away with it. However, again, the best workflow that you can do if you want to match an object is to make sure to capture the actual environment where the object is going to be. That's what photography directors and technical people doing movies like. Let's say they're recording the Avengers in Times Square, right? So someone's gonna go to Time Square and he's going to take the pictures that he needs to make sure that the whole chord, the Iron Man armor or anything looks exactly as if it was there at the time of the shooting and it's just part of the process. Now, one more thing. Sometimes people find the image planes here in my annoying, like having the image there could be a little bit distracting. So it doesn't really matter, but you can change the scale all the way down to 0. So you can scale the image all the way down. Even though we don't see it anymore on the scale, it's still gonna be there. Okay? So it's still going to be affecting the object exactly the same right now I think what I changed was the rotation of the object. Today. Yeah, let's bring this rotation back to 0. For instance. There we go, kiss. Really sure the skill shouldn't matter. Let's try one. Yeah, there we go. So scale of one. And we have this working perfectly fine. And then we do a scale at 0.1 for instance, like super small. And it really, it doesn't change anything, it shouldn't change anything. It should be the exact same thing. So one thing you can do this is a little bit of what's the word they. I'm a Reagan trick. I'm going to create a locator. I'm gonna go Create Locator. And I'm going to bring this locator up, scale it up so that we can see it. And I'm going to parent this to the locator. So now if I rotate the locater, I it's, it's pretty much as if I'm rotating the HDRI. So you're going to see how this changes on the scene right here. And that way I can just modify this one instead of modifying the image. And that way it's not distracting and I can focus on the lights. Oh, of course, if you want to keep the object there, you're welcome to do so. Just Shift P to bring it out. Let's leave this locator. Let's grab the sky dome light, bring the scale back to one. And I think what I changed was the exposure. Yet Let's go back to a normal exposure. 0 panels which are selective. And let's rotate this a little bit. Well, that's the Hypershade. And let's render. There we go. So now the light is straight up at the front end. That's why we're saying it's so much illumination. And yeah, that's, that's that's the, that's the HDRI. So the sky dome light, that's one of the important ones. Photometric lights, we're going to talk about this one later. These are more like architectural lights. We can use something called an IES profile to get specific light ships. Not really necessary right now, but mesh lights I do want to talk about because those are interesting. Let's filtering this exposure a little bit down. I'm going to say like minus three. And every now and then, we're gonna have objects that emit the light, right? So if you have a light bulb and you have the little, the little springy thing on the inside that's incandescent and it's glowing. You're going to have something that's going to be emitting light. And there's two ways to emit light. You can emit light through something called an emissive, a channel. So for instance, here's a sphere. We're going to use two of them so you can see the difference. So we can grab this fear and say, hey, I'm gonna give you a new material, Arnold AI standard surface. And on the admission options. I'm going to tell you that I want you to emit, let's say blue light like this. So what's going to happen now is when we render, we are going to have a light that's emitting light information into the scene. And you can see how it's illuminating different parts of the elements. Thanks to the noisier, we're actually getting rid of a lot of noise because emission is very, very noisy if I get rid of this. And then we render again, you can see how there's a lot of samples everywhere. And then as it gets cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, we get rid of those samples, but emission tends to be really, really noisy. One of the bad things about the mission or cool things, but the same kind of like a double-edge sword again, is that we can actually increase the multiplier here. So if we multiply it by five, what's going to happen now is we're going to be emitting a lot of light, but it's gonna be a lot noisier and opposite to what we had with the lights. There's no universal sample for the material that we can change the way this material is being sampled. So it just like it just follows whatever sample we have on our scene. So we would need to really increase the samples to clean all this up, or we wouldn't have to use a de-noised. But here's where things can get a little bit splotchy, right? So let's bring this back to a white one. And what I'm gonna do instead is I'm gonna grab this guy right here. I'm going to say Arnold lights and I'm going to say Mesh light. What this will do is it will eliminate the geometry, will hide it, and it will assign this light to the object dislike P sphere two. Now, this behaves as a normal white. So for instance, we can select the color, the exact same color and say, Hey, we want the exposure of ten. And this is going to work as a light bulb that's emitting light with a specific intensity. One thing that we definitely need to do though, is we need to update the scene. One thing I haven't done this, I haven't saved, so this might crash, which will be quite unfortunate. Let me pause real quick. Okay, fortunately it didn't crash, so I'm going to save this save Scene As I can't call this fruit finished so that you have the fruits start ready to go. And one thing we introduce, we have to go here, render and say Update, foreseen the updates, anything that we've added. So any new life that you add, any new geometry, the renderer needs to know that we're adding it and look at this. So this one is actually emitting light as if it was a light source. And we can control, Of course, the intensity right now things a little bit too intense. Let's go five, and let's render now. So it's a little bit closer to what we have with the emission one, but it works better. Okay? So whenever you have an object that's going to be emitting light, if you can avoid using a miss it and you can use traditional lights, then that's fine. You won't always be able to do this. Think about a robot that has like little lights all over the place like decals and stuff, like stickers and things like that, then yeah, it will work just fine. But if it's like a light bulb or a lamp, or a flashlight or something. And you want the actual geometry to be emitting light, you definitely want to use a mesh light. They are expensive though. You can see that this one is taking thirty-seconds opposite to the ten seconds that it took the Without this type of flights. But it looks really nice as you can see here. And of course ignore helping us get this very nice effect. If you want the source to be visible, you need to turn this thing in light visible. And then we're going to have a bistable source. The source we'll never have shadows is seen important physics concept. A light source by default are by definition, cannot have shadows. So if you have a character and you want the character to be glowing, You're not going to see the forms of the character. You're just going to see a silhouette, right? Because everything is submitting a light and therefore it's not receiving shadow, it's casting shadows. So yeah, those are the two types of light right there. Then we have this light portal and the physical sky. The light portal is a tool that we're gonna be using later on when we work with interiors. And it's a way to filter light from any, from HDR for my sky dome light into a closest space. Because as you can imagine, you can. Let's go to my really ugly drawings right here. So if we have the HDR, then we have a closed room right here, which is like a window. There's a lot of rays being shot from 360 degrees, right? But only a very small amounts are actually going into the window, only the ones that will be like, let's say here, right? So by using that one, we place that under Window any kind of like helps all of the rays get in there and help illuminate the inside of the element. Again, we're not going to really use it right now because we're in an open scene. But it's important to know. And finally, the physical sky. That's one of those things that I don't really use. Like I can't even remember the last time where I use this one right here. But the physical sky is a procedurally generated the sky that the works with elevation, time of the day, stuff like that. It's, it's literally NHGRI, but it's made with programming like with computer elements. The only reason why I know this one is it's important, is due to the fact that maybe you want to do a render and you have the specific time of the day and specific elevation and everything on the sun. Let's imagine that you want to do a render of how a specific tree looked on your birthday, right? Well, you can grab your bird, that information, go online and find where the sun was in a specific location. And you can input all that information here and you're gonna get a super, super precise representation of how the song was positioned on that specific day. You won't get the weather though. So if it was raining and you're not gonna get that here, but you're gonna be able to get something really, really close. The only thing I don't like about this render it that it looks really, really renewed CG. So it's not going to give you a very realistic look. It looks very computer-generated. If you're ever wanna do like an algebra. And we're of course going to talk about outdoors rendering. We're gonna go to a polyhedron and the easiest way is just browse to the outer section and just find something that matches as closely as possible to what you want to get. A cloudy days is like a sunset. Like there's a lot of ones right here. And usually, usually you're going to find something that works with the type of project that you have in mind. So yeah, that's that's pretty much it guys. That's it for all of the light information, all of the rendering information. We're just missing the camera information. That's the final one that we're gonna do. And then we're going to jump onto the actual rendering of the cinematic render of this specific football. So hang on tight, and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 6. Camera Fundamentals: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with camera fundamentals. And this is the final part before we jump onto the actual creation of the cinematic shot for this fruit bowl. And yeah, it's just, there's actually just one thing that I want to talk about. Let me delete those guys right there real quick. Let's jump onto a camera. Panels, loops are selected. This is of course, our camera. And again, there's two important things that we need to understand about cameras. Cameras, or the way in which the audience is going to see the world. So we as directors, we as the artists, we decide what the audience is going to be able to see. Do we want them to see a really far shore? They really close show? We're going to talk about composition in the next chapter. But it will give us a lot of different ways to communicate whatever is on our Scene. As for the camera itself, one of the most important things that we have to take into consideration is something called the forgotten. What's on the top of my tongue, tip of my tongue. It's the lense. But that's not the lens focal length. There we go. Focal length. Sorry about that. There we go. So forgoing, this is a concept that everyone has on their minds. Like we understand what focal length does, but we sometimes don't know all the technicalities of it. So in traditional cameras, we have of course, the lenses. And the lenses will focus all of the points of the immaterial or all of the light in the image into a specific point, which is this one right here. And then from that specific point, the image is going to be flipped onto the sensor. And then the sensor of course, is going to flip it again so that we can see the image right? Like it's very similar to how our eyes work. Now, the distance between the point where everything is focused and the sensor itself is called the focal length. The bigger the lens, the bigger the distance and therefore, the bigger the focal length. And how does this changes the way that we like, the way that the camera is going to work. Well. We generally have three types of lenses. We call them the wide lenses, the photo lenses, and I'm just going to call them the traditional lenses. So our eyes work in the traditional lens sort of distance. And you can measure this distance by using millimeters. This one right here, focal length, as you can see right now it's set to 35. So if you go from 35, I would say to something like 70 were working in something that's like a very normal traditional perspective. So for instance, if I go to 55, important thing here is we're not moving the camera. The camera is still in the same place, the same location in the world. But the way that the image is going to look, it's gonna be a little bit different. Look at this. It kinda looks like we went further in, right? Like if we assumed in, but we didn't. The only thing that changed was the focal length. And the more we increase the focal length, if we go to 80, it's going to look like we're focusing or zooming in even more. But again, the camera is not moving. We're just changing the way we're receiving all of this information. The other way around. If we go lower than something like a 24, the camera is going to expand and we're gonna see more of the scene. We're gonna be farther away. Technically. We're not moving again. It's going to look like we're farther away and we can go all the way down to something like 14. It's gonna be really, really distorted because we're going to get a very nice, I like fish islands effect where things on the borders are really distorted and the image here is gonna be really, really small. So that's, that's pretty much the way the focal length worse. We're going to show you a couple of examples real quick. But if we were here on this row and we start taking different pictures, you can see that depending on the kind of focal length that we're using, we're gonna be able to focus different partial foreseen. The higher the focal length, the more specific we're gonna go. I loved using this image right here. So as you can see, we're in the middle of a field and we're not moving places were in the same place. The only thing we're changing is the type of lens that we're using. So when we assume in per se, what we're changing is changing the distance of the focal length. And now we're focusing something that's farther away, but we're not seeing as much of the picture. And then we go with a really low vocal and we're gonna see more of the scene, but with less specific points right? Now, as we move forward in this series, we're gonna be using different kinds of focal lenses. But for this one right now, one of the ones that it's going to work really, really well is a 55 focal length. The 55 focal length is one that I like to use a lot for portraits. And it's a really, I would say flat effect. It's not gonna be super, super flats and I'd like an orthographic front of you or anything, but it's gonna be quite, quite flat. So let's move the camera a little bit. Just wrote it and give it a nice composition, something like this. I want to have a little bit of space up here. And now if we take a render, what we're going to see is this right here. So we have an interesting composition. We have our main focus, which is of course, the fruit bowl. Let's turn on the light. Now we're going to be combining lights. So I'm gonna go back here to the intensity. We turn this on. What's happening now is we're combining the HDRI of light that we have, which is giving us this very nice reflections on the fruit. And we're combining the artificial or like CG light that we added on top to get this very nice effect. Now, I'm going to save this image real quick. Let's stop and say that's a 55 lines. Now, again, I'm not going to move where my camera is. I'm just going to change the focal length. Let's go really low to an 18. We render. Now what's going to happen is it's going to look like we're seeing more of the scene. But we're not really focusing that fruit bowl, right? It looks like a kind of looks like an establishing shot where, where the movie starting or something and we're gonna be pushing in or zooming in. And then we're gonna be of course, looking at the fruits, but there's a lot of space and compositionally wise, it might not work because it's very empty on the outside. And the other way around, if we go for something like a 90, which is really, really close in regards to the focal length, we're gonna be super close up. And as you can see, the shot looks like it's very, very cluttered, right? Like like a little bit claustrophobic where we can't really breathe and we can't really appreciate everything because things are just flowing everywhere. So that's the kinda stuff that we need to be very careful about. And then when we need to check one that whenever we're doing our compositions and preparing our shots, because depending on what type of lens we use, we're gonna be able to obtain different results. In movies. What often happens is Directors will animate this. So we could, for instance, they would animate right there would record and be changing it. That's a go. But we can start, for instance, with a really low focal length, like an 18. I'm going to right-click and set a keyframe. And then in a 100 or 200 frames, we're going to go all the way to 55, right? So what's going to happen now is that we're going to have this sort of like push in. Again. We're not moving the camera. We're not moving the camera towards the center of the image. We're just changing the focal length. And we're gonna get this illusion of how the perspective is changing. And now we're focusing in the fruit bowl without having to, again to move. So we're going to talk about camera movement swell in the next couple of chapters. But it's very important that you understand that depending on which focal length you use, you are gonna be getting a different result. There's a couple of other things I want to talk about here, but I think I'm going to wait until Chapter two down here on the camera shape, There's this Arnold tab where we can actually modify the camera to make it work a little bit more like a traditional camera. Shutter speed, focus, this That's aperture size, aperture blades and stuff like that. Again, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not go into that right now because it's a little bit more complex and the scene doesn't really work with what I wanted to teach you. But we're gonna be using this node right here. So on the shape note though the camera, just remember that we have this Arnold option. We're, we're gonna be able to change things around. One very important thing, this is super, super important and you never, ever, ever want to scale the camera. You should always keep the scale of the cameras set to one. If we're working with a really big scene and the camera is really, really small. What you're gonna do is you're gonna go to object display and the loci or scale, you can change this one. I've got like a ten. So now the camera is going to be bigger. It's going to be a little bit easier to select, but we're not scaling the camera. You should not scale the camera because that will modify the way the focal length and all of the other things work. And that's gonna give you a really, really weird resolved on the final renders. So I'm going to save real quick, and that's it. We're ready to jump on to the actual cinematography of this shot. We're gonna be looking at some reference and we're gonna be using that reference to create a very, very cool shots. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 7. Cinematic Light: Hi guys. Welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're gonna be talking about the cinematic like the topic that everyone has been waiting to hear. But now that we've probably, we've covered most of the technical stuff, we can now focus on the study of what makes a shot cinematic, right? So I'm looking here at some reference to the fruit bowl paintings. And the, whenever an artist's painting fruit bowl, It's one of those things that pretty much everyone has done at some point, if they've done any drawing or painting, it's a very common exercise. They will change the way they interpreted that fruit bowl, right? Like sometimes it will be really well lit, sometimes has very, it's going to have very harsh surfaces. He changes every, every once in a while, right? So we need to understand before we jump into this cinematic topic, I don't want to take a brief moment to give you a super quick like art history lesson about how humans have developed a way of utilizing light in the art or art to make more believable stuff, right? So if we go back to Egypt, Egypt page, you're going to see that in Egyptian paints and there was no light. It was just a line art and color. That's all there was to it. And the artists back there, they probably knew about shadows and lights and stuff. But it was not something that was used because it was not something that they required on the paintings that they had. As they move on, for instance, in a Greek painting. We started seeing a little bit of that and we started seeing a little bit, well, not this one, like old paintings, so line-drawing, but then the Renaissance or just started playing around with lights. But most of the times the lights that we saw on the Renaissance were really like soft the global lights. And even though they gave me a very nice look to it, they're not as harsh or as a contrast. Yes, I like them to be. But then came Michelangelo. Michelangelo, he was a great guy at painting and he started using a little bit more contrast. You can see that on the 16th chapel, you can see that on this one right here. Ben was the birth of Bento story. He started using something a little bit more interesting. There was still no specific light source as well. We're taught nowadays that you need to have specific light source and move it around that came onto a guy by the name Carlos. Who was it? I always forget his name. Who was though was the name of this guy? This guy? I always forget his name. Rembrandt. Rembrandt, There we go. So Rembrandt developed a technique that was really interesting and I'm actually a huge follower of his stuff. I really liked the way he portrays things which is called the Colorado School in Italian, it was chiaroscuro or something like that. And the Claros kudo technique tells us that there's gonna be a specific point of light, usually like a light bulb. That's the trick if you ever see a guy being illuminated by an old like candle, It's usually, It's usually Rembrandt who did this. And he developed this technique where you had this very cool looking effect and a very nice like soft shadow going around the character. I personally really like this one and we're gonna go for this specific effect using this of like this painting as an example. So we are going to be developing a sort of like cinematic look for our fruit bowl using this chiaroscuro effect. I'm gonna go here to the, to the Maya. And the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to delete this slide. I'm just going to remain with this global light right here. As we can see here on the Claros Kourou, the effect that we want. It's a very dark and contrasty effect. So that tells me that my specific shot. Then I'm going to bring the shot a little bit lower. Something like this. Kinda want to have this composition where the food bolus down here and we're going to have the light coming from the side. So based on that, I'm going to grab my HDRI and I'm going to rotate it so that the window is mostly on that side. Okay, now we go here. Here's a nice little trick. We can say panels looked are selected and I can say panels pure off copy. And now we can have a little window here. If you have a second monitor, this is really helpful. I'm just going to have this one on the, on the site. Now I can just write here. So if we write R Now, this is what we get. And again, we want to find a balance right now we're only using one light source. And this is the first big lesson that I want to teach you about cinematic lighting. Whenever you're doing cinematic lights, you should always do one light at a time, like play around with one light at a time. And this one already looks quite nice. Like I really liked this very nice soft effect that we're doing. But I think we can go even lower. So I'm gonna go minus four. There we go. So I really don't want this much light to be coming from a domain specific light. The key light that we're about to add to be doing that specific function. So this right here, I'm going to change the name. I'm gonna call this a Global Light. I know that this is globally affecting everything. Now it's time to add our light and I'm going to say Arnold lights. And we're going to add an area light. And here's where we need to start making decisions. Lightning and cinematic language is all about having or making decisions. Is this gonna be a candle, is just gonna be a lamp? Is this gonna be a window? Is this gonna be a spotlight? Like what kind of light or do we want? I think this is, I want this to be a window. So I'm gonna make this window a little bit bigger. And I'm going to position it where I would expect the window to be in the real-world, which is like roughly right around here. If I were to render now, nothing's going to happen of course, because there's not enough light coming from that a square. So I need to bring the exposure up. Let's go ten, and let's render. There we go. We start getting something. There's, there's some light coming in. But if we take a look at the image that we have right here, I can definitely see that this is a lot more harsh, a lot more contrasty than what we had, right? Well, let's bring this a little bit higher. Let's try a 15. A little bit too much. This already burning some of my image. Let's go down to 13. And this looks way, way better. We got this very nice harsh light coming from the window, which really matches this light that we have right here. Cool. So one of the things that they see here on the image on our reference is the fact that the temperature of the images are warm. So one thing that we can do is turn on the color and bring the light into the warmer tones. So something like this. There we go. That's already going to give me something a little bit more interesting. I think I wanna go like quite warm, so let's try forty four, forty five, forty five hundred. There we go. Now, if we really want to copy this one, we need to really study what we are seeing, okay, this is one of those things that a lot of people will just gloss over and they don't really analyze what's going on here. So I can see that there's this very harsh shadow here and here, right? So this tells me that there's probably more than one light source on this particular image, meaning there's probably like one window coming on this side. You can see that shadow here as well. And then there's like another light that's giving me a little bit of an extra punch on this specific part of the picture. So that's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna use this first slide as the window. And we already know what to do when we want a shape to be a little bit harsher, right? We can bring the spread down. So by bringing the spread down and rendering like really, really down, we should be able to start getting this sort of like a nice harsh line over here. Now I am going to move the window a little bit. I'm going to move it up and rotate it down. I know this is no longer like a like a window. I'm going to start rotating it down. So we get the shape that we're going for. Something like this. I just want to like the back part of the, of the fruits to be illuminated. There we go, something like that. I'm actually going to push this slide a little bit closer in something like that, even this little line right there, I'm not bothered by it, but see how nice this looks now, right? It looks like this very dramatic and very intense light setup. And we haven't done anything weird like that. That's the beauty about cinematic like that. It's not the fact that there's no secrets. We're still using one light and one global light. There's no more lights is just how we approach each specific scene and what's the story that we want to tell? So I'm going to stop this one right here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this one because as we see on the scene, on this one that we're using as reference, fruits here on the front do receive a little bit more of a punch on this view right here. So by duplicating this boat, there are these two lights now have the exact same amount of light. It's way, way too much. So this second light that I'm using here, I'm going to bring the exposure quite a bit down. If your computer can handle it, you can keep this thing on so that we can illuminate the shapes without having to get rid of them. Here's the other thing. Like at any point I can make this smaller. For instance, remember that the light is going to be a little bit more intense. So we definitely need to bring this thing down and maybe even rotate this around and move it so that we only have this very nice little light hitting specific parts of the fruit, right? I would just want this parts of the fruit we hit right there. A little bit more spread. Now we can bring this guy up. I rotate it down so we start seeing that specific shadow right there. There we go. And look at that. So it would've been impossible to get this specific shot and this is specific illumination with only one light. And that's one of the things that not a lot of people know about. When you go into a movie set. Amount of light, spotlights, bounce lights and things that they have is just ridiculous. It's like you would definitely be surprised by the amount of things that they use to create this sort of thing. So, so don't worry about using more than one light to get specific results. For instance, one other thing that I'm seeing right here is the fact that the shadows, they are really harsh like we have this very dark shadows, but we still have like see this light colors over here. So it kind of looks to me like there's another light coming on the top here. So I'm going to stop this one real quick. Control D. I'm going to move this guy, probably push it. Further up and make it a little bit bigger. And this just think, just gonna give me, as you can see, a little bit of extra light here on this area. I also would like to have a little bit of light on this area as well. So I'm probably going to bring this intensity down to four. Let's duplicate this one. I'm really going to get closer to this corner because it looks really, really dark. There we go. This one maybe increase the exposure a little bit. There we go. It's kinda like helping the bananas as well. Are we getting this very nice effect right there? I still think it's a little bit too dark. Here is the point where if I feel like the whole scene is a little bit too dark, maybe we can go back to our original environment life and bring this up a little bit. So maybe like minus two and see how this looks. Because there's gonna be more like going into the scene without really destroying what we already have right here. That looks, I would say really good. I think that looks really, really nice. Now one thing I would definitely like to do here, and again, this is one of those like cinematic tricks is, I don't think that this light right here is helping me from, again, from a composition point of view. One trick that you can do a View, turn off the colors and just focus on the blacks and whites. From a composition point of view, my main focus is all of this, right? The fruits. But we have this like contrast part here where there's a lot of light and the shadow that's going to tell my eye to look there. And I don't want that I don't want to look there. I want to avoid looking there. I just wanted to look on the fruits. So how can we avoid doing that? We can block this slide because I know does light is coming from this main light, this one right here. And some of this light is bouncing on that specific area. Well, there's something called light blockers. And in our case, a light blocker is nothing more than the plane. So we can grab a plane and position the plane off camera so that we don't see it. But in such a way that it blocks that specific part of the light's. See that right now I'm blocking everything, right? But as I start moving this thing to the side, you can see that I no longer see this part right here because it's now covered the shadow. And we only see this and we get this very nice looking effect on the, on the fruit bowl without having to worry about that specific shallow. And these are the kind of things that again, you never see, you never see them on the Shroud. You never see them on the reanimation, but they exist. There's light balancers, light blockers, light filters. There's so many things that happen both in real life sets and in the digital sets to make sure that the composition looks as nice as possible. I'm going to stop this one right here. And yeah, I mean, this to me. I think it looks really, really nice. I would like you guys to try to get to this point because now we're going to talk about two more things. These are called imagers. And we've already talked about the first one, which is of course that noisier, which is gonna give us a very nice effect. I'm actually going to bring the blend, as I mentioned it out to like 0.5 because I want to say a little bit of noise. It helps with the grain effect. But there's one imager I want to talk about before we get our final image in, before we jump to the other secret that I'm going to share with you today, which is post-production. Okay? So the other secret that I want to share right now is the denominator, lens effect, or sorry, imager lens effect. So the lens effect is, I'm a very cool and useful effect that we have right here that we can use to add to a specific effects to the camera in post-production. So after the rendering is done, to get again, a more cinematic look. The first one is vignetting, which you've probably heard about this one being at this when we darken the borders of the scene. So we can add a very subtle being at right here. And as you can see, this is going to give more focus to that. The main shapes to the fruit bowl that definitely makes things look a way, way more cinematic, more interesting. But this is the one that I really loved, the Blum. Blum is when the light is just as the name implies, it's going to bloom and create a little bit of light that bleed all over the place. You can change the threshold of the bloom. Like if we increase the threshold or actually decrease the threshold, more things are going to bloom. So what we can do is we can lower the threshold and have a really soft blooms everywhere like this. Okay? The radius of the bloom is hat is how big the bloom is gonna be. So we can make this thing like a really glow, as you can see right there. And it's very common, especially in old cameras. It was very, very common to get this sort of like glow on objects where you can get a little bit of dust or a little bit of air. And that's also going to make your objects look a little bit more realistic. So just be careful not to overdo it because it could definitely become like way, way, way too much. So it's just the little effect right there. And again, it's, it's kinda like an Instagram filter, like a post-production kind of thing. It's going to help us get a better effect. I'm a little bit concerned about the let me save this real quick. A little bit concerned about this guys right here, kind of looks like they are not set up properly on the roughest. They are. Cherry roughness. They they look a little bit too rough for my liking. I'm not sure if I'm not using something. Everything seems to be fine. That's where I would expect them to be a little bit shinier, but that's fine. Maybe they're like really rough cherries or they share with you. So yeah, this is it, this is now the final render. So take a look how far we've gone. Like this was the original. What's the word? The original element? I don t think we can see it because we didn't have the answers back then. Let me see if I can now we can see them. Okay. But you can see the terminal here, like this was just one light coming from the top. Now we have three or four lights playing around with this very, very cool effect. So, yeah, this is it for this one guys. Now, before we leave, I am going to save this image real quick. So I'm going to say File. And there's a couple of ways in which you can save the image. You can see with an eight bit image, which is what I'm going to do right now. But if you are a little bit more proficient with post-production techniques, you might want to save this as an XR, which as we saw with the HDRI, there are 32-bit float elements that you can use in software such as dementia resolve or a new and stuff like that to do more or better color balance. In our case, we're going to keep it simple. So I'm gonna save this image and we're going to save it on the image. We're going to call this fruit bowl render. And I'd like to save this as target file so we can start GFS tend to be a little bit better in terms of compression and the amount of information that they save. So that's it. Make sure to save your scene and I'll see you back on the next one, guys. Bye, bye. 8. Post Production: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about post-production. And this is one of those super, super, super big secrets of the industry. You will never, ever get a final render is straight out of your render effects. You will always go through some sort of post-production process. So post-production is nothing more than bringing your image into an image. Editing software or video editing software such as Photoshop or After Effects and tweaking a couple of things here and there to make this image look even better. Because yes, I mean, this looks really, really nice. It looks really natural, really cinematic if, if I may say so myself, we can again do a little bit more. So I'm going to talk about three main things right now. Again, we're going to keep it basic. We're going to cover this a little bit more in depth as we move forward with the series. But there's three main things that we want to change, or we went to modify on our images. The first one is exposure and gamma. So I'm gonna go here to the left side or right side of foolish, I'm going to click this button. I'm going to say, I'm going to add an exposure adjustment layer. Adjustment layers are really good because we're not actually modifying the image. We're adding a filter and at any point we can just modify or edit this filter. And there's a couple of things we can do here. If we double-click your eye here, we're gonna get this properties. Sometimes it pops up a little window, in this case, it's right here. And we can change the exposure, which as you can see, we're going to expose everything or underexposed. We can change the offset, which is going to change where the midpoints and black points are. And we can change the Gamma, which is also going to darken or lighten the scene a little bit without really like crunching things in a bad way. So in this case, I think I'm going to lower the Gamma just a little bit. So we're going to have like super, super dark shadows and exposure wise. I kind of want to bring this up a little, just a little bit. So that's the first one. Exposure is really, really good tube to modify some basic stuff. And then we have one of my favorites, which is color balance. Color balance. It's a very basic layer that we can use to change the way our image looks. Now, color is super important in storytelling and in cinematography because it allows us to, again tell different stories. Usually when when you are filming any movie, the film that you get or the recordings that you get are in something called a raw format. So yes, there's going to be light information, they shall the information, everything, but there's usually not gonna be any color graded. So you're gonna get this sort of stuff. And it looks very visceral when I first saw this like really this is what people get and the answer is yes, they get this information in 32-bit images in RAW files. And then they use color grading softwares to re-color the shadows, re-color the lights, recolored everything. Pretty much. The cool thing about working in this way is that once you have this thing, which is, as you can see, very great, very dull, you can color this any way you want. So you can go really saturated, really desaturated. You can go really warm, really cool. Like there's a lot of things you can actually, I'm going to show you real quick. I'm not going to have as much a range on this image and specifically. But if I were to do the same thing, like add a color balance, I can say, hey, you know what? I want my shadows to be warm. And we just make warm shadows. And then I want my lights, my highlights to be cool. And we pushed this like this. Got it. So by changing or by having a very nice space here, we can modify the colors. And of course, using other software, you have way more control over the things that you're doing. And you can read, colorize the image to fit the specific and narrative that you want. In our case, for this, a fruit bowl that we have right here, there's a couple of things I wanted to just to balance things out. So on the color balance step, one thing that I'm noticing is this a little bit too warm, right? And usually you should have a balance between warm, warm colors and light colors. So if everything is too warm or they can do is I can go to the shadows and say, hey, why not make the shadows slightly cooler. Juice a slightly very little, just like there's maybe even a little bit purple right there. And maybe go to the highlights and push the warm effect of the lights just a little bit right there. And you can see the difference. This is without the color balance, and this is with the color balance. It's already giving it a little bit of a different effect. Now, one of the cool things again, as I mentioned, of working with this sort of effects, is that at any point I can change how much of this is really affecting. So maybe I just wanted like a 30% of this effect. And yes, it's going to have this very interesting like purple, purple shadows as you can see right there. But it's not really overwriting anything of what we just did the same with the exposure at any point, I can just remove some of the information for the exposure. This is again something that can be done using a color balance, or you can also use something called a curves, modify array curves element. The groups element works as follows. What you're seeing here, this histogram tells you how many pixels are black and how many pixels are white. So as you can see, most of our pixels are on the black side. It's a really dark scene. If I were to grab this graph and push this over here, we're pretty much looking at everything go darker, yeah, go a lot darker. And then we're going to have even more intense contrast. And then we push it to the other side. We're going to light everything up. It really cheap and easy trick to do here is create an S curve. So we create three points on this curve. And this one, for instance, we make the darks a little bit darker and we made the lights a little bit lighter. So we crunched the elements. Or you can do the inverse. You can do like this and you're going to get another sort of effect, which I don't particularly like to be honest, but it's there. So I'm going to push the darks a little bit darker just a tad bit. And I'm going to push the lights a little bit lighter as well. And the cool thing about this one is that you can also go to the curves and do the same thing. If I feel everything is a little bit to red, I can just grab the red curve and bring it down. So now everything's gonna go into other colors such as blue and green. Or if I want things to be even Rodrigo and warmer, I can just push the red color a little bit more like this. Or I can go to the blue color, to the blue channel, say, Hey, you know what, I want the shadows to be a little bit bluer. We'll push them up like this just a little bit. And I will put this guy back like this. So again, feel free to experiment with the curves. It's a really, really powerful technique to again create variations. And this is what a lot of people don't tell you. There's so, so much work done in post-production that you don't even know about? I was working with a client recently and the malls that you deliver were really, really bad. But since everything was going to have motion blur and moments and stuff, and he was like, yeah, that's fine. We don't even need precision which needs the blobs to look nice and that's it. So look at the difference. Now, if I grab this three things right here in control, actually let me just double-click this one. It's going to bring a copy all the way to the top. So this is what we got out of Maya. If we see this, this is what we get after a little bit of post-production. So just a little bit more tweaking here on the highlights, a little bit more tweaking on the colors. And we get a really, really, really cool effect, something that looks even better. Now, this is not the end. Just a couple more things that I want to add. One thing that usually happens with 3D is that images get blurred a little bit, right? So some of the textures might not be as sharp and things like that. So usually even throwing a smart, smart sharpen right here, I'm gonna go Filter. I'm going to say sharpen, smart sharpen. That usually helps a little bit as well. It makes things look a little bit more interesting. Something that's a little bit too much. You can see it right there. Like it really brings a couple of things into existence. It really nicely, it's gonna give us a very, very interesting effect. Another thing that we can do is we can add a little bit of grain. Remember we talked about grain or noise. And there's a very easy way to do this. I usually like to add this at the top of everything. So I'm going to fill this layer with black, control and delete to fill this with black, I'm going to say Filter Noise, and I'm going to say Add Noise. And we're gonna get this usually not that much, 5%, this is more than enough. Or sometimes maybe, let's try ten per cent. Nice. Let's try 10%. There we go. Then this one, we're going to set this layer to screen. Screen layer will get rid of all of the black colors and it's going to only leave the color effects. So we get this sort of like film grain again, it's gonna, it's gonna, it's all looking to reduce the blacks because as you can see without having a grain, all of this is just like a splotch black. So by having a little bit of grain, we get something interesting. I'm going to reduce this by 50%, which is still going to be quite helpful. And there we go. That's again, another little layer that we can add to make this thing look a little bit better. Finally, finally, and this is just this. This is only going to work for still images, but it's something that you definitely want that if you can, I'm going to look for light particles texture. And you're going to find this sort of images where it's very, very common that a camera I will like, there's just gonna be like little bits of things floating around, like like in dust and stuff like that. So just look for someone, of course, are for some image that has a good size. So I'm going to look for large, a good size and that hopefully matches or is as close as possible to the direction of your camera, right? So for instance, in this case, this light source is coming from the camera. So I'm going to copy this image right here. Make it a little bit bigger, Flip Horizontal, a bigger like that. This is also going to go into screen mode. And really, really low. It's almost nothing. So you can see it's just 6%, 7 percent maybe. And that's it. This a little bit too big actually, so I'm gonna make it a little bit smaller. And now that's the smaller. We might be able to bring a little bit more more dust. There we go. And that's it. So again, this is what we had, this is what came out of Maya. And after doing a little bit of pulling and pushing students to the Photoshop, this is what we can get. Quite nice change, quite a nice effect, quite a nice presentation. And this is what's going to give us a really nice portfolio piece for our renders. Now this is a very basic one. We only added a couple of lights and all of them are pretty much coming from the same direction we're doing visceral like chiaroscuro effect where we'll have really, really high contrast. But as you can see, we get the really, really cool result. So I'm going to stop the video right here, guys, make sure to finish this exercise. Try to get to this result and make sure you understand all of the fundamental things we talked about. And in the next chapter we're gonna be talking about composition. And we're gonna be talking about a couple of more camera adjustments that we can do. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 9. Scene Setup: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. We're now going to jump on to chapter two. And in this chapter we're going to make a special focus of what I like to call. Well, that's not the way I like to call it name of composition. We're going to talk about composition and we're going to talk about, of course, cinematic. And also gonna show you a couple of things about texturing. Some very quick ways in which we can get some nice textures. So this is an exercise that I do with all my beginner level students inside of Maya, we do a chessboard them huge chess fan. Ever since I saw the Queens Campus, I am one of those late adopters of the game and I saw the series and it was just fascinated by it, not only due to the intricacies of chess, but if you take a look at the cinematography of queens gambit, you're going to find that we have some, a really, really interesting shots is this classical sort of cinematic look like it looks old. It looks really dark colors, not super saturated, super soft lights, amazing, amazing framing overall. So today we're gonna be focusing on recreating one, a shot from the series that I love, which is this last part of the series. If you haven't watched this year is do yourself a favor guys and watch it. That's just amazing. In the final tournament that she attends, she goes all the way to Russia to face against one of the most powerful players at the time. And they face in this very nice three girls sort of style in the Bosch are illuminated by a single spotlight coming from the top. As you can see, the saturation of the colors is not super, super huge. You can see that there's not a lot of color in the scene. It's very well be saturated. But that doesn't mean that we can't play around with certain stuff. So every single time I started with 18 when I'm setting up the lights for my team, I always like to start with what they call what it is, the camera, right? So first of all, I'm gonna go here to this button right here. All of these elements already have materials assigned with Arnold AI standard surface. Actually think, I don't remember if I add that subsurface scattering to some of them. But they believe I did acknowledge we're going to add them shortly. Um, but if you don't want to see and you're just wants you to great stuff. You can just click this one right here and it's going to ignore the materials in that way. It's gonna be a little bit easier to see where things are. You can see that all of the squares are just painted their single-phase that I painted with the material. So this element has multiple elements. Here's the wooden material that we don't have any wood materials just yet. I'm going to show you how to add that one in the next video. But yeah, I'm gonna go to rendering. We're going to create a new camera. This is by the way, chess set start. I'm going to click the camera. I'm going to say panels, look through selected. And we're gonna be looking at the chessboard right here. Let's turn on the colors, just see which one is white. Okay, so here's where we're going to start talking about composition. As we mentioned in the last video, the camera is the eyes of the audience. This is what the audience will see, and here's how we're gonna communicate what's happening. So there's total of psychological intricacies that can happen when creating a or setting up a shot. And it's up to you to try to give meaning to these intricacies or to try to explain through the use of the camera and the lights what this is, the message that you want to convey. So this right here is starting position. I don't think it's the queen. It's the queens can be subdued. Now it's not the wind scam. It's like a weird position. I don't even know what position they created it here, but like the beginning of a game, right? I think it's like a catalog or something. So the point is, we need to make a decision. What kind of composition that we want. Do want asymmetrical composition? Do we want an asymmetrical composition? Do want a composition favorite, and why do we want the composition favoring black? Like what's the story that we want to tell? Well, since the Queen's gambit, this is a story of what's the word of the underdog, Like she being the, the new girl in the chess world. I think we're going to go to the black side. We're going to see this composition through the eyes of black, which is usually the, the pieces that have the disadvantaged because they go second right? Now, we need to decide, do we want asymmetrical competition that we won? The competition is really close to the one, the ones that's really far. There's a lot of different ways to think about this, but I'm going to show you the first one, which is the rule of thirds. So if we were to divide this image into three parts, I'm going to use my little like Creon here. If we divide the image into three sections right here, we want to make sure that the most important things of our composition are in this blocks right here. Because this is the, the areas where the eyes of the audience are gonna go the most. So if we were to move the board like this, That's a horrible composition of course. But doing something like this might also not be the greatest composition because we don't have specific things going on, on the points. So in this case, I'm going to try to align these plane in the best possible way so that the corners of the element give me a very symmetrical sort of effect. Now we could also go like really down, like here are really high, right here. I think since, since again, since we're the Black Business and we're supposed to be facing against the white pieces. One thing we can do is do something called a low angle shot. So we can go to this sort of like a low angle where we see the white pieces on the other side. I don't know this could also work nicely. But in this case we're going to start simple. We're going to start just, we're, we're, we're going to suppose that we are Beth Harmon. We want the audience to think that there are bed Harmon and they're seeing the position like this. So I'm going to change this a little bit so that we don't see our opponents. So we're only focusing on the on the board. I think something like this is going to work. Yes, I know we're seeing a little bit of space here, but we're going to blur it out or something. So, yeah, this is gonna be my composition. So how do we save compositions? Like let's say, let's say we want to try a couple of competition. We don't want only one, we want to give it a shot to a couple of different ones. How do we change this or how do we say there's a couple of ways to do it. The first one and then one of the ones I like the most is you can select the camera, which we forgot to rename. It's called a shotgun. And we can just keyframe it. So we just select the camera and hit S, and that's going to add a keyframe. So at any point we just go back to that keyframe and that's it. We are going to remember that the other one is right here. We say view bookmarks and we can create a bookmark and we create a bookmark, but clicking this little button right here. So now if we were to move the camera at any point that I just can say view bookmarks on the camera. View bookmarks. We just clicked that one and we're gonna go back to that bookmark. You can save as many bookmarks as you want. I personally like using the animation method because I can switch around without having to go to the menu, but it can be any. So let's say that as a first option. Let's go for a more like asymmetrical option right here. Something like this. And then let's go for like a bird's-eye view. Maybe. Let's try to center this in the best possible way. We're going to have like a very interesting bird's-eye view effect right there. And let's do one final from the other side like this. Because one of the important things about a rendering, and this is especially true to a 3D rendering is the fact that we can experiment quite a bit like we were not constrained to a physical camera that we have to move around. And we can just move the visual camera as many times as we want to find something that works. So I'm gonna go to one of the compositions that I like, such as this one. I'm going to say panels, look, alright, tear off copy. So we have this nice little copy over here. Let's go back to perspective. There we go. So now we need to add our first slide. I'm gonna go Arnold lights and we're going to add an area light. And we're going to push this up. Now, this is something I haven't mentioned in the last video with the fruits, but it is very important because it has to do with how light reacts. Here inside of Maya. Everything in Maya, especially with lights, will work in a real-world scale. So if I were to create a cube right now, this cube measures one centimeter, okay? So the board right now, it's actually quite like real in regards to the size, because if I make this cube bigger so that it matches the board, this is roughly like an 80 centimeter boards. It's quite a big board right then I should actually a little bit bigger than normal. But it's closer to a real board rather than if we had everything under the grid, right? So as you can see, the grid is really, really small. And whenever you are rendering, especially if you're doing like physically-based rendering, you always want to make sure that you're rendering at the proper, the proper resolution, right? Like the proper size because that way light is going to behave in the most realistic way possible. So now that we have that, I can grab this light rotated, start this off. Let's rotate this 90 degrees like that. And we're going to change, actually, we need to rotate it the other way. So it's minus 90 degrees. There we go. We're going to, of course, churn the exposure up. Let's just start with a ten. I usually like to start with ten, then go from there. We definitely want color. I'm gonna go with cool colors as well, or wrong color again. And we definitely want to bring the spread down. It's gonna be a disk effect because we want to have the spotlight area. Let's just check our samples right now. Three samples is fine. Let's go. System's GPU is fine. Let's give it a shot. So we're just going to render by default it always goes to the perspective shape for some reason. So just make sure to change this to shut down. There we go. I can see something, but it's very, very difficult to see because it's right there. So we need to increase the exposure. That's telling me immediately that we need to increase the exposure. Let's go for a 50 exposure. Now let's render. And there we go. That's a lot better as you can see, this immediately makes it look really, really cool. The spread is looking quite nice. I think I want to push the spread a little bit closer. There we go. If we take a look at the scene, we can see that the colors are really, really blooming, like it's a really intense light, kind of like a spotlight. So I would expect this to be quiet exposed. We can try doing that by bringing the spread in and maybe increasing the exposure just a little bit, not that much, probably like an 18 I think would work. 171616. There we go. That's a lot better. Yeah, that's already giving us a really nice effect. However, we already know this. One of the things that's going to give us the best effect is having a sort of aimed. And then here's again where if we were there on the film, we would need to have a 360 degree element of the film, but we don't. So I'm gonna go to the intersection and I'm going to try and find something that matches that sort of effect. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is where some of my students get stuck there, like I need to find the exact same setup. It's gonna be very difficult to do so you might not be able to do it, but you might find something that works pretty, pretty close. So for instance, this old hall or this old room, or even this sub pool gold chapel, basement. I think this is probably the best one to be honest, because look at the effect that we give this an example of the scene. And as you can see, it's really, really good. We get a very nice. A shadow coming from the top so it matches what we need. So I'm just going to copy this. This is gonna be on your files by the way, or you can just get it directly here from polyhedron as always. Let's go real quick. Let's just wait for this to finish. There we go. And this one we're going to copy into our source image is always, always, always have your stuff on source images. Now, we're of course going to go to Arnold lights, sky dome light. And we're going to add a file. And we're going to add this symbol called basement thing. I don't think we really need to the side because everything is coming from a very global, like a distribution of light. Now when we render, what's going to happen is not only are we going to get the light that we already placed, we're gonna get this HDR. And it's going to add a lot more visual interests to the scene. As we've done before. I don't want this thing to be visible on the camera. So let's turn this off. And another thing that I didn't want to say probably want to bring the intensity a little bit down. So I'm going to say something like minus two, so that we do get a little bit of reflections and stuff, but not that many. And there we go. So this is already looking quite nice. I would say we can definitely turn on some of our images over here. So for instance, we can do our de-noise your optics, as you can see, since the samples are not really that good, Here's where does the noise you can't really do a great job. I mean, it's trying its best, but it's a little bit difficult and we're gonna get a little bit of a splotch ***** here and there. But it works. And we can already add, for instance, let's say the lens effects, right? So let's add a little bit of vignette. And let's add a little bit of blue. There we go. Now is where we can jump into all of the other scenarios since you'd like, okay, which one do I like the most? I like this one from the top. Now that really doesn't work, right? This one on the black side, that one's quite nice, but this initial ones looking quite, I think that's one of my favorites. This one is also quite nicely. Having this little pond on the side here kinda makes for an interesting composition. But I think this one is one of the, the, one of my favorites right now. So I'm going to jump here into the camera. Let me turn off the colors so that I can so they can focus on the pieces and find a little bit of a more symmetrical composition. There we go. This is pre, pretty similar to like a one-point perspective, right? Like we're, we're seeing everything going into a single direction. So we have all of the lines going into a single-point back there. Now, here's one thing I wanted to show you before we jump onto polishing this scene. And that's the fact that if we take a look at the elements right now, the cinematography, we mentioned that it's very door. I like the colors are really toned down. The saturation has been brought down. I don't want to wet all the oldest time until we go into Photoshop to modify that, there will be really cool if we could already see that happening here. And we can actually do that with this color correct node. So if I add this color correct, we do have a couple of very basic things that we can't change here on the scene. So for instance, we have chat duration, so we can say, hey, you know what? Saturation is gonna go down to 0.8. And that's going to bring the colors down quite a bit. It's a little bit too much. Let's start 0.85. And there we go. And again, at any point they can just turn this on or off and they can see how all of these things are gonna look. We can change the contrast. For instance, you will want more contrast, you will want less contrast. I think the film has a little bit less contrast. So let's go with this. This is kind of like doing a little bit of the post-production that we did with the fruit bowl. But without having to go all the way into what's the word? Into Photoshop, **** blacked out there. So here are the shadows. We can also do a couple of changes. Doesn't seem to be working for some recent kinda like broke. They break. There we go. Something broke when I was trying to do the shelves, but yeah. No, don't don't do anything just yet. We're just going to wait here. We'd imagined I just bringing the saturation down so that they don't have to desaturate the textures, right? Or the materials that way we can control a global saturation directly here on the saturation pen. So this is it for this one guys, in the next one, I'm going to show you how to very quickly bring in some textures for our element because it will really benefit from having some interesting, like wood textures, especially the table I think would benefit from having a very cool texture. So hang on tight and see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 10. Substance Materials: Hi guys. Welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about substance materials. And this is an fortunate and unfortunate reality of 3D work, right? If you want to have amazing looking renders, you need to have amazing looking marbles and amazing looking textures. It's part of the drill right there, there, there's no way you're gonna be able to create amazing looking compositions with just like spheres and cubes. So you do need to have models and textures working perfectly nice for you. And today we're going to talk about one very cool thing that we have here in polyhedron as well, which are textures. So thanks to the sharing of the Internet, we have access to a lot of sectors that we can use for our elements. So for instance, this one right here. Let's see, Well, when I have a very nice water table on our scene, and maybe we're not really good at texturing, but we do know how to create a plane like the one that we have right here. And it's just a matter of using v6 texture that we have over here. Or maybe I think this one is a little bit better like a warranty will look, so it looks quite nice. So the way this works is up here we're gonna be able to download specific texture maps from R objects. I'm clicking the little options here to select specifically which ones I want. I'm going to use this ambient occlusion, roughness, metallic. I'm going to use the diffuse. We don't want displacement right now. Displacement that is good for things that really changed the silhouette. In this case, this is not changing the slip as much. And we want a normal map with OpenGL options right here. So once we have this, we just download the objects. I believe they are download at four K textures. You don't have to download them by the way, they're gonna be there on your on your project files. But I wanted to show you how to use this in case you want to use any other materials later on. So over here on the textures, we're just going to bring all of these things into our source images folder. Give me just 1 second. So you're just going to grab N to keep things organized. I actually like to have a folder for each specific textures. So I'm going to call this a width. And right here we're just going to get this guy's in there. There we go. So now we're going to jump into Maya and we're gonna do the connection. I'm going to show you how to do the connection using a plugin, which is the substance plug-in. And it makes our life so much easier because it's definitely a little bit. What's the word? Not? It's time-consuming to do this by hand. So I'm gonna go here to the substance element. To do this, you also need you first need to make sure that the substance plug-in Eastern on. So you're gonna go to Windows, substance Settings and Preferences Plug-in manager and you're going to type in substance. If for any reason you don't have the substance plug-in installed, make sure to go to the Internet and download that substance for Maya, it's completely free, install it and you're gonna be good to go. Once you have this here on the shelf, you're going to have this option right here, which is applied workflow to maps. I'm going to click this one. I'm going to select which workflow we're gonna be using, which in this case is Arnold. Of course, I'm going to select the multiple maps. We're gonna go to our tables and we're going to select the IRM, which is ambulate Boucher are often is metallic, the diffuse and the normal map. Sometimes it won't know if the terminology or the naming convention is weird to it. It won't notice in this case, I'm just gonna do the diffuse, which is the color. And we're going to do the normal, which is this one right here. And I'm going to do the roughness, which is the IRM. But I'm going to show you one extra thing right here. I'm actually also going to do the occlusion with the same one. And when it's gonna happen is as follows. When I hit Apply, He's going to create a new material up here on the Hypershade. And it's going to apply all of the necessary things that we need for our elements. This one right here, I believe, yes, last AI standard that you have, There we go. So this a standard. First thing I'm gonna do is gonna change the name to M with tables so they know that this is the material that we're gonna be using and we need to change a couple of things. So for instance, right now we have here the ambient or the diffuse, which is the color in it's being multiplied there. It should be it should be multiplied by the roughness or the ambient occlusion. But it's not doing that. It's actually multiplying it by a lot of different colors. And that's why we get this sort of like orangey look. So I'm going to break this thing away. I'm just going to connect the red channel to all of the inputs. Let's open the inputs and we're going to connect all of the red channels right here. There we go. So that way we should recover the original color and we should have a little bit of ambient occlusion. Now, this one right here, it's very important that cetera and alpha is luminous, both of them. Now this is the, supposed to be the roughness. And again, we don't want to connect the ER, we do want to connect the, well, not sorry, not the alpha channel. In this case, we want to connect the green channel, which is the roundness because in the name ARM, It's embryo cushion for a, for a minute cushion, the R4 roughness and the M for metallic, we actually don't have any metallic, but if you want to connect them elements you can do should be the exact same thing, but everything else should be already set to the proper elements and proper setup. So now if we just grabbed the spleen and assign the existing M wood table material and we go to the Render. We're gonna be able to render this thing really nicely. Let's just wait a little bit for this to load. Remember, every time we render a new texture, it needs to convert the textures using the texture file competitor. And once that's done, it will render the thing. So let's just give it a couple of more seconds. There we go. So as you can see, now, we have this very nice like wood table on the back part right here. Seems like it's I'm not sure if it's trying to render using my using GPU. Yeah, I am using GPU. So there we go. That's the table. And as you can see, it looks a lot better and it makes her pieces look quite nicer. Now, one thing I don't like about the thesis is that the materials that I'm using a really simple, and I would like them to be a little bit more complex. So I'm going to talk about a very cool material that we have here inside of our null, which is a subsurface material. So this piece is right now on the black marble. I only added this or like black color to the base color and that's it. But marble has this tendency to let some light go through. It's one of those materials that makes things look a little bit more interesting. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually going to go down here to subsurface and I'm going to turn some surface on the base color. I'm actually going to turn it off. And the subsurface color is going to be the same like brownish color that we have right here. If we just do this, if we just leave it like this and we render, what's going to happen is now the pieces will have this sort of interesting halo on the edges where things that are a little bit thinner or not as, not as thick, we'll let a little bit of light goes through. And it's gonna look a little bit more interesting. It's definitely taking a little bit longer. It could be also all of the answers that we have right here. So I'm going to turn them off for just a second so that we didn't have to worry about that render type. And you can see right here, for instance, here on the Queen, you can see that the crown of the Queen is white because the material that we selected has a radius of white. So it's letting white light go through or it's absorbing wildlife. So in this case, if we change this to, again, another sort of like brown color, we're going to have this sort of like reddish tone on the effect. And it's going to make the pieces look a little bit more interesting there on the borders as you can see right there. If we make this thing a little bit lighter, you're going to see the change here, and this is going to look a little bit lighter as well. So it depends on the kind of effect that you want. I don't want this much sub-surface right now. It's very important that we're working on real scale. Otherwise this will not work properly. And now look through the white pieces. So very similar, we're just going to grab one of the white pieces. We're going to turn off the color here. Turn out that subsurface, the subsurface color is going to be the same color. And usually the radius is pretty much the same color, but lighter. So something like this, like a cream color. And then when we render, you're going to see that there's a lot more noise because this is one of those materials that's really, really noisy. But we're gonna get this sort of like a marble effects EQ, how it looks very milky. Like. It's not like a complete flat color. It makes it look a lot more realistic, if you may. If I may say so. So I like this color, but I would like to do this color for or I would like to have the material for the border of the board as well. Like I liked the inner side of things, but the outer side looks a little bit to CG, like the reflections are too perfect. And that's what immediate Patel to know that something is a little bit to CG. So let's, let's go with that. So there's a couple of ways in which we can handle this, but I want to show you one that hopefully some of you have access to. If not, don't worry, I'm going to provide one of the assets. But if you are a subscriber of the Adobe substance suit, when you search any type of material that you can use inside of substance painter, you can also use this sort of materials in other software such as Maya like this, SBS are archived elements. So if I just hit download here, I'm gonna get this as BSR. And I'm going to move this one of course to our setup. So we're gonna go real quick to our this one. I'm not going to have on source images. This one's gonna be on assets, same as the column canvas that we use for the other place. So if you have one of this, there's a very quick and easy way to import them into Maya to use them as a material. So you're gonna go here to the Hypershade. You're not hit tab and you're going to write substance, and you're going to locate this substance no texture. Once you locate this, you're gonna load, of course, the substance note here from your assets folder. This would a one-inch hit Open. There we go. Now, in this one, we need to go down here and select Arnold and create a network. And what this will do is it will automatically create the whole network that we need to generate that material, as you can see right here. Very, very cool material. Now, we don't need a height map, so I'm gonna go here to substance notes and down here, these are the outputs that are being generated. I don't need to hide message. I'm going to turn it off. And I'm going to rename this. I'm going to call this M with what's called a wedge, right? So now what I can do is I can go to the board, RTD, to the edges of the board. This face is right here. And there's actually an easier way to select, as you can see, this already have this m with material on the outside. So what I can do is I can go to the Hypershade, look for the M with material, which is this one. Right-click and say select objects with material. And as you can see, all of the faces are going to be selected. And then I can go to the M would watch, right-click and assign Material to Selection. And technically that should change the material to the wet material. And I think I can see it right there. There we go. So now let's just very quickly save. Oh, I shouldn't have to save there. My bad. I shouldn't say I just saved on top of the chess set start. I'll see what they could do. So now we're just going to go over here and I'm gonna go into m. Sorry. One thing I need to make sure is that we have UVs because if we don't have UVs, then this is not going to work and as you can see, we don't. So what I'm gonna do or we do it kind of looks like we do. Let's give it a shot to the Render. Maybe we do have UVs. I remember doing UVs for this one, but it's been a while. So let's take a look. So let's just render real quick. It's going to translate the texture sense. Yeah, Okay, So it does have UVs and as you can see, the grain of the wood is going in the direction of the length of the woods. So that's what we want, is we want to see because that tells us that it's been built properly. As you can see, just by changing textures, just by adding some cool textures to the scene, everything is gonna look even better, like the cinematic look that we're going for. It's gonna be, it's gonna be there. So I'm, now we're going to talk about one more thing regarding what's the word regarding the camera before we jump onto the, onto the next part, which is the post-production side of things. So if you guys remember, when we were taking a look at the camera, Let's grab this one. Panel's looks for selected. We decided on one specific shot, which was this one, and it's fine. We can go for something a little bit more interesting. So if you remember, we had this shot right here a little bit better. I'm going to go for another one. So let's go to something a little more of a close-up where we can kinda see some pieces on the first part of the element, on the middle ground of the element, and then on the back part of the element. So whenever we're seeing a composition, we not only need to think about the flat composition, we also need to think about the 3D composition. And usually we're going to have something called the foreground, which in this case, this is where the horses were, the rook as some of the pons. We have the middle ground or the midground, which is right here. And then we have the background, right, like all of this business on the back, like this little part right here. And it's very important that we understand this elements because there's one very cool thing about cameras that we can use to make these things look even better. So first of all, let's get a render of what we have right now. Let's go to the outcome. Are we not going to shock can say render, update full scene. And there we go. So as you can see, this is a more interesting composition because we're actually really close to the pieces, especially like the rogue and the horse and everything in here. The light is, we already know it's working quite nicely and we have this very nice background like dark background make giving more focused to the whole thing. Well, the first thing we can change is of course the focal length. Right now we're working with the traditional 35-millimeter focal length. But what if we wanted to make this more extreme? Well, if we want to give this some sort of like Epic Effect, we can go into a more intense and dramatic looking for calling. So let's go all the way down to 18. And what's going to happen, as you can see here, as we get closer and we move these things around is this, we're really going to be pushing the perspective above the thing. We're gonna be distorting the image quite a bit. Let's find another nice composition here. There we go. And what's going to happen, as I was mentioning, is we're going to be destroying everything. So let's save this one real quick right here. And let's do a new render and look at the difference. Look at how intense this things changes. It's not the word distorting the geometry. The geometry is exactly the same. The one thing that is changing is the focal length of the camera. The focal length is going to really give us a very interesting Look. I'm actually going to turn off the color so I can focus on everything a little bit more. Because I want to make sure that we can get a really, really nice composition. This is what I call a V composition, where everything is pointing to one corner. In this case, it's this corner over here. So we can make sure that this is a really, really intense and really interesting, something like this. Now let's take a look at the render. And there we go. So it looks quite nice. I'm not super sold on this one right here because he can't look so weird. So maybe 18, it's a little bit too much. Let's try going for something like a 24 because I do want to see the border of the of the table as well. A little bit of the border, something like this. Let's give another shot. There we go. That looks really, really interesting. So we have this URL like a V-shaped composition, where we have this hidden arrow pointing towards us. It's kinda like opening, opening the whole picture so that we can appreciate what's going on here. We can make this a little bit more intense as well by changing again to the angles a little bit more. So it's not like a super sharp B. And that way we can see a little bit more. We're gonna be able to see a little bit more of the chessboard. And, uh, yeah, I mean, this is looking quite, quite nice. Now, how can we make this even better? Well, once we know that we have a nice focal length, another of the things that we can do besides turning on the lens effects and the correction, like the color corrections and stuff like that, we can talk about something called a depth of field. But since this a little bit more for a technical topic, I want to wait until the next video to show you. So make sure to get to this point, find a cool composition for your, your chessboard and get ready to, to add a little bit of depth of field to our whole thing. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 11. Depth of Field: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with the depth of field. And this is something that we mentioned in the last part of the video. On the last video, hopefully you didn't skip ahead because we also talked a little bit about focal length. So if you miss that one, go back and check it out. But if not, then we're ready to talk about a depth of field. Depth of field. This is very, very, very cool effect that we can get with cameras. And we can fake this, of course, in the 3D world. But I'm going to explain what this does. Usually when we take a picture, everything is in focus, or at least most of the times everything is in focus. But by burying something called the aperture of our element, which is how much or how wide we are opening the diaphragm of the camera to let light through, we can get a really sharp images, are really blurry images. Usually, Usually we're gonna be working with really sharp apertures with really high aperture so that everything is in focus. If you tried to take pictures with your cell phone, most of the times you're going to have a really high apertures and everything is just going to be in-focus. And that's one of the main mistakes that people make when taking pictures. They don't like Manager or change the settings on your cameras and everything looks very, very in-focus, very flat, very boring. So one of the things that we can do is you can see is by opening the aperture or for lens, we start blurring out things that are not on the area of focus. So the bigger or the lower the aperture, the more shallower the depth of field is going to be. And therefore, the less things that are gonna be in-focus, as you see here on this diagram, we have this exact same setup that we can do this exact same thing inside of Maya. Now, to do this, we're gonna have to go to, or we're gonna, we're gonna jump onto the camera settings themselves. So I'm going to click this little camera icon right there, this one right there. And if you remember, I mentioned a couple of videos ago that we have this Arnold setup over here. And this is where we're going to be enabling the depth of field. So we're going to hit the first enabled depth of field. If I render right now, nothing's going to happen. Depth of field ace enabled, but nothing is happening because we haven't actually changed any settings under depth of field. So there's three things that you're going to need to get a proper depth of field. First of all, you're going to need to have a focus point. You need to know where you want your focus point to be. Where do you want everything to be in-focus? In this case, the center of the board. So we need to know how far away the center of the board is from where we are. So if I were to go into vertex mode and I select this vertex right here, or this phase right here. He thinks object, this object right here. I'm going to get this information now to get this little panel right here, you need to go into display, heads up display, and you're going to select this object details option. Make sure this is on. I always have this one on precisely for this sort of rendering things. When they sort like this little pond, you're going to see that we have this distance from camera and it's a 103 units. These are real-world units. So this is centimeters, one meter away from this guy, 103. So if we select the camera again, when we go to the focus distance, we need to set this to, let's say hundreds, right? Like this is roughly the area where we want to be. You don't have to be super, super precise. If you're working in real-world scale. If you're working with really small scales and you need to be super precise because one centimeter more or one centimeter or less, and things are just gonna get out-of-focus. Now, if we render again, nothing's going to happen. We're still not activating depth of field because we have not finished using the last thing that we need, which has this thing called the aperture size. So the aperture size is very important because we're gonna be using this one to, to like tell Maya how much distortion or how much depth of field we want. If we were to set this all the way to one, you're going to see that everything becomes really, really blurry. This would be the appropriate aperture size if we were using like a traditional camera, as you can see right now, we don't have a specific f-stop that we're using, but this will be like the traditional kind of aperture that we will have with this sort of like distance. And it looks quite nice. You can see this horse right here, the pons right here. They are distorting or disappearing quite a bit. And then these guys are really in focus. Then this guy's disappeared again with this sort of like very nice camera blur. However, I do think this can get a little bit too much, so I recommend always playing around with how much you want this aperture size to be like 0.5 is perfectly fine for this one. I would say that the way we still get a little bit of focus here on the pieces without losing too much detail. So again, those are those sort of things that you always want to take into consideration to make sure that things look as nice as possible. Now, I'm going to stop this one right here. And let me get a model real quick because I want to show you a couple of other material things on this, that the field thing. So we're gonna go to File Import, and we're going to import this wine glass. Fbx is another model that I have from a long time ago as well. And we're gonna be using this one too to add a little bit more again, visual interests of the whole thing. So let's go through a shotgun panels looked or selected. Let's go to the shadow where we're using this one right there. And then we have the panels tear off copy. There we go, so that we know where we're going to be placing these cups. So imagine there's a couple of gentlemen playing around or maybe Beth Harmon swinging around and they're having a cup of wine, right? So what I can do is I can push this cup of wine back here close to the pawn. So that's right there on the part of the scene. Then the other competitor would of course have HIS on this side. We probably wouldn't see it, but I'm still going to add it. And the reason why I'm going to add it is because the reflections, refractions over things that are gonna happen with this one could potentially affect the overall look of the render. So now that we have this, we can go back to the render. And if we render, we're of course going to see this wine glass over here. Now, the reason why I wanted to bring this wine glasses, because I want to talk about glass in conjunction with the distortion that we're getting from the depth of field. Because glass tends to be really clean and really efficient. And when we start adding more and more layers on top of things, you're going to see how things are going to definitely change. So I'm gonna grab this guy right here, right-click, assign a new material. We're going to assign an Arnold AI standard surface. And we're going to call this m underscore glass. Glass has no color, so we're going to turn this off, but it does have transmission, so we're going to turn this on. And this is now a glass material. So if we were to render this, you would see that this now it looks like a glass material. However, it looks a little bit weird, right? Like it's reflecting things that maybe are in the environment, but I don't want to reflect. So here's where we need to decide. Do we want the main element domain that like a world to be refracted in the glass. And if we don't want this to be available in refraction, we need to get rid of this in transmission. So now when we render, this is no longer visible on the transmission and we're only seeing the reflections and the diffuse of the glass. So this is going to look a little bit better. We're not refracting the world and it's going to look more believable. Let's say we want to add a liquid to it. This is one of the big questions that a lot of people asked him. I wanted to use the scene to show you how can we add a liquid? Well, there's a couple of ways, but the easiest one is I'm going to duplicate this object, isolate it. I'm going to select one ring where the liquid is going to finish, which I think that would be a nice line. And then I'm going to delete that one. I'm going to delete all of the external ones. So we're just gonna be left with this and then this one, we're going to Control E to extrude Our to scale in. And then do one more extrusion. And we're going to fill this. I'm going to say mesh, feel whole. Select this one, Edit Mesh. And I'm going to say poke. We're going to bevel this one right here. I'm gonna go probably middling level. Let's do two segments and this mole fraction. So I'm going to press number three. It's like soft and smooth. We of course need to mesh, display and reverse the normals. And this is the most important thing. When we have this on top of the glass, it needs to be slightly bigger. Almost nothing. Slightly bigger, just overlapping with the glass itself like this. The reason why this is we have to do it this way is so that the refraction on the rendering work properly because this again, it's a little bit technical, but usually when you have a glass of water and then you model the water, if these things are not overlapping, there's going to be pocket of air right here, and the render is going to try to render that as a pocket of air and then you can get my GED. We're refractions. However, if you overlap them, it doesn't detect that pocket of air, any parenthesis the proper way. So this one, I actually want you guys to see the difference. Let's start with a normal Lambert. So it was just like a basic material. It's just standard surface. There's gonna be the wine. We're going to add like a wine material here. There we go. When we render. This is like a solid effect, right? But it looks like the company now has something. Sorry. Now to make this water. The other thing that we need to do is we need to go here again to the color, get rid of the color, bring the way in and change the color to a wine color. So let's go for this or like purplish red, dark color. And now there's gonna be one. Now the reason we're not seeing the wind is because of course the scene is way, way too dark. So here's where again, once we have something that's looking good, we can start pushing it further and getting it to look even better. So why not add a very nice rim light coming from the back of the scene? I'm gonna go to Arnold lights and we're going to add an area light green. I'll make this area a little bit bigger. And maybe this is like a window or something that's here on the back. And we're going to have this push some light into my, into my composition, into my scene. We're gonna make this a cool light. And we're going to increase the exposure. It's not gonna be like super big, but definitely needs to be big enough to be a seeable. And there we go. So now as you can see, we have this very nice light coming from this side. You can see it here on the little elements. It's going to shine here on the cup as well. Now, we can try turning on the transmission again. Here on the image, it might change slightly how things look, doesn't look half bad though. But there's one more thing that we need to change it. This has to do with glasses and I'm actually going to grab this cup right here. Let me actually delete this one. Let's grab these two elements and let's duplicate this. Let's duplicate. There we go. Now let's imagine that for some reason this cup of wine is right here on top of the, of the chessboard so that we can see it a little clearer. So let's, let me save this with a different name. We go. So when we render now, you can see that the couple of, the glass of wine is right here. The glass looks a little bit not as shiny as I would like to. I'm gonna go here. And let's bring the roughness down. Same for the wine. Let's bring the roughness down so that when we render, things are way, way cleaner, clearer and we can see through the elements right. Now, here's the thing. It looks really dark, it looks really black. Why? Well, the, every ray tracing engine in the market has a certain amount of default or right depth, which is how deep each ray is going to travel and gathering information from. Right now, what's happening is we need more depth to really see through the elements. So I'm gonna go to the Arnold setup, Arnold Render Settings up here on the Arnold renderer, down here on the right depth. As you can see, we only have ten total erase, eight for transmission, one for diffuse and specular. We need to bring this up. So I'm going to bring the diffuse to 66. And this is gonna be honest, 16. This of course is going to increase the render time, but as you're gonna see, it should allow us to see more through the glass. So now we're going to be able to see a little bit of more of the color that we're getting right there in the cups are going to start looking way, way better. Okay? So, yeah, this is pretty much it. Now one thing we can do, this color is a little bit too dark. If we make this thing a little bit clearer, what's going to happen is the colors also going to be clear and we should be able to see through. So you can see how we're getting this sort of like refracted pieces through the glass, right? And we get this nice little purplish hue on the cups. I do want to have a little bit more of a reddish tone. So let's go back to the reddish effect. But that's pretty much it. That's one of the ways we can do that. Now, we can also change this thing called the index of refraction, which is the way that light is being refracted through the element. If we bring this down to something like 1.3, which is a little bit closer for water, we're just going to go through. So as you can see now, we can actually see through the glass. We're seeing things through the liquid, through the wine. Glass usually has a, an index of refraction of 1.45, which is what we have by default. But water, it's usually a little bit lower. So as you can see, this is giving us a very interesting result. Those red points that we're seeing right there look a little bit weird, but I mean, it's fine, right? So I think I think two cups look nice. But this one is definitely not where I want it to be. So let's bring it back here. There we go. And over here a little bit out of focus. Now we're going to have this two elements right there. And as you can see, the composition starts looking better and better. Now. Now that we have this, now we can start seeing what our little effects over here are doing. And for instance, this de-noise, your optics. It's of course going to clean the whole thing. It really struggles a little bit, as you can see with glass, because glass tends to be really noisy. So this is where I would definitely go back and change the amount of samples that I get from my image. I'm also working at 960 by 540. So we know that when we go to full HD, we're going to get a better result. But this one is going to work well. The little glow and the vignettes also going to work nicely. Maybe the beanbag we can make a little bit stronger just to get a little bit more contrast on the scene. And then we have this color correct to two doll things out. Maybe it's a little bit too much. Let's try 0.9. That's a little bit closer to what we might like, right? So, yeah, I mean, as you can see, the composition is looking quite, quite nice. I still think we can make the marble pieces look a little bit better. And the thing that we're getting with this marble is the fact that it's too perfect and that's one of the main issues that we tend to have with what's the word with with TG things when they look too perfect. So the way to break this down is by changing the roughness. We only need to modify the roughness. Let's jump real quick into a polyhedron. If we look for textures, we can look for a marble texture. And we have this ones. But no, that's not what I'm looking for it because it's gonna give me this like lines. That's not exactly what they want. I just want to look like a random noise. Even like that leather could work, but I'm not sure that one's not bad. Even like this white plaster because I know this is what I want, right? Like this map. That's, that's perfect. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to the Options and I'm actually just want to download the angular motion, rough this metallic, or if I want to, I can just download the roughness like that. Just keep download. We're gonna get this one right here. And it's just a matter of exporting into our source images. I'm going to export it on the table. So if you guys are looking for it's going to be on the table. And there we go. Now the one thing I don't like about that texture is it's probably gonna be a little bit too much. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go real quick here, and we're gonna go to our white marble. Let's start with that one. And if we drag and drop the texture, where is it? Or we can just go. Right-click, we let right, right texture or file, sorry, final texture. And we're going to go for the wood table. And here we have the white plaster. So we know that the higher the roughness or the wider the roughness, the Bradford, it's gonna, it's gonna look very mad. So I want to invert this one. And there's a way to embed this, which is using an inverse is not them versus reverse, reverse node. So we're going to input the color. As you can see, it reverts it needs, it makes it darker instead of wider. And then the output X is gonna go into specular roughness. Just like that. Take a look now at how the marble is going to look on the pieces. Let's save a copy of this one. And let's render, pay attention to again to the sharpness of the white marble. What should happen now is that we're going to break down or where you're going to break up that that shininess and it shouldn't be as clean as it was. Especially the white, the white marble. We might not see that much of a difference, but we're definitely going to see it on the on the other ones. There we go. You can see it there. It's not as perfect anymore, but we're going to see it here in just a second. So let's start real quick. We're gonna go to the, the black marble. Now. This one, same deal, we're going to look for a file texture. This file texture is going to be the white plaster roughness. We're going to do a reverse to flip the colors. And then we're gonna get this into the specular roughness. You can see it here like the way this is not like the shine is really high, but it's not the perfect anymore. You can see like slight changes there on the surface and that's what those surface scratches and stuff, That's what I'm going for. So let me say real quick. And let's do one more render. So there we go. That's it. With this. We've managed to create this very cool composition. Now, the last thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go back to the samples. I'm going to use my adaptive sampling. I'm think probably I'm going to go for like 200.015. Yeah, look at that. A little bit noisier. And that's going to definitely help, definitely help the overall field. And then we're going to talk, I'm gonna show you one very cool little trick into Photoshop to give this thing another sort of filter, another sort of effect so that we can get a really, really, really cool finished. So let me stop this real quick. I'm gonna go again, as I mentioned here to the samples. I'm going to, oh, it's already enabled, so it has enough samples. I think that's good enough. So I'm just going to let this wrong guys and I'll see you back on the next one. Once we have the image and we're going to get it ready for the final post-production part. So hang on tight. Make sure to get all the way to this point. And I'll see you back on next one. Bye bye. 12. Look Up Tables: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to take a look at something called a look up. Tables are most commonly known as loops. And loops are one of those secrets of the industry that not everyone tells you about, but they are super, super important in the post-processing side of things. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm actually going to read, get rid of the color correction node. I am going to keep the bloom and the denominator of course. But I don't want any color correction. I want to dislike natural look from Maya we have right here. Actually, I forgot to do something. This is not the full HD image, my bath. So let me change this to full HD. Let me render real quick. Very well. So as you can see, it took quite a bit of time, three minutes, 45 seconds. So if we wanted to do like a full animation, as you can imagine, this will take quite a bit of time. And the reason it took so long is because there's a lot of things going on, right? Like we have, again, subsurface scattering and all of the pieces. We have several texture maps and most importantly, we have the wine glasses over here, which as you can see, are refracting and reflecting both of reflective surfaces and subsurface is elements. So there's a lot of calculations going on. Yes, we could stop this way, way, way sooner. We can increase, for instance, the focal, focal depth, the depth of field to blur out all of these elements over here, but I wanted to keep it as clean as possible. Now we're just going to save Image File, Save Image. And in a very similar way to how we saved the fruit bowl, we're going to save this as chess set underscore rendered Dr. TGA. Remember, at TGA is the one that we want because it's a lot better. It's just has more information. So lookup tables are certain filters that color correcting people use to create specific effects for your elements. Now, here I am getting a weird result though. It could be the alpha channel. So one thing that we might need to add here is like a black. It's actually really weird. I'm not sure what No. Oh, yeah. I didn't want to re-render. I hit Spacebar again, which are re-renders things. Let's just stop this even though it's a little bit weird. So I'm going to save this image, and let's try to save this as a JPEG instead, which is not the best one, but I'm a little bit concerned about that sort of Bloom effect. I'm guessing it comes from the what's the word? Yeah, it might be coming from the from one of the filters. Know. What they said was softwares today just crashing around. Really weird. Anyway. So let's just open this real quick again. And as I was mentioning, so lookup tables or lose our way of color grading. That makes sure to save certain types of information. I'm not the best person to explain how this word because it's a lot of technical stuff going around, but it's pretty mad. It pretty much maps certain types of colors to certain types of values, right? So the way this works is you would get your ungraded effect and you would just literally load one of this lookup tables. And they would automatically graded in such a way that it matches everything. And lookup tables are super important, especially for instance, in film, we have several scenes going around. And if you were to manually try to recreate the same color correction on every film or in every scene, you might not get the exact same result, right? So that's why I look up. They will sort of super, super important. The cool thing about lookup tables is that you can actually download them. So I've included on your project files on the data folder 35 loops that I found online that I think are gonna be really, really helpful to help you get this cinematic look. Again, this is not the solution. If you have a very bad render, even if you add a lookup table, it won't make it look better. You need to have a cool looking render before using this lookup tables. So the way this works is again, with adjustment layers. I'm gonna go here to fool the filter. In. If I double-click here, you're going to see that by default, I'm sorry. For the filter, my bath. It's adjustment layer is a tendency for the filter. There we go. But we're going to change. That's weird. The Color Lookup, sorry, Color Lookup. There we go. It's the final will not follow from there called Luca. So by default, you actually have a lot of color lookups loaded with what's the word? With Photoshop, you can try and check them out, for instance, late, late sunset, right? And it changes the color to make it look like this. You can try moonlight and it was going to give you this sort of effect. You can try candlelight and it's gonna give you this very nice effects. So these are pretty much like your Instagram filters or any social media filters that you can use to change things around. But most of the ones that come by default are not really, they're not really good, right? So even though you might get some interesting results, it's not exactly what you want. So you're gonna hit this button right here that says load 3D. Look, if you'd navigate to the Data folder of your project, I included this loads file and it's all of those ones and some of them are really, really good. You're going to have to try them out and see which one works best for you. But as you can see, you're gonna get some really, really interesting effects. Let's look at another one. Let's try this Coby for instance. And all of this, what they will do is again, they will change the way your image look and they will readapt the colors. If you're doing pretty much what we did with the fruit bulb, but automatically in this dot cube file. So let's try, for instance this arabica, right? And this really matches or it's really close to what we were going for, right? Like it gives us a very, very close effect to what we were seeing on the queens can be the facts. So I really liked this queen arabica or arabica effect. Now, what we can do is even though we already have this, we can still play around with more adjustment layer. So for instance, let's throw in another like curves. And let's do a little bit more contrast. And a couple of areas like right there and right there. Let's throw in like a color balance. I know that we don't have as much color, but why not go to the shadows and maybe make the shadows a little bit warmer? And just because I wanted to make the shadows a little bit warmer, it makes it kind of reminds me of my grandpa. This sort of like older, old timey fashion or old timey got fashioned effect. So there we go. So again, if we were to duplicate this guy right here and bring it to the top, we already had a very good effect when we were coming out of Maya. But once we add this sort of stuff, now we introduce the cinematic feel to it. Again, it's a little bit difficult for me to describe what makes something cinematic. But the best way I can try to explain it to you is if you've seen it before in cinema, if there's a lot of movies that use this sort of effect and you nail it and you managed to get it, then that's going to give you a nice cinematic effect. There's one more thing I'd like to do. This is a very obvious thing, but I call, they're called a letterbox effects. So if I add two black lines, one on top and one at the bottom, this is going to look like the frame of a movie, and it automatically makes it look a little bit more cinematic. I don't know whether this with those two little frames, but it's very common. You'll see this in movies all the time. So I like to add that the sum of my composition is whenever I want to get this, it kind of gives us sort of like a super dynamic or stretched like inhibition effect to the things. Now, this is again where we can add a couple of camera effects are cameras, blooms, camera a dirt cameras, scratches, all of these things that you can look up online. For instance, I do think that we would benefit from having a little bit of that. So if you go online, you can also look for old camera grain texture. And you're gonna find this sort of stuff, right? Like this thing right here. This thing is right here. And it's fine, especially for still images when you just have a one single image, either worst fine. However, be careful not to overdo it. You don't want your compositions to be destroyed or like, like you didn't want the noise to be the hero of the shot, right? Like you want all of your work or loved the work that you did to be telling the story. So in this case, again, we're just going to use a screen with this one, we can press Control L to modify the levels and push the level so that we don't see as much grain. And make sure to bring this really down. You usually don't want to go more than five or 10%, maybe. Like just a couple of scratches here and there. See, it's just dirt is the composition a little bit, and that's the kind of stuff that you'll wanna go for. Maybe, maybe we can add one more vignette, like a manual vignette. So I'm gonna go with a soft round brush, really, really big brush. Not that big. I'm just going to darken the colors here. One thing you can do is play this into overlay so that the shadows are a little bit darker. And again, you don't want to overdo it. You want to go for this sort of like very soft transition, maybe like 18%. So it's just something, it's just like a little something there that's going to give you this very cool looking effect, right? So this looks like an old timey classic leg, right? Like, I don't like maybe some sort of LPA Adreno things. The Godfather in Spanish us and bothering that the Godfather sort of stuff. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough. The better rendered you're, you're gonna have the best renders when you have really good models, really good textures, really good camera work, really good compositions, and all of the effects that we've talked about. Now, here's another thing that I want to share with you. All of this information that we just saved, all of these layers. They can stay right here. And one thing we can do is we can go back to the compositions and look for other compositions. So if we jumped here, for instance, say Hey, you know what, I wanted like a really low competition, like, like really close to the border, maybe something like this. That's fine. We can totally do this. What's going to happen is of course the main focus point is going to change. It's going to be like right there on the middle. And when we render, when we save this image and we export it, let's push this a little bit more like this. Always look for the best possible composition. When we rendered this, what's going to happen is we just bring this, this new composition into Photoshop. And all of the filters that we have, we can save this and they're all going to look the same. And this can be replicated in After Effects. It can, it can be replicated in a new key, Cadbury, replicated in any sort of image software. And you can render a whole animation here from Maya. And then once you export things, it's going to look just amazing. So, yeah, I think that said, let me look, for instance, stop this. Let's save this image real quick. File Save Image. It's gonna be a File Save Image, chests and render. Let's call this is 002 dot JPEG. To get rid of the halo, thinking, let's go to Photoshop real quick, File Open. And literally would just bring this guy into this scene right here, all the way down beneath all of the, all of the elements. And it's going to look exactly the same. Look at that beautiful, right? Very, very cinematic. So, yeah, that's it guys. I'm going to stop you or I'm going to stop the video right here. Make sure you get to this point. Make sure to get some clean renders out of this scene and play around with the filters, play around with the loot table, lookup tables to see which one you find looks the best. I think this first one looks really, really nice. It looks like this very old timey classic effect. And yeah, that's it guys. I'll see you back on the next chapter when we're gonna be talking about interior lighting. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 13. Interior Scene Setup: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're gonna be talking about the interior light setup. This is gonna be a whole chapter on a spooky, very, very spooky scenario, which is this one right here. I'm going to turn off with the textures because they definitely make everything look really, really dark unfortunately or fortunately. And unfortunately, the newest Maya has this thing called the aces 1 SDR video sRGB, color correction mode, which it's technically supposed to be the most accurate one, but it darkens everything quite, quite a bit. So if you want to work with this, you can go into on tone map, SRGB, and you're gonna be able to visualize the kind of texture toward using. However, due to the way that normal maps are being used right now, it doesn't really look that good, so I'm just going to keep assist. That's fine. And we're just going to turn off textures since we're gonna be seeing all of them inside of our render. So for this one, we're actually going to jump into what's the wording to the horror type of things. And there was this series of moving is called a conjuring. Hopefully you guys saw them recently. There's some series is like a whole universe, kind of like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but we'd like spooky things and they have really good cinematography like this one right here. Release carry very high contrast stuff. Lot of cool elements, sometimes warm elements, usually single points of light or very, very specifically placed the lights on the scene that we're gonna be using some of this as a reference for the whole thing. But before we jump onto actually like lighting of the scene, There's two main things I want to talk about. One of them is the how we're going to be lighting this whole thing, right? Because this is an enclosed spaces. You can see most of the geometries is working fine. We have like cables and stuff. And as with everything, we first need to set up where our camera is gonna be, right? So as we've mentioned before, the camera inside of our rendering elements is always supposed, supposed to be. Let me save this by the way, I'm going to save this scene S, let me save it. Normally. There we go. And I'm going to Save Scene As I'm going to call this finished because this is the one that we're going to finish off course. And if you want to start, you can use the hallway stopped. So one thing before we move, quick parenthesis, if for any reason your textures are not properly linked up, you need to go to the Windows, a general editors file path editor window, and all of the images should be here. If you see like a little like a dangerous sign or like a error sign, just select the top root right here. Go to repack files, select your source images folder, and make sure that you have this search subdirectories for files and repack current free resolver files and we'll just repack and as you can see, we should have green arrows indicating that all of the textures have been properly re-pattern. There we go. One thing that I definitely need to do is as what we did with the with the other one. Like, oh my God, thinks that's a that's annoying. Let me let me go back to before I did that because I already had done that for the repeating. Let me just open this. I changed all of the metallic and the roughness back to rock into a linear essentially beat. Well, it's under one hallway. Finish, there we go. So technically, if we take a look at the geometries and then we go to the roughness. It should be said, it should be cetera, man, already did this. Anyway. I'll do this off camera just to save some time. But remember all of the normal maps to be set to raw and stuff like that. It's, it's just to make sure that everything renders the way it's supposed to be rendering. I don't know why it's not working. I I could've sworn that they did this. So just a quick reminder, normal maps should be set to row and then a roughness. It should be said to rot as well. And it should be set to Alpha's luminance. Same for mental illness. So Alpha's luminance, it, this should be set to row. Again. I'm not going to bother right now doing it because it's going to take awhile. I'm just gonna do it off camera. But you need to I'm gonna make sure that you save that one for you guys as the start, so you didn't have to do it. But if you find yourself with a renderer will look a little bit off. That might be it. So we're going to start with our basic sky dome light right here. And as you can see, the scale is quite big, right? So we might need to scale this up just for a visual sake. Remember, we can always leave this at one, or it's 0 scale. And it's gonna be just fine with the sharp cam. We need to find a specific place where this camera is gonna look fine. So we have a lot of very cool Like environments inside of this house, for instance. On this side we'll have just a walls and a hole in the wall. This one right there. I have the stairs. So we can go all the way over here and check out the scene from upstairs like this. We can be at the base of the stairs like there's so many different options that we have. So I'm gonna go to one of these corners and I'm going to position the camera low. Whenever we play around with the camera, it's important again to understand that it's nectar. So if the camera is really low, We're kinda telling the audience that we are either kids or like a mouse or we're not supposed to be there and we're kind of hiding. That's the kind of psychological message that we are portraying whenever the camera is positioning and weird place. On the other way. If we were to place this like let's say over here, which is not that common place for someone to be. We're more like an expert, expert theta, right? Like a security camera or a vigilante thing where we're just Seeing something that's what we're, we're not supposed to be. I'm going to bring this focal length down to like an 800s so that we can go for this very creepy vibe. And again, I'm going to start down here. Let's start with like a shot from downstairs and then we'll move upstairs as well. If we turn on the resolution gate, this is of course what we're gonna be seeing on our rendered. As you can see, by lowering the focal length, we're gonna be able to see more of the scene whenever we're doing interior shots, It's usually better to use wide angle lenses so that we can see more of the room. Yes, it's going to distort the characters quite a bit, but it's going to allow us to see more. That's why usually when you check in on a hotel and you're looking for a booking or something, the rooms look very spacious. And then once you get there, they're like, really like normal rooms. That's because they usually like for publicity saying for marketing, they will use a wide lens just to make it look very, very big and ample when it's really not that much. Okay, so we're gonna do something like this. I would say, again, I'm just going to select the camera and hit S to save a keyframe to make sure to save this one right here. And that we can actually go, let's say to frame 1040 like another, like another one like right here, something like this. So now we have this camera going up and down and it's gonna give us two different abuse of the whole scene. So let's start with this one. I'm going to go back to perspective view. On this one, we're going to actually load the same file that we had before, which was the theme of you remember from our source images, It's this little chapel basement because it's pretty much, it reminds me of the moon, would like a very intense full moon and just like the street lamps, right? So again, you don't have to have the exact photograph for your HDRI. You can use things that look similar or at least give you a similar sort of results. And it's going to work exactly the same. So I'm gonna go here to the options to make sure that the GPU is set up so that we get faster renderers. And we're gonna say Renderer, renderer, and we're going to render it through the shotgun. Actually, I run them through the traditional Maya RenderView. That's fine. I'll just show you how this works. There we go. Let's close that up and let's just render on the Arnold GPU. Let's just wait for the render over here. And this is what we got. Let's of course go to the shop cam. And this is what we're seeing. Now. Again, we're having the same issue that we had before, but now it's a little bit different, right? Because when we were doing traditional lights, we always need to push the exposure all the way up so we could see some light on the scene. Since we're now in an enclosed space, the problem is that yes, we are getting light, but it's so, so few rays that are coming in here that we're not really getting as much information inside of the scene. So we really need to push the exposure as you can see all of the lights quite a bit to get a difference. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to grab this guy right here. I'm going to push the intensity to five, or sorry, not the intensity of the exposure down here, five. Now, if we're render again with exposure set to 0, of course, this is what we're going to get. So now we're at least to seeing something. It looks very nice, very moody, very spooky. But still not enough, right? Like the amount of samples that we're getting here, it's not really enough. So let's do a couple of things. First of all, let's turn off the camera visibility. I don't want to use the camera. We're going to use a different image later on to place here on the window. As you can see, the problem here is we don't have enough samples, right? Like all of the indirect light that we're getting from the HDR, It's getting trapped, if you wish, on the outer walls of our geometry. And we're not really getting enough energy inside of this, in this scene. Now, technically, technically, there is one way to solve this and that's by using these things called the lights and they're called the light portals. So light portals are supposed to be these big shapes, pretty much like, like area lights that will push more sample information towards the inside of the house. I've mentioned this once before. So they're kind of like, like filters, right? Like like doorways for phonons and for all of the information on light information to get in here and give us a better sample. The instructions, if you were to go to the documentation, will tell you to place one of this board lights everywhere. You're going to have like a light entrance. So in every single window, we should have one of these things. So I'm going to position four of this because we have this three windows and then we have this big hole on the top here. So this one, oh, this one right here. Let's rotate this minus 90 degrees. There we go. You can scale it to make the shapes fit as nice as possible. Now, here's the deal though. I don't know if it actually works. What they mean by this is we render this. I really don't see that much of a difference. I was doing some tests before recording this. And I think my problem here is that we're not using CPU. So I think this is one of those lights that only works with TPU, or at least it works better with CPU. We're gonna get a better effect because they really have no specific setting. Like if you were to select any of these guys right here and you go to the shape. There's nothing, absolutely nothing that there's absolutely nothing we can calculate this bounding box, but it's not really going to do anything. As you can see here. We really don't have anything. The one that's going to control a little bit of this is actually the dome light. So if we go to the dome light and we go here to the portal mode, you're going to see that it says Interior only. So it technically should be using these elements to push light. Through the through the portables and make sure that the lights a little bit better. Again, unfortunately, it's not really the case. I do like to add them just in case there's like a couple of folders or elements here and there that are really being pushed into the scene. But one of the things that's going to give you a better result is of course, the sampling on the actual sampling size. So if we enable that, that subsampling now and we hit render by giving them more time to render, we're gonna get a little bit more information. So as you can see, all of those black pixels are becoming more and more illuminated and we're actually getting some light into the scene. So we'd interiors. One of the things that you're going to know this is that we're definitely going to have more samples. We need more samples. Usually when you're in the exterior, a lot of light is hitting the scene. And therefore you don't need high samples because there's a lot of light information. But for interior, since you're definitely going to need and that's usually going to bring your render times quite a bit higher. Okay, just keep, just keep that in mind. But yeah, as you can see, now we're getting something interesting. We're getting this effect. And it's now time to help this effect, this like very basic ambient light effect, give us a better result. Now here you can already like if we were to push this a little bit more, like we could get an idea of how much more we want to push it. So if we push it to six, we're gonna get a little bit more light, but I don't want to do that. Whenever I use my HDRI. I like to keep them as a secondary character. I don't like them to be the main the main light source in my scene. They're just there to help me support the general thing. So how are we going to support a general thing? Well, we do know that we have a moon coming from the top right. So why not just add a light, airy light. Change the area light to a shape with the Vicky. I'm just going to snap it up here, make it bigger. Rotate it so that's pushing down like this. Almost there, almost there. Sorry, there you go. It doesn't really matter. And we're just going to position it right here. So we're going to have a big spotlight, like a big window that's just like getting light into the scene. Now, of course, there's one really needs to look like a really high number, like 15. And this is one of the first things that you're going to know this as well. Since we're working with a real-world scale element, we are going to need quite a bit of light if we want to see light coming down here. So there's two options here. We already know the two options that we can use to get more light. We can either lower the spread to make this thing more like a spotlight. And now you can see that there's more light coming down here on the hallway, or we can definitely just increase the exposure. So if we start increasing the exposure, there's gonna be more and more light going into the scene. And we're gonna be able to get this very cool effect. Now we can play around again with this breath to soften it up maybe and get a different effect. I actually don't like this effect because it looks like a, like a white lamp and I will have more like a light shaft. So I'm going to bring this thing down or the spread down rather. I'm going to kick this pusher kinda high like this. There we go. We're going to have a really nice, interesting light effect over here. And of course, all of this light bleed all the way here. We're definitely going to use cold temperature and let's push it to the, towards the blue side. We get this very interesting, creepy look. Now, we also have this sort of like streetlights right coming into the scene. And here's again where you can decide, do I want, do I want this like nice or interesting orange shadow right here? Because that orange shadow is coming from one of this like a thing. He's on the outside and it's going into this wall and going right there's probably like that one right there. So if you don't want that shadow, we can use the light blockers to start blocking on our lights. And you can say, Hey, you know what, I'm just going to have a big, huge Blaine over here. Let's rotate a little bit and push it up. And now if we take a look at the Render, what's going to happen is we're going to get rid of a lot of that orangey color. It's gonna be a lot less because we're not letting all of those rates of information getting here. That's the kinda stuff that people don't see. Like you're not going to see how we're manipulating the scene to generate something a little bit more interesting. Now, as I've mentioned, we can tell stories through the way in which we place lights. We can tell stories. So why not tell the story of a really creepy door and really creepy room that we're not seeing right now, right? Like maybe we want the shadow of a door right here. Can we do that? Yes, of course, we can do that. We're gonna go Arnold lights and we're going to introduce a new area light. In this area light, we're going to make it the shape of a door. So we're going to make this quite big over here and tall. And let's position this door where we would imagine it to be. So probably like maybe maybe one this corner right here. So we're going to rotate this around. And we're going to position it right here. Now, even though we don't have a door, even though there is no door where no wind or nothing, we can still make it look like there's light coming from here. Okay? So we're gonna go to our render and then we render, we're not really going to see anything, but as soon as we start increasing the exposure, Let's try. We'd like exclosure of ten when we hit play, or maybe even more. Let's try 20. Like really intense. We should start seeing something. You can see this whole pillar is now being illuminated due to the light. Let's bring the spread all the way down. Hit Render. And again, here's where we're not. There's no one holding our hands and saying you can't do this. The most important thing is the shot. So why not push this thing to the side like this? Let's push this out of the wall so that we can see the whole thing. And maybe I want the element or the shadow to be projected right there. So just move it around, move the light around, bring the spread even lower. And now we're going to have a very creepy, interesting light looking right there. That's the story that we're telling. Like there's a doorway right there That's giving us this slide. Let's change the temperature of the light. Let's go for a very warm light. Maybe there's like a fireplace or something. And now we can think about modifying the intensity of this thing and just changing it a little bit. So there's not that much light. And look at that super, super creepy vibe. I'm the true like that to be honest, it's creating a sort of like a weird composition. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to keep it, but I'm going to move it. And instead of having it on the side, I want to have it on the back. Let's just play here. There we go. That's a lot better. So let's push this back. There we go. Look at that, look at how nice this effect looks right here. And we can see a little bit of the shadow back there on the stairs. I'm actually going to push this a little bit more. So we get a little bit of the series and all of the projection that back there. So we have this very intense soft light coming from the top. And then we have this very cinematic get red light coming from the front, probably going to decrease the intensity a little bit. I don't want to overexpose it and maybe not as, not as a warm, something like this. Now you guys read it for the next thing right here. What have we set about? Playing around with things that are not really there or the character or the audience is not going to see. What if we add like a really creepy silhouette right here on this door? How can we do that? Let's just grab the sphere. Very basic sphere. Let's flatten it out. So it's this sort of like an M&M, like this. And then I'm just going to grab all of this faces, extrude them down. And then grabbed a couple of them. A sudden something like bare. And it's pretty much like treating it like a mannequin, right? So just grab a couple of these phases, Control E to extrude, and then R to scale. And we're just going to scale this out like this. And what we're gonna do is we're going to place this silhouette right in front of the light. On the position, of course, where the audience is not going to see that. But it should project this very creepy shadow onto the scene. Let's see if we can see it. Probably needs to be a little bit bigger. There we go. Let's bring it up. I want to see the shadow right there on the back. See that? Very simple, very subtle. But there's something hiding there, something that's going to tell a story when people will look at this are going to be like, Well what the **** is. Well, what the **** do we have back there, right? And that's the kinda stuff that you want to hide or do you want to play around on your productions to make things look a little bit more interesting. So, yeah, this is it guys, I'm going to stop the video right here. This is just the basic block of unforeseen. We're going to continue adding more stuff because as you can see, everything is really dark right now. We can't really see anything. And even though this is a very cool and interesting composition, we need to eliminate this a little bit better to get a sense of how how big and how dangerous this hallway is. So make sure to get to this point, guys, make sure to set up your scene properly. As I've mentioned, I'm gonna be changing some of the materials because for instance, I remembered this was a little bit more shiny like gold. It's just a matter of going there. Remember roughness, normal and metallic should be set to raw and metallic and roughen it should have the Alpha's luminance turn out to make sure everything is working as accordingly. So yeah, make sure to get here, guys and I'll see you back on the next video. Bye bye. 14. Creating Fog: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with the next part of the rendering here and we're going to talk about Fock. But before we go and talk about fog, we need to understand what's going on here on the scene and the reason why we needed of course, we're doing a creepy scene, like a spooky scene, and we want things to look the best possible way. And fog is one of those things that gives a lot of atmosphere and the law of effects to the whole thing. But the real reason why I want to add to the scene is because as you can see right here, even though we have a really nice setup so far, it's really dark, right? Like we really can't see anything on the walls or on this pillar right here. And yes, we're gonna be adding a couple of more lights. I'm going to show you a couple of new tricks here. But the fog is one of those things that's really good for illumination purposes, even, even if it might not seem like it. Because what fog does is, as you know, it's just like particles of water and they diffuse lights kinda like having a lot of really, really, really small mirrors all over the place. Now, I'm going to preface this by saying that fog is really expensive. So this is not the only way to do fog. There's a lot of post-processing things that they do in post-production, where you can add certain things like smoke and things like that. Because having a general formula where we're about to do is really expensive or render time. So I'm gonna go here to the Arnold renderer setup. And we're gonna go here too. But the environment and on the atmosphere option, we're going to click this little button and we're going to select Create a atmosphere volume. Now why atmosphere volume and not ****, because atmosphere is going to be like a global effect and are a global judges to look for this one. It really doesn't play really well with the GPU options. So we're gonna go with atmosphere volume. By default, nothing's going to happen. Give me just 1 second. There we go. Sorry, I don't know why my taskbar sometimes shows. Anyway. So when we do this by default, nothing's going to happen, like we're just going to render. And that's gonna be exactly the same because we have not properly done the render to work. Now as you can see, I'm getting this error right here. This is something that I discovered while preparing this class. It says optic stack overflow exception encountered, blah, blah. What's pretty much telling us, Hey, you need to close this and just open it up and get it. Because anytime we add something new to the scene, we've talked about this before. Anybody? Anytime we add a material, a geometry, a light, whatever the Arnold render package has to update, right? So you can also go here to update full team, but I prefer just to close it and open that up again. So if we go shut them again, as you can see, we no longer get this error right here. It's showing here, but it's, it's no longer there. You can just clean this and this. And anytime we select anything else and we just click again, it's going to, it's going to work. So make sure to refresh your scene, make sure to save your scene as well. Sometimes when you don't have like it's untitled scene, it doesn't work as well. There are several things in Maya that break when you haven't saved your scene. So make sure you do that. Now, where is the node? We can't see anything right here, like the outliner does not show where the fog is. And that's because this is actually working as a sort of like global variable that's not available to us. So there's two ways to get here. First of all, you can go to the atmosphere and click this little black arrow. And that's going to bring us to the node. And the other one which I actually prefer is going to display options and turning off this thing that says DAG objects only back objects. So now as you can see, we're going to see a lot of different things here. We don't need all of this is pretty much every single thing that's on the scene or it's being referenced by the scene, it's going to be now shown. Normally when we don't have the thing, we only see what's being displayed. So in this case, when we turn this off, it's everything, the textures, the files and notes, everything. So if we look through this nodes, you're going to find this one right here that says ai atmosphere volume. You can click that one right there and that's it. So both of them work. I actually, I said I prefer that OneNote through this. I prefer this one right here. So just go again into render settings, go into Arnold renderer, and we select the atmosphere right here. Now, here's where we're going to have the different things that we can change around to make sure that this looks as nice as possible. The first one is of course a density. If we bring this to a density of one, it's going to be really, really, really high. And then what's going to happen is there's going to be so, so much fog that delights, which is going to diffuse pretty much everywhere. And we're gonna get this overblown effects. So you usually don't want to have super high numbers. Let's try something like pointed one, which might seem like a very, very small effect. As you can see, it's still quite a lot of light like there's so much fog that every single particle of light is being refracted and bounced around. And that's where we get the super wide. The fact if that's what you want to go for it then fine. But in our case, we're going to go super low, 0.01. Let's try that. And if we render again, That's looking a little bit better. Now we can see this very nice God race. This is one of the cool things about the default using fog is that objects and lights will be occluded. So we're gonna get this really interesting effects. Now let's bring this even higher. So let's do 0.001 and that's pretty much as low as we can go. And that's a little bit unfortunate because I would like to go a little bit lower. But if I tried to place another CEO, yes, it's going to work, but I'm not going to be able to see it here. So it's a little bit counter-intuitive, but my only shows three float values even though I did input the 0.001. So if I do 0, let's say five, for instance, it should be more than this. And if we take a look, yes, it is indeed more than this, but it's going to display it as 0.001, even though I know it's not 0.001. Just keep in mind that a little bit hacky, but it works. So we're gonna have to work with very, very small samples. Now the reason why we need to work with small samples is because we're in that very small scene. It's just a room, so we need to bring these things down. Now, another thing we can do to attenuate a little bit of this is this thing called attenuation. So we bring the attenuation up, as you can see, it's kinda like toning down the amount of fog that we get is we're telling the light that it's gonna be dying as it goes further and further along the path of the file. So now if we go back to 0.001, we should get a little bit more ******. Still a bit too much for my taste. So 0.0005, That's what I'm going to go for. This looks a little bit better because I can at least see the things that are back here. So yeah, there we go. Very, very simple thing that we can do here and that's gonna give us a nice result. Of course, we can change the color of the fog. So if we go for a pink fog, this is going to be a pink frock. If you were gonna go for the sort of like haunted mansion, sort of like green frog. Then we go and get that. So you're free to change the color on your composition and that's gonna give you a very nice result. Be very careful when changing this one right here, because this is going to darken. You're seeing even more. This is more like smoke. If we bring this down into a darker color is more like if we're having Smoke on the scene. And so I always recommend keeping default on the white color so that we get this very, very cool effect. And I think 0.0005 still too much. I'm going to go 0.0003 and hit Enter. It's going to be a little bit less. And it's gonna give you a, give us a nice result. Now, as you can imagine that this is also going to increase our render time because you can see the progress bar here is trying to go higher and higher and the samples, it's going to be really, really noisy because there's a lot of particles in the air that's gonna be, gonna be changing this effect. Now, here's one interesting thing. I'm going to pause this real quick. Color at the end of the day is nothing more than a Mac, right? Like we can, we can chart or we can load the map in here and we can generate interesting results. So for instance, if I were to go here to the color options and lowly in a checker pattern and render this. What's going to happen is certain parts of the fog are going to be completely white and certain parts of the, of the other parts that are gonna be completely black and we get this really, really weird result, but that's not exactly what I wanted to do. Of course, lets go back with this little arrows right here. There we go. Let's break the connection right there. And what we can do instead of say, hey, you know what, like don't use a checker, use a fractal for instance, like a fractal noise. If we do this, what's going to happen is there's going to be a little bit of irregularities on the ****. It might be a little bit difficult to see them right now. But if we were to increase, for instance, the threshold or increase the ratio, play around with some of these things right here. We're going to start seeing a little bit more berries. And so not going to look as uniform as what we had before. There's gonna be a couple of spots where the fox is not gonna be as, as evidenced. And it's a good way to add variation. You can of course map your own textures over here. Right now. I think just doing this sort of thing should work quite nice. I like that one right there. Cool. So you can see it's a little bit difficult to know this, but there's a little bit of a weird noise going on. Now, if you want to have this sort of like a super realistic clouds and fog leg with a smoke machine. Then we're talking about volumes, we're talking about smoke, and that's a whole different thing here inside of Maya, you can use Bifrost to get there. But for the purposes of this tutorial of the series, we're not going to be able to cover that. So now that we have this, I still feel like we need a little bit more light. It looks good. I liked the overall feel and tone. I know I can play around with the Gamma and Gamma. I'm always pronouncing like in Spanish gamma. The gamma and ring the colors in any different direction. What I mean by this is if I were to add an image or a color correct image, you guys know that we can push the gamma up a little bit. And that's going to make sure that the blacks are now this black. Blacks are not as black and we can even bring the contrast down. And things are gonna be like flatter, but it's also not great, right? So before doing any sort of post-production thing, we should always try to solve things by utilizing what we have here on the engine, on the render engine. So here's what we're going to talk about, something called soft boxes. And you've probably seen this one's around. Let me show you. So if you've ever gone to a photo studio, you've probably seen this soft boxes around the softbox is are really good. I actually have a couple of Mexican neither soft boxes here on my on my recording. So you probably have seen them before in some of my other content. But this off boxes that they have are just like a big lamp. We they like what's the word with a white the cloth on top of it that diffuses the light and therefore we get softer shadows. And so foxes are really, really good because you can hide them very easily. They're usually small. I mean, these ones are quite big, but you can have really small soft boxes and create an interesting effects. So for instance, if I were to see this thing right here, I need a little bit of light here and I need a little bit of light here, but I don't want to have a light source because that's going to create a different effect. So what I do here, Arnold lights, we get the area light and we go of course, for a big, big, big area like right here. This big area light probably not as big. We're definitely want to have this on one side of the camera so we don't really see the element which is going to be pushing some light to the side of the scene like this. And I'm going to start quite high. One thing I like to do this is a nice little trick that I was taught by one of my teachers back in the day is usually a weird color. Go for a pink color just so that you can see where the samples of those pink color are going. So for instance, right now, I do this and I really don't see a lot of pink. I see a little bit of pink right there. I'm not even sure if that's my light or not. So let's bring this even higher. And there we go. Now, we can definitely see the pink effect, right? So we know a 20 is gonna be way, way too much. 15 seems to not be enough yet. So 16, 18, for instance. Okay, aliens gave me a better result. 17 looks a little bit better. Another thing we can do, of course, this is not forgetting about one of the most important principles of light and that's physicality. If we bring physically like if we physically move this light to this area right here and we have this sort of like pink light on S area. We're going to be able to eliminate this thing right there. There we go. So now that we have this, we can go back to a normal white color and always, always play around with colors. So in this case, since we have this very warm color coming from the door under the downstream section, I would definitely go for something similar. So I'm going to bring this thing into a warm tone right there. Again. I'm not sure how I can stress this enough. Hopefully with me repeating this so many times you guys are getting the idea. Is this a scenario that you would find normally in this sort of hallways? No, never, you will never find like a floating light like this, but it makes it look better. And that's the kinda stuff that we need to look for us as we're like lightening up a scene. When you go to the movie sets, you're going to find on a lot of lights everywhere. Sometimes there's like super small lights pointing specifically to specific parts of the set that directors want to make sure that there are emphasized enough so you don't have to follow the sort of realistic everything has to make sense a workflow. You can play around and do very crazy stuff like this one right here, adding one extra light just to give this sort of like nice warm effect on this specific part. Let me bring the spread down within. Want to bring the spread down for this one. Quite a bit. There we go. And of course the exposure has to go down. Just play around here with exposure until we get something that just indicates that there's something there. Right? Okay. That's that's the that's the pillar that I want to emphasize. Maybe even like a little bit lower like here. And now that I have a nice emphasis, It's all a matter of, of getting a proper balance on the composition. Something like this. So it makes it look or it's gonna make it look like there's a little bit of light bleed going onto the stairs, right? We can use this or like framing device up here to have like dark colors. But I didn't want this thing to be like over, all over the top. Maybe I'm tempted to just kill this slide. I'm gonna go Art click and I'm going to go to object mode. There we go. So we can scale this up. And again, it's gonna be like a weird spot like that. We're going to have right there. There we go. That's looks way, way better, slower this a little bit more. That's it. Now since I already liked this one and I feel like it looks good, we can duplicate this, move it around and pointed to work with this other pieces. So now we should have, Let's bring this closer to the pillar right there. There we go. See that. So now we're beginning this pillar into the action. We're adding this extra, extra light of the whole scene. And we're, we're making sure that the composition from a competition standpoint, we get a really, really cool effect thing, maybe a little bit back, so we don't have as much light. There we go. That's going to give us I really, really, really cool effect. So as you can see, the amount of flights that we're going to add, we're pretty much free to add as many lights if we want. There's no limit to the amount of light. So we can have as long as they make sense and as long as they look good, I think I would like to add one more light under the original model right here, there's a lamp. You can see this one right here. And I'm going to add a mesh light on this light bulb so that we get some soft lights going and Indian dating or flooding the whole scene. So I'm gonna grab this guy right here. I remember for mesh lights, we're gonna go Arnold lights and we're going to say Mesh light. This is going to create a new note. We don't need this to be visible, that's fine. We definitely need to increase this. So let's go for like 15 exposure. I'm definitely going to use color temperature is going to be even warmer. Let's go to like a 20. There we go. So that's, that's giving us a lot more light. This is of course it's hoping one of the issues that we had before and I do like how it looks like it doesn't look that bad, but I do think it's adding a little bit too much noise or too much light to the scene. So let's lower this down. Let's go 17. And it's still gonna be there. It might not look like much, but it's there. I know that we're getting those elements. Those are called Fireflies by the way. That's one of the things that we're gonna be focusing with the samples. Remember, when I mentioned that some lights, we can change the samples. This is one of those lights. You can see that the samples on the slides are not high enough and that's where we're getting those horrible fireflies. So here for instance, let's bring this to five. And that should clean up some of the fireflies, should give them a little bit more and more detailed. Now, one of the things that's going to definitely solve that problem is going to be that the noise that inertia will immediately detect that there's an outlier right there and it will soften it out to be appropriate measurement. So yeah, maybe 18 or safety too much. It looks good. I think it looks good. It's not too much, not too little. So I think I think we're in a good position here. Cool. So yeah, that's it. I do think it would be cool to move the r creepy guy here to let the wall to this section right here. I'm going to grab the creepy guy and the creepy line right here. And I'm gonna move this thing a little bit to the side so that we can see the shadow. Again from a competition standpoint. There we go. Something like this. Or I mean we can, another thing is we can keep the light. I kinda like it there. Let's just be very careful how we, how we approach this because I don't want to have a lot of light here. I don't mind having the light there under the stairs. I do think it's a little bit too high on the light, so I'm going to bring the light down. So we just see the, the framing is going to look really big. So let's just move him down there. There we go. What do you guys think? I kind of liked him being a little bit hidden by that, by the stairs. Give it a little bit more of a mysterious RS. So let's just create a little bit of overlap there. Just a little bit because I don't want him to be like an invisible. I want I don't want people to miss it. I think it's a very, very important part of the whole thing. Now there's this beam right here in the middle of the room. That's kinda like creating a weird effect. We can just move it to the side. I think it will be, I think it'd be better if we move with a little bit. That's another thing. We haven't really talked about composition that much. I mean, we've talked about like the rule of thirds and the Fibonacci or the golden ratio where there's sort of like spiral going on and we want to follow it a little bit. But if you find that something's not working for your competition, the best thing you can do is just move it out of the way. Move it, tweak it a little bit, change it. Unless of course you're following a concept and you need to be super truthful to it. But more often than not, you're going to have the chance to just like a more of a couple of things around. So in this case, that thing right there, I think it's working quite, quite nice. So I'm going to stop the video right here, guys, there's one more like that. I want to show you that we're gonna do up here, maybe something over here as well, a little bit of a light bleed as well. But yeah, other than that, I think we're in a really, really good position, so hang on tight. I'll see you back on the next video. 15. Using Gobos: Hi guys, welcome back to our next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with a light, a gobo. This is a very, very old concept. This actually, I think it might predate the, what's the word cinema and film, even in theater. There has been this used for things called a light Goebbels. Goebbels are nothing more than a mask. It's just a mask that they placed on top of a light so that they create interesting shapes for the scenario for stage two to have a more interesting look. So, for instance, this one imagine that you're doing a play where the main environments like a factory and besides the prompts and the decoration that you have there, you add, this sort of goes to your lights so that it looks like there's like beams and the scaffolding and things being projected on top of your characters and the actors. So there they're easy way to introduce a global instead of Arnold, but it uses an image. And the problem with using an image, as you guys know, is that images can come in really low resolutions and that resolution gets transmitted down into the Gobo inside of your scene. So for you guys, I'm providing a another, I'm actually going to be showing you another technique that we can use. So first of all, I am going to, what's the word? I actually want to grab this thing and let's just scale this down to 0. There we go. Shouldn't change anything as we've seen before. But in your Assets folder view, say File, Import, Assets folder, you're going to find this thing called the old joke. I actually got this from SP3, so you speak tree to create this tree right here, as you can see, it has this information right? Now. The only problem with this one, this is you can see it actually comes with the foliage of the elements. Let's see where this out. And I don't want that. If I were to go into the attribute editor, it's just going to see that there's several materials. We have the bark, the cluster, the white coat, white oak 33 materials pretty much. If you go to the, to the Hypershade real quick. And, uh, we are right-click and select faces. We can look for this one. It's not the bark. It's probably going to be, the worse it it's probably gonna be the, the cluster could be clustered. Right-click, I'm going to say select objects material. There we go, and we'll just delete that. That's, that's what we want. So I'll just delete the faces of the, of that cluster. We don't even need to have a material because we're not actually gonna be seeing these tree. We can actually assign just the basic Lambert material. Once you're assigned a Lambert material, you can go back to the Hypershade. And one very cool thing that you can do is say Edit optimized scene size or delete unused nodes, sorry. And this will delete anything that we're not using currently. So therefore, it's just gonna be free. And the advantage of using like an actual shape like this one is that if we place a light outside of the house, we can actually get all of the branches projected onto the wall. And this is going to make things look way, way, way more real, realistic right now if I if I were to just hit Render, yes, we might see a little bit of light block because there's more shapes. So the general elements and gentlemen effects from our environment are gonna be slightly blocked, but I want to have more intense light. So again, maybe it's the maybe it's the moonlight or something. Let's go to Arnold lights and assign an area light or add a new area light. And remember the secret with airlines, especially if we want a harsh shadows, is to keep them small. So this is gonna be like a spotlight. It's gonna be shining towards that area. There are some very cool trick. Let me see if it works still now doesn't work anymore. That's a shame. There's a couple of vendors that allow you to point this thing to specific places. I'm going to show you another way to do this. This is a little bit more. It has to do with rigging, but if you follow along, you're gonna be able to create a very nice a connection here. I'm going to go File, I'm going to create that. I'm going to create a locator right here. Then I'm going to do, we can make the locator bigger. Ace, I can select the locator and then the light. And we can go to rigging constraint. And we're gonna do this thing called an aim constraint. And if you leave it by default, really doesn't matter that much. What's going to happen is now this thing is going to follow this element right here, but as you can see, it's not following with the proper axis. So the axis that this thing is going to be using is the negative z-axis. So the aim vector is going to be negative one over here because this is x, y, and z. So again, just an aim constraint 00 minus one on the Inspector and hit Apply, the driver driven apply. And that wherever this thing goes, the light is going to follow. So why is this useful? Well, because I can just place my thing right here on the window. And now I'm completely sure that this thing is gonna be following it. And if I were to move this thing around, it's still going to try and follow it. So it's always going to follow the direction of the constraint right there. This is, again, a little bit of reading, but it's going to be useful for word about to do. So. Just move this thing closer to the window like this. And we definitely need quite a bit of expulsion and start something like 20. And again, as what we did with the lights and since we have more lights in the scene, It's important that we know what new light we're getting there. So let's just start with this very pink color. And then we hit Render. As you can see, 20 exposure is not enough. And the reason it's not enough is we haven't changed the spread. So even though yes, we're using a small light, the spread still quite big. So let's bring this all the way up. Actually, let's go render and I'm going to say update full scene. And now when we render, we should be seeing, we should be able to see some light coming from the window. Let's wait for the render to start. Let me pause real quick. Wait for this to start. There we go. So as you can see, we are getting the light into the scene through this elements right here, which are looking interesting but not good enough just yet. That's fine. Now, this is of course, going to be yellow bit noisier and stuff. But so far I like how this is looking. Let's go back to this guy right here. And let's bring the spread even lower. Let's try this again. There we go. So now we can see the rate that the superintendent a ray of light coming through the window. I think I'm actually going to make this thing a little bit bigger, taller. I'm going to move this a little bit to the side because I want this light to be reflected on the back wall right there. So there we go, That's a little bit better. And as you can see on the shapes right there, we should be seeing some of the shapes from a D tree, which is this one right here. Now to make or get some better shapes. Let's the tree closer to the light source because it closer, actually closer to the window. Because the closer we are to the target of our scene, the nicer the shadows are gonna be remembered that the farther away an object is, the softer the shadows will appear. You can see some of that interesting shapes right there. And we're also creating this interesting pattern where light is bouncing in some of some sort of like different directions right? Now if we want to make this thing a little bit more inclined, we can definitely like push this up. There we go. Something like this looks interesting. Now we have this very nice ray of light going into the center. We could even, again, talking about giving more importance or more storytelling. We can rotate this around so that the light is shining right there on the other wall that we're, we're still missing. We can of course grab our constraint right here and move it around a little bit so that we find the perfect position like that. Let's move the tree. As you can see, it's a little bit difficult to know this, but there are like some god rays coming there from the tree. Let's see if like pushing the tree for up can block some more of those race. Creed, some harsher shadows. Cool. There we go. Now that we have something interesting now where they have all of those rays of light coming into the scene. Now we can of course, modify the color back to a normal color, white color, and play around with the color temperature and maybe make this thing a little bit bluer, right? Like a lot cooler. Technically, the light of the moon is supposed to be warm because it's reflecting the light of the sun which is warm. But we've been conditioned to think that it's not that way due to quality wouldn't films. So yeah, but I mean, in this case, that's totally fine. There we go. We have that the light shafts. I can see some of the light shafts right there. I think we're getting some nice results and other thing we can do if we want a little bit more occlusion, let's just duplicate this tree. Just add one more right there because we're never going to see this tree, right? It's only helping us with the geometry side of things. And it's just again, blocking some of the light and we're getting some interesting shadows right there. Because I don't think we can go any lower on the on the, what's the word on the spread. We could try making this even smaller. If that works a little bit better, yeah, that works a little bit better. Because you can see now there's some more interesting shadows there on the wall. Give it even smaller, kind of like a, like a spotlight. Now we can actually see the sum of the random stuff there on the shadow. There we go. So that's the kind of stuff that we can do. And as you can see, it's going to add another level of complexity to the whole scene. Now we have this very interesting like light shafts coming from the kitchen or from wherever this mysterious figure is. We always have this guy's coming from that from the top right. Now, technically we could add more of this if we want to, like if we want to add some more coming from the top or maybe from this window, we can do so. But usually you don't want to have a lot of light sources competing against, against each other because you're going to confuse the audience. Yeah, I really like this one. I think it looks quite, quite nice wondering what will happen if we duplicated this slide to create a second one. Because they're really narrow, right? So I know that by duplicating, I'm not really adding more likely to the scene. I'm just I'm just doing this. I do think they're a little bit overexposed now, so I'm going to grab both of them. And let's bring the exposure down to 17. And yes, we're going to have that sort of nice shadow coming there. Maybe 17 is a way to go. 18. Cool. So now the whole scene is looking quite, quite, quite nice. I think it's time that we start adding a little bit more effects to the whole thing. And the one thing that is really bothering me is the fact that we have a really strong light on this area, like on the pillar here, on the pillar here on the door, but there's nothing here on the actual floor. So I would like to add something there. And the best or easiest way to do that is by just duplicating the one that we already have or using a new one. Let's, let's hit the silhouette and hit F. And again, breaking a little bit of what would be in reality, I'm just gonna go Arnold lights, Area Light. And I'm just going to use an area light here on the floor. I just want to shine a little bit of light on the floor following pretty much the same direction that we're following from the from the door to get something. So let's start with 15 big light. It's definitely going to be warm. So let's bring this down and let's take a look. Again. What I want is I want a little bit of light bleed here on the underground. Let's go back to Shotgun. I can definitely see a little bit more, but I definitely want a little bit more as well. So let's increase this. Whoa, something like this. And then again, what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to break a little bit of the rules. I'm just going to bring this thing down like this. I might even just like a royalty this around. So that's only like a illuminating the floor. We definitely need to bring the spread down. There we go. This is the kind of stuff that I was looking for. So again, this will be quite difficult to achieve on what's a word on a more traditional, on a more traditional process right on the set. It's definitely possible, but it will be a little bit trickier. But thanks to the CGI world, we can play around them, break some of the physicality or things that we would normally expect on it and a scene and get something a little bit more interesting. So I think I think I'm going to stop it right here, guys. So far we've looked at the whole all of the setup to get this very nice, interesting elimination. We definitely need something like I feel like we're missing something here. This is a very cool scene, but we're missing something to make this thing look even better. I'm thinking about adding something creepy here, a child story or something like that. But maybe, maybe we'll leave that for another time because there's still a lot of topics that I wanted to cover. And there's a couple of other things that we're gonna be exploring. I think I'm going to leave it for like this for now. And in the next video we're going to take a look at the post-production because we still need to do a little bit of post-production on this thing on the scene to get the final frame for our horror films. So, yeah, hang on tight and I'll see you on the next one. Bye bye. 16. Adding Details: Hi guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. So I couldn't control myself. And we're gonna be adding details because I felt like this was it's looking so good and it will be way, way better if we just add one little extra touch on the cinematic n, right? So one of the biggest movies in regards to scary stuff is of course it, you hopefully saw that remake. Or if you saw the original meaning series back in the 90s, then you'd remember this super creepy clowns. And one of the signature thinks about the Klan west, of course, a red balloon. So I thought it will be quite easy to do a red balloon. So let's do it. I'm actually going to do it real quick for you guys. And I'm going to do it here on the scene. Normally I would do it this as separate scene, but super, super easy. We're just going to grab his fear like this. And I'm going to grab the lowest buzzy. I'm going to press B, which is soft selection. And then if B and middle mouse click and drag to get trade this thing, which by the way, I'm not sure when this gar nicht thing is now turned on. There we go. And now we can just push this thing down. So you can see right there. And then that's just going to give us a sort of like a baloney, baloney shape. And I'm going to make this in a little bit thinner because balloons tend to like thin out a little bit like this. If you want, if you want to be like super, super perfect about this, we can just believe a couple of this edges to make sure that we get this very nice, like elongated effect. Now for the little thinky that it has right here, I'm just going to use a cone. I'm going to V doesn't have the cone right there. Make this thing bigger. And the cone. So really weird shaped because it has an angle right here which we don't want. And then I'm going to use my cut tool to cut the tip out. So just cut the tip like this. Don't worry if you don't, you don't feel so confident and modeling, I'll share this model with you as well. Control E to extrude this. We're just going to extrude this. So when we smooth this out, and then usually there's a little bit of an extra border here on the, on the edge, like this. Now you might say that we really need to model all of this and we could keep it really simple. But I think one of the things that's really adds now to give this a little bit more natural, LET I'm going to use again self-selection. And with a small element here. I'm just going to switch this around. There we go. Now of course, make this smaller so that it matches the proper. Why do you would expect from a proper size? Let's give it a little bit of a switch there. I'm, one of the most common things we 3D is that it's too perfect. So by making it not as perfect, slightly skewed and stuff, That's what's going to give it the look that we're going for. So let's bring this to the center. What, let's combine this into a single object. Scale it down and look a little bit. And it's gonna be right there floating on the, floating on the, on the center of the stage, right? Super creepy. Now, I do want to add a tooth That's like resting on the underground. So to do this, I'm going to isolate this. I'm gonna go to the front view. And I'm gonna go to Create curve Tools, EP curve. There's going to start right there. I'm just going to start clicking a couple of times. I think we'll go there underground. And then a couple of more now, I know I can't see it because it's isolated. It's right there. So you can see. Now again, just to give this thing a little bit more for believability, let's spare around with how we will expect the gravity to fall and to get this chord on the ground. So all of this chord, the team would be on the ground like this. Should look like It's actually like Hanging. Let's go to the right view because as you can see, it's really flat. So on the right view, we're of course going to move the chord back to the balloon like this. We can play around with the perspective on the right B as well. I know this is not like a modeling class, but hopefully, hopefully you understand that having this are like little details are. That's what it's going to make our compositions even better. Now. Um, if we grabbed the Earth, it's way, way too thin. I thought it was going to be longer. That's fine. We'll just scale it a little bit. It seems like it's fine. Let's just bring this down so that it touches the floor. Again. I rotate the chord a little bit. And then I'm gonna go into the control vertices again. And this one is we're just going to push them up a little bit like this. Maybe this one's, one of them can go up. Again. It should look kind of like relaxed, right? Let's go to the object mode. This, I'm going to freeze transformations. I can move this back like this. And a little. There we go. Now we're going to use this tool which is called the suit mesh. You can also find that here on Create sweep mesh. And it's pretty much just going to create a course. That's pretty much it. I'm just going to reduce the size of the chord. And that's it. Now we have a very nice effect. I'm going to say real quick, this guy, I'm going to add a new material, Arnold, to the surface. Let's call this a red balloon. On the color of the object is going to be red. I actually got to make this metallic, sort of metallic and metallic balloon. I'm going to increase the roughness. And for the course it's going to be a white courts. So just Arnold extender surface and just increase their office because it's supposed to be a rough material. Let's call this M course. Again, we say real quick, we go here and we're going to see a render update full scene. So it loads the new materials and he loves the new models. And look at that. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. I think the metallic effect, it's a little bit too much. So I'm going to stop it. Let's go, let's delete the history here and we're going to bring the metal is down, so it's plastic plastic balloon. I'm kinda wondering if we want to add a little bit of surf surface, sea surface effect. Or maybe like transmission, like a little bit of transmission. Like if we had a love of transmission, we might be able to see through the balloon. So it's or like a like a thin plastic. I think that could work in the front going to change the color of the transmission to read. So we can see through it. There we go. Now, again, talking about a composition, we need to be sure that we understand where we, we positioned this balloon in the most like, creepy possible way. We're going for a very symmetrical composition. Now, if this is a shout and we want to, we want to imply that this shadow, is it the clown? It will be cool if it looks like the shadow is actually like a holding the balloon, right? So I'm going to grab the balloon and the core. And let's bring this thing towards this side. Again. It's to kinda imply that he's holding the balloon, right? I kinda wanted them to be out of the light. So like this. Now the court of course, to scale it a little bit so that matches the new scale. So right about there, the court is going to be important as you can see, because it's going to tell us how the bonus attached. I do think that courts a little bit too thick steel. And the cool thing is we still have the node right here. So I'm gonna go half this appoint one. It's gonna be like really, really, really think cord is just going to barely a bounce some of the light around. So we can kind of see it there. Even that one seems to be a little bit too thin. So let's go 0.05. I just want to like a super, super thin thread, like floating around. That's also going to give it this very creepy by right, because we're barely seeing the thread that's holding it. And now, again, to imply that this shadow is holding it subconsciously, subconsciously with telecom nieces or something. Well, we can do is we can add like a, like a cylinder or a box or something. So doesn't really matter which shape we grabbed. But if we make this like a elongated shape right here, and we bring it to the side right there. Now it's going to look like he's holding it right? And you're not really going to see it because of course he's not holding it, but it's just the imply that he is. Now. Here's where I'm, I want to try and do something interesting. And again, this is that there's a famous quote that says The devil is on the details, right? So, well, first of all, let me lower this thing right here. Because it was looking a little bit weird. So it says, there's a very famous quote, I repeat that says the devils and the details. So I kinda wanna see the shiny creepy eyes of the character. Even though again, this is going to break the physicality of things. But if I were to delete these faces right here, technically, if things work the way I'm expecting them to work, we're going to see two holes on the shadow that are going to read like or could read like ice. I don't want to have two more spotlights. They are too low lights, but just that little effect right there, I think works quite, quite nice. It's, it might be very, very subtle, but I think it's there, I think it's there and it looks interesting. I do want to grab some of those vertices right here, like scale them out. Maybe. Now what we're going for this sort of like it, the buyer might as well go for full Crazy Clown right here, right? So there we go. We've managed to create this very interesting effect where we have the shadow. I think the shelves have a little bit too big though. No, I have to find the perfect balance. There we go. I think that looks a little bit better. So there's the secret. Now. Now I'm actually thinking about like, yeah, I like that thing, but let's hide it a little bit more. It's two on your face, right? So we hired a little bit more. We might be able to create this sort of like mystery effect. And these are the decisions that you're constantly going to be taking whenever you're working on a project around the scene, especially when you get the artistic liberty to explore this kind of stuff. It's really, really cool because you're able to think about all of the different things that can be done and create amazing compositions like this one. So now, the final thing that we need to do is we need to go, of course, to come on, we need to set this to full HD. We're going to turn on our de-noise. Sure. So Dino is your optics is going to turn on and I do want to turn on my lens effects. We've used this once before. I don't think we want to do any sort of depth of field in this one. I think we want everything to be in focus, but we definitely want to look at the vignette and a little bit of this thing right here. So let's render real quick. Oh my God, look at that. Not that much vignette. Stop it and give it another go. Just a little bit of vignette. And as you can see, right now, all of this fireflies are glowing thanks to the bloom. But as soon as the noise your kicks in, most of them are gonna be gone. And we should only get a little bit of glow on the stairs, on the balloon and other different parts. So yeah, there we go. So you see how all of the fireflies get cleaned up. That's what we're going for. Shadows working really good. It's definitely going to take a while. It's, as you can see, things are getting more complex and more complex even though I have a powerful system, still going to take some time. So just be patient and make sure everything is set up the way you want the patient. And yeah, I'm going to wait for the render to finish and then we'll see the result of the, of the whole thing. Or we'll do a little bit of post-production in the next video. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 17. Post Production: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about the post-production of our scene. Now as you can see, the renderings still going. But 10%, I'm pretty, pretty happy with the results that we got so far. Oh my God. I press Space-bar again, my bad. So it's going to render it again. I'm just going to wait for this finished, but that's what I wanted to say. I find that a 10% is just like good enough. So we already know how to deal with that. We can go to adaptive sampling. And if I know the ten per cent is good enough, then maybe lowering the sample. So something like six should be more than enough. It's definitely going to be or should be a little bit faster. And as long as the user does its job and cleans things nicely, then it's fine. Usually for single images, like if you're just gonna do a couple of renders, but they're not going to be moving. Then as long as you have a cleaned rendered, that's all you want when you add in motion, when things are gonna be moving from 1 to another. That's what you'd really need to make sure that your samples and your cleanliness that the noise turned everything is working as nice puzzle because the blurriness that you get from the denoise will be visible on the animation. So you really want to crank your samples up on that specific point. But as you can see, like right now, this is more than enough. I know that the denominator is going to be able to solve all of these little points very easily and the image is looking quite, quite clean. So let me pause this real quick for this to finish. And then when it finishes, we're actually going to save this image with a different format to talk about a couple of things before we jump into the post-production in Photoshop. So give me just 1 second. There we go. So the thing we're gonna do differently is we're actually going to be saving this as a multi-layer XR, which is just an EXE file. If we had layers, we will be saving all of the layers, but we don't. So it's just gonna be spooky hallway. And if we go into Photoshop real quick and we opened the image, something interesting is going to happen. What's going to change here is the fact that a now we're going to set this as alpha channel, very important. And this is what we get and it won't look the way it looks in mind. And this is very important when you export as EX Rs, we're exporting as a raw file. Remember when we talked about the raw files and the sRGB, thanks, Well, that's exactly what we're doing here. So when we see this in Maya, This is the sRGB. This right now is the raw file. But the cool thing about the raw file is that we actually have a little bit more room to work with several of the things that we have here. So what do I mean by this? Well, what I can do for instances, we can add some adjustment layers and we can add the exposure adjustment layer if we start changing the gamma, now we're gonna be able to lighten up a little bit of the scene without destroying are overexposing things. As you can see where our way, way, way, way more room to play around. We can also play around with the exposure. And it takes quite a bit of time until we start breaking things up. And even when we break things suddenly when we read the overexpose things, It's not really breaking them. As you can see, it's not like creating super ugly colors or anything. It's just like making the lights quite, quite intense. So we can play around with this elements right here. I wouldn't recommend playing around with the opposite as much. Once we're happy, once you're like, Okay, you know what? I've done a little bit of tweaking, especially kinda wanna recover a little bit of the ground here. I don't want things to be extremely, extremely dark. Now we can convert this image into an eight bit image and work with it or tweak it in a more traditional way. The way you're gonna do this is you're gonna go image. You're going to say adjustments there, sorry mouth. And we're going to bring this back to 16 bits. And we're going to say merge. What's going to happen? This is going to happen at first. It's gonna try to do this thing. We don't want to do this. We're gonna say exposure and Gamma, very important. And if you leave it like this, it should remain exactly as what you had before. Gamma is set to one exposure said Syria, we just hit, Okay, and there we go. This is now a 16-bit image. And all of the filters that we have right here are going to work a little bit better. So let's bring back some of those cool colors that we had because right now we're losing some of them. And I'm going to start by doing this with a color balance. So we're gonna go to our highlights. We're going to bring some of that nice golden elements. We're going to go to shadows. And let's go really, really cool on the shadows. There we go. Again, at any point we can either, we can even change the blending mode of this things and create some interesting effects. For instance, overlay, freely crunches or colors and mix things look way too intense, but we can lower this as with anything here inside the Photoshop to 15%, for instance. And we'll get a very interesting look. Now another thing we could do is before we add any sort of effects, we could play around with the color lookup tables you guys remember from the last chapter. And we can load some of the lookup tables that we have available for us on the data folder. For instance, are not like this chemical one. That's interesting, that looks quite nice actually. It gives us very interesting cinematic look without really like breaking a lot of the things that we're going for. So do I like this thing right here? I might bring the intensity a little bit down to something like like a 70%. And now we can even like on top of these things, use this color balance to punch things look a little bit higher in certain, in certain directions. Let's go for a curse. I really like using curves. Let's see if we can. Like, I think I want to go to the reds. I bring the rates down a little bit on the shadows. And then let's go to the blues. Go for this very nice, interesting yellowish effect. I do think we could benefit from a little bit of exposure. So just a tad bit here. It's something that's also very important and I strongly recommend you do this. Make sure to try the images in multiple monitors or multiple screens because sometimes the screens will look a little bit different. So for instance, if I were to grab this one and bring it to my other monitor real quick, it's really bright, and this one is a lot more contrast here. So some things you're gonna be like grading stuff and making sure it looks very nice on your computer. And once you bring it somewhere else, it looks a little bit different. Just keep that in mind. Let's have the vignette. We lost the vignette or we lost a little bit of vignette. So let's add it back. Here we go. And again, we can play around with the vignette, maybe in set to overlay so we don't lose all of the effects. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. One thing that I definitely want to add this is film grain. I think, like some scratches and this one will be quite nice. So I'm going to say film grain texture again. And we can look for something like this, sort of like a camcorders stuff that you find like destined right here. This is great. Let's copy this image or this one looks a little bit better actually. You'll want to try and find the best possible quality like this one's a little bit small. So it's probably going to pixelate a little bit. When we do the overlay or the screen. I think we're going to do screen and we'll definitely going to bring this down. It should be very, very subtle, very subtle. Because one of the bad things about this layers is that they tend to flatten your image because it's just like having a screen on top of everything. So they do tend to flatten the image is quite a bit. So just be careful there. You don't want to, you don't want to kill all of this very cool things that we've created. Another thing that I have seen some people do for the renderers is looking for textures, for instance, like grunge textures, and adding a little bit of this effects in different parts. And especially if they have color like this one right here. If you have, like our desk things right here, this is the stuff that you want. It, it does add some very interesting effects, even if it has linked the watermarked X, that's fine because it will add texture to the whole thing. Especially if, like in this case, we don't have everything like super, super textured. This could potentially add some interesting effects to the whole thing. Again, you definitely want to go soft on this. Things like you don't want to overdo it because they will, or it will flatten your image. Okay, so as you can see, it looks quite nice, but it is flooding the image. One thing I suggest here is using masks, this little button down here, and you can mask out certain areas. So for instance, I really like the effect that we're giving the pillars. But maybe we don't want that on the back walls, right? Or in the other parts of the picture. So we can just soften it up a little bit in certain areas. And yes, we do have it. It's still there, but it's not as obvious. It's not really like destroying the whole composition or making it look super, super intense. This is where we would definitely add like decals if you want to. Like, usually you would have this in texture showing the moles. But if you don't have time to do that and you're gonna do this in post-production. That's fine. As long as it holds a single image, it's perfectly fine. I'm going to add my letterbox thinking that I love adding. Because again, it gives us very nice cinematic look. Kind of like cleans up the image a little bit as well. I think it really helps. And yeah, that's I think that's it. I'm not sure if I want to add anything else. To be honest. Particles, like light particles, sometimes work. And again, that's the kind of stuff that it's easier to add in the post-production. So for instance, let's go for something like soft light particles. This one looks cool. As long as it's copy this image. There. Since it's black, could just hit Screen. And then with a soft round brush, we're going to fade them out a little bit. You can blur them out as well. Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, something like that. Of course we can lower the opacity as well. So those are the kinds of details you, you don't see this because it's not super obvious, but every single image that you see on the Internet is probably going to have a little bit of post-production done to it, even if it's just like a basic contrast or saturations and stuff like that. It's going to have something, that's something it's what's, what's gonna make things look a very, very cool. So I like now that I mentioned saturation, how would this look like a black and white image? Quite nice. Maybe a little bit less saturated. The works fine as well. There we go. Oh, yeah, There's one more thing I want to show you, but for this, we're actually going to have to combine all of the images. So this is one of the, one very cool trick. They use this a lot in sci-fi movies and in scary movies like this. It's called chromatic aberration. So in old cameras, in defective cameras, there's this effect, especially towards the border. Of the image that's called chromatic aberration. So usually in any perfect lens, all of the colors should reflect and then moving the same way. But sometimes, sometimes especially when cameras again, there are a little bit faulty. What's going to happen is that the red, green, and blue channels of light are gonna be split. And towards the edge of the image you're going to see this sort of like, well, it's called chromatic aberration when things don't perfectly line up. And it really adds this very uncanny valley feeling to it. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go all the way down to the, to the image. I'm going to grab everything here. I'm going to hit Control Shift E, or sorry. Let me control C, Control Shift Alt E, that's the shortcut Control Shift. Alt eats four keys and that's going to combine everything into a single image. Then I'm going to duplicate that image. I'm going to grab this image and I'm gonna go to the channels. I'm going to grab the red channel, and I'm gonna move it with my arrow keys. I'm going to mark key, select the whole image. And I'm going to move this channel to two taps to the, to the right, so 12. And then I'm going to grab the blue channel. I'm going to do the same to the other side, 12. So now what I've done is I've pretty much shifted the colors slightly. Okay, So each, each channel is slightly, slightly different channels should be they not move. Try that again. That's really weird. There we go. So let's, there we go. So 12 pixels to the right on the red channel and 12 pixels to the left and the blue channel, as you can see, that's a little bit too much. Let's, let me go back one pixel. So just gonna be one pixel to the right, one pixel, one pixel to the left. But as you can see, we get this very cool effect. Compare this to the other image like this, say clean image. And this is the chromatic aberration image. And we get that interesting rainbow effect. And it might not look like, much like people won't really know this. But it's going to be there. It's gonna be there on your image and it's definitely going to give a different feel to the whole thing. As you can see right there. Now, usually it gets a little bit more intense towards the edge. So I've seen some people go to the edges and extend it even more. I didn't think that's really necessary. But if you want to give it a try before feel free to do it. But yeah, that's the, that's the chromatic aberration effect. And again, that's one of those like a real life artifacts that happened on cameras. And that can really help you get a very, very nice image. So I'm just going to save this image real quick. Let's call this spooky hallway. We're going to save this as a JPEG, of course too. We able to publish it online. Unfortunately, the JPEGs do suffer a little bit of compression. But yeah, there you go. After about an hour, I would say for work, we got this very, very cool interior image. Now, I wanted to do one more render, or actually a couple of more renders from the scene. And let's see how they look from different angles. I wanted to show you a very nice camera trick that we can do to create a cool little effect. And then we'll jump onto another interior scene and where we'll explore a little bit more of a friendly light, a little bit more, more whimsical, more magical. So yup, hang on tight, and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye. 18. Camera Angles: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to cover, today we're going to continue with the next part of our series. And I just want to show you a couple of extra angles that we can get here. Now, remember, if at any point you're like, Man, I actually really liked this one. And I felt, I felt like after the competition we got a little bit too clean. Don't worry, we can just save this one. Let's go back to Maya. Maya, we can just save this one as a JPEG. So if we go here and we just save this as a hallway, that's called What's wrong. The jpeg could just bring this into Photoshop. Let's open a real quick. There we go. This is the rock hallway. And then we just bring this thing in here, even though this is a 16-bit image. Let's just scrub with M, grab the whole thing, V, drop by, drop it here. There we go. The RGB channels, sorry, my bad. There we go. And if we turn this guy off, and we'll just bring this all the way down before the effects and the layers and everything. We're of course going to get a different effect. This one right here, it's a lot darker. I wouldn't, I wouldn't publish something like this because it's really, really dark. And sometimes when things are way, way, way, way too dark, It's difficult to see what's going on. That's why I prefer this one right here, which is a little bit more illuminated. But yeah, of course you are free to do whatever works best for your specific beats. Now, let me get a new camera. I'm gonna go rendering camera panels looked just selected. And I want to find another, another view like this one right here from the top of the screen. Now, of course, the light setup from the top of the screen is not going to look the same as what we have from the bottom. Because all of this composition that we did was specifically made to make it work from that specific angle. So as you can see, when we do this right here, it's going to make it look horrible. It doesn't look nice at all. The materials are not showing. And this is one of those things that allow people don't think through as much. But when you are working on the set, on a film set, there's gonna be lights in the ears for specific situations. Yes, there's gonna be certain scenes where the illumination is going to work no matter where you're shooting from. But you will always be moving lights around depending on the setup of where the actors are going to be a standing, where the main action is going to be happening, etcetera, etcetera. So what I wanna do here is, since this is the elimination, It's working from this angle right here. I just want to show you very quick, like camera trick that we can do. This was made famous by a super famous director, which is called Hitchcock. Alfred Hitchcock. And Alfred Hitchcock creating a movie or a film, a movie called vertigo. And I believe it was in vertigo where you had this, a very interesting effects. Where the camera, where the character was looking from a tall building and it felt like he was being stretched out. And this effect is he's super, super cool effect. We're not gonna be able to see it under render because it will take quite a bit to render. But I'm going to show you here on the viewport. You're going to see how this changes the way we see the scene. So the effect happens thanks to two things. We're going to start with a normal focal length. Let's say something like a 24, something like this, actually now Let's start with something like a 35. We're going to start with the 35 focal length. I'm going to hit S right here on the camera S. To save a keyframe. Then what's going to happen is we're going to be bringing the focal length down. We're gonna go from a 35 to something like a 60. It's going to be like super, super long, like this. Okay. Maybe not that much. Let's go like 18. There we go. Something like this. And we're going to hit S again, or we're just going to click here and hit Set Key because we did not so keen on the first one actually fund those ones. We do need to right-click and manually set the key for this specific one. So set key. So now what happens is as the movie goes forward or as the animation starts, you can see this sort of like stretching going back. But this is an interesting thing. We have not moved the camera just yet. We're just keeping these things are now on the same place. We're just changing the focal length. If we go to the first frame to frame 0, let's select the camera right here. It's this one. If I'm not mistaken, if we go to frame 0. And then as we move the focal length, the back. So as we get more of the room, we push the camera for worth. What's going to happen is we're gonna get a super, super creepy effect where it looks like we're being stretched out. Look at this. This is the typical leg when something's going to go wrong and you're like, Oh my God, the monster is going to attack me. Or like maybe you just turn the corner and you'll see this balloon and you just immediately field is like your stomach sinking down. This is where you would get this sort of trigger when you will just move this camera in a super, super intense way. And the effect is achieved because we're both pushing the camera in, we're moving the camera in towards the scene and we're bringing the focal length down. So we create this juxtaposition of things where two different though like a perspective, are competing against each other and we get the super intense effect. So the effect, or the most intense part would be here at frame 70. And if we take a look at this render is going to look like super, super stretch. Let's go to camera shape one. Yeah, that's the one. This is what we would get. Now, if you want to use this one as your final render, then you're welcome to do so as well. Feel free to just render this will now then use all of the post-production and things that we just did. And you're going to have something that looks really, really cool. Again, if I wanted to render this out, I will need to render the full animation sequence. And it will look really, really cool, really, really scary, but it's definitely going to take a couple of hours to do so because we have 17 frames in this case. If it's taking, let's say two minutes per frame or one minute per frame, it's gonna be a little bit more than an hour, right? So if you have the time to render, go ahead and do it. It's going to look very, very cool. I'm actually going to see if I can render this 70 frames. It's a little bit too fast and prolly gonna do a 120 frames to make sure that the effect is really, really nice, really consistent. But yeah, I'm probably going to have to leave this overnight rendering. So that's it for this one guys, we're finished with our first interior, a lightening, hopefully all of the tips and tricks that we saw here, how to play slides, the Goebbels, using shadows to create interesting narratives and everything are of course useful to you and make sure to practice, make sure to get all the way to this point. Try to get an interesting render out of this haunted the hallway. And I'll see you back on the next one where, as I mentioned, we're gonna do one more, one more interior seat and then we'll jump into the final project. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 19. Interior Golden Hour: Hey guys, welcome back to our next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with at the interior rendering. We're gonna do a couple of more renders. And I want to show you some very important concepts that we're gonna be using. Or it can be used a lot, a lot, a lot in a renders for production. So when we're talking about architectural visualization or when we're doing the rendering of an interior scene, you're usually going to have to define what time of the day you're going to be doing this. And as you can see, this is the first one that we're gonna be exploring and it's called the golden hour. Golden hour occurs at them in the morning when the sun is rising and also in the afternoon, it's more usually referred to as in the afternoon because no one really likes to wake up super early to go and take some photos. So everyone waits until the end of the day, right? So this is the kind of shots that you're going to have and they tend to be very warm, very like what's the feeling like your home or you're about to get some rest. Like there's, there's hope, there's happy feelings surrounding this sort of our renders. And it's again, very, very common to have them. If we take a look, for instance, at Toy Story, story three, final scene, it happens in a sort of like it's not precisely the golden hour in this case. But that's the sort of feeling that will try to evoke, rightly. We tried to get this sort of like everything's gonna be alright. We have this warm tones. I remember there was this scene in Toy Story chew with Jessie. Jessie scene where she is, There we go. That's what I'm talking about. So this is what I meant. This is the sort of, again, the golden hour sort of effect that we're going for. And again, as I mentioned, it evokes the feeling of, of good, Good Feelings, Good elements. So of course, this is not the great scene, right? Because it's, hopefully I'm not spoiling this for everyone, but it's the scene where she gets abandoned after the end of the day. And it could also evoke nostalgia and things like that. Now, how are we going to set up our lights? Well, first of all, I have a very cool file for you guys, which is this robot room start. Unfortunately, I don't have this one texture. We're now going to be using textures. This chapter is going to be a little bit, a little bit shorter than the ones that we had before. Because the concepts that we're gonna be covering are, I would say, rather simple. And then we can jump onto the more interesting things for the next couple of chapters. If you've seen the intro video, then you know what I'm talking about? So yeah, this is the one that I actually did this scene probably like ten years ago, about ten years like it's seven years ago. It was a really, really old scene and it was one of my first Maya projects. So it's here for you. We're gonna be using all of the techniques that we've learned so far to create a very nice composition. So I'm gonna save this scene S, so that we don't have the same issues that we've had with the other ones. Robert room. Let's call this golden hour. There we go. So the first thing we need to do as always, is create a camera, right? So we're gonna go rendering. We're going to create a camera panels, look through selected, and we need to decide where we want to place our camera. Remember that the camera is an actor. So depending on where we place the camera, It's the kind of message that we're sending in the original, the original time or when I did this project several years ago, a lot of years ago. The decomposition was meant to be something like this. But you can change it around if you want to go like this or maybe like up here from the stairs, you're free to do so. Now, one thing that you will know this is the fact that we don't have walls, right? We don't have Watson, we don't have a ceiling. This is something that we definitely definitely, definitely need to change if we want our lights to be as realistic as possible. Because otherwise, when we create our very nice sky dome light here, we're going to have light coming from everywhere. And yes, this could give us a very well illuminated effect. But I want to go for this again, cinematic effect. And the more control we have over the lights, the easier it's going to be. So I'm going to create a couple of planes here real quick. I'm going to create this one real quick. Here's a quick tip. If you press E and click, you can select the screen rotate so that the snaps probably know this already. But for those of you that are not. There you go. We're learning. What's the word? We're learning? Modeling stuff as well. So this is gonna be our back wall or right wall. And then we're gonna have another wall right around here. And we're going to have one final wall. One final wall right here. Thanks. Sure. It does not overlap with the little arc that we have there, just so that we get a couple of a nicer shadows. If you're doing this, by the way, if you ever do some of these techniques while using a render engine. Like if you want to do this in real or unity or stuff like that, things change a little bit. For instance, those engines don't really like things to be completely thin. They don't react as well with lights. So you would probably want to have something like this. Now here's one thing that I can do. Even though I do want to have all of these walls, I can save all of them in a render layer or in a display layer, sorry, and just turn this into templates. And once we render, we just turn this on and that's it. Now, here's my tip for choosing a good HDRI for when you're gonna be doing golden hour stuff. It's perfectly fine. If you go here to, for instance, to sunrise, sunset, you're going to find a lot of this. It's perfectly fine to select one that has the exact terms that you're going for. But as you can see, it really changes the way things feel. Depending of order not wearing the nature rocks in a city like things change quite a bit like this sun setting that Chuck query, it looks very good. I usually like selecting images that have the tones that I'm going for. For instance, like this, this guy is on fire. And I usually like to go for images with soft shadows. And the reason is if I want to add a long shadows, which is what we're gonna be doing. I'm going to have more control over it. Because if we were to select sunsets like this one right here, that this cape heal, it already includes this very hard long shadows and it's going to be very, very difficult to move the light around to make sure it matches exactly what we're going for. So in this case, I think since we're gonna go for this very nice colorful sky, this one is really good. This overcast pinkish oranges sky. So let's download this real quick. Let me go to my Downloads here. Add this one is also gonna be included, of course, in your source images, you can download it again, or you can download a different one if that's what you want. And I'm just going to select this one right here. My sky dome light. We're going to go into our color and we're going to select a file, and we're going to input the file, which is the sky is on fire. There we go. Let's select a camera, I guarantee Let's call this a shotgun. And let's go panels and look through selected. Now we need to decide about the focal length. Remember, the focal length is super-important. That's another way in which we can control our stuff. So give me just 1 second guys. So with the focal length, we're going to be playing around with a low focal length. You never want to go super, super low unless you're going for a super extreme, like if you go to eight, it's kinda like a fisheye lens. And I mean, it could work for a certain types of things, but not for this one. So let's go for something like an 1818 is it's good. No, actually that's a little bit too much. Let's go with a 24. There we go. 24 is it's a little bit better. Now it seems weren't really thinking about the competition. We also need to think about whether or not we wanted to have a little bit of what's the word, the depth of field, is that something that we're interested in having here in our scene? And to be honest, maybe yes, maybe just a little bit the focal depth of field, but not yet, not yet. Let's take a look at how this looks first. So I'm going to say real quick, make sure to set up or whatever you're working with. In my case at GPU, I'm not going to change my samples right now. I'm going to keep them low. And I'm just going to say Arnold Render. Now, I know that throughout the series, I have not actually made use of the initial advice that I gave you guys of bringing these things or are playing with the elements with a really low resolution render. That's because I want to make sure that you guys can see as much as possible. But again, if your computer is struggling, trade rendering really low, and then I'll bring up the size of the samples as required. One very important thing we need to bring this back. We can keep this as reference actually. And if we keep it as reference, it should be working. Should be able to see this. A lot of light though. Missing something feels like there's a lot of light. Let me delete this layer. Could be affecting the way this is looking at, shouldn't though. I'm not sure if this is actually responding with what I just showed you or I just mentioned about Arnold, are first of all, let's grab our HDRI and let's rotate it so that the sun is actually coming through the windows. We have a beautiful look at the sunset. There we go. We do have a very big windows, so that could be it, that could be the factor here. I feel like we should have a little bit more depth. I'm going to grab all of these guys right here. The, the initial walk that we created, I'm going to Control E to keep them on love with an extrusion. Let's see if that helps. Because it could be that light is bleeding through. Let's do render update full scene. It could be the light is bleeding. There we go. Yeah. Bleeding through the through the plains and we're getting we're getting like super lit surface and that's not exactly what we want. So as you can see, we are getting this very nice soft light into the scene, but we definitely need to help the fold and a little bit more. So here's where we can use the portal light again. I apologize for my dogs are usually record at night when they're not making that much of a mess, but it seems like something's out there. We're going to use this border light. And if you remember from the haunted hallway that we use, this portfolio is supposed to help us, are supposed to help the image here. Let's update the render scene again. It's supposed to help the photons get into the room. You can see yet there is a little bit of something there. So I can definitely see some of the light going inside of the room. So let's go to the samples now. I'm gonna go to adaptive sampling enabled us so that we can see a little bit more. And I really don't want to bring the exposure up. I know we can grab this guy and bring the exposure to something like a four. And I know that this is definitely going to like it's going to add a lot of light into my scene. But I feel like this is not the right way because it's going to overexpose especially the image. That we might get some weird results. So I am going to expose it a little bit, probably like a two, but not that much. There we go. This is like the soft light that we're getting from the ambient. Like if there was absolutely no lights turn on our scene. This is the sort of like bounce light that we want to have. Now, I'm also going to turn off the with the word divisibility of this thing. I don't like seeing this thing because as you can see, it's, it's really overexposed. It's gonna give us a really weird result. Though. Let's talk about what kind of images we can have, right? So if we go for, Let's go sunset CD window, right? Like if we can try to get like, what's the kind of like I'm sort of images that we would see on a sunset. We can grab something. Like imagine that we're looking literally through the window and see what we will be looking at, are taking a look at something like this, since fine. Just going to save this image. And I'm going to save this on our image folders because we're going to use it. Hey, those formats. So you can grab again any, any sort of letters. Isn't something different? Let's look sunset, see the skyline. If we look for this, we're gonna get this sort of pictures. And again, you can imagine that if we're looking through a window, this is something close to what we would expect to see. Maybe whirling one of those super big skyscrapers. I'm trying to find something that's like not super, super like this one. This one's fine. It's a little bit high and they were really high, but it's going to work. So I'm going to copy this image. I'm going to bring it into Photoshop. So let's paste this image. Let's make a little bit bigger. I'm going to blur it. So I'm going to say Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur quite a bit, not a lot, which is quite a bit something like this. And we're going to save the scene. And of course I'm going to save the scene on source images. And that's a JPEG file and we're going to call this sky line. There we go. You can do this at the very end then in the post-production part of things, somethings like cool to have this in here already. So I'm gonna create the plane, just make it really big. I'm going to assign a new material and this is very important on the Arnold options. We're going to assign something called a flat, this one right here. So the air flight is just a color that receives no shadows or no shelves. There's no there's no elimination or anything is just literally a flat color, just the texture. And we're going to append this one right here. So if we press number six, we should be able to rotate this around and position this. Let's go to our camera, pounds electro selected, and we can position this plane. Let's play right here. It's just the one. Hand, the wrong section. There we go. So we're going to position this plane right there. Let's go back to our shock camps panels looked for selected. We can grab the plane. Yes. You can scale it up. Push it back. There we go. Let's move the competition down a little bit. And that's it. Now, very important on this one, we're gonna go to Render sets and we do not want to cast or receive shadows. We don't want that. We actually, we do want to be invisible and refractions, reflections. That's fine, but we don't want to to receive anything and what's going to happen now if we render, render, update the full scene is that that image is going to be exposed at the intensity that we have, right? So as you can see, that's exactly the same amount of color. There's no more light. Even if we expose the HDRI super, super heavily, this image would still remain at this exact element. And as you can see, it looks quite nice. So as a backdrop, it really works. This is a perfectly valid way to add images to your compositions. Usually again, this sort of thing is done in post-production. But if you feel like, it feels weird or you don't like the competition or something. This is a great way to do it. Now how do we get more light into the scene like we, now we want those long, nice shadows going into the scene. This is where we're gonna be using one of our area lights. Right? So we've actually yeah, let's just the area lights. Let's go Arnold lights and we're going to use, and they're like, what can show you another light? You can actually use the old Maya like directional light. But what I don't like about the directional light is that the angle of the shadow doesn't look as good and we don't have as much control over things. So I prefer working a little bit more naturally. Now, how can we fake a son, right? Like Is there a way to focus on in the answer is yes. If we make this thing really, really small, remember the smaller the object is sharper, the showers are gonna be and we'd like rotate this thing around. Let me get rid of the screen. Rotate now that we have this sort of really flat long shadows going to words like that part of the wall. We're going to increase the exposure here quite a bit. And we're going to start seeing how this looks. So 25 is a way too much. Let's bring this back. 101515 is working a little bit better. As you can see right here. We definitely need to work with this breath. So in this case, we want the sun to just like give us this very nice long shadows that we're seeing right there. This is also too much. Now, I think this is seen as not in the real-world scale. So that might be why these numbers are way, way, way too big. Let's go back to something like a 12th. Hello folks, a little bit better. We're definitely going to use temperature. It's definitely going to be a warm temperature. Really nice warm temperature. Or, or if you feel like you can match the color of the element, you can turn this off and go to elect to the color, like you maybe want to go for this sort of like reddish, pinkish, sort of like interesting. Interesting. What's the word sunset? Let me bring this back. Push to the side a little bit. There we go. So now as you can see, we're gonna get this very nice long shadows on the objects that are very, very close to what we would expect from us and said, I think it was a little bit too much. I'm going to bring this back. There we go. And I do think the shadows are a little bit too harsh like normally yes, with sun, so we get harsh shadows. But I like when the border of the shadow is a little bit soft. So I'm going to add a little bit of softness to that border right there. Maybe we can rotate this a little bit more so we get a little bit more light on the coffee table. Let's keep the shadows more like this. There we go. And we can increase a little bit exposure. No, not that much. There's something like, well, there we go. Now let's bring the temperature down a little bit more so it's warmer. And that's it. We get this very nice, cool looking. What's the word? This very nice cool looking? Golden outward effect. Now, once we have this, this is where we can actually start thinking about, okay, what kind of lights would we have on the setup like this? I can see this light right here, like a lamp. I can see this other land right here. And that's when we think can take some decisions like maybe, okay, it's the afternoon and I'm gonna be reading a magazine here on the coffee table. And I want there to be a little bit more elimination. I want to have an extra, an extra source of light. So maybe I'm not going to turn on all of the lights, but I will definitely change a couple of things, right? So for instance, here, I don't remember modeling a light bulb, so we're gonna get a sphere right there. It's going to be a big sphere. Remember the bigger the shape, the softer the shadow. So it's gonna be a big sphere. We're gonna go Arnold, lights, mesh, light, color, temperature. I'm going to keep it white. I think I'm going to keep that one white. Let's go with a ten. And when we render, well, we should have right here. Let's stop this real quick and always, always remember to update the scene whenever you create a new light or you create a new geometry, it's important to update this. In other words, we're not going to get rid of salt that we want. Let me pause real quick. There we go. So as you can see, this is, this is close to it and this is one of a very, very common mistake that a lot of people make. They don't like to exaggerate things. They're like, well, isn't the sun supposed to be the most intense light source in the scene right now? Yes. If we were to measure them bright, but if we're taking a photograph or if we're doing this stuff, I would expect this time to be quiet, illuminated as well. So maybe ten is a little bit too much, but we can keep it at eight and see like a really nice light contribution here on the couch. Now again, if we want to go for this or like warm, nostalgic feel, yeah, we can definitely make make the temperature a little bit lower, right? Like if you want to go super, super low, I think we're going to like this is going to fall more into the super warm effect. But it could be, it could be one of the good, good, interesting result. There we go. Now, since we already have this globe, we could duplicate it, but I actually don't recommend duplicating or duplicating elements or lamps that you are using a light mesh width or mesh light with because it could cause some issues. So it's better if you make them from scratch. So for instance, this one right here, this one we can actually would benefit more from a spotlight effect. So that means that would go Arnold area light. And I'm gonna be using this area light. I'm going to press V and snap it right there. Just position it. So that's pointing in a very similar way. And changes to eat disk. There we go. Push it back and we're not going to see the desk, right? We definitely want a little bit of spread or reduce the spread. And let's see how this looks. Let's try a high exposures get again. And there we go. So as you can see this thing right here, this is one of those parts where it might be useful to set the visibility of the camera or the, or the light to on. 20. Extra Lights: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with the golden hour and we're gonna be doing a couple of more lights that we need on the scene to make it look really, really nice. Now again, remember, we don't have any textures on the scene. This is just a basic illumination pass or elimination process. And actually this is something that I wanted to talk about because a lot of times when I'm working on the project, especially if I know that I'm gonna be doing some sort of like final animation or something like that. I like to light my scenes even if I'm not done yet with modeling or rendering or stuff like that, I'd like to just play some blocks and play a little bit with a life so they can get an idea of what things are gonna be, seeing, what things are going to be. What's the word more important on the whole element. And that way we can focus on making sure that everything looks as nice as possible. So don't don't be worried if you are working on the scene and you want to start lighting and creating some renders. This might not be the final renders because of course, we're missing the, what's the word, we're missing the other textures and everything. But he will give you a really, really close idea of how all of this will work. Now, I want to talk about a weird shapes that you can use to create interesting illumination effects. So imagine that we have this lamp. It's made out of, Let's end. This lamp is not a circle, it's not the light bulb, It's actually a ring. So we can go Create Polygon Primitives and create something really, really crazy. I've actually seen some really crazy stuff. That's your left. Let's go crazy. Let's go. We'd like a helix thing. So what I'm gonna do here, so I'm going to grab this helix and I'm going to make the coils little bit more intense. I'm going to make the width or the radius definitely thinner, something like this. There we go. And I am going to reduce the amount of subdivisions. Because the more subdivisions you have, we're gonna be using mesh lights, as you might imagine. And the more subdivisions here you have, the more intense this is gonna be. What they can do is I can create a really complex shape. You've probably seen this sort of like modern art pieces. Where were they? Just like well together, a lot of like crazy looking stuffs and it's just like a really nice looking magical lab. We're not gonna, we're not used to. Or what I mean by this is we're not actually going to see it. We're just going to combine this whole thing into a single object. It's going to be above our whole thing. You can imagine this thing hanging from the top. Maybe it's made out of a lot of LED lights. And this thing is just gonna be a mesh lights. I'm going to go Arnold lights. I'm going to create a mesh light. I do want the shape to be visible. So I am going to make the light visible. And if we go to the render setup, so we render of the full scene. By default, of course nothing is gonna happen, right? We render. Yes, we do have one extra light up there, but it's not really going to do anything. We need to increase the exposure because we have a relatively big scene and without having that exposure is going to be a little bit difficult to, to see anything. Let me pause real quick because this thing seems to be stuck. As soon as I said that it got unstuck. So there we go. And now, Yeah, Let's just going to increase this into a more interesting effects. So as you can see, I'm sampling are making this exposure or setting this exposure to ten. And as you can see, there's a lot of samples everywhere I'm definitely gonna be using color temperature is gonna be really nice, warm color that we're gonna be getting onto the scene. So we are not mandated or we don't have to always use traditional area lights are spheres and stuff like that. You can use weird shapes and it's definitely going to give you a more interesting look right now we're not getting any weird shapes because remember, an object won't create shapes. Like if you have, what's the word? If you have an object emitting light, It's not going to be projecting any sort of shadow. Now if you were say, Hey, I would love to have some sort of shadows here. Well, there's a couple of functions. Maybe we can grab this object right here. Let's duplicate this. And this, duplicate it. Let's delete the lights. Let's grab this thing. I think it highlights it or something for for recent or let's just right-click assign existing material and let's assign the lumbered one. It's very weird doing it. Let's duplicate this again. Don't want this. And then here we do have primary visibility and everything set up. That's really weird, I'm sure other ego. So the object display disability was thrown off when we created the shallow. So maybe, maybe what's happening here is that we have this very cool lamp and like in-between this whole like clothes and stuff, there's like this metal framework and others like let's embed it in-between all of these elements. And we have this geometry, like this actual meshes that are intertwined like a Medusa head or something. Let's close this and just render again. And then now, now that should project as you can see, some very cool shadows right there. If we go back to our shop camp, we might expect to see some interesting shadows being projected on some parts of the floor, right? Yeah, that's that's the way we can illuminate this in right here. Now we're going to talk about illuminating this bar right here, because I don't want to add more lights. I think we have enough lights. I think this looks very nice, very warm. If we were to add, for instance, the lens effect and we add a little bit of the bloom that we have here and we increase or decrease the threshold to make things like Bloom a little bit more with play around with this sort of like again, golden hour south sort of thing. But I think we're missing some light here, like on the back. And again, I don't really want to have like one specific light bulb. It wouldn't even make sense, right? Because we don't really have anything. So here's where we can use something called a light feels very similar to what we did on the, on the, what's the word on the whole way? So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to create an Arnold light. It's going to be another area light. And it's gonna be it's kinda it's kinda the gunner help the ceiling bounce more light into the scene. Because we know that in a normal house, when light enters the room, it bounces everywhere, right? On the floor, on the walls and the ceiling, and it fills the whole the whole scene. But I know that right now if I only left my HDRI doing all of the work, it wouldn't be able to feel the whole thing. So by adding this like super, super big panel of light here on the top part, I'm gonna be helping the ceiling bounce more light back into the scene. Okay, so we're gonna start with exposure for, and again, as I've mentioned before, when you're trying something and you don't know what the contribution is going to be, try using a weird color. So for instance, right now I'm using the syrup purple color, not really seeing much of a change. Let's try eight. Not seeing much of a change. I'll change, sorry. Eight. Now I'm seeing a little bit of that purple over here. Let's try at 12. There we go. So we 12, I can definitely see the change. So I know that 12th is gonna be a good number right there. I'm going to change the color temperature and we're of course going to be bouncing this sort of like nice warm light coming from the sun. Now of course, this is a little bit too much, so we're going to bring this down a little bit. Maybe something like nine. And there we go. There's gonna be a little bit more light, pretty much all over the scene. If we were to, let's say, let's take a quick snapshot here, stop this. And I'll take a quick snapshot. Turn the intensity off so we don't have that light. Let's wait for this to render and now we can compare. So this is width delight and this is without light. And you can definitely see that there's a little bit more like ambient light going into the room. Again, this is not something that you might find in every single set physically, but in the digital world, we can cheat with this sort of stuff and make use of this very nice slides. I still think that they need a little bit more balanced. Like I would like to see a little bit more bounce. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate this light again. And now I'm just going to move this around and have it only hit those areas. In this overlap angle way. We gotta be very careful though, because as, as this is a big shape, I don't want to have a lot of energy or light hitting like the like the lamp or anything. I just wanted to those particular areas right there. Let's take a look at this. Let's hit Render. Let's play around with the intensity on this one's going. I just want to make sure that we see it feels like I need to update. Let's do a quick update. We go, I'm not seeing the change. It's a little bit weird. Let's try more intense light. Really. Oh, silly me. I forgot since I duplicated this one from the one from the ceiling, it had its intensity. One of course is going to completely yep. Going to be way, way too much, that's too much exposure right here. So let's go back to nine. Let's take a look. There we go. Now as you can see, we have this very nice illuminated a section back here and doesn't look like there's another life because this is such a big shape in such as a soft like, sort of like like a softbox that we have right here. It's kind of like faking the fact that we're just adding this to, to bring more life into the scene. This is a trick that's just all, all the time in CG. Like we add this or like fake lights, fake bouncers to get more information into areas that we want to be a little bit more illuminated. Same thing could be said about this section right here. Like I, even though there's, again, there's nothing. I don't have anything. I could very easily just grab one of these guys. And let's move this back. Scale this, and use this to push some light into that specific section. So when we do this, as you can see it, there's gonna be a little bit of light flooding into that section, which is what happens in the real world. Unfortunately, we don't have enough bounces out which we could change by the way, but it's going to make our render so much, so much more time-consuming. But it doesn't happen on what's the word on the real-world, right? Usually everything happens naturally in the photon's. Worked in a very interesting way. If you're wondering node like this is just a quick wildest thing is rendering. This is just a quick history of how Golden's work. I'm not like a physician or anything or physics master, but from my understanding, photons will hit a surface and they will transfer energy to that surface. Then the phone will bounce off of that surface and it will bounce into other surfaces. And eventually all of the energy is gonna be gone and it's going to decay into, into all of the different elements. So when the photons that have bounced all over the place in their room bounced into our eyes retina. That's when we see, right? Because we're seeing all of that information being bounced onto our, onto our eyes. So yeah, there we go. Look at this with just a couple of minutes. It's been like about 30 minutes with the scene. And we've already have something that looks very nice, very warm, and it makes it very normal place that we could use others. Another film that I want to, I want to reference, which is the Incredibles. And in the Incredibles, they use a lot of this golden hour sort of stuff. So you can see right here, like this golden hour, this close to golden hour, this is more like midday, which is the next one that we're going to do. Here's another golden hour and look at the tones, look at the sort of color balance and stuff that we have, right? That's what we're looking for, that's what we want to emulate or imitate. And as you guys know, we're still not done here. After we're done with this one, we can of course, add things such as a little bit of vignette, for instance. Just to give a little bit more contrast there, I'm going to have like 0.9 vignette. And we can have, of course, our Dino is your optics which is going to clean the whole image. Has this renders. Didn't know she was going to do a better job. And for instance, we can already add something like a like a color, correct. We're actually know rather than the clerk, correct. There's another mapper here or another thing that's really cool. Let me remove that one, which is called a D white balance. White balance is really good because it works in a very similar way to how the temperature works. And we can change this. And as you can see, we can change this to, for instance, sun. And it's gonna give us a little bit of a different effect, daylight shade overcast. Well, that's incandescent overcast for instance. So I'm gonna go with sun. You can see that makes it warmer or we can change this to temperature. And in the same way as how we control the lamps, we can make this thing cooler in this case, or warmer. So it's, it's kind of like a, like a global color balanced that we can do here. Again, I wanna do this as a different setup inside of Photoshop. We're going to do a very quick, very quick pass with a filter and a couple of layers as we've already done. So yeah, so we don't really need this one. Let's remove it. And that's it. We have our very nice golden hour effect and feel free to play around. Feel free to use more shadows, less shadows, more light, less light. So you're free to experiment and find the best possible solution for this kind of rooms. But again, this is something that's super, super common. Golden hour is one of those things that you're always gonna be doing. Directors love to shoot in the golden hour. The only unfortunate thing about the golden hour is that you only have it's about 30 to 40 minutes, sometimes even an hour. It depends on where you are of time to do that because after that it's just, it's just a sunset. It's very red, very warm. And before that is still quite high the sun, so you're not gonna get the best shots. So, yeah, this is the first part of this exercise guys. This is the again the golden hour part. And I'll see you back for the next one, which is going to be midday. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 21. Interior Midday: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. So do that. We're going to continue with the interior midday. So this is a more, I would say, traditional look on the rendering and stuff. It's actually gonna be super, super short. This is one of the easy ones. The reason why this is, tends to be a lot easier is because when it's midday, the sun is up high and shadows are usually underneath the subjects. So what I'm gonna do here real quick, and this is really cool. I can actually grab all of the lights that we've created. You can actually go Select all by type. And I believe we can select lights. Now that's just highlights how that's a, that's a shame anyway. So I'm going to grab all of the things that have lights. I love this guy is this guy, this guy, this guy Control G to group them. And it's gonna be called the golden hour. Let's grab all of this for airlines and group them all there as well. So as you can see, we have all of these elements right here. And if we were to hit H to hide at that specific layer and we render now, we're not gonna see anything, right? Like there's absolutely nothing. Maybe just the I think it's just what do we have here? The helix, right? Yeah, it's not the one, so let's grab this helix as well. I've got it here inside of the golden hour, and there we go. Now, technically, if you were to render, it will be completely, completely black, which is fine. I'm also going to grab the plane and get it in here. That way, when we render now it should be completely, completely black. Now we're going to start building from scratch. And you can actually create multiple lights, like even multiple sky dome light. And it's perfectly fine as long as you don't have both of them active. Okay, So right now, one of them is hidden and that's it. Now if I were to render it out and now what's going to happen? It's just a big white light coming into the scene. When selecting HDR eyes, you want to select a wants that again, are easier to control. And in this case, if we go to just skies, It's better to select a sky that is a very overcast, overcast skies are always better because you have more control over how the whole light is going up. It's going to happen if you select this guy, the skies where there's again a directional light, you aren't going to have that directional light on your render. And it could be a little bit more difficult to control. You can try it. Of course you're free to try it. But I personally like using ones that are like this one where it's just the song up high and we have a very simple normal effects. So we're going to download this one. This is a Shank hi, Riverside. And we're going to of course copy this into our source images because that's the one that we're going to be referencing On this one would just go here file and we graph our Shanghai at Riverside. There we go. Just 1 second. So yeah, now we have this Shanghai sky. Of course you want to rotate this thing so that this guy is closest to the window if you want to get the most possible. And if we were to check a render now we have something very similar. We have this very nice blue hues going into the scene, as you can see right here. Long shadows is what we hear. So we have a strong light coming from the window. Of course, if we move this around a little bit like this, Let's move this on a little bit to the side. We're gonna get this just again, just normal light coming into the scene. Let me turn off the lens effects so that we can see what's happening. You can see that still quite warm. And we didn't have any temperature. I'm pretty sure we don't have any other any other effect. So even though we're using a very nice, like it's supposed to be a neutral light. We're still getting this very warm color. And here's where we need to learn a little bit about color balance, right? Like color balance, balancing our lights. So I'm going to start with an area light. Again. Big area light that's gonna be coming from the window. I'm now going to change the spread is gonna be a really soft, softer light coming into the scene. So something like this. And I'm going to use cold temperature during this a little bit up. So if we know or we see that the light that we're getting into the scene is quite warm. We can use a cold one, a cold light in this case, to balance that out. So let's bring this up to a ten that was like that. Like the magic number two, we're getting maybe 15. There we go. So now as you can see, what's going to happen is that it's not going to look as warm because we have a different approach to things. So I'm going to try something a little bit lower, maybe like a twelv food that looks really nice. Try 13. There we go. That looks really, really nice. And here's the trick. That's why I mentioned that this one was going to be a little bit faster than the other one. I'm going to assume that whoever lives in this department is not home today. He went to work, he went to the park or something and he turned everything off. But that doesn't mean that there's not gonna be any light on the department as you can see right now, the shadows and everything is still quite, quite dark. So here's where we can, again, use the trick that we use on the last video. Hopefully you saw the whole video of course. And you didn't just skip ahead to the cool parts because we use this very, very big panel here that it's helping us a bounced the light's kind of like a, it's kinda like helping the photons bounce around and it's kinda like giving them a second life. And that's gonna give us way, way more light here on the interior. It's gonna look a little bit more like a clear render as you can see right here. But I like it. I'm definitely gonna bring this down. Let's try 11. There we go. And feel free to add as many of these ones as you need. So for instance, I would expect that the back wall, the back wall here, to also serve as a balancing point for the, for the elements. Now when we render, as you can see, we're going to have this now. This back wall will definitely have less energy than the, than the ones in front of it. So we can bring this back to something like ten or even like a nine. And that we still get this very nice cool shadows here on the back parts of the elements. But it's not gonna be like over, they're not going to be overdrawn, right? Like we're going to have this very cool effect and it's gonna look like an overcast day. We still have this very nice effect here on the window. Actually think I want to rotate this around the HDRI. So I'm going to rotate it back. So you get the, there we go. Look at that. We get this very nice effect on the, on the, the, what's the word from the bars and the window. It's now being projected here on them, on the walls. Again, here's where some directors might be like, Whoa, wildlife, the shadows down here are way, way too dark. Is there something we can do about it? And that's what you as a surrendering artists will need to use more of this feeling things to emit a little bit more lights. For instance, I can duplicate this one right here. I'm going to use this one to bring some light here on the underneath the stair. They started the artistic decisions that you're going to have to make every now and then. And yes, we are, as I've mentioned before, breaking a little bit of the things that you would normally find on on a set on your house. Like you're never going to have your house with all of these lights just playing around. But in CG, CG world, in the 3D world, it really doesn't matter. What matters is that we can get these things to look as nice as possible. So as you can see, I'm getting some light there. Now be careful though, because as you can see, this thing is getting real close to the, to the stair and that's illuminating the sterile, they're a little bit so we might want to just like balance this out. Maybe you've been changed. Like here's where we're using like a cylinder lamp is really good because we could just get the cylinder in here. And since this is more of a kinda like a three sixty, three sixty degree is going to make it look a little bit more, a little bit more natural thing we can rotate this like this. Usually the corners and the ceiling are gonna be less affected by light. That's where we get the sort of like ambient occlusion and stuff. But as you can see, by adding that light right there, we're helping the whole environment make it seem like light is bouncing in a more natural and realistic way. And at any point, if we feel like that's a little bit too much, we can just reduce it a little bit more. So we do have a little bit of light on those walls, but not as much. Same deal for this guy right here. Like infant might seem a little bit stupid what I'm about to do. But believe me, I've had clients were like, Hey, wildlife, the renderer is looking great, but I don't like this shadow underneath this object or back here. Can we get something? And I always tell them, yes, of course we can do something, but just keep in mind that this is no longer realistic. So if you tried to build this exact set somewhere, it's not going to look the exact same way because we are adding more light than what, than what we're using, right? So we can add one big panel of light literally underneath the table. And of course, lower the intensity quite a bit. There we go. So now the shadows are done or that they are not as big. Now that the closer we can get it to the actual shape of the table, then the nicer is going to look because as you can see, there's a couple of additive shadows happening right there. And that's definitely something that we don't want. So you'll want to keep things as soft as possible even if we have to go above or all the way around. There we go. So again, this is no longer realistic. This is no longer the way physics works in the real-world. But it might save you from those clients that one things that are just not possible, right? So as I mentioned, guys, this is a quick one. Honestly, when we're talking about midday, like cinematography, there's not much you can do. Like there's just a big, super big bright light in the sky, which is the sun. And even if we were to turn on lights here on the room, they wouldn't really make that much of a difference because there's so much energy coming from the, from the inside. And you can see this on the video. It looks forcing them photography. You can see this in scenes where it's like I'm the outdoors. Like this kind of seems like there's not much you can do on the lightning department. There's usually just gonna be one, maybe two or three directed lights if you want to have a couple of rain lights and stuff, we'll look at this. There's just nothing or not much we can do, right? And where you're gonna be able to play around and make this thing look a little bit more cinematography or a more cinematic semantic is of course, with the filters, with the color balance using this sort of like teal or orangey or pinky colors. That's where you're gonna be able on to under post-production side of things, you're gonna be able to tweak this even more and get something looking way, way more interesting. So I'm going to save all of the slides. So we created here Control G, and we're going to call this midday. And this is what I love about this exercise that we can turn this one off. The other one on. It's pretty much the same thing, like we keep everything. So whenever I'm showing clients this sort of stuff and we're playing around with the lighting scenarios, it's always good to have several options, right? Like, even if they're not completely sure of what they wanna do, just show them a couple of options. They don't take that long to render. They don't think like long to experiment with. And they're going to appreciate it way, way more than just showing up with one single idea. So I'm going to stop it right here, guys. And in the next one we're gonna talk about a dark scenes like in the night, like how can we light the scene? So it looks interesting when we have a nine-hundredths on our rooms. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 22. Interior Night: Hi guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with the interior night setup. And it's a very, very similar to what we saw on the hallway. But they want me to talk about some very important things. First of all, as you can see, I just grouped all of my lights over here and they are now part of the midday seen. And I've created this new AI sky dome light, which is going to be my night sky dome light out. This is the first mistake that a lot of people make when they're doing nine-hundredths, they will try and look for a night HDRI. And the problem with doing that is that you didn't have as much control over life as what you would have with a normal traditional light. So as you can see, I went and downloaded this one called Belfast the sunset. It's an overcast days. Yes, there's a sunset, but we're actually going to be using only the colors of the scene. It's a very empty scene and we're only going to be using the colors. I'm not sure why we're getting that sort of like super super rock color. There shouldn't be that much of an issue. Let's just get rid of this though. We don't see it. And if we go to our camera panels, looked at selected and we render, we should be getting a traditional like normal looking scene. And here's the deal with night scenes. Usually when people are doing Nazis onsets, they're not waiting until the night. That would be really productive. They will just make sure that they have full control over lights. That's the, that's the main secret to getting a very nice night effect. So in this case, this is pretty much all we need. I'm just going to grab my sky dome light. I don't want to have visibility on the camera. And if we turn this on, this, there's a little bit of something there, but it's not really there. We can definitely bring the exposure up if you want to. We know what's going to happen when we do this, we're gonna get this very nice like Uber, like global elimination kind of thing. But usually the moon is a reflective surface, so it will always try to reflect the warm light that the sun provides. But unfortunately, eat it doesn't have as much power because it just bounces back. So usually at night, you will have a very soft shadows like what we're seeing right here. I'm actually going to bring the exposure down to something like a two because I don't want the light from outside to be influencing most of what's happening inside. I wanted the lights from the inside of the room to be the ones dictating what's, what's happening here. Give me just one. So now that we have this, now it has this very nice base to start working with. We need to decide what kind of like a night scene we want to do. So again, the best thing you can do, especially if you're doing, especially if you're doing some sort of like architectural renderings, is just look for a living room night, for instance. And you're going to find this sort of illuminations, which is something that we, psychologically, What's the word we connect, right, with this psychologically, when we use like cool blue lights like this one, you would never have this over a blue light on a traditional home, or at least in my house. We don't have this sort of like super cool lights. But you can see they're usually very soft light, very nice reflections on the floors and stuff like that. Let's actually give the floor a nice reflection. So I'm gonna go to the floor, right-click and I'm going to assign a new material. Maybe this is like polish concrete. So let's do a AI standard surface and just increase the roughness a little bit. There we go. Maybe darken it a little bit more. Remember, we're not working with textures in this particular one. So the results might be a little bit different once we texture everything. And it's always good to do this sort of tests again beforehand just to get an idea of how things are going to look. But also after you've done all of your texture, because if you have a lot of dark furniture, dark elements, or really dark paint, then you are going to need a little bit more light if you want to keep things as light as they were when we were doing the traditional light gray color effect. So in here, I do think we want to bring, or I would like to bring my TV back. I think there'll be a nice effect. I actually want my land. Remember the Lambda we have over here wasn't the golden hour and there was this peak helix. I'm just going to duplicate this WikiLeaks and bring it out. And it should be right there. Perfect. So now technically, if we were to render this, there should be a little bit more light coming in here. I'm not seeing yet, so let's make sure that we have enough exposure. That no, no. Oh, you know what? Let's do a update full scene rendered now. That's really weird. Oh, it's missing. I think this is what I've mentioned before that you shouldn't be doing this sort of stuff. So let me delete this slide right here. This P helix. Let's go to object display visibility. There we go, and let's assign a new mesh light. There we go. So now when we do this and we increased exposure to something like cat pen, There we go. Now we should see a little bit more light going into the scene. Let's make this a little bit bigger. And that's the 15th, 15th, way too much. That's the 12th. There we go. And let's go for a nice warm color temperature. Cool. It's a little bit too much. I feel like let's get rid of the normalization. I just wanted to have a little bit of light right here. I don't want the light to be going everywhere, so I'm going to keep it really, really software while they checked right here. This normal assumption, this breaks away from the physically correct way that lights work and it will allow me to just be a little bit more artistic. So it pretty much just disconnect some physicality that occurs there. And give me just 1 second here. Now we need to decide what other light sources we want in our scenes. And again, if we take a reference on this sort of like elimination, you're going to see that we can go for some, a little bit more stylistic choices like this or like pink colors and stuff. But don't want to keep it really, really simple. This is late at night. Maybe whoever lifts here is just waiting together a little bit of rest. He's watching TV while reading the book or are browsing on his phone. So again, I'm just gonna go, I'm going to create these fear over here for the lamp. It gets smaller. And we're gonna make this a mesh light as well. This is going to be a warm lamp. You can, by the way, duplicate the lights that we had before. If there are a couple of lights that you liked from the what's the word from the golden hour? You're free to just like duplicate them. But I want to go for a little bit more contrast right here. So something like this. Now, if you remember or if you were keen enough to see, we do have this little lamps like over here. I think it would be cool to have a couple of small light bulbs here as well. I'm going to create a warrant, right. There are no lights, mesh, light, color, temperature. They should not have as much energy as the other ones. So I'm going to add six energy and keep this warm. This is something important like even if we want to have a very similar effect to what we have on this one, we need to understand that the size of the light bulb will definitely impact on, on the intensity of the light bulb. Therefore, you shouldn't expect to have the same amount of light everywhere. It's just gonna be like a little bit of an extra lamp right there. We're going to do the same thing on this land right here. So again, we create a sphere. I'm using a trick here, a V and middle mouse click to snap to points so they didn't have to see where the, where the sphere is. Just snap it. And we're going to go Arnold, lights, mesh, light. Five on exposure, color, temperature, warm. There we go. We're going to have another nice little land right there. It seems like something broke over here. It's weird. It's like they moved us. Listen backwards. Supposed to be. There we go. There we go. So that looks a lot. A lot there. This is one of those situations or specific elements where I would probably advise against using the bounce light on the ceiling and stuff. Because again, we want to have this sort of like dark like late effect on the whole thing, right? So if we were to use a little bit more balanced life, what's going to happen is we're gonna get more, One more information. One thing that would be cool though. I think it's a little bit too warm. One thing that would be cool is indicating that there is something else. This is always similar to what we did with the shadow and the door on spooky hallway. You always want to be telling a story about how things are happening. So one thing we can do is maybe we can suggest that there's light coming from upstairs and that the main room or the master bedroom or something is up here. So we're gonna go Arnold lights, Area Light. And we're going to move this area light up here to the beginning of the of the steps. This is again, one of the secrets not only of rendering, but in general about storytelling is you always want to leave little clues and things for people to find out. If you spell out everything, if people can see every single thing are you seeing, then it becomes really boring because there's no mystery through it. There's nothing really important. There we go, look at that beautiful. Let's use the color temperature and let's go, let's go blue in this case. And maybe decrease the intensity a little bit. Just gonna be a little bit of something indicating that there's another light source up here. It could even be the moon, like it could be something from, from outside, just getting more information here into the scene. But as you can see, we can get this very, very, very cool effect where you have another extra light coming from there. This is also where something called rim lights. I don't think I've mentioned this once before, but you probably already know about them. But this is where we can use a little bit of green light to give more, more visual interests of the whole thing. So remember we mentioned that we wanted to have our TV back. Let's grab our light. It's going to represent the TB. Let's move it to work. I would expect it to B2B just right around there. There, there. It's going to be quite exposed. It's gonna be bluish. And we're going to be having this sort of effect. We can increase this thing a little bit more. Let's go to like 679. There we go. So now with a nine, as you can see, we have this thing. I'm really going to push this into the blue colors, really, really blue. And then we have this, as you can see, a lot of the elements here on the table are getting this very, very nice rim light whenever you have a high contrast seen, this rim light is really useful for two things. It will separate things from the background so that you can more easily see foreground, midground, and background. And it will also add a little bit more silhouette to the whole element. So we're gonna be able to appreciate where things are and what's the form that they're that they're portray the yeah. I mean, that's pretty much it. This is what I would do for a nine-hundredths, to be honest. Now, one final thing we can do here, and this is very cool. When we're working this way. We can grab all of this controller G. Just call this night. If any point I can hide this, unhide this, and if we render the golden hour, we're supposed to have, or we should have the golden hour. It looks really nice, really welcoming. And then we have our midday, which is going to be really, really blue, really nice, really interesting. And finally, we have our night, which is gonna be a lot more contrasty with a different sort of a beaver effect. It seems like I misplaced to one. Once fear right here. Change something. That's kinda where that it's not showing here. Let's make the light visible. We might need to rebuild that one, but yeah, that's it, guys. I'm going to stop it right here. With this. We're pretty much finished with this chapter with just a general overview of different times of day that you can use to light your interior scenes. Feel free to explore around. As with everything we've mentioned, there's a lot of options and the more creativity you put into them, the easier it's going to be there. As you can see, it's really not that complicated. In the next chapter, we're going to jump onto something called the Moral, what I like to call Character presentation. Because I know a lot of you might not be super familiar with environments and you might be really good at the characters. And there's also ways to present our characters in more interesting ways. So we're gonna take a look at different kinds of framings for the camera, different kinds of light setups in that we're gonna be using a really, really cool character. So hang on tight and we'll see you back on the next one. Bye. 23. Character Render: Hi guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with chapter five and chapter four. This is one of the ones that I've been waiting to share with you because I'm going to show you several different ways in which you can present your characters. I know a lot of you guys watching this series, our character artists or would like to present their prompts or characters in a better light. Literally. So this character right here as a character I did a couple of years ago and I had a friend of mine, his name is Jose or psychoanalysis. He helped me with the clothing system here today clothing system using marvelous and the lightsaber, of course, is supposed to be a Jedi Knight. Creature. I throw in a very quick rig is actually very dirty, like we can't really move him that much, but you guys are free to tweak it if you want to. We're just going to give it a very, very basic pose. And we're gonna be talking about the basics of the rendering process for characters. What are the kinds of things that we want to, we want to emphasize and then make sure people know this about their characters. So the first thing I actually want to go over how this whole thing is set up, because there is a couple of interesting things going on here. If at any point during the project you can't find the textures like you tried to render and everything renders without textures. Make sure to go here to Windows, general editors and file path editor and just read path, whatever it is not there. Most of the textures that I'm using should be on source images. But in the next chapter and the final chapter, some of the textures are actually not the source images, so you might need to repeat them, just select, looked for them right path. And that tip is everything should be connected at the materials and you should be able to access everything. Now for this guy right here, he's actually using UTMs. So he's textures are quite a bit heavy. I wanted to give you guys the best possible result, the best possible quality. So he's using, I believe like four or five or three. It's three for k textures, okay, for each map. So quite heavy, quite heavy. I get everything should be set up. Everything should be set up properly. So if you keep render, we should get, we should see something. Now when we're presenting characters, one of the most basic ways to present the character is through something called a clay render. I actually always recommend my students to do clay renders if their characters have no textures, but this character actually does have textures. So we should be able to do a very nice clay render. A clay render is nothing more than a very simple setup that we can use to present our characters as you can see right here in a very nice way. And as you can see, something that's very, very common in clay renders is this background right here. This is called an infinite background in, well, I like to call the name from that background. I've heard other names like in Mexico cure, they call it C Clarke Emma, which is just like a round quarter. What we wanna do is we want to create the plane like I just did right there. Move this edge all the way up, and then either move this edges a couple of more times, like so, or even double them. Bellowing them should work just fine. You can scale this and decide where you want the shadow to be. It's again, this is mainly the function of this plane is mainly to make sure that it looks like there's no hard line on the shadows on the background of the character. And that way the character is the main focus of the whole thing. I'm going to create a new camera. So I'm gonna go rendering camera panels, looks for selected. And we're going to find that one very full body shot. We haven't really talked about camera shots in regards to characters because we haven't had a character until now. So in the next video, I'm going to go very quickly about some of the different cameras that we can have. This one is called a full shot camera. And as the name implies, the character is gonna be fully on the show. That's pretty much it. Nothing, nothing else now for characters and thanks to social media, one thing that you can actually do nowadays is changes to a wonky composition. That way, the character is the focus of the shot and we don't have a lot of extra, extra elements. And the next thing I want to do, and this is very, very important. Whenever you're doing character renders and you just want to show the character. Ask the character like you don't want to make or do you don't want to be telling any stories or anything? I strongly, strongly recommend you use a studio HDRI is like this ones right here. I personally love this one, this brown folders student, it was added relatively recently. This one is also quite nice. There's a Brownfield, the students, you're one which has like wooden floors. It's going to make the colors a little bit duller. Of course. My advice is still stands as for the Lights like tried to go for things that are not super contrasty like this. Shadows right here could be a little bit difficult to control later on. So lets this one, let's use brown folders to the one. I'm going to download this real quick for you guys. Again, this HDRI is going to be available. Not sticking a little bit longer than usual. That's weird. I'm not downloading anything else. So this is going to be, as I mentioned, available for you guys, your source images folder and you can download any other ones that you might want from pulley haven. Get this real quick here. There we go. Oh, where we're headed. So here we're just going to go Arnold lights or actually, let me save this real quick. I'm going to save this as a different scene. So do you have the infinite plane? This is going to be Act rock finish or Portugal's that we call. So I'm gonna go Arnold lights, sky dome light, and the sky dome light. We're going to load of course, our very nice HDRI. We go for the brown photo studio. There we go. And that's it. Now, again, we need to decide where we want the light to be coming from. In this case, I'm gonna go for this sort of like right side effect. And here's where the interesting bit is going to happen. If you go to Arnold and you go to Utilities, there's this texture manager. Here you can see all of the textures that we're using quite a bit for them, right? Like we have all of these gyms for the character and then all of these elements right here, as I mentioned, it is a little bit heavy. So if, if your computer can handle it due to memory space, you might want to try and change the resolution. I always tried to provide the best possible resolution, but I do know that it might be complicated sometimes. So I'm going to say Arnold render and we might get a little texture file conversion. I'm actually also including the texture files. I think for you, my friends. I don't remember if they were included or not, but if they are, that could potentially make things a little bit easier. Let's take a look at the render here. Again, this is quite a heavy scene because we have a lot of elements and that's also a little bit of the unfortunate side of renderers. The more or the cooler you wanted your rendered to look, the more information, the more materials and stuff you're going to have to add, then therefore, things are gonna get or become heavier and heavier. So yeah, this is, it seems like the belt doesn't have the proper texture, so it's looking a little bit weird. And of course we're gonna go to camera shape one. There we go. So this is one of the most common mistakes that people make when they're doing a character render that just throwing an HDRI. And they're like, That's it. I'm good. I like how this looks or no need to do anything else. And unfortunately, even though it looks quite cool and it looks interesting, it's not, it's not there. Like we really need to push the lights a little bit more to create a more interesting effect. So I'm going to show you guys one of the most basic and most common ways to eliminate or a light, a character to get a good result. This is what I like to call her here in Mexico, we call it labia confabulate, the old, the old thrust worthy method, which is the famous three-point light. In a three-point light setup, we're going to have, as the name implies, it's three lights, three main lights, and the first one is going to be our key light. So I'm going to go to my HDRI and I'm going to actually turn it off. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go Arnold lights. We're going to create a new area light and we need to decide how we want this light to be. I'm going to be following you guys. Remember when we did the little football back in the beginning and we've talked about Rembrandt. Well, remember, not only use this kit Claros cool technique quite a bit, he actually popularized a very famous lightening technique that's used today. It has been used for several 100 years, which is a Rembrandt illumination. The way this works is you're going to have a main point of flight, just 1 of light illuminating the character. And you're gonna get this sort of like triangular shape underneath the eye that's on the shadows. Super, super, super common to find that this effect is Rembrandt triangle on a lot of stuff. If you've ever taken a photography class, you've probably heard about this one. So I'm going to do that. I'm going to create a light. It's gonna be kinda high. Over here. I want to change this to a disk, so it's more like a spotlight. And I'm going to move this around so we can see, we can hit that little triangle that I'm expecting to get. Now, one thing that I didn't mention, the character can be moved a little bit. So for instance, if I grabbed like this three joints right here, I can't rotate him slightly. That's gonna give me a little bit of a different effect. Of course. That's gonna give me a little bit of this contrapposto. It's not rig, like not all of the pizza rate. So for instance, the skirt here, we might need to just move it around and just tweak it so that it's not overlapping. Like the finger there. Just rotate a little bit. For instance, the head. We can move the head a little bit just to make him look a little bit more alive, right? Like we don't want things to be in the perfect T-pose. Now of course, if that's changed, we might need to go to the camera. Fine. Like a good, a good if I actually liked, I went looking to the side. It looks quite, quite interesting, quite menacing. So there we go. Now, if we go to this one, we're of course going to use a higher exposure. This guy is in real-world scale, so you might need to use a bigger numbers. And if we take a redder, as you can see, this is where we get. He has a really, really shiny skin. He's supposed to be this sort of like amphibian character, as you probably can tell from the colors and stuff. So yeah, this is the, this is a character. I really liked the library now, but I think we can increase this a little bit more. Let's start in 19. I think that's going to be a little bit too much. Let's start low wearing it. There we go. Let's go for a little bit of contrast. Not that much, something like that, I think. Yeah, there we go. Maybe 1717. That's going to work. There we go. Now, as we've mentioned before, depending on how we want the shadows to be, we can go for really soft shadows are really harsh shadows. I do think I want a softer shadows. I'm going to go for a bigger, for a bigger form. And that's immediately going to give me a softer shadow because there's more area on the light and we get this very cool effect. I'm actually going to break one of the rules that we've been using so far. I'm not going to use temperature right now. I want to show you the basics first and then we're going to tweak it up a little bit. So yeah, that looks good. Now we're going to go to the folder studio and the photos today is gonna be the second light that we're gonna be using. There's some little bit of overlap on the code. Less. Rotate this a little bit more. Just like bring it forward. You can see the little overlap right there on those specific areas. There we go. So yes, I was mentioning we are going to be turning on our main element right here, our HDRI, the intensities back on. And when we render what's going to happen is now working to be combining two light sources. And it might not seem like it because the main light, the key light is actually coming from the same side as the, as the other leg. I'm actually not using GPU. Gpu. There we go. Let's go render, render or sorry, Arnold, render. Hopefully this doesn't break because it's so a lot of textures. There we go. So as you can see, we have two very cool lights coming. And you've seen this shots, you've seen this chart before. And the reason I'm the super certain that you've seen this before is they do this all the time for photo shoots. So if you look for Star Wars photoshoot, like magazines, stuff like that, they always do this sort of like characters on a white screen just showing you how they, how they are. I remember them saying as a kid, I can't remember exactly which magazine, but this kind of shots are really, really, really common in the industry. And they're really good because you can focus solely on the character. You can get to meet the character as a way of appreciating what, what's gonna be on the movie. So there we go. Now, let's grab this one right here. And what I'm gonna do You usually the field like the main reason why we have it feel like it's because the field light will, as the name implies, feel the information or the areas of the character to that are really dark. So if I run it right now, on the other side, if I move this to the other side of the character, as you can see right here, the exposure of the window is going to pretty much get rid of those very nice shadows that we had on the character on this side. So in order to avoid that, we're definitely going to bring the exposure down because we do want to have a little bit of contrast, but not that much. There we go. So as you can see with a minus two, we still get this very nice light information on the character. We're no longer like an overriding this whole thing. You can go even darker, of course, like if you go to a minus four, for instance, it's gonna be like again, like super dark shadows. But the main reason why we have this sort of like phyllite is to make sure that the shadows are not as dark. So I'm going to keep this up minus G. There we go. That looks really good. And finally, finally, the last light that we're gonna be adding. And this is like the chefs kiss is the little extra light makes everything come together, is called the rim light. We've talked about this one before on the night scene, we're gonna go Arnold lights. We're gonna do an area light. And we're going to position this area light. Like here, the side of the character. It's usually supposed to be placed on the opposite side of your key light. So if that's my key light, I should place it over here. It's gonna be a little bit difficult to find the perfect position. It usually has a really small shape, like the beans are really concentrated. So we're going to have a bigger array, smallest spread. And the reason why we use a rim light is because we want to separate the character from the background. So let's go to a 1015. There we go. That's what we want. That very nice. Like a shadow, like illuminated bit on the character. That's what we're going for. I'm actually going to move this thing like higher up. So we hit the shelves and sometimes some things the intensity of the rim light is even bigger than the one from the main light so that you get this really, really intensive. It's literally like a spotlight. So we can play around with that. And I think I'm going to increase the spread a little bit. That's going to make this look better. And we'll look at that. We get this very nice effect where we have our main light showing the whole character. Then we have this rim light, and then we have all of the other lines. Now, one of the important things is you can see right here is worth kinda missing something there on the island were missing a little bit of a reflection because otherwise that looks kinda death. He doesn't have any texture, eyes or anything. So here's again where we can start breaking away from some of the traditional ways to do things and go into the CG world and say, Hey, you know what, I'm going to add just a super small circular light right here. And I'm just going to make this like lighter. Let's do like 20. Of course, that's way, way too much. Let's bring it down. Let's go through a teen. Or do they change the material? I'm wondering if I change the material now the material is there. There we go. I mean, we can increase, for instance, on the maturity nets, it sets the metal. There we go. That was problem. So let's get rid of the metal. So it's not metal is just gonna be a reflective surface. There we go. But now you can see that thanks to this extra little light that we added here, it's not really affecting my composition or eyelids. It shouldn't be that much and I can bring this even lower to 12th it but it's going to be on the eye. If I were to turn this off. We're going to lose a little bit of that effect. It's super subtle, but there's a little extra like pixel right there that's helping us with the whole character. So, yeah, that's, that's pretty much it. There's one more thing that we can add for this, and this is also going to bring your character renders to the next level. That's, I think, a little bit of a backdrop kind of like framing the character. So for this, we're also going to be using an RD light. We're going to place this area light back here on the back of the character hidden by the robes or whatever we have right here. Let's up like this. And that's like a ten. Let's lower this bread a little bit. Let's go for like 15. There we go. See that. We can go even more extreme like 17. And it looks like he is like in front of a spotlight, as you can see right here. And it's another way to frame the character. You want to hide this as much as possible, or blink this as close to the bus, almost to the character. So we don't have this weird shadow right there. And it's not the end of the world, but it could make things look a little bit weird. And that's it. That's pretty much it. With this we have are very traditional three-point light setup. So with this guys, if you know how to use the brush, if you know how to model things. I hope that you never, never, never have to go back to just like taking a screenshot of your ZBrush Bu board or just printing your screen with Directory for Maya, you now have the tools. Yes, it will take you about 15 minutes, 20 minutes to set it up. But as you can see, you can get such a better render from this. And now of course, on top of this, we can add our images, we can add our answer, and we can add our camera effects. Once effects. In this case, I just want to add a little bit of vignette to, again framed the character a little bit more. You can see that the noise we're doing its job, they're really nicely. Let's go to the Options here. And what I'm gonna do is I'm going to render this as two K squared. So it's a little bit more than them full HD. And if we go render now, we're going to have way, way more pixels. That's not it. Let's go camera shape one. And there we go. And we have this very cool, clean look at our character. You're gonna be doing a lot of this renders because not everyone wants to see a cinematic render where the character is hidden by shadows or there's a lot of folks, sometimes you'll want to show your character just as it is, just like this, like just straight into a super clean light and that's it. We are going to be doing the cinematic shots. You've already seen those in the intro video, of course. But it's also very important that you guys understand how to do this sort of shots. So in the next couple of videos, we're going to explore. First of all, we're going to go into the camera positions like the camera framing that you're going to have sort of like a visual guide of all the different cameras that you might get when you're planning your shots. And then we're gonna do a couple of more interesting light sources that we can have here on that character. So hanging pipe, and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 24. Camera Composition: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about camera compositions. They, as I mentioned in the last couple of videos, there's a couple of camera compositions are known as like industry standards. And it's very important that if you're gonna be working in the production environment, you know about this shots. Now, I am going to be rendering some of them so that you can see the difference. But it's actually a really, really short lecture. I'm gonna go to my camera up panels literal selected. And right now we're going to start away the one thing that we call the wide shot. Okay. So the wife Charlotte, or the ultra wide shot, It's usually used as a establishing shots. So when you want to tell the audience where we are, we're gonna be using this very big open shots where we're going to see all of the elements, usually in this long shots or wide shots, we're gonna be using a wide camera lenses. So we're going to be like a 2418, stuff like that so we can see as much as possible. And then we start pushing in, which they're pushing in towards our character. And we're going to get probably the most common and most well-known shot, which is the full shot. The full shot, as the name implies, is just a character being completely seen by our camera and we get to see their sort of stuff. You can have two people in a full showed. You can have three people on the full shot. And again, the full showed is usually described as the type of chart where you're gonna be seeing the full character. From here, we're going to jump to a shot that's actually very curious and they do, they do use quite a bit in Star Wars, which is the famous cowboy shot. And that's known as the caboose shot because we're going to cut the character at roughly a little bit above the knee so that we can see whatever he's holding on his belt. And it gets, if a Jedi, that will be of course, the lightsaber. So this is what we would commonly see as a cowboy boots. And cowboy shirts are really, really good if you're doing a characteristic creature, usually the legs or the, or the lower part of the body is not as interesting as the top part. So it's really cool to have this sort of like a, kinda like a profile picture for your character. You're going to see the top part of the, of the, of the creature. This is what I would normally do for my, for my characters as well. Like I will do definitely a flu shot. But if I wanted to talk about the lower or if I want to appreciate the details a little bit more, I would definitely go into this sort of close shell radius, which is called another close shot that's called the cow ********. After this, we have the mid shot, which is just cutting the character at like literally at the half. So something like this. And as you can see, we can appreciate more of the actual gesture of the character. So if he, if he is angry or sad or he is happy, this is where we're gonna be seeing most of the movies nowadays. Whenever you are seeing like a shot, like a normal shell, like someone talking to another person, you're gonna see this sort of stuff where it's a close-up. What's not that really close? It's like immediate medium shot where you see half of the character. Then we go further in and we go into the famous close-up, which is something like this. Now, thankfully, our camera where a character array now he has a texture so he can hold. We can see quite a bit of detail even at this distance, which is quite, quite nice. But if you don't have this much of detail on your characters, you would definitely try to avoid having this row shots because then you can start seeing the fragmentation of a decimated character. Or maybe there's like a weird topology and stuff like that. And that's of course not something that you want. One thing that you do need to keep in mind is once we start getting into this a specific distance. So once we start seeing the characters like really, really close that what we're seeing right here, you definitely want to change the focal length to something a little bit flatter. Because even though, even though we're at 35, which is considered to be a standard focal length, it will still destroyed your characters and they will make them look a little bit weird. So once you go into the portrait mode like this sort of stuff, you definitely want to go for something like a 55. I really like using 55. You're definitely going to have to push out to re-frame your character. But 50 fives, and I've seen some people go all the way up to 90 on the focal length are really good for portraits because they won't disturb your character as much. You will see things in a not orthographic way, but really, really flat. I personally don't like the nineties because there are quite a bit flat for my for my taste. But I like 5555. I think it works pretty, pretty nice. And we can get a really nice close-up here for our character. And we're going to get a nice effect. And finally, on this sort like shots, we have something called a super close or extreme close-up, which is where you're gonna be focusing like a specific part of the character. Maybe the scar, right? Like if you think about like Harry Potter when they're like, Oh yeah, Your scar and then you have this super, assuming that version of the scar will that that will be your, your your extreme close-up or you're just like super intense zoom on the character. I would also avoid using low focal length lenses at that point, I would recommend keeping flat lenses like this 55 or like a Nike ad, but that's of course up to you depending on what the project calls for. Those aren't like the normal shots that you're going to have for your character. So whenever you are communicating with a client, whenever you're in a project and someone tells you, Hey, I need a render of this character. Always ask them what kind of render a full shot, medium shot, cowboy shot. Do we want to close off? Do you want a specific part of the character? Like always asked for those kinds of directions because it's, it's quite annoying when you send something to the client and they're like, Oh, no, that's not what I meant. Well, you didn't ask the right. So it's it's a little bit difficult. Remember that at the end of the day in a production that communication is key. So make sure you always ask for the specific shut that they're going for. Now when we go back to the full shots, There's a couple of The things that the camera can do that are also important for presentation purposes. So for instance, right now, again, this, if I mentioned, this is a full shot and it's a really nice, I would say, balanced close to full shots. However, there's two things that we can do here. We can orient or rotate the camera so that we stay in the same position where we're seeing him from above or we can bring the camera down. And it's usually referred to as tilt, tilt upward, tilt down. Those are usually deed the camera movements that you're going to find. A tilde down will be something like this, where you're gonna be seeing the character from beneath like a more of a hero shot. This are really, really cool because it makes you, as the audience looks more like a k, there were like a little soldier or something. And it makes the characters local, more, more important, more menacing. Even if you are going for the villain, you want to bring this sort of like importance to the thing you can play around with the angles here on the camera. One thing that you can definitely do here is bring the focal length down. So if you bring the focal length down and keep the camera low like this, then what's going to happen is that character is going to look like super, super epic, right? So playing around with both the focal length and the position of the camera are important to generate this sort of effects. I think that's a little bit too much. Now, if we go the other way around, I'm going to go back to a 55-year. We go the other way around. If we tilt the camera up, now we're going to see, be seeing the cow, that character from the top. That usually gives you as the audience, a sense of superiority or that you are more important, bigger or something, then the character in this case, it doesn't seem like much because the character is actually looking down so he doesn't care that the word bigger. But if we were to go to the neck for instance, this is going to break the Rick and he is looking towards us like this. Now it looks like we are better than them, right? Like in some sense, we have the high ground, haven't got that, or we're just like looking at them from a balcony or something. Again, that's the position of the camera. Like where are we actually looking at the character from? And that's going to give us a different sort of impression. We didn't have something called again, the extremes, right? Like that was still down or tilt up. And again, it's gonna give us an interesting effect right there. If we go really, really down like this. I've seen this thing called an enhanced view or like a floor perspective. There might be reasons why you might want this sort of composition if you want to seem like something important that he's holding or if there's like, I don't know, like there might be some justification on why you might want to have a super, super low, like a view of your character. But the one that I've seen more often is something like this, which is called a bird's-eye view. And that's when you go really, really high. And it's like if you were a bird and you take a look at the character and maybe they're about to babbled someone else. And you see them as a field, like kind of like a helicopter, right? Those are the most common shots that you're gonna find. Of course, there's other things such as camera movements and things like that. Like the one we saw with Hitchcock, that are gonna get more visual interests to the whole composition into the whole presentation of your pieces. But as long as you know how to play around with how close you want to speak to your character and how you want to frame the character. You're gonna be able to create some really, really cool and amazing our compositions. We're going to now talk on the next video about some more interesting light scenarios. So I want to go for a mid shot right here. I think something like this is gonna be cool. Oh, that looks really, really cool. We're not letting the audience see everything. There's a little bit of a hint from the lightsaber right there, but we're not letting the audience see everything. And then of course, um, what I'm gonna do here is a probably will not rotate his face a little bit. I know that he's Nick is breaking. Let's let's not do that then. Let's bring the face down a little bit. I do want to hear I want him to facing slightly, slightly to the side like this. Now we can fix that on the rigorous as well. I'm not sure that's I don't think that's great. So let's let's bring this back or let's just rotate the camera. And again, find the composition. Usually there's this another interesting bit of information. Usually the characters tend to face towards the right. Again, there's this sort of psychological reason why we place the shots in certain ways. And usually psychologically, we associate the right of the image to moving forward or looking forward, and the left of the image we associated with looking backwards or going backwards. So usually the character is going to be looking towards the right. Usually not always. You can of course have any, any sort of composition that you want. Just keep in mind that that's in general rules. That's what people think or see when they see this sort of a compositions. So, yeah, this is it, this is the composition that I'm going to keep against kinda like a cow boy shot. I think I'm gonna go a little bit more for that, sort of like cowboy shirt. Another thing I'm gonna do here, AS in regards to the focal length, because that's important. I'm gonna go to a 55 to keep things a little bit flatter. That means that of course is going to have to move the camera a little bit. Let's stop this. Let me move this around. There we go. And when you see this thing right here, there is, we haven't really talked about like the way to frame things, but there's three main things you can do. You can keep asymmetrical composition like what I have right here. You can move this thing too, one of the sites like this, kinda like a rule of thirds. So keeping him on one of the first, and then we have this thing called the golden ratio, which is a spiral. You've probably seen it before. You don't have to follow those things like Purdue rules, like you can always break, break, break things and move things around. But one of the things that you definitely want to avoid is having a lot of empty space around the character. So in this case, for instance, if I were to render this way, way too much empty space here. So either I move the character or I pushed a camera in a little bit more so that women have as much empty space on this area where we are keeping this sort of rule of thirds. So he's on one of the thirst of the scene, but we don't want to overdo it, maybe even a little bit more centered. But now we're losing the cowboy shot the way half. Since he is very symmetrical, something like this. There we go. So he's not perfectly in the center of the frame, like most of his message you can see is towards the left. And that's gonna give us a really, really cool composition. So I'm going to save this real quick. I'm going to stop the video right here, guys, in the next one, again, we're going to talk about very dramatic light setups that we can do this ourselves that are usually used in photography, in theater as well, but we can definitely use them for renters to create something really, really interesting. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. 25. Dramatic Light: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with a dramatic lights and we're gonna go here with our character. But before we jump there, actually want to let you know that on our images folder, I've included a couple of images from exercises that I've done in the past that are gonna be really, really helpful and this is what we're gonna be going over. So first of all, regarding composition, I created this little sequence a couple of years ago where I explained my students the different kinds of compositions that you can have. And they're basically as follow. This first one is called a symmetrical composition. We talked about this one on the last video. When you have everything on the center and it's pretty uniform and things are balanced. That's a symmetrical composition. Think about Wes Anderson, and he really, really likes using these types of compositions. Then we have this thing which I call equilibrium composition. You're gonna find them, by the way, exactly the same. There's a little bit of storytelling here as well. And in an equilibrium composition where you're looking for is you want to have the same amount of weight on one side of the image and on the other. In this case, we have two points over here and we have the queen over here. The Queen's a bigger piece and it has a darker color, therefore, it has more weight than £2 combined, and that makes decomposition look at balance. Then we have this one right here, which I don't remember how I called it rule of thirds. There we go. Who rule of thirds? Which is when we have one image and the other leg, the important points on the thirds of the image, which we've already used this one before. This one right here is the golden ratio composition, which is this one. And the golden ratio, we haven't really seen the graphic you saw in the very phrase be this, this sort of like spirally thing. And you want to focus point to fall on that point of the spiral-like there, there's a little bit of movement going. It's a little bit more dynamic in regards to the, the way this works. And finally, we have this one which again, I don't remember how I call it complex composition, which is where we combine a couple of other things. So for instance, here, I played around with that foregrounds backgrounds and of course, a low angle, low focal length for the camera to create this kind of competition. So again, just referenced them for your personal use if you want, those are really, really useful. This one is not supposed to be here. There we go. Now, this is where we're gonna be taking a look right now. This is what I like to call dramatic composition. And we already saw the first one, which is this Rembrandt effect. This is an old model that I used several times when teaching this sort of topics. And when we're talking about a dramatic composition, that's when we really want to one to two, to communicate a specific feeling or a specific presentation of our work, I would not recommend using this one for a traditional renderings like clear renders and stuff because they're really contrasty. They're quite dramatic. Again, for dramatic shots or for more interesting shots, it definitely, definitely works. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm going to go over this guy's control G. I'm just going to go call this 3 so that I know that this is our three-point light and let's hide them. The dome light, this is important. Don't let these to be really, really, really light. So we're going to go all the way down to something like a minus six. Let's try that again. Minus six. There we go. So now if we were to render, this is what we have, right? Well, this is what we had before with the three-point lighting. And now this is what we get. Let's go to camera ship one. And we're pretty much like not seeing anything. I usually like to keep my light so that I at least see something on the, on the image because otherwise it becomes way, way, way too dark. So something like this works fine. I'm going to turn off the noise here and the effects just to get some faster renders. And there we go. That's quite nice. Maybe even a little bit lower, to be honest. This term minus five, minus five. There we go. So for the first type of light, we're gonna go for the top lip. And the top line is one of those slides that you have seen, again in a lot of movies, especially when you're introducing the villain or something that's gonna be a little bit creepy, a little bit of what's the word drama and stuff. Like, again, the best movie I can think of as The Godfather When he is on his office and there's just one light coming from the from the top right. So we would expect to have this in a really, really high exposure, or at least high enough to see the character a little bit higher. There we go. The interesting thing about this sort of, what's the word this sort of lightning scenario is that your eyes and your nose, they create some really deep shadows that hide the actual like color and everything about your eyes. So they're really creepy. I mean, this gives a very, very interesting, very, very creepy Look. I love using this style whenever I'm doing things like new R or when you want to have again, the bad guy, if you really want to portray that sort of stuff, this is a great way to do it. Another thing that you can definitely do for this specific celebrate here is to go to the, what's the word? Go to the spread, of course, bring the spread down. So it's more like a spotlight. Then play around with the exposure. And that what we're going to have a very, very cool faith here towards the borders of the character. And we're going to get this, as you can see, it's a little bit noisy. We need to let this thing run and we can of course use our denoise or two to clean it up a little bit. But this is gonna give us a really, really crazy detail. Like I really like the way things look when we're using one-point light. Now, all of this extra space or all of these examples that I'm going to show you right now. We're only going to be using one light. There's usually going to be more lights in the scene, but I want light to be the main focus of the scene. Then on the next one we're going to do two lights. But yeah, so this is the this is the first one. So since I do want to save all of this guy's for you as well. I'm going to enable my adaptive sampling is going to lower this to something like eight. I think we don't need that many. Let's try eight. And let's get a clean, a clean image. This guy is supposed to have this sort of like tattoos, like a cross, like a paint crust on top of the of the, of his face. Not to brag, but I do like that character. I designed this here. This is my own creation By the way. I did it him a couple of years ago. I think it was 2019 when I did him. So yeah, there we go. We get this very cool effect. Let's stop this and let's save the image or the snapshot so we can compare. Now, we're going to use the exact same light like I'm actually not going to create a new layer. I'm going to use the exact same light. We're going to change the focus. And instead of going up, we're gonna go down. And what this is going to achieve as you're about to see, is we're gonna get the same sort of like creepy vibe. But now he looks more like a, like a demon or like a villain. This is used quite often on horror films. The other one, you can use it for good guys, you can use it for bad guys. Like it's pretty universal. This one, I would recommend only using it for bad guys because it makes things look really menacing. As you can see, this is the sort of like, you can imagine, maybe this is some sort of like a fire pit or something. And this is the reflection that we're getting, the way that the forms of your characters are going to look will be quite different than that's something that you need to be aware of. Like you can see the shape of this head. It looks really, really different to this, right? And that's just due to the fact that the elimination, It's a little bit different. So just keep in mind that yes, this is very creepy, but now he looks kinda like Dracula or something. It's still just one light and see how nice we can make this thing look. So I'm going to stop this one right here. I'm going to save this one as well. And then we're gonna go for the Rembrandt, the rubber arm we've already seen this one is just a single light that's gonna be coming from the side. It can be right or left, whichever one you prefer. But the thing is, we want to have this sort of like interesting in light here on the ice. And it's super, super nice. This is one of those, like it's never going to fail you if you, if you ever want to do like some sort of cinematic render and you don't want to think about it, just go for the Rembrandt and you're gonna get an amazing result as what you're seeing right here. It doesn't look as clean as what we had when we had the three-point light. That one looks a little bit more like a studio light, but this one looks really, really cool. And the cool thing about this one is we can play around, for instance, with the exposure. And now it's gonna look a little bit or even more cinematic. Something like this. I just finished watching a couple of days ago, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series from Disney. In the final episode, I'm not going to spoil anything, but they use a very interesting lighting setup for a very important moment. And the highlights are not super extreme. That surprised me like they don't go for like super high highlights. They they keep things like very, very uniform like what you're seeing right here. Now in here, we can actually combine a little bit of what we saw when we were doing the spooky hallway. And if you're like, Hey, you know what? I want to give it even more, more contrast to specific parts of the character. You can use light blockers. Like we can introduce a plane. Usually a small plane really close to the camera to cut off some parts of the light. And as long as it's not visible on the camera, that one's definitely visible. So we need to move it a little bit. There we go, or we can just move that light as well to get more space. And then what's going to happen is we're only going to have light, unspecific part of the care. Now since the light is a little bit farther away, we could benefit from having a little bit more light right here. So there we go. This is going to give us this sort of like remembered the fact, as you can see right here. It's gonna give us a very nice effect. He's just one light. This is, this is what I want you guys to get out of this exercise that you don't need to have a ton of lights like what we like what we did on the room. The room is a different case because there's more area to utilize her to work with. But for this sort of stuff, for a character like this one, you can get away with a very, very simple light solution. It's going to look amazing. Now, see this right here. That's important. As you can see, the plane is visible, aren't refractions and we don't want that. We will actually like to see the actual shape of the element. Can we change something? Yes, we can go to the plane. And if we go to object display, we can go to render stats and say, visible and reflections and refractions. Know, we do want it to cast shadows because otherwise it wouldn't work as a light blocker. We're actually right now, this has to do with don't want to, we don't want to cast shadows. Now actually we do want to cast shadows. So we're gonna get this. And what I'm gonna do is I'm also going to go to the light and I'm going to change the shape to a disk. Let's take a look now. It should look a little bit rounder. Can still see the blocker. I would like not to see it, but I think the only way to fix that it will be to move the blocker or a little bit out of the way so that we get a little bit more reflection on the character. In the physical world, we will definitely expect there to be some sort of shape. There we go. That's a little bit better. So yeah, we still see a little bit of it, but now we get this oh, it's contaminating our scene now. So yeah, just play around with the position of the element. Should be able to get something. I definitely need to set this to cast shadows, otherwise it's not going to work. What can we do? I'm trying to think if I'm missing something, I don't think I'm missing anything. Let's give them a shot. Go. I don't love this one right here. Let's just make this thinner. That's really weird. Now we're seeing that weird effect. Anyway. I'm just going to delete this one guys. Don't worry too much about that one. I would personally love to use like that tree that we use for the old hallway. I think that would look a little bit better to be honest to get some interesting shadows because that blend, it could definitely create a little bit of a problem. Another thing that we can definitely do is like we can improvise a little bit of an environment. So if you imagine that this guy is going into some sort of like Jedi temple or something. There's a column here and the light source is actually behind the column. This will look even more natural. There we go. So we're going to have that big pillar. They're covering a lot of the elements. And that's again, that I'll make it look more and more realistic. That's one of the best advice that was given by one of my teachers back in the day. Always try to make it seem like your characters inside the funding environment. If you do that, your renders are going to look ten times better. Now, finally, let's save this one as well. Let's wait for this to finish. There we go. Finally, the other one that I want to show you is what happens when this is a straight to the front. Like you have a completely frontal view of your image. That's one of the other ones. We could also do it like a side view, but sometimes you're going to have a straight line. You're just looking straight at it. And something really interesting happens on the eyes. This is a really nice technique to get that Very nice, like white reflection on the ice. And that's to have the light sort of be a straight there. Now, the only problem with this one, the only thing I don't love about this one is the fact that the ice will or the digital rendering, the rent there in general, we'll look a little bit too flat when the light source is exactly on top of your camera or at the same direction that your camera is pointing, things will look a little bit flatter, which could work. For instance, when I am recording for any live stream or any video that I'm gonna be submitting online, my lights are actually hitting me from the front so that my face looks really well illuminated and there's no weird shadows like obscuring any of my features. It's just a way to make things look a little bit nicer, but do keep in mind that it's going to look a little bit flat. So let's say this one real quick. There we go. We have one light, top light, one light, but downright one-line Rembrandt light and one light frontline. And this is again, one of the main things that I want you guys to understand from this exercise, even though it's a simple exercise, even though we're just using one light, see how much storytelling we can actually create with the character. One single light and look at all of these different emotions that we're having. Like super bad ***, super creepy, some mysterious thing it's about to happen. He's walking somewhere important. And then just like a normal, hey, this is me, this is the name of this erase that I came up with. It's AC rock. So i'm, I'm not grok and I'm a Jedi master or whatever. So yeah, this is it guys. I'm going to stop the video right here. And the next one we're going to take a look at two pipes are using two lights to again create more dramatic effects. Remember that this techniques that I'm showing you are all for presentation purposes we are going to be using are combining some of them for our final project, which is going to be next chapter. But just keep in mind that you can, you're free to use any of this for final renders for your character that you can add to your portfolio. And believe me, if you present your characters like this, people are going to know this. People are gonna know this, as long as it's not just a screenshot from ZBrush, you guys are going to be on the next level. So make sure to practice. I know it's very simple and I know it sounds like it doesn't matter, but believe me it matters. You need your brain to understand it, to connect all of these ideas that I just explained to you. And you need to see them in action. So make sure that your practice, and I'll see you back on the next video. Bye bye. 26. Two Light Setup: Hi guys. Welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to take a look at two light setup. Again in a very similar way as to how we saw the last one. We're now going to be using two lights to create interesting compositions. And the first one that we're going to show as one of my favorites, by the way, it's called the top-down composition. So we start with a light on the top. I think I'm still rendering. Am I? Yeah, let's stop this. So we're gonna start with a light on the top, similar to the super intense one that we have. And then we're going to duplicate this light and we're also going to have a light from the bottom. Okay? So if we render now, what's going to happen is we're going to have a very similar situation to what we had with a top light, but it's gonna be diluted if you wish or it's not gonna be as intense because we do have a little bit of fill light coming from the bottom. My advice when using the top and down, a light and setup is makes sure that the, either the top or the bottom one is slightly less intense than the one on the other side. So in this case, if I make the lower one that's slightly I'm slightly lower on the exposure. Started like an 11 or like a 12th. That's going to give us a very interesting looking as, again, as you can see, yes, he looks quite intense as well, but this is not going to be super, super intense. So we soften the effect a little bit. And it really gives us like serious tone to it without looking too scary. For instance, here I'm rotating this so that we can see a little bit of the, of the reflection on the eyes. That's also going to give him more humanity. So he's not going to look as scary as what we had before. Yeah, that's that's, that's the first one. That's the top and down composition. After this one we have a very similar, we just need to take our lights and move them to the left and the right. And it's called the split composition, where you're going to have one light coming from the right and one light coming from the left. And I'm actually going to do something that I saw very recently on a movie that I think you guys might be able to tell which movie it came from. Very easy. This type of composition that I'm about to show, it's really cool because it allows you to create the really, really interesting contrast. Now, you can, you're free to decide how far forward or backwards you want the lights to be. In this case, I'm actually going to bring them backwards. So if I were to render now, you can see that there's very interesting composition where we have one shadow going down the middle. Now that we have this, we can grab each one of them and say, Hey, you know what? This one is gonna be a red light. And this one is gonna be a blue light. So when we do this now, we get this. Now this is way, way too intense, of course, like the colors are completely overriding all of the texture work and all of the texture information. So how can we like a, make their change this a little bit. Just bring the saturation down. Bring the saturation down, keep the same hue. On the right one. We might need to keep it a little bit higher. So we actually have something, actually the red one might be the one that needs a little bit more punch right there. There we go. We're going to get this. It's very common to see this one. Like I've seen it on police shows or cop shows where they're about to arrest someone. And you see the light from the cars, light shining on the character. This is very, very common and it creates something interesting. Now, don't be afraid to play around with colors and intensities, even if they might destroy the composition that you have with your character. Because as you can see right here, it actually makes it look quite, quite nice. So, yes, we're not seeing the blues and the greens that we had on the skin anymore. But now it looks again that he's part of an environment. Now imagine adding like a fence or a couple of shadows being projected here on the character. And we will have a very interesting effect. The next one, we'll actually, I didn't save the other one. Right. I think I I miss that 1 12th. It was just the top and down. I'll let let me redo it there real quick. So this is down. And this was top. No, color wise, they were both white. Because I'm studying all of these images for you guys in case you wanted to see them on. They're all in the image folder. There we go. So the next one that we're going to do, we've already actually done it with the three-point lighting setup. We're just going to keep it a little bit more. More contrast here. And it's gonna, it's gonna look a little bit more intense. And the first time I saw this one was in Blade Runner. There's a character named Blade Runner and the original Blade Runner call Rachel. I think her name is Rachel. And there's this very famous scene, this one right here. It's like iconic to the whole thing. And it's iconic because they actually combined two lights on the same direction, which is a little bit uncommon normally you hear about placing one light on one side and then another light on the opposite side. In this one, they actually placed both lights on the same side with different intensities. The way they managed to do that, let me just save this one real quick. Is first they position their key light. So I'm going to select this one and just turned it off for a second. So they position their key light in a very like Rembrandt sort of way. You can see the little triangle there underneath her cheek. So this position right here. That looks good. I'm actually going to go a little bit closer. Then they, they kinda overdid it were or exaggerated that light with another light, sort of like a rim light coming from the back like this. Now, this rim light, as you can see that the first line right here is very soft. We have very soft shadows on the fingers and or her face. There's not like a spotlight. It but this one, the green light, we will definitely see more of a contrast, the effect you can see that on her, on her cheek right there. So let's turn this one back on and I'm going to bring the spread quiet down. And the interesting thing that happens here, and to bring the exposure up, where is it? Why am I not seeing it to us too high? Let's bring this down. There we go. The reason why this works so well is because we pretty much overripe whatever whatever shadows we might be getting from this spotlight, from this second spotlight, we're overriding them with the frontal or with the Rembrandt light that we have right here. So if I were to turn this guy off, he would see like super dark shadows here on the face of the character. And that would obscure a lot of the effects. But thanks to this light right here, we're balancing that effect and we get this super harsh, intense rim light on the character without actually modifying anything else, right? Like we just keep all of the shadows and all of the illumination in a very nice way. Now, of course, we can bring those to the other side, to the opposite side back here and get the rim light. But we've already done that with the three-point light. So I wanted to show you this other celebrate here. I think I am going to lower this thing a little bit. So let's do 13.5 so that it's not asking tense. And just let's wait for this rendered. As you can see, this portrait also looks very, very good. I really like using this whenever a character is entering somewhere and there's usually like a window or a door, door frame or something. It's like combining two light sources into one. And it looks very, very nice. Finally, we have, I think in the folder, therefore the oriC and there's also the reference that I call the cinematic light. For the cinematic light, it's pretty much just play around and find something that looks good. My best advice for this one is trying to look for a movie that you really like and try to gather how they did the cinematographer that character. So there's another very famous scene here on Blade Runner where there's this dude, I don't remember his name, but this one right here. I don't remember his name or the name of the character, but he is on the rain and it's like, I don't want to spoil it. It's a great movie. If you haven't seen the movie, definitely go watch it. It's just amazing. And as you can see, the lighting is quite tricky. So if we wanted to recreate this, the question would be, how like, what would be the proper way to do this? And here's what I would do. First of all, I would use this one right here, but with a very low exposure. And I will use this one as a rim light. Because as you can see, there is some sort of like very soft light. I can see they're reflected on his eye. It's a very soft light that's making sure that we don't see like complete shadows on the character. And then there's this very strong rim light here on the back. So if we do this and we render that brain or that the room lids looking good, Let's bring it a little bit more to them. To the side. Let's just move this down. Something like this. I liked something like that. There we go. Stop real quick. Let's grab this one. And we definitely need to increase this. I'm going creep this spread up so we get more light information. And we can play around with this. Now this is one of those occasions where I will definitely use color. And then we'll make this thing a lot, lot bluer. There we go. I'll probably even make this slightly bigger. And remember the bigger the element or the bigger delight software, the shadows. Just play around until we find something that looks interesting like this. Now there's a couple of highlights here. You can see this, this highlights coming from another direction. Do we want to recover those? I think I think I would like to. So how can we do that? We'll just grab this guy right here. This guy right here. This is no longer. What's the word three-point light, of course now, or two-point light. Now we have a three-point light. But if we did this, we move it to the other side. We can add some highlights there. I would definitely make this thing lasts less explosive. It's just a reflection that I want to catch there on some of the elements. And there we go. We have an interesting, very, very interesting cinematic composition. So, yeah, that's it guys. As I've mentioned these two videos, the single-point light and two-point light. They're just a general tools and general as scenarios that I wanted to share with you. Because I do think it's very valuable for us as an artist to have like a, like a toolbox of different options, right? You don't always want to have your characters illuminated in the exact same way we extended. It looks very, very boring. So by playing around with all of this, look how much like variations we can achieve. I'm going to save this one real quick and look at this. We have a different variations of the character. We haven't changed the camera and we haven't changed the character is the exact same character. And just look how much and how many options do we have now, here's where the director would come and tell us to change certain things. The client would ask for moments here or there, but at least we have something that looks really, really cool. I'm super happy with this one's rendering is one of those things that always makes me smile. It makes me really happy because it's, it's like the final celebration for our 3D artists. Like it's like seeing everything you've worked so hard. Now being materialize into something that looks epic. It's not just a sculpture, it's not just the textures is not just the materials, it's everything, everything. There's rewards so far to, to create. It's now finally, don't like this one. I really liked this one looks really interesting as well. So play around with this two-point light setups. Again, do the exercise, not just the watch the video. Because then your brain says, hey, I know how to do it, but unless you do it or until you do it, it won't really register on your mind and you won't be able to apply this well once you really need it on your job. So yeah, hang on, tight guys. I'll see you back on the next one. I actually want to do, I'm going to do a quick parenthesis. I want to fix the cape. I feel like we can improve the texture to match the character a little bit better. So, yeah, hang on tight and I'll see you back. And the next one, Bye bye. 27. Displacement: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to talk about displacement. And this is just a quick chapter to go over something that we can fix here for the, for the main clock, it is texture, texture it, but I think the texture is not really holding. And it will be better if we can create something a little bit more interesting. So this is the pattern. And if we go into modeling UV, UV editor, you can see that everything has a patterns like everything is there, like it's working the way we would expect this to work. This are actually the patterns for a marvelous designer, so we just brought them here. Now, what we're gonna do is I'm going to go into my Hypershade real quick. We're going to clean this graph with this little button. And I'm going to hit Tab and I'm going to write a substance and we're going to open a substance, note that texture. Make sure to have your substance plug-in turned on. So this works properly. And then once this is turn on your assets folder, you're going to find this one called cotton denim. Jeans pleaded weren't going to have to open that down here. We're going to make this a, an Arnold, Arnold network. Now in this case, I'm actually going to keep this thing which is the height map activated because I do want to displace a little bit of the fibers. So it looks a little bit more interesting. I'm going to grab the character for just a second. I'm going to hide it. So that actually has this fine. I was going to say we can hide that just to save a little bit space. I'm going to go here. I'm going to assign the existing material, which is AI standard surface two. That's the new one or should be the new one. Let me just make sure that it is the one. Always make sure to rename this. I'm going to call this M cloak new. I'm going to hit and just say, There we go. So if we assign that one to this guy right here, which it has, now we just need to say render, Update full scene. That should update and registered on new things. And when we render, which should start right now, you can see that the texture is right there. Now, the big problem that we have right now a, is that the texture is not working the way we would expect. The size of the texture is way, way too small. So I'm going to select this one. I'm gonna go back to the element right here. And if we go to the place 2D texture, we're going to repeat this out like 20 times. I think too many times should be a good amount. Let's render. Now let's take a look at the density of the fibers. There we go. That looks a lot better. As you can see now we can actually see the little bumpiness of the effect. I think this is still a little bit too big to be honest, so I'm going to stop it. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give it a little bit more. Let's try 2525. There we go. That looks a little bit better. Now. Two displays it because right now we're not really displacing anything. I mean, it's trying to do a little bit of displacement. It's not really working as much to displace this, what we're gonna do is we're going to select the object. We're gonna go to the object's shape right here, ropes shape, and down here, Arnold, we're going to select a subdivision, Kevin Clark, and let's say let's give it three subdivisions. So what's going to happen now is add render time. This thing is going to be divided a couple of times. It's pretty much like if we were smoothing the object. And once the object is smooth, it's going to push the vertices up and down. If three is too much. Tried lowering it because it could definitely be a little bit heavy. Let's just wait and see if this one actually works. It should should've had registered. I want let me pause real quick and we reset the render. There we go. So now, now what we should see is we should see a little bit of the points being pushed up and down. Now, if the intensity of the displacement, you can see it right here. If the intensity of the displays, it's a little bit too much and it looks way, way too noisy. Well, we should definitely do is we should go back to the Hypershade. And here under displacement shader, we can reduce the scale, let's say 0.5, half-full we had before. So now when we do this, yes, where he could still going to have the displacement, but it shouldn't be as syntax, right? So let's start with a quick render and wait for this to run. Come on, my app and family were doing so well and stuff. Okay, let me let me pause it real quick, guys, with for Maya to unfreeze, are There we go. So one thing I also want to do this, I think the color is a little bit too dark, and this is one of the advantages. We've mentioned this before when we use this materials that we can change the way this looks. So if the color is a little bit too dark right now, Let's lining up a little bit and give a little bit more saturation. And what that should do, Let's keep one picture to compare. It should lie on the whole thing up a little bit. I feel like still too dark. So let's, let's try something really extremely. It's really saturated. This guy. That's a little bit better. I mean, even after that color, It's still like I feel like still not there. But it's getting better, It's definitely getting better. Another thing that we need to check is, for instance, the roughness. Maybe we want this thing to be a little bit more rough. So up here, we should have, there we go, roughness. So let's just increase a little bit more. And I think that's pretty much it. Let's increase the luminosity a little bit. That should give us a little bit more like a nicer color there on the garment. Cool. So yeah, that's it. I mean, again, the more time you invest in something, they're more like texture work we do and stuff, the better everything is going to look, Let's stop this thing real quick. I'm going to grab this slice right here, Control G. I'm going to call this a dramatic. Let's bring back the three-point light because I wanted to see like a cowboy shot of this guy with a new texture. Let's go to the sky dome light and let's do minus two. I believe it was. Let's go to the camera. This one right here. Panels look through selected. And that's gonna be my cowboy shot right there. Let's render. I think that's the way we too much right now. But the rope yeah, it looks a lot better, right? We haven't got this sort of weird border. I think that's quite nice, quite, quite nice. I like it. We are going to get this effect. This effect happens with any sort of like repeating pattern where you get this sort of like, like pixels, not really knowing what to do when the image is too small. But yeah, this looks good. I like it. I really like it looks way, way better, I think. So. That's it, guys. Uh, we're, we're pretty much done with the character. We're pretty much done with all of the tips and tricks that I wanted to show you for presenting a character. We saw all of these different variations along the way. And now with this new cloak, I mean, just, just looks amazing right? Now we're finally going to jump onto the final project. We're going to do chapter six, which is the decomposition, the storytelling composition. And then it's going to take a while. First we need to build this scene, this scenario. We're gonna build a lot of things following our traditional like a competition rules. And then we're going to jump into rendering. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 28. Environment Setup: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to start with our final project and we're going to start with the environment setup. We're going to start working on the environment for this guy. This is the scene cold final scenes start. I'm actually going to save it a real quick. So before I forget, I'm going to call this final scene finished. And we're gonna do three types of light setups. We're going to keep the environment pretty much the same. Maybe we do a couple of changes here and there. The character is also gonna be very similar on most of them. But I want to play around with the feeling and the emotions that we want to convey with each individual environment. Now, how are we going to do an environment? Well, right now, or for this particular series or tutorial, we don't have enough time to do a full environment, so we're gonna be using Quicksort, all of the assets and I'm gonna be providing you came from quicksort. Quickselect is now a has been acquired by unreal and all of the content that is instead of quicksort, is completely free. So if you go here to products and browse magazines, we have all of this mega scans and it's totally fine to use mega scans or any sort of 3D models to decorate your scene, especially if you're not in an environment artist. So long as you specify on your on your piece of the portfolio and your demo reel, that those were not made by you because the worst thing that could happen if someone calls you and they're like, Hey, I saw the environment of your character and I loved that one. Can you do that one for me? And yes, so always, always, always make sure to credit the artist and credit where things came from. In this case, this one's came from, uh, the I believe it was can't remember which one that was just one, northern coastal cliffs. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to say file. And in this final scene finished in your case finally, start, you're going to say file, create reference. And we're going to reference this one that's here for you that's called Nordic cliffs kit. When you referenced this end, what's going to happen is all of the things that were on that specific elements are now going to be here. There is a sky dome light, which we can use if you want to use this one, that's fine. If you don't want to use this, just don't forget to hide it because otherwise you're gonna get two lights. I'm going to keep this one just for now. And if I press number six, which is a texture mode, we should see the textures if things are not linked, don't worry, we're gonna go Windows, general editors, file path error. And we just need to make sure that as you can see, all of these things are not they're not set. So no problems. We're just going to grab all of these guys. We're going to say RightPath files and we're going to browse them. Remember when I mentioned that not all of them, we're gonna be in source images. This one's are actually in assets. So here just select this one, set and repair. And as you can see, those have properly being repackaged. So now if I press number six and turn this thing off, you should see everything with textures. So all of the clips have now been textured. So how are we going to set up the scene? What are the things that we need to think about when we are setting up a scene. Well, first of all, we need a camera. We've already know about this. It's very important to have a camera. So I'm gonna go rendering. We're going to create a camera. I'm going to say panels looked are selected. And I'm going to call this camera shotgun. Now we're gonna be working, as you can see, it will still have the square element from the other scene. And we're gonna be working with a full HD. So 16 by nine, proportion or aspect ratio. Full HD. There we go. Yeah, It's time to find a frame. So when we talk about framing a character or creating a scene, the first thing we need to think about is the composition. We've mentioned composition. We've talked about several things about competition, but now we're really going to go in depth about what makes a good composition and what makes it bad composition. So a good composition is a composition that helps the story. We need to tell a story. And that's usually what you wanna do through your pieces, especially if you're gonna be doing things like this. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab all of the geometries from the cliffs and I'm just going to move them to the side like this. And I'm going to find where I want my character to be. Do I want him, do I want him to be on the foreground? Do I want him to be on the middle ground or do I want him to be on the background? Right? That that will be or that should be the first question that you asked herself. In this case, for the first photo, for the first element that I want to create, I actually want it to be a establishing shot. And the concept of establishing shot is any kind of shot that establishes a scene. So establishing shot, again, very, very common, and it's usually a wide shot. You're going to see a lot of the environment. There can be characters that there is no problem, but it should allow you to understand where you are. One of the best ones I remember are the ones from Lord of the Rings. I loved Lord of the Rings, one of my favorites movies and this kind of shots are very, very common, rightly, you have your character. He's looking towards a direction. He's going to travel somewhere. And you just like you just absorb the whole element. And I loved this tablet screenshots. So this is what we're going to start with. And I want to start with establishing shot where my character is on the midground would be fine. So I'm going to start right here. I'm going to grab this group. And I actually grew up everything so that we can rotate him a little bit easier. A double transform though, I think we actually need to grab the reference because that's the skeleton. We're just going to rotate this guy. I mean, we don't even have to do that. We can just rotate the camera or the other way, right? So we're gonna go with the character right about here. This is going to be my shot if I go back to the camera and that one needs to decide the focal length. And as we mentioned for establishing shots won't. The important things is you want to capture as much as possible. So I'm going to try to go with a low focal length, something like a 24. And as you can see, that immediately changes how it looks. Now the characters on the floor, right now, it doesn't really seem like there's a little bit of perspective issue where we can't really appreciate it as much, but he is on the floor. So where do we want him to be? Up here, in the middle or down here, right. Like all of those are the questions that we should ask ourselves. Usually, it's down here, it's usually in a certain position where it works like this. And now that we have this, we can start working on placing all of the different stones. So we're gonna go panels, I'm going to say tear off copy to have a copy of the composition right here. And I'm going to go to my perspective view. Now as you can see when I move out, since this is going to be a really, really big scene and it's part of what we're gonna do to make this looks as nice as possible. Since this is gonna be big scene, we definitely need to play around with something called the clip planes. We haven't actually touched this ones. But if you click this thing right here underneath the focal length, we have these things called the clippings. And that's the plane that it's like a distance where the cameras stops rendering things. So if we go really far away, you can see things disappear. But if you just add 10 right here, we're going to see them again. So usually something like this should work. I'm going to start with the big cliff right here and I'm going to position it on the background. So this guy is gonna be, like I would say, right about there, something like that looks interesting. And then we can just duplicate this guy, wrote it around and we can even play around with the scale send stuff. Now, when we see this thing right here, we need to think about the composition. And again, we can go for asymmetrical composition. We can go for our rule of thirds. We can go for this Fibonacci golden ratio sequence. I'm going to go for like a golden ratio. So I'm going to start here with the character and we're going to spiral. And the main point of the composition is going to be right here. So I'm going to play around with the position of the cliffs. They looks like this is the point or the place where I want my character to go. Now let's move some of this back. Now here's another thing. You should always try and use the assets that you have in a way or are in such a way to point the characters towards where you want them to be. So, for instance, this stone right here that has this very obvious direction pointing towards this side. This is the kind of stuff that, that will probably want to have right here. There's another rule that we're going to be taking a lot of care about, that. It's called the tangents. You don't want to have an object that's in front of another object such as this one, connect on a point here on the composition because this point right there that's connecting, that's going to make thing, that's going to make the composition feel flatter. So if we wanna do weird stuff, like in this case, I'm fine with this sort of like door right here, but this one right here, I definitely wanted to just push this forward and have it overlap, rather have it overlap with the stone, rather than creating its own stuff. This is also going to be helpful to hide things that we're not going to be able to see your term we're not gonna be seeing because that's, that's also going to be important. We have this other wall right here. Let's just, just to frame a little bit of the midground right here. So right about there. And then this one, for instance, Let's duplicate it again. Rotate it. We're going to scale it down. Maybe skeleton, long, long way. I'm actually going to rotate this so that we see a different part of the texture because we're repeating textures in my V. Or it might become a little bit obvious that we're using the same one. Push this back as well with that. And then we have this small stones as well. So let's bring this one in. I really like this, like small rock formation to be framing some of the forebrain is going to be like, it's not gonna be super, super visible. Can I want to go for like a, like a low, look round like this. There we go. Careful with the tangents just again, making sure that the composition works. One very cool trick is hitting number seven. But actually, right now since we have light that we're not gonna see anything. But if you're going to have a life, like if we were to turn off the sky them right here and we've placed number seven. We're only going to be able to see the silhouette. And that could also help you find a good composition. Now, I do have a couple of grounds here for that, for the character to stand on. So that we don't have like, just like a plane. I'm going to have him stand right there on the border of the element. I might have even stand on because the problem is we don't really have a ground floor like a texture. So I'm thinking about going a little bit lower and just deleting this plane right here. I can just hide it. And what we can do is let's have this sort of like floating mountains, right? So we don't really see the ground. But we do see the elements there, the mountains. There we go. And we just hide all of these elements. Now here again, it's where we can play with composition C. This is whether the character right here. That's the kinda stuff that we want to see. That's the, that's the compositions that we're looking for. Because those are the ones that are going to make sure that character, it looks really, really cool. And here's where we use one trick that's called. It's kind of like what magicians just like if you're not going to see it, then it's totally fine because no one's going to know that we're missing that sort of effect. I think we're going to have to bring the composition a little bit closer. Lowering this again, lower. We're trying to go here, so we might have to add something there, something interesting. Let's keep lowering this things so we don't see the cutting off point. Now one thing we can do if we don't want to see the cutting off point, but we still want to keep this things like relatively high, for instance, like this. There are a couple of planes like this point right here. And we can just rotate this plane and kinda use it to, to hide some of the ground. We need to see how this actually looks, right? Let's turn off textures. And as long as the combination there doesn't look have bad, then We're fine. Even this one right here, I can just grab this one up this floor right here. Push it over here. Just create this sort of ramp. And again, as long as the cutoff point doesn't look super, super weird, obvious, it's gonna be fine. We can already make a quick test. So let's save this real quick. I'm gonna say Arnold and just render. Now I do. What's the word I do? Warn you guys? There's a lot of models, there's a lot of textures, there are some other things going on. It might take a little bit longer than usual. Let's go. Come let me stop this because I think I forgot to turn off the light or turn on the lights. And right now we just have NHGRI is just a basic one of the basic HRIS that we're using. But here we go, look at that. Not freaking bad, right? Not freaking bath. This already looks like a like a scene from a movie, I would say. It looks very cool. Yeah. As you can see, like discriminatory, she doesn't really like annoy me or makes it complicated or anything. So I think that's fine. I do think the cape is way, way too shiny for this particular one. So let's go back here to the initial substance known. Let's bring the luminosity down and the color down as well. There we go. Let's give it a shot now. Not update render of this whole scene. We're going to have to play around with that one a little bit. But yeah, as you can see, we're building this very cool world now. The light looks horrible. It's a very, very bad light. But this to me tells me that we're on the right path. I'm going to push this one. I'm going to push this one a little bit backwards. And I'm going to duplicate this one. I'm going to have another one like a very similar one, like backyard, but really, really far away. Even if the clip plane doesn't see it. This is one of the interesting things. Even if the clip plane doesn't see your render or your element, when you render, it is gonna be visible. Let's just wait for this to update. Let me actually stop that. Render the full scene each shoots yet though. Weird. Okay, Let's grab this camera right here, and let's just add two more zeros. Okay, what could be happening here? Now because they ignored the cliff face? No, it's, the skill is at 0. So not really sure we're not seeing, you know, it's there. Let's just close the render and just open it again. Maybe I forgot to look at the image. I getting an error or something. There we go. Let's go back to shotgun. There we go. So now we see that a pillar up there and the cape actually update that as well. Cool. So yeah, I like that one. That one looks interesting. Let's do one more. Far away as well. Like this. Now we also have like stones and boulders and stuff. So let's add some of these guys as well. Again, this are going to add the depth and in cooling information to the whole scene. Let's use the same one. But back here, one thing we could add just for, what's the word for compositional effect? Just like a big obnoxious or like right here. That will be the focus point. I wish we had like a, like a like one of those shifts from the movies and that would be quite nice. But yeah, you can see that the composition is flowing very nicely here. We are going to eventually go into composition and we're going to play around with the back plate because we don't have anything just yet. But yeah, that that works. This works very nice. Cool. So there's one final thing I'm going to add right now before we start playing with the lights for this particular scene. And that is fog. Fog is definitely going to be important for this one because it's going to give us a sense of depth right now, as you can see right here, everything seems to be on the same plane. Yes, we do have a very interesting effect with things going from 1 to the other. But in general, everything seems to be again, part of the same process. So I don't love that. Let's let's fix it. So to do that, you guys remember all let me say real quick before anything bad happens. And we're gonna go here are the renderer. We're going to go, we need to close the renderer. We're gonna go environment and we're going to add an atmosphere, atmospheric atmosphere volume. And if we check the atmosphere volume, we have the options right here. Let's start with something really low points. Here's your one. Let's see how that looks. And let's say Arnold render. Let's take a look. Let's wait for this to process. Seems like it's going to try and do it from the perspective. Let's go to the shotgun already. Okay, there we go. I don't see the atmosphere. Since this is real-world scale, we might need more. So let's try point. Let's try it with 0.1. That's not enough. Interesting. Let's try one. Straight tan. That's not letting me do ten. It seems like it's not updating or something to do or not getting any errors. So this should be working. Could it be the nicer? Let's remove this guy's for just a second. And let's go back to the atmosphere volume. That's really weird. It should be working. I'm not really sure why it's not working. Let's turn this off again. So I'm going to stop the video right here, guys, just to what's the word? Just to have a good boss. A word that we'll talk about fog in the next one. We're going to start lighting this in. So we're gonna start adding some interesting light effects to make sure that we get a very, very interesting competition. So, hold on tight and I'll see you back on the next video. Bye-bye. 29. Rock land Scene Lights: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with the lights and I was able to find out what was going wrong with the fog. And that's the fact that if you don't have a light source on the scene, the fog really doesn't know what to do with just the HDRI, so we just need the one of this. So I just added this scene or disliked and we're going to start lining things up. But before that, let me just adjust the default real quick. So as you can see right now, I'm points 0001 to really, really small attenuation or rather, sorry, density for the fog. And let's start thinking about what we want for our element now, in the original sky dome, I'm actually using a sunset. And as we've mentioned before, the problem with using sunsets is the fact that we're already like determining how we want things to look. So I'm going to go for something a little bit more like neutral. Like even this brown studio is fine. I don't know. Should we go for like, Yeah, let's go for this one. Let's go for free. Really nice orange effect. And let's take a look at this. So if we rendered, Oh yeah, that looks really, really nice. Let me just find where the light source is coming from and it seems to be coming from the, what's the word from there, right? Right, or from the back. Let me actually bring the scale of this thing up. There we go. So that's where the sun is. Let's rotate this thing a little bit like this. And then when we render there we go. Even the sky looks quite nice over there. So yeah, I like this. I like, I like this. Sort of finished right now. But now we need to add a little bit more life to the whole scene, right? So how are we going to be adding life? We're not going to be manipulating the actual elements right here are the actual HDRI. We're gonna be adding our own lights. And I want to try to do this sort of like God race effect where certain parts of the scene are gonna be more LIT than others. So to do that, we're just going to selectively pick a couple of flights to work with. So I'm going to go Arnold lights and let's of course it start with our character. So for our character, I want to have one ray of light or one light pointing towards him. So this one is going to be coming in a very similar direction to the sun. So it's gonna be low, long shadows, something like this. And on the exposure we definitely need to go a little bit heavy so we do 20 exposure. You can see that's definitely illuminating something. I'm definitely going to be using color temperature. Let's bring the temperature down and let's bring the spread down as well. I'm going to try to go towards the light and pointed towards the character. Might need to increase the exposure quite a bit. You can see as we increase the exposure, the fog is being more visible. Let's bring the spread even lower because I really just want the character to have the illumination here. Let's go lower here. I'm going to change this to a disk. That's looking interesting and I think there we go. That's what, that's what I wanted. Like I really, really strongly beam of light hitting my character, something like this. And now that we have this, we can of course move the, the intensity of the light a little bit lower. So we get this very nice, sort of like Godrej illuminating my character like this. And as you can see, we also get a little bit of the fog information. Let's go back to the fog. And now we can, now that we have one light, we can start playing around with the intensity, right? So let's start with a 0.1 and see how much. Hope that's way too much points. You're one way too much points. Here's your one. That's a little bit better, but still a little bit too much. Let's try 0.0005. So half of that. I liked that it's a little bit too much steel, so 0.002, maybe it looks a little bit better. And we definitely can play around with attenuation. I feel like the problem with attenuation is the light is looking good, but then it's getting rid of the of the HDRI. And I don't like that. So it seems like we're gonna have to keep a 20th attenuation very low, so like a 0. Okay, so now that we have one very cool looking ray of light, the ideal thing is to eliminate other parts of the scene in a very similar way so that we get an interesting effect because I do like this, like Godrej, I actually think it will be a little bit better if the Godrej was hitting a little bit forward. So we can see the character. There we go. Like just barely touching, discuss. It gets rid. There we go. Now we're talking. That's what I was looking for. So that's sort of effect. Cool. I like that. I really like that. We can make this thing bigger, of course, and that's going to soften the lights as well, which I think it's definitely helpful. And now that we have that, now we have a light that's looking good. We can just Control D grab this light. And for instance, pointed towards this sphere. That's another ray. There may be increase the spread here a little bit. And make it shine on this fear. Anyone, like, I really want to hit that cliff right there? I think that's going to really make it quite interesting. There is a book that they strongly recommend if you're interested about learning this. I think the name is painted with light or the magic of flight or something like that. And this is one of the concepts that they mentioned. The fact that at the end of the day, everything that we see slide right? So we can use light as a brush and we can paint things with light and create amazing composition. So for instance, this stone right here, this one that we have right here, we can make it shine just a little bit, just like a, like a corner of the element. If we go here. And we position this so that we hit just a little bit of the elements, right? So you see that that's sort of light right there. And then we can of course play around with the exposure. And maybe that light or that part of the stillness now that's exposed. But see how nice this makes it look really, really cool. I would say. Finally, there's ones that back there. I think those should also receive those like very magical sort of light effects. Grab another one of the slides and duplicate it. And that should be hitting the corner over there. Bring it back so we see the whole like Ray length. There we go. Let's keep it warm. Now we're gonna get this very cool looking like Godrej effect. That one's already illuminated. I like that one. And we can duplicate it once more. And also give them a little bit of shine to that one over there. Now you might not want to overdo it on the ones on the bag. Because remember when we're talking about atmospheric perspective, things that are further back are going to be less contrasty, the things that are closer to us. So, yeah, I mean, the composition is looking quite, quite, quite nice. I really like it. Now one thing that's really going to help this hole, the composition before we start playing are a little bit more with lights is we can try doing some depth of field, right? Because right now everything is in focus and I would expect to have a little bit of a change there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to save, of course, before anything happens. And I'm going to jump into my camera. Say, let's close that. Say panels look through selected. Not that one. Shotgun. Panels looked are selected. And let's, let's think about what we want to be in focus. And I think we probably want this big sphere to be in-focus. I still haven't decided what this is gonna be. It's not gonna be as fear, Don't worry. But this thing, as you can see, it's three kilometers away. So 33327 units. So that's what we're gonna be going for. I'm going to go to my camera again. And then we're gonna go to Arnold. We're going to say enable depth of field. And the option is gonna be two or 327. That's it. Now we can start doing some tests. So if we go Arnold, Render, Render ran out, should be the exact same thing. Nothing should change. Stop this, and let's bring the aperture size all the way to one and see how much like blurry things get. I'm not really seeing that much of a change to be honest. He said rendering though. There we go. So for big shots like this, it's definitely a little bit tricky to get the aperture size, right. But you can definitely see how the character is getting blurrier. And that one's also getting three or so. I like that. I do believe can we go higher here? Yes, we can definitely go higher. So if we go really, really high, you can see that the character getting way, way blurrier. But the hills or not. So this to me tells me that I probably won my focus distance to be a little bit closer. So like 1500. And that way, if we do this and we reduced the aperture size, let's go for something like a to. The character should be a little bit more in focus while still blurring out the things back there. Now one thing that's really, really bothering me is the backdrop. Like I really loved the sky. This pink sky looks amazing. But unfortunately you have this hotel right there. And unless I move the stones to cover the whole deal, it's really making it a little bit difficult for me. So I'm actually going to go here to the disability and I'm just going to turn it off. I know it's gonna be a little bit difficult because we were not seeing the backdrop. And as you can see, some of the libraries are a little bit more visible, so that's something that we definitely need to change. It's also going to be good for me to know what things should be visible and which ones shouldn't. So technically we should have all of the rays coming from from the back. So if there's any light that we're actually seeing, we shouldn't see like all of the slides should be coming from the side. There we go. Again, here's where we need to exercise a little bit of that sort of that's sort of what's the word create will not correct. It was just imagination. And understand that all of these things that we're seeing back here are gonna be replaced by something that's going to look even better, right? So like a sky or something. So yeah, I mean, this looks okay. I do think this guy is right here. Could be could be pushed over a little bit further down or further back. So we're going to grab this guy's in them really. I'm gonna go into world mouth and I'm really going to push them back. Then one of them even further back. Because the further back they are, the more this effect should play with it. Yes, As you can see, they become way, way blurrier. And that's sort of what we're going for. I definitely want to have some sort of like framing thing on the front. So let me this is where having two meters is really handy. Unfortunately, since I want to show everything, I can't make use of those. For instance, I like this sort of like bolder thinking. So let's bring it here with my character and use it as a framing device to indicate where the foreground starts, right? It's just like a stone that's framing him a little bit there. I'm going to stop this. Another stone like over here. And again, all of those things, what they're doing is they're adding planes to the elements. So certain things are going to be in the main plane and other things are gonna be in the secondary plane. And this is how we're going to be able to create a really nice composition. Now, I can definitely see his robe us a little bit weird, so I'm just going to bring it back a little bit. There we go. Cool. So yeah, I really like how this thing is looking. I think it's looking quite, quite nice. Like compositionally wise, things are flowing. As you can see, most of the mass is down here. He's nicely silhouetted here. A nice, nice frame right there. I'm tempted tube and grabbed the neck here. Just rotate a little bit him. So he's kind of looking to the side. And again, this is an establishing shot, right? So the main focus of this type of shots, make sure that we present the, what's the word is to present the people with something interesting. We're gonna be doing another shot. I'm going to do another short probably like, like this, like a heroic charlotte, a close-up. And then we're going to do one or two more final shots. But yeah, this this shot right here, it looks quite, quite nice. I'm trying to think what else we can do. Really am I really wanted to do this for you guys. I really want to add a water plane. So I'm going to grab a plane here. And if we convert this whole thing that we're worrying about into water, that could give us a very interesting composition. So let's render this. It's definitely too high. So let's bring the water down. It's also going to be really cool because now it looks like he is like above certain things. But now we need to make this a water shader. So I'm going to stop it right here, guys, I'm going to decide what I'm gonna do with this sphere real quick. I'm probably going to provide the mass of this wall to it to make something cool. And I'm going to show you how to do a water shader for this one. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 30. Ocean Shader: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. So today we're gonna do the ocean shader and we're going to replace the sphere with something a little bit more interesting. So let's start with the shader. The shooter is actually quite, quite easy. I'm just going to right-click on the object. I'm going to assign a new material. I'm gonna go Arnold AI standard surface and we're going to change this name to m ocean. We're gonna change the transmission of this object to 0. That way we are gonna be like, it's gonna be like a glass. So if we hit render, as you can see, this is just gonna be reflecting whatever is on the elements. It's kinda like a glass blend. Literally. What we're gonna do is we're going to change the IOR to 1.33. That's the, the index of refraction of the water. So as you can see, just by doing this, the water already looks quite nice, but there will be cool if we had some ripples. Because even though yes, this looks quite nice and it's reflecting the sea and everything. If we were to see the ripples, it will look even better. So to get that to work, we're actually going to be using displacement. And we've already talked about displacement. We use it for the code of the character, but now we're gonna build, build it from scratch. What the **** is all of this? Okay, So all of the shaders, That's fine. So all of this shaders that you're seeing here, those little shadows from the rocks, the ones that we're referencing. So if we go M ocean right here and we open this up, we need to include a displacement node. So we're going to type in a tab key and we're going to look for displacement shader. We're just going to plug this displacement shader into the displacement right there, one like this. There we go. And we're gonna be using something called a bacteria displacement, which is a more advanced sort of displacement. Hopefully this will work. So we're going to look for a file texture. And the texture that we're gonna be using is located in your source images. This is provided actually by Arnold team which has this ocean shaped 001. It's a fillable texture and it's an ocean texture. So the color goes here into the vector displacement. And we need to go to the plane. We need to go again into the object, or sorry, the Arnold component and make sure that it has subdivisions, Kadima, Clark, and let's add three subdivisions, Let's say real quick. And then we hit render. What we should expect to see here is the displacement of the plane. As you can see, yes, the plan is being displaced. Why? I might, I might add, as you can see right there, the scale of displacement this way, way, way too much. So let's bring this back. Let's go to the displacement right here. And under scalar, say something like 0.1. Let's try this again. As you can see, it's doing a really cool displacement, but point when still way, way too much. That's a lot of this lesson. Let's say 0.001 render now. And as soon as this thing starts cleaning, clearing up, we should see some of the displacement working there against some small ripples across the surface now, unfortunately, well, not unfortunately, right now, the plane is really big, right? And actually, it will better if we move the plane to the center of the stage so that we can see most of the ripples, the texture that we're using. We need to replicate it a couple of times. So here on the displacement, we can say, hey, you know what, maybe repeat this ten times. Give me ten repetitions. And hopefully we will get now is a couple of more ripples here on the water. So this is immediately going to add another level of another level of visual interests to the whole scene. It's going to make it look nicer and that we're gonna be able to get a very interesting effect on this. I read here, I'm already thinking about adding the two songs that we normally see in Tatooine, right? Or like some sort of like a galaxy effect. But yeah, that looks, that looks okay. It looks good. It looks a little bit too big, I would say, and that's definitely killing up the scale. So let's go back here and let's try like 2020 and see if that works a little bit better. Yeah, I think that definitely helps. But I even think 2020 is way, way too low. So let's go really crazy. Look, score a hundred and one hundred. And hopefully that will give us really, really small ripples. There we go. Way, way better see that. Now we can actually see the ripples of the water. Now that's a little bit too big. I would say, let's try 5050. And that should give us some really nice clean wrinkles there on the water. And the water right now, due to the angle that we're looking at it from, it's gonna be refracting or reflecting quite a bit. However, if you want the water to be a little bit darker, we can play around with the transmission or the transmission color. Maybe we can say, hey, you know what? Let's go to that material. And on the transmission color may want the water to be a little bit more. What green, blue. Let's start like a light blue. And what's going to happen is we're going to have a little bit of a tint right there. So it's gonna look like really, really pretty. I do think that's a little bit too much. We can make a loop really murky, really dark, like a turbulent. Can also play around a little bit with the depth. The depth is actually quite heavy. So if we can avoid doing that, that could be a little bit better. Hopefully this doesn't crush. The thing is we save, always, always remember to save. Because yet this is, I'm trying to do everything IPR so that you guys can see the changes. But if your computer is having issues with that, just try doing it one by one, like give it a test, stop it, give it a test and stuff, but that would be my main suggestion. So yeah, it looks like my eye is going to kick the bucket. It looks like it's gonna be it's gonna be gone. So let me pause it real quick, guys. Let me see if my recovers. If not, I'll just open this in real quick again. I'm still waiting for Maya to recover. I just wanted to share a quick tip for you guys. This is a way to know if it's completely lost or if there's some hope. As you can see right here on the Maya options, It's still processing. I actually saw that just recover there. So as long as you see numbers moving here, that means there's hope if you don't see any number moving, then it's probably it's probably dead. So yeah, as you can see or as you saw there, the depth really killed the element. But having a little bit of this bluish tint, I think it's a good idea. Remember, we're still going to be doing color grading and then some changes later on on the, on the elements themselves. But so far this looks really, really, really cool. I think it would be nice to have some mountains on the, on the back here. But I'm not sure. Let me show you real quick. Here's how I would do a mountain. So if I wanted to have something like old way back there, I would probably use a, an element that very mountain, mountain like this one right here. I'm going to duplicate this. Let's see if we can take a look. But we're just literally going to bring this thing all the way to the back of the sooner. It's to be a really, really, really far away. And we definitely need to make this like super, super big. So something like this. Let's start rendering this again. That might have been a little bit too much less of the full scene. Let's render and see if that does it. No or yes. There we go. Thing that camera might need to see it. So let's grab this shotgun. Panels literal selected. Since we have this very low angle. We are going to have two. Again, this is gonna be like a super, super big mountain where it should be like really far back. There we go. So as you can see, that could look like a big mountain. All the way back there. Let's push this even further back. And even further back. Let's push it up. Yeah, The problem is the fog is not really helping us that much. Because normally with, again, with the atmospheric perspective, this will look a little bit better. We can try playing around with the Fog a little bit more. Let's really quickly go to the environment right here. And let's try points 001. See that the problem is, I really liked the way that this thing is locked down, like they look really, really far, but now it's just too much, too much blood cells zeros, zeros, 0.55 of this. Not bad and things to look like really far away. So that could work. I'm going to stop it. Kinda want to rotate this the other way. And then go and composition wise, I wanted to leave serve like an empty space there in the center. So this sort of like curvature pointing towards where the sphere is. I'm still not sold on the amount of ****. The good thing is when we, if we were to render this in a more traditional pipeline production thing, we would render them as separate pieces or separate layers, and we could just composite them in a different way inside of Photoshop or something. But now I'm going to go 0.0003. Remember that we're not going to see the number, but Maya knows that that's the amount of work going forward. There we go. It looks a little better and yeah, they're far away. The lens flares working have the C, which is looking quite nice. This line right here. That's one of the things that, it's one of those things that bothers me sometimes with, with compositions where, when you can see where things like start and end. So let me just go here. And one thing we can do is just grab one of these like small walls and get it right there. Of course, easiest ways to go shop camp panels, looked at selected, grab that one and just get it in there. And that way we don't see where the scene cuts. It's just a it's just another barrier, right? Yeah, it makes for a good effect. So I did get gmodel guys for you that I think it's going to work. So unfortunately isn't another setup. So you're gonna have to go in settings preferences Plug-in manager. And we need to turn on something called the STL. Stl is stereo lithic, something I think. And this is usually for 3D prints. So I actually got this one from Thingiverse. And if you go import assets, There's this sort tracks of boringly sphere. And as the name implies, is just a boring old sphere, very alien looking, I would say. So we're gonna go right there. And I'm gonna make this a metallic object. So new material, Arnold, standard surface, Let's call this m border NOI. So this is the main effect, metal unless all the way up. And let's increase the roughness a little bit. So now we take the render, we go definitely make this darker. And now let's just make sure that this is not the way it's supposed to be, should be right around here. That's pushing up. It's also going to create some very interesting shadows. And again, compositionally wise, it looks interesting because it's right there on one of the thirds. It's following the rule of the elements. I do think we can write it up a little bit more. And this of course, is there going to be, the rays are going to be following it. Look at how cool this composition looks. Not bad, right? Not freaking bad for like 30 minutes of work, 40 minutes of work. We can already showcases, show this to George Lucas and hopefully he'll, he'll hires for the next movie, right? So, yeah, this one looks very, very cool. I think I would definitely like, unfortunately, this is not a like it's just like decimated and stuff. So we didn't have I don't think it has to be to be honest now it doesn't. So we can't really use a material even if we dropped a material from substance is not really going to work. One thing I would like to give it maybe like a gold material would be cool. Like a dark bronze material maybe. Yeah, it looks, that looks interesting. It follows a sort of warm concept that we're going for. Thus in contrast that much, definitely less saturated. There we go. That's a little bit more interesting. Now, one thing that usually can be helpful is if you have multiple elements. So for instance, if I have one sphere right there, I could have won another sphere like a back here. Being covered. Where are we? Where are we? There we go. This sort of composition where you have multiple elements at different depths. It can sometimes work very nicely as well. Because it gives a sense of this sense of, oh yeah, they're wearing where on an unknown world. But it's consistent, right? Like we see this weird shapes just floating around everywhere. But they're consistent. So I can see this one right here. I can see another one back there in the distance. And again, overlaps. Remember how we talked about overlaps, they really, really help. So for instance, this one, we can hide it like this mountain right there. And then this one hide it a little bit over there. And by creating those overlaps, we add more depth to the scene because we can imagine, there's not that we can imagine. The audience will know that all of the spheres that we're seeing right here, all of them share the same size. Like if if I if I ask everyone what's the size of all of this, they will guess a number, but they would get all of them are the same because they share the same shape. The only difference is that some of them are further, further back and some of them are closer to me. And again, we get this very cool sort of like alien worlds effect. I'm definitely going to be adding the letterbox later on to give the sort of like a stretched panoramic view. But yeah, um, I think this will be it. As you can see with exterior scenes, especially as we talked about when we were doing the room. Exterior scenes where there's just like one light source, which in this case is the sun. You're not really going to be adding a lot of other stuff. One thing we could add this, we can have like another re-invite over here. Maybe it's the shape of this guy or something, but I didn't think it's really necessary. I think that the image and the competition in this case speaks for itself. And it looks quite, quite nice. So one or a couple of things that we can have here, of course, are the optics which is going to clean the image a little bit more. We are working a full HD already though, and we can definitely add a little bit of the lens effects. So here on the lens effects, I'm going to add a little bit of vignette. There we go. 31. Backplate: Sorry about the abrupt cut on the last video. Actually the OBS, which is the one that they used for recording, I ran out of memory and I had to finish the render and then stop it to make sure that I could continue working. But this is a this is the final composition. We don't have the back plate and that's what we're gonna be working with right now. Because one unfortunate thing about this thing is that we can't export the file. It's really, really annoying, but the fog is not being registered on the alpha channel, as you can see right here. So if I export this image, it's gonna be super, super complicated to place the backdrop right here. So we actually need to place the backdrop using another technique, which is a little bit interesting. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna save this image file, Save Image. I'm going to call this like a final composition. A JPEG. Jpeg is fine. Actually, no, it's not fine. We need to save this with an alpha channel. So let's just save as final composition. One more thing. Before I forget that we need to go File and on the Save Image Options. Here, we do want to know That's fine. We don't want to export this with the alpha channel. Okay, So here's what we're eventually going to do here, as you can see on the color, we can change the color of the background. So if we grab this sort of green color, say, Okay, as you can see, there's gonna be green. So eventually we could get an image right here. As you can see, we can say background image and we can just import an image and have it here. That's why we're going to be building the back leg and then importing in here. So I'm going to Save Image. Again. We're going to save this as a final composition, a. Let's try to target PGA. Now let's jump into Photoshop. Let's open. Or images. There we go. And yes, as you can see, we do have the alpha channel, so we can grab the alpha channel and then just mask everything out. And as you can see, we're gonna be able to work on the composition. So I'm going to look for the maps that we need. We're going to look for a sunset. So I'm gonna look for sunset backdrop or just sunset clouds. So we have some clouds right. Now. Let's look for something that looks interesting. So whole. Preferably something that has, oh, there's one looks really nice. I love this one. We really don't need it to be like super like high-quality because we're gonna be blurring it. So we can start with something like this. We of course are going to flip this horizontally. Can we can have sort of like Klaus, you're on the background. That looks amazing. And now what we can do is we can just add another layer. Do a little bit of paint over. Well, actually, let's do it on the layer below it, which is a little bit of paint over. Now we do need to do it on a layer on top. If you're good at digital painting, this should be fairly easy. If not, don't worry, you can use this one. Here we go. As I mentioned, it's not really important that it's like super perfect because we're gonna be blurring it. So filter Blur, Gaussian Blur. Not that much, just a little bit because it's supposed to be all the way back there on the background, right. So yeah, this is like this. I think this looks good. They want to have like another clause right here. I could work. We did mention that we're gonna have the Sun's, right, so, so maybe we can go a little bit lower or something like that. So we can have something like, uh, like the element of planets. And because I know that we have all of the other elements right here, like the what's the word? The fog, right? So now, now that we have this image, which again, it can remain like this, like what? You don't have to fill it, everything, just save this. Let's say this as a JPEG. And let's call this backdrop. We go back into Maya, and here we'll just load the background image. So now we'll look at this amazing, right? Because now we can actually see how all of the elements are interacting with each other. And even though we're not doing any sort of a post-production just yet, we can already go, have a very good idea of how this thing is gonna look. We can get rid of the color management. I don t think we need it. I do think it kinda like merges it. That makes it look good together. Because without the color management kind of breaks it now, we are going to have to keep this one because we're not doing like the super-advanced compositing techniques where we split things into different layers. We're keeping it like this. So I think this is going to be, this is gonna be what we're gonna be working with. So now that we have this very cool scene, I can say File Save Image. And we're going to save this as composition. It's called this night composition, a dot. And I'm going to export this as a thought. And now if we go back to Photoshop right here and we open the night composition, a. Haha, what happened here? It should have saved the background image. Well, I mean, if it didn't save it, that's fine. We'll just bring this thing in here. Let's double-click this one. Let's bring this up. Select the alpha channel, mask it out. This is, this is something called anti-aliasing goes now the anti-aliasing, it's due to the what's the word the change the width for the. When we select an Alpha channel, that's not perfectly clear. We get this sort of effect. Let me go back to Maya because we definitely need to fix that post-production. I'm not sure if it's the Blumer, the begetting that's affecting something. File, you know what? Let's save the image. But let's do this a JPEG. I know it's not the best compression technique. But I think this one should say with, with the with the backdrop. Let's go to Photoshop. Foolish or real quick. Let's Control O. Oh no, it's not saving it. Really weird. Let me, let me check real quick, guys. Very well guys. So it was a very, very silly mistake on my part, but I was able to solve it. So here's the solution. The problem is when I created this mask, because the alpha channel is working just fine. If I double-click this Alpha channel, as you can see right here, it actually does have the little feather effect on the mask, which is what we want. This is what we got from Maya. So if I Control click, which is why they did and they select, it's going to try to select based on the intensity of the white. And as you can see, it's leaving several pixels out. So we can actually select that way. We need to select it the old-fashioned way. I'm going to select m, which is the Marquee Tool. Copy this whole thing Control C. Then on the layers, we go back to RGB. On the layers, we select this layer, we create the mask, we Alt, click the mask to get into the mask, and then we control V to paste it into a mask. And now, as you can see, we're not going to have way that's an icon. I just said we're not going to have this and we actually have it again. They make something oh, it's this mask. There we go. Did I mess something up? I just did it. I swear I just did. I actually got another image right here. It's this EX our image. So this night a, I'm going to set this as a color element. There we go. So as you can see, this one looks great, which is what we want. Now if I go here and then go to the alpha channel, I can grab the whole alpha channel Control C. Go here, create a mask for this thing, alt click Control B to paste this into the mask. As you can see this, this should be working perfectly fine. And it should be doing the thing that I get, it's working fine. So I'm going to go, now here I'm going to change this XR from 16 bits or 16 bits. I'm not going to merge. So don't merge. And let's see if this fixes it. I'm going to grab my final composition here. Get it in there. Yes, that's fine. We're going to go there. There we go. That's halted. It seems like we need to do the XR route instead of the target file. I apologize for that. I just didn't work. So I'm gonna go here. And the one thing that we did is we actually change the exposure, remember, and this one are the gamma. So I'm gonna go Image Mode. And we're going to change the Gama's Image Mode. And we're going to do, I'm sorry, adjustments exposure. And if we correct the gamma, we're going to correct the gamut down so that we get this very cool effect. So now we have our plate, we have everything we need, things are looking good. I think this one we can blur a little bit. So I'm going to say Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, just blur it a little bit more. There we go. With this, we can pretty much start working on the, maybe creating a couple of more planes for our elements and playing around. So let me just a real quick review the whole process that you guys are aware. So the way this works is as follows from Maya. You're going to grab this thing like your image and you're going to say File Save image. Let's say this night a, again, save, yes. And this is going to save the object as an XR, so the colors are not going to be there. Remember, we're changing the colors a little bit. I'm going to say Control O to open. We're going to open this one. Or actually we're already using it. So let's just delete. That's fine. Control O. We opened this one alpha channel. And this is the image that we have. Again, the colors are in disorder like rock colored raw format. That's why we're not seeing the exact colors that we had, but we can very easily recover them. And then I'm gonna go channels. I'm going to select the alpha channel control and, or hit V to select and then copy this Alpha channel. Go back to this guy right here, create the mask alt click and go into the mask. That way the guy is gonna be masked. We're going to have a soft effect. Now that we have this mask, we're going to bring this back to Eight, Eight bits. So adjustments would go back to 16 bits to have a little bit more, don't merge. And there we go. So now if we bring in the final composition JPEG that we had before, just go here, that's fine. And this goes right there. And now this one we can start playing around for. So I'm going to add very quickly just a hue saturation. And let's just saturate this a little bit more. So we recover the nice like orange colors that we had before. I press Alt and click to make sure that this hue saturation only affects the first one. This one, I'm going to say Image Adjustments, Exposure, and let's lower the Gamma. So it's a little bit more kind of washed out. There we go. Actually kinda want to move this thing. There we go. Then with my marquee tool, I can just Control T and just like stretched out a little bit more. There we go. So yeah, that's it, guys. I'm going to stop the video right here. And the next one we're gonna take a look at the composition. We're going to do some post-production here on this particular plate. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 32. Post Production Rock Land: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to continue with the post-production of this scene, which we already changed to an X 16-bit seen in the last element. So this is what we're gonna do. I'm just going to add a couple of lines. Let's start with the curves. We definitely want to have a curves. And again, I'm going to press Alt and click here. So this curves element is only affecting this layer right here. And we're gonna do the traditional effects. So we're going to just darken the shadows a little bit here, push the colors up there, and there we go. I do think the saturation is a little bit too much. So I'm going to bring the saturation back again. And there we go. Now we can add, we can add like an color balance. I think it would be nice. Let's start by changing the shadows. So let's go for it for a little bit of a warmer or softer shadows. And the highlights, Let's make them a little bit warmer like that. There we go. Now I'm gonna do a paint over pass, and I'm gonna do this on top of all of these things. So after the changes and what I wanna do is I want to push some of this things like further back. So I'm going to grab a blue color here and a soft brush. This is normally done in other softwares, by the way. But I'm going to be improvising a little bit. So I'm going to grab the same color of the sky like this and just lower the opacity a little bit. And then we then an eraser. You can soft erase it but really small to not contaminate the clouds as much as you can see. What that does is it pushes that maintain the back. It makes it look like it's, it's further back and I'm gonna go back to my brush. I'm gonna do the same for this one right here. All of this mountain. It's gonna go all the way back, so we're pushing it back. Let's go with my airbrush, recover some of the character. And again, those are the details like those little effects, right? They're really, really useful to push a couple of things back into space. Seem very subtle, very simple, but it's definitely giving us a way, way more depth on the whole thing, right? Um, what else can we do here are the planets, right? So let's look for planet. The planet they sky. Just going to have this sort of stuff, right? Like just the indication of something. Oh, that's great, but unfortunately it's watermarked. Let's look for something. Even this could work like just a source of wet. I'll show you why copy. We bring this here. And if we set this to screen, it gets rid of the blacks. So we can just add this one right here. And then of course we blur it out. Just got like a huge moon that we have right there. Now, going back to this, once, we can push this one's back as well. So I'm going to grab it like, sort of like why the effect. And again, just remove some of the glow to, to make the pieces, are the elements look like they're a little bit farther away. And now for the magic trick that we can of course, add one color lookup table. And we can load one of the lookup tables that we have and see if, if it's something that we want, something that looks cool for what we're going for. Let's go for a faded, Let's see how that looks. God, Oh my god. This is, I, I really, really feel like cheating whenever, whenever I use this sort of like a cube elements because let's face it, this already looks like a shot from a movie. And I mean, I don't know I don't know what else we can ask for. Let's just bring this down a little bit. Let's go for like a 50. So there's not like super, super intense. And let's go for our traditional little letterbox here today. I love to use again the letterbox. It's not really necessary, but it's one of those things that they feel like adds some sort of like it looks like a storyboard frame or something. For some reason, I've always thought that this sort of composition, it looks really, really good. I like using them. I really like using them on my on my stuff. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I would like to add to this particular assignment that I don't think so. Like he already looks really, really nice, really, really clean. We can add some dust particles or stuff like that. Like this. This guy is definitely look a little bit too perfect. So we could add a little bit of texture. Remember how we add the grunge texture so we can go grunge texture. And literally any, any texture will work. It's definitely going to flatten the decomposition a little bit. But it could work, which just make this way, way smaller. And we set this to like an like this. What's that difference? Okay, that works. Well, I'm going to do here, so I'm going to mask this. I'm going to mask it out. Then with a small brush. We can just mask it back in. You got to have to be very careful so that we don't paint the sky in this case. Can of course play around with the opacity. I guess just to add something right, because it definitely looks a little bit too clean. So it's just to break up the surface a little bit. Since we're not doing an animation, this is just a, a, a frame, right? Like a concept piece, then we're perfectly fine. If we were doing an animation, this could also be done in an animation, but there's a whole lot more work involved. Yeah, perfect. Even this one, I wanted to let's duplicate this one here. Make it smaller. So the, the thing that matches. And then erase everything first and then just hit X to invert the mask. And again, just a couple of dots here and there to break up some of the of the surface. Now the image is really clean. I think a little bit of grain would be great. So I'm going to look for camera screen real quick. Let's go for something that's not super obvious. Well, this looks interesting. Let's see if we have a really big one. So let's go Tools large. And usually I like to go for color. Who? The sustain interests. Oh, this is great, great, great, great, great, great. It's great because it's really big, which is amazing for us and it has colors. So when we set this to, again, like like soft lights off late works fine. We just lower this to like 5% or maybe wouldn't I be a little bit more extreme? We can go for a 10%. And let's bring it underneath the letter books. There we go. So now we're going to have a little bit of grain over the whole scene. You can have some nice dose. And that's it. We're finished our first scene, so we're gonna do two more scenes. I'm going to do one close-up for the character, which is gonna be the next one. And then we're gonna do one like a super dark and consciously like in the night with a lightsaber and everything. So yep. That's it for now, guys. Hang on tight and I'll see you back tomorrow. Bye-bye. 33. Another Scene Setup: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with the next scene. Then that's shadow we're going to be rendering. And that since we already did this establishing shot, I think one shot that could benefit us, it would be a more of a cowboy shirt, like something that's a little bit more about the character. And then we're gonna go for the last shot is just gonna be this very dramatic, dramatic final shot. So I have this one right here, this final scene a in, since we already have a lot of materials and lights and things. So the easiest things we can do is just save the scene as another one. So I'm just going to call this scene final scene a, B, underscore finish. And we're just going to start from scratch, right? Let's think about what kind of story we want that we want to tell. So if I see all of the things that we have right now, the environment looks cool, but it will be interesting to see our, our character in a different light, right? So I'm thinking about having him be exploring some of the shapes and maybe getting closer to this fear. We're not going to see this fear in this next shot that well, I'm gonna be doing, we're only going to be seeing the character. But I imagine it will be cool if he went from this position right here all the way to this one right here. And he's kinda like looking up towards the sphere. So easiest way to do that is to move the character. Unfortunately, the character, the rig of the character, as you can see right here, only moves the character itself. And not all of the prompts are very easy to fix here, I'm just going to grab this lightsaber group, the ropes, the shorts, and the belt, like all of the domain or the top groups right here. I'm just going to parent them to the main leg little located right here so that if I grabbed the locator, everything moves. So that makes that should make it a little bit easier. And we're going to position him are right here on the next level of Ireland. Maybe he did a force jump or something and now he is up here. Cool. Now, of course, we're going to have one very interesting problem. And that's the fact that we don't have anything back there, right? Like we have this very nice setup on this side where everything match. And the now on this specific area, we don't have anything, don't worry. The way we're going to fix this is we're gonna go again to rendering. Or we can just go to the same shotgun and say panels, look through selected, and move the camera all the way to where we're going to have the cowboy shot. In this case, I'm going to go for a symmetrical shot. So I'm going to have a half of the wall right here. And then the character on the other side. I kinda wanna have some of the wall on the foreground like this. I probably play around with something like this. We're gonna go for this sort of like cowboy shot. He's definitely going to be looking up. Right. Kind of like appreciating what the hills over there. So yeah, I like this one. Let's say panels tear off copy to have a copy. And now we can go to the perspective view. Let me turn off the materials so that we can see just the shaded effect saving on this one. And we really don't need to see anything else. And then we can just grab it, this rope and maybe push it slightly forward so that we don't have as many overlaps. And his skin. There we go. The ideal thing would of course be for us to like a regular character properly. Now, the focal length that we have right here, it's way too low. So let's go for more of a cinematic look and we're going to go for a 55. That's of course going to mean that we're going to have to change some things here. Yeah, 55, it looks interesting. As you can see, we're going for this sort of low angle shot where we're gonna be seeing him from the back. Means that we actually don't need as much information on the background as you can see right here. Let's, let's do a quick test. So I'm just going to save this real quick. We save, remember to save rendering. And anytime you're gonna put your computer on, there are a lot of stress which offers it's important to save because that's usually when these brushes are when things crash. So let's go here with the shaft cam. And now we're going to have either friendship, but technically, the renters should be a little bit like a lighter because we don't have What's the word? We don't have as much information. There we go. That looks really nice. Okay, So the first thing, taking a note here as the depth of field, depth of field on this camera here. So way, way too much. So we're gonna go to the shotgun shape. And down here, first of all, let's see how far away he is. He said 295 units away. So on the Arnold options, we're going to change the focus distance to, let's say 300. And we're going to change the aperture size to something like a one. So it's not as extreme right? Render. And there we go. Now he's really, really nicely. There. We are seeing the background, which is fine because we're gonna be using a very similar sky. I kinda wanted these two seems to be same sort of a moment or universe. Like I don't want things to be all that weird. I think I'm gonna go a little bit back. Again trying to work a little bit here with the composition seems to be a little bit though. The police just going to move him a little bit back like that. There we go. And now we can start bringing some of the elements that we have here on the background to the foreground like to, to create again a little bit of an interesting composition. So for instance, that one, Let's duplicate this. Were actually quite lucky that the angle that we're using right here, as you can see, we're not really seeing the floor. So that's going to say it was quite a bit of trouble. I would definitely like to add something all the way there on the, on the background. So one thing we can do is just grab one of these guys, for instance. Especially as long as it's not really affecting the kick, the character, you can just move with this. And really again, push it to the back. Hopefully we're gonna be able to get some nice atmospheric perspective on this guys. There we go. So I know we don't see it here, but we should be able to see it under the Render. There we go. And since we do have a little bit of depth of field and stuff, It's going to look like he's going through this sort of terrain, right? Again, we can add something here on the sky. I would definitely do something like that to, to make sure it looks really nice. And then now we need to think about lights. However, before we think about lights, I'm not sure if we have the atmosphere set up. Yes, we do. It's a little bit low though. Like since we're a little bit closer, we can actually play around with a little bit more atmosphere. So let's do points. Here's your one and see how this looks. You can see a little bit of the rays of light right there. I'm tempted to go like really high. Now that's way too much. On serious 0 to x. I kind of like seeing that sort of ray of light going through the tough part. Things are also a little bit blurrier on the background, which is fine. The depth of field. It looks a little bit too much. So let me select the camera real quick. And then the petrol sizes go to a 0.5. There we go. Because I mean, it, it has this sort of like blurry effect on the borders, which is fine, but I'm not sure if that's exactly what they want. He seems to be looking quite like a forward, like he's whole body is very forward facing. So again, I'm going to grab the character. I'm going to rotate him slightly. So we're not seeing the everything from the front like this. Then let's grab the neck again. Just rotate the head slightly. He's still like looking up. Now he looks a little bit more natural, right? It doesn't look like he's just like stiff. Looking forward to the same direction of the camera. There we go. Now we can think about adding more lights, but I'm going to stop the video right here just to keep things a little bit more organized on the production side of things, I'm going to keep things separate. And we're gonna be taking a look at the at how to properly light the scene to get a better result. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 34. Scene Lights: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of the series. So we're going to continue with the lights of this scene. And I think we're gonna go for some very simple lights where you're coming from, from this, of course, the left side in this case. And they're gonna be illuminating probably half of the character. So what we're gonna do is we actually already have a very nice spotlight that I did not erase, which has some of those ones. So this one right here, I think it's gonna work perfectly fine. Just do not duplicate this and position it right here. So as you can see, there is going to be an angle. It's gonna be a little bit difficult to find, but it's this angle right there where we can position the light in such a way that it hits our character without actually hitting the, what's the word? Will actually hitting the or while hitting some of the shadows from the rocks as well. If you want to remember, if you want to keep this just like save a bookmark so that we don't lose the specific composition. There we go. That looks interesting, but now the fog is way, way too much. I'm actually tempted since we're really close to the character, I'm tempted to not use atmosphere right now for this particular shot. So we're gonna go here and we're just going to turn the density to 0. And that should get rid of all of the, all of the ****. I know that, yes, we're losing a little bit of the atmospheric perspective on these guys, but we saw in Photoshop we can take them quite, quite easily. So now that we don't have that sort of diffusion, we should be able to calibrate this light a little bit better. Let's start by bringing the exposure quite high. Okay, it's there, of course 21st, way too much. So we're hitting the right place. Let's turn on or turn off the noise and stuff so that we can focus on the on the effect first. There we go. I know where we're close to the right place. We need to just give it a little more a little bit more rotation towards the care day airway you go, That's what I'm going for. So when I have this sort of like half, half tone effect. So we do see the shadow of the character, but it's not like super obvious. Now that we have this, we can play a little bit with this breadth. So it's a little bit softer. Because I do want to have a little bit of shadow, but not that much. Let's rotate this out. There we go, maybe a little bit less. So 0.04. It looks a little bit more natural. I'm going to sing a little bit warmer. Lover, more exposed. Not that much. I think that's too much. Let's say 22. There we go. Now we get this very natural log. We get this harsh shadow right here on the light coming from the rock. And It's just going to make the composition look a little bit more interesting. Now since we already have the light, I'm going to go back to the composition and find something. Again, interesting because I'm not completely sold about what we had there. Something like this, maybe really wanted to, I would really like this rock to be a little bit more detailed. And if you go into the Quicksort files, you can actually get higher resolution. I just didn't want that seems to be super, super heavy. There we go. That looks good. It looks really nice. But now we have a problem, right? Like one of the problems that we have is that the shadows here are way, way too stark. Have some really, really crazy shadows right here. I don't love that. We also have this super weird border. So one thing we can do is just grab the sea and just push it up. Push it up. Or even like rotate this. I'm not sure now rotation might not work exactly as I intend. We can try a different, like a little bit more like a flat surface. Let's keep the SeaWorld wass and let's just lower the decomposition is that we have right here. I don't know. I kind of like this, sort of like low angle effect. I'm going to keep the low angle. Let's bring this here. And what we can do instead is like grab some of this, gets rounded, this a little like barriers that we have. And just, just, just to cut the ground to hide the hide the, the horizon, right, pretty much that way because I know that this image we can very easily fixed. But that line right there was a little bit more complicated to to deal with. So yeah, this looks this looks interesting. I like this. I think we could use something they're like, I really like this or like spiky spiky stone. Let's go to the composition. And again, I'm going to use this stone, a scissor, a framing device. And kind of like point towards the character. You know what I mean? There we go. So see how this thing is kind of like pointing towards him. That's again, sort of like triangular composition. It's also used quite a bit in film-making. And that's gonna give us another sort of effect right here. It seems that this one account want you guys to be little bit higher. There we go. I want to create a nice border therefore, for the sky or the scary kinda like finishes. Now, this empty space that we have right there, I'm not sure if we can fill it with water. Could be could be that the weekend. Now, water is too low. Because if you guys remember on the original composition, that character was supposed to be like up somewhere. So instead of that, I'm just going to use another plane right here. Make this a little bit bigger. So that empty space. Just rotate this a little bit like this. And now everything's stones, right? The cool thing about using these kits is that they are all part of the same environment, so they blend very nicely together. We can create this sort of very cool effect. Now, as it was mentioned in one of the things that I don't like about this scene is that the shadows here way, way too dark. So you guys remember when we did a little bit of bounce light on the room where we want it to have some just like general colors bouncing in the scene without over exposing in certain areas. That's exactly what we're gonna do here. So I'm gonna go Arnold lights and we're going to create an area light. And we're going to help the bounce light from the stones right here. So right here, we're going to use a sort of like pinkish hue or we can use temperature and just lower this down. Big light. And what I want us to want to get rid of some of this slice right here, some of the shadows, right? They're becoming a little bit tricky to work with so little space. I'm actually going to try to bring this light from the back. Right now as you can see, there's not, nothing is really happening. But if we increase this exposure to something like 15 or 20, Now we have the light. So this is the area that I want to affect the most. So I think instead what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go low here. There we go. It's kind of like having a, a big light effect over here. Of course the exposure is going to be way lower. Like I do want to have the nice contrast there. Now, let's make this warmer. We can play a little bit with the spread string this low, around with the exposure again, there we go. That's, that's the kind of effect that I want. But I don't want it to be super intense. Let's try 17.5. Sweet too little. 18. It gets a little bit better because we still get the shadow, but now it's not as intense as what we had before. So I like that. I think, I think that's a good competition there. As you can see, we have this very nice frontal light on the character cowboy shot. There's a very nice focus on the saber. And then this light is not as dark as what we had before as we've done before. Or you can, of course, save a picture and then let's turn off this light and just compare. So important to, to compare whether or not we're, we're doing it. Yeah, you can see the difference there. So it looks way, way more interesting, I would say. Cool. So, yeah, I like this composition. I still think that this part right here is a little bit too dark for my, for my liking. But I'm not sure if I want to add another beam of light going right here. Well, we can do though, is we can add a little bit of rim light, right? We've talked about rim light before and red light. It's really good to separate our character from the background. So even though the rays of light are not coming in this direction and this angle there is light coming from this side. So we can expect to have something over here. I'm going to make the spread of weight lower in this case. And there we go, see how now we can eliminate or we can eliminate this. We illuminate a little bit of the, of the head right there. Now again, we play around with a little bit of the exposure. There we go. There's one big mistake. Have you guys know this that on the background there? So one super, super big mistake. And that's the fact that the image on the background AS actually inverted, right? Like the light is coming from left to right and this cloud is being illuminated from right to left. Some of you might not have noticed this and that's fine. But it's, it's one of those things that we definitely need to change. I'm going to make this thing a little bit smaller. Not kind of want to get this thing. I want to get a little bit of that shine here on the, on the rope. The rope materials not really friendly with this sort of refractions. When we did like a really intense there we go. A little bit more exposure to really see that. Now this are those lights and we've talked about this type of slide through for this are like the fake lights, right? Like you will never exceed this specific, you would actually there's a specific light setup on the real-world because if we have a shadow that's coming from the rock, then this rim light, it's really not it shouldn't really be there. So let's be very careful there because I don't want to break the illusion right here. Okay, the one I have a little bit of that interesting shadow. Let's bring this down to 17. Just very, very solid rim light right there. Something like that. Anything works nicely. Now again, as I've mentioned, we're going to change the sky. But yeah, this is, I think this is a good composition. As you can see. Again, this is the famous cowboy shell where we see half of the character. We're gonna be able to of course, turn on our de-noise her and turn on the lights effect, which is gonna give us a little bit of shine. Now the lens effect right now the strength of this one's way, way too much. Let's go back to a 0.5 or even less like 0.2. I do want a little bit of a glare on the lightsaber, but not that much. 0.10.05. There we go. That's a little bit better, more manageable. And that's it. Now, if we have a full reg, if we had the full post, of course we could get this thing to look even, even bad red. But we know that once we get this into Photoshop, the the dilute the facts and the little post-production that we can do is going to give this job. And a Mason looks, so I'm trying to see if the focal length this is right. It's one of those things that I always question myself when I'm doing this or a renders like do we want 55? Don't want to go a little bit lower with a, with a 35 for instance. The problem with the 35, as you can see this now we're seeing some of the elements right there will need to go really, really low. And that's not something that I want to do. I don't like this one though. So maybe just grab some of these elements, move them a little bit. I don't know. I mean, I'd like to 35, but I think the angles a little bit too low. Let's just try to I didn't want to bring this things all the way down and they're going to look really weird floating around. So now let's go back. Let's go back to the, to the 55 that we have. Let's go to this sort of like cow boy shot that we have. Let's just bring these things up again. I think this one's going to look a little bit better because we're closer. There we go. That looks nice. We have this very harsh light. I'm wondering if we should soften it up a little bit. Halloween, soften the light. You guys already know that it's this light, right? So it's often this just to make it bigger. And that should give us a little bit of a softer shadow there under the code. A little more diffused. Now of course, that's going to change the intensity because there's more area. So we need to increase this a little bit to bring back the, the amount of light that we have. There we go. So soft shadow, very nice reflections and everything. This is looking good. I want to change a little bit on the composition. So there's this thing right here, which I'm going to move to the side. So we can create this thing right here. This, this shape that we're seeing right here. It's distracting because it's gonna be really high contrast. We're going to see the light sky and then the dark stones. It's gonna be really weird. And then this stone right here that's close to my character, I might want to move it a little more into the scene to see, to just just to see it a little bit better, right? Again, I'm not super fond of the quality of this rock because it's, we're really close and scan look low poly. But that's, that's what we have. So we'll got to roll with it. Maybe, maybe not that much. Let's reduce the amount. There. There we go. It's also giving us a little bit more light. I don't want it that much lighter, so let's bring it as Fort Worth. Stop it. It's gonna be a balancer because we're using this light to block half of the character, right? So something like that. There we go. So half of his face is gonna be slightly obscured by the way the rock, and the other half is going to be illuminated. Now I do think that since we're not, we're, we're seeing more light here. We definitely need to bring this thing down a little bit. A little bit too intense. I don't want to be a little bit warmer. A little bit more golden hour effect. There we go. Our shot is ready, so now it's just a matter of waiting for this to finish. We're rendering at 1920 by 1080. And in the next one we're gonna do the competition. We're going to bring this into Photoshop. We're going to use pretty much the same sort of filters that we had for the first one because we're still in the same scene. And then we're gonna do a, another one, a final scene, which is gonna be like the dramatic one I'm probably going to do. I'm thinking about doing one or two more, but I definitely want to do one more. So so yeah, hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 35. Scene Post Production: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to continue with the post-production. And unfortunately, as soon as I finished the last video, there was a power outage here at my studio. So we lost everything. The previous render that we had was lost and I just rebuild it. Of course, I can't specifically match the one that I had before, but it's gonna be close enough. So I'm just rendering this one real quick. And we're gonna do is we're gonna take this guy into Photoshop and we're going to add the same filters that we had before. So it's very important that you actually do have all of these files available in your files. So this, if we go to D night a PSD, it has all of the filters, all of the information, the type of film, grain and stuff, like all of the things that we need to get the exact same, sort of like feeling an effect, right? So we're just going to wait for this to finish. It, it's finished. And we're going to say File, Save Image. And we're going to save this image as night a b. And we're going to save this as an XR. So dot e XR. Why the XR? Because we're gonna be doing the Alpha technique that I showed you earlier. And we need to extract the Alpha in the best possible way. So there we go. The colors, as you can see are not. They've changed a little bit. There are no linearized, so we need to make a little change here. I'm going to grab all of these pixels, Control C. Go here, mass this thing out. Hit Alt and click on this one and Control V to paste the alpha channel. And now if we go back, it should properly got everything. And we're just going to say Image Mode, 60 minutes per channel. And we're just going to not, not much. Image Mode. 16-bits don't match, and we should have the same one right here. So now it's just a matter of grabbing this image and bringing it into at night and our knife a film and bring it all the way to the bottom. All the way to the bottom. Right here. Right here. Actually, let me well, I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn this one off. I'm going to de-link this once with Alt and then relink them. So they have the exact same effect. Up here. This guys we don't need anymore. And there we go. We have this sort of effect now, I can definitely see that the lights a little bit too warm. So I need to see where this is actually happening. I think it might be it might be the curves. So I'm just going to turn some of them off. I really liked the color balance though. She's tuition is fine. I think it's a curves. The curves what I'm going to difference, it's going to lower the intensity of the curves a little bit. And we're gonna get this sort of effect. And yeah, that's it. As you can see, we get this very nice, cool looking cinematic effect. If the color lookup is too much, for instance, we can lower it a little bit more. And the planet, Let's get rid of the blend. Of course, there's the planet here. One thing that we definitely need to do is we need to go to the clouds. I'm going to hit Control T. And we're gonna flip horizontal. And now we can place the clouds behind him, for instance, something like that. And we can add another cloud right here, right. We also did a little bit of paint over. We need to get rid of that, those weird spots that we have right there. And we can add a new paint over. I'm actually going to save this as a different one. I'm going to save as, and this is going to be knight b. So if we want to do any changes, we can just do them. And here I'm going to show you something. For instance, this, this stone, as we've mentioned before, I don't love it because it's really flat, like it's just like a straight line right here. One thing we can do is we can actually paint a little bit of a sky here. Like if we just go all the way to the top. Actually, not to the top because we do have the noise. So below the noise. And we just use the hard, hard dish brush, not super hard with just a little bit hard. As you can see, we can give it a little bit the silhouette. We can even go all the way down here and on the mask. We can paint with a mask. And that's gonna give me a little bit more of an interesting look, right? Because rocks usually have this sort of effect. So again, that sort of thing will definitely help the whole composition. I don't think I wonder been yet. I was thinking about adding as being yet, but I don't think it's gonna be necessary. Well, they do want this I would like to push this rocks are a little bit further away. So again, just above the noise, we sampled the same color as the sky. We use a soft round brush. And very carefully, we just draw a nice little mask here on top. All of this rock strength here. You can try using a blend mode. I don't particularly like that. I think just opacities more than enough as you can see right there. And then and then again with the with the eraser, just try to be as precise as possible to erase a little bit of that sort of like glow the weekend, especially here for the cape for instance. So very hacky way to do this. But it works for a render piece or your portfolio. This is way, way more than enough. The reason why I'm saying this is usually on a production pipeline. If you're doing the light's not all the time, are you going to be recorded to the post-production? Like there's people that are super specialized in post-production and that's their job to do this sort of stuff. So I'm probably going to use something like a 10% only. But as you can see, that definitely like separates the rocks from, from everything else and gives us a very nice effect. The clouds and the back. I'm going to hit Control E to combine them. And I'm going to say Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, just burn them a little bit because they're really far away, right? That's it that we have our second the image. I'm going to save this real quick as a JPEG. So we already have our first composition. Did they not save that one? Let's call this night the render. And that's it. So we opened the night a render again. Let me just save this one real quick. Let's just scroll this night a render dot jpeg. There we go. Now in our folder and their image folders, we're going to have all of this and look up how many renders who have done so far. And then we have our establishing shot, which is the character getting into this a specific place. And then a close-up of the character finding that light source or dad like force something. It just the magical storytelling device. So yeah, there we go, guys. This is it for this one. Now we're going to jump onto the final composition. And this final composition is gonna be a little bit special because we're gonna be doing a shot that can be seen from three different angles. So we're gonna be able to see it as a wide shot. We're gonna be able to see it as a, what's the word as a medium shot. And we're gonna be able to see it as a quotient. So Yep, hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 36. Last Scene Setup: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series. Today we're going to do the third and final scene for our S-series, which is gonna be the final shot. So I'm gonna go to the perspective view and let me explain what we wanna do. What I wanna do is I want to create a different environment. We're going to use the same sort of elements, but we're going to go really, really contrast. He really, really kinda like a moody and the witness is going to work is I want the character to be a really nice composition. So let's go to our shot cam panels which are selected. And I want to be able to go from an open shot with the character and go really, really close until we get like a portrait shot. Okay? Now in this particular case, there's actually one thing that we're gonna do. I'm gonna rotate the character here. And the one thing that we're gonna do is we're gonna give him a little lightsaber. We're going to add another source of light. So let's grab the neck. I'm going to lower the neck a little bit so he's kinda looking down. And as you can see, we have the lightsaber here. It actually has its own groups, so I'm just going to position it on the hand. Again. The reason not perfect, but it should give us enough. What's the word enough room to play around with the lightsaber here. This is gonna be like this. I think I want to have the lights are actually go sideways like this. So the hand, It's gonna be rotated like this. I'm going to grab the whole arm. Just move it a little bit down. So we stay within the cloak. Let's grab the lightsaber again. And we're going to make him hold it. So we're gonna grab this bone right here. And again, since we're gonna be seeing the shot from quite far away, it really is not as important that this thing, it looks great as you can see the rig breaks there, but that's fine. We're not going to see this, which just need to indicate that this is happening like this. There we go. So it's just an indication that he's holding disabled. Right. And the first shot that we're going to go for, it's gonna be a wide shots, it's gonna be something like this. I definitely want to water, so let's bring the water closer to us. I don't want this very symmetrical shot of the character. So we're gonna be using this sort of like a silhouette, this framing for the whole thing. I do like this empty space right here. We might add something back there. But I like this sort of effect right now. We need to be very careful with that, with the grounds right here. We can definitely like we can duplicate the grounds and just get something interesting. Now we're going to start with a big focal length or a low focal rank rather. So we're probably going to go with something like 24. Get the camera on the 21st a little bit too much. Let's do 28. There we go. So this is gonna be our first shot. I do want to keep this fierce and everything. So we're gonna be using the same environment. We're not going to change it that much. And we're going to do something like this. Now, I do want him to be like kinda like menacing. So something like this. Let's grab the head. And they can really make him not mean, but, you know, just a little bit more aggressive than what we'd seen before. So, yeah, like this. He selects are inside of the element. That's not something I like. So let's watch him up. Here's where we're going to have a little bit of overlap. We can easily, easily fix that by adding, what's this? By adding like rocks and stuff close to the floor. So we're gonna be hiding a little bit of those elements. Go back here, panels which are selected. Yeah, there we go. So that's going to make it less obvious, right? It's also going to have with overlaps and competition and all the things we've mentioned before. This is not a perfect setup, but of course, if we were doing this for a movie, we will need to be super, super precise about all of the elements that we're going to be including whatnot up in this case. That's what we have. One thing that might be interesting, like, I have this fear up here. What did this fear was now? Like? Their same for this one. Like maybe he got some power from the sphere's center and something's going to happen. So, yeah, that's it. Let's save this real quick File Save Scene As, and we're going to save this as. Final scene is z. Then. Now what I wanna do is I want to go to the camera again, and I do want to make sure that the shot looks good in all of the angles though, this is not something that we're going to be changing shot to shot, but I want to know where everything is gonna be from the get-go. So we're going to start with a low shot right here, something like this. I really like this effect right now. Think I want to push this thing a little bit further back. Careful with the tangents. Remember the tangents, which is when two objects are in the composition. So it's fine to have more stuff back there, but careful with the tangents. And now I'm going to select my camera. And I'm going to save a keyframe right here. And I'm also going to keyframe the, what's the word, the focal length. Because the next frame, Let's go to frame ten. The next room is gonna be a cowboy shot. And the camera is going to be going a little bit higher. And we're definitely going to change the focal length of something like 55. So we're going to have something like this, right? And again, we want to make sure that the composition looks, it looks good. And in this case, I do like this one. I think it's, It's fine. It's still looking straight into the camera, which I love. And then we're gonna go to frame 20. And it's gonna be the close-up. So the close-up, we're going to have something like this. Think again compositionally, see how I'm trying to fit everything in this sort of like framing element. That's what we're gonna do. So yeah, that's pretty much it. And we're going to keep the 55, I think I think that's fine for this one. So now as you can see, we have this animation where the camera go scenes push us into with the focal length at the same time. And then we get this. There's a little bit of a weird moment. We're not adding meaning to camera right now. I just want to find my first or my animation is right here or it might my shots. So yeah, that's, that's it. Now to properly give this guide the lightsaber, we need a cylinder, so I'm gonna grab a cylinder. Let's go here. We're going to go up the top part of the cylinder. We're going to bevel it two segments and a big fraction. In this case, I normally do small fractions with, It's gonna be a big fraction. Now, grab all of these vertices and just bring them down. I'm going to bring the pivot point down there. And then I should be able to snap this with the V key to that vertices right there. And now it's just a matter of making sure it follows the proper direction. We're going to scale. This. Looks good. Really good. A little bit skew. Let's try to get this as straight as possible. Technically, we should know what there's now. I'm sure I'm wondering if we could align this to the normal, but that's fine. Let's keep it like that for now. Let's go back to our shotgun minutes to take a look at how this looks. Yeah, that looks good. That looks good. Cool. So yeah, that's pretty much shared. Let's let's do a couple more things. So of course, we're not going to be using any of the area lights. So I'm going to delete them and we're not going to be using this one either. I'm actually going to change this to the other one that we've used before, the chapel one. So let's go to the this one. We're going to use D simple curl chapel basement open. And there we go. Because we're going to have some interesting lights, like a warm lights coming from other parts of the scene. And then we have this. So I don t think all of this Airlines, let's get them out. Technically, we should only have one light. Let's save this real quick. Let's see how this looks. So if we were to say Arnold render, which would get something right now it's a, it's a completely different scene. So the values and everything that we have right here are gonna be slightly different. Don't, don't worry about that. Let's just wait for this to do the render really like this one. I think it looks nice. Maybe the, what's the word? There we go, shotgun. Perfect. We don't need the background, so we're gonna go here to display, and we're just going to say bg color, and it's gonna be just like a black color for now. There we go. So as you can see, we have this very interesting light setup. We have the spheres right there, like one right there. I think we can push the water up a little bit more. I think that'll be interesting to see. I'm going to grab the water and just push it up a little bit so that we can see a little bit of water reflection here on the front. That's going to look quite nice. There we go. Nice, nice. So as you can see, the composition I think works perfectly fine. I think that's a great, a great framing overall. Let's go to the post-production. Let's get rid of these denominators. So removing majors. That way the rendering it should be a little bit faster as well. And I actually liked the way that the, what's the word the lightest working right now I think it's a little bit too intense. So I might bring the exposure down just one stop. So I'm going to go minus one. And this is gonna give us a perfectly fine place to start a lightning off we're seeing. So I'm going to stop it right here, guys. And in the next one we're going to start playing around with the lights for this scene. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye bye. 37. Last Scene Lights: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to talk about the lights in our scene, then this is what we have. So for this thing, I think that we're definitely going to be using atmospheres. I'm going to go back here to my atmosphere and then bring it back. So 0.00001001, I don't want this to be a little bit more foggy. So let's see how this looks now. You guys remember that for atmosphere to work, it can't just work with the normal stuff. We did need some light. So we're going to start with the lightsaber because the lightsabers is one of those things that's really important for the light setup. So we're going to freeze the transformations, everything, and just gonna go Arnold, lights and mesh light. We are going to make this light visible. If I were to render right now what we're going to see is we're just going to see a white band or not even there, because we're done, we'll have enough, we don't have enough information. So we're going to bring this bush are quite high. Let's try ten. There we go. That's a great response. Now, I'm gonna give you guys a little bit of a history lesson right now whether it would Star Wars, in the original Star Wars, the lightsabers where Don in post-production. So they would use, they're used this sort of like a longer metal, like something. And then they would add this thing in post-production, that glow and everything. They even did that for the sequence or the incidence equals yes, this equals right? And the prequels, like every, every single time they did lightsabers, they would do, they would do this. They will be like something that they will replace, impose, some sort of like flexible thing that they would replace imposed to make sure that they could work with it. The problem is that it makes it look a little bit fake because this things are emitting light and the emission of light is not being visible. During the fight. They changed that. They changed that on the newest OB1, serious and some of the newest stuff where the light servers are now actual light sources. And as you can see, they really, really nicely illuminated the characters. So that's what we're doing right here. Like this. Things that we have right here is actually going to be illuminating the scene. Let's make this thing a little bit brighter and strike 15. There we go. Now, that's what I'm talking about. That's the kind of like a glow that I would expect to have. And we can actually change the color. We can go for a green color, for instance. And the decor of the light will, as we go higher in exposure, the core of the light will be white and the rest of the element will be green, like the frog will be green because the light that it's emitting, it's green. It's so intense at the origin of the core that it just goes white. So of course, trainees way too much. Let's try 1616. That's, that's it. I think that's it. I think that's the proper one. I do think this is a little bit too much, so we're going to bring this back a little bit on the saturation side of things. But look at that. That looks really, really, really good. Now one problem that we have right now is the focal length again. So another focal length or depth of field. So we're gonna go to our shotgun again. Panels look through selected. Let's go here. And we are going to be animating. We're gonna keep the same focal number. We're going to be animating it. So if we go to, Let's get this down. If we go to our note and we go to focus distance, right now, the character is at 613 points. So we're going to say 613. And we're going to right-click and set a keyframe. And then here the character is at 487. So this is gonna be 487. And finally, when we're in the close-up to characterise a 155. So this is gonna be a 155. Sit, sit game 487. There we go. So now if we render, we should see the character quite clear. Like of course, there's a lot of fog and there's a lot of information here, but as you can see, he looks very nice. My God, I'm sorry. I'm just always, always super excited to see this sort of results because it just looks amazing. It just looks really cool when all of your hard work finally comes together. It's just, it's just so rewarding as an artist. So yeah, I mean, look at this, it's just looks really, really cool. It just looks like he is. They're standing menacingly on the, on the what's the word on the, on the element? I think for this particular scene, I want the water not to have any waves. So I'm gonna go to the hyper shade. And in this scene, if we go to the water shader, this ocean, I'm just going to destroy the displacement map. And what's going to happen this now the one render or when we render, the water is just gonna be like completely steel. Now one thing that I would definitely want to do for the water because it looks a little bit rough right now, is let's bring the roughness down. So it's like a really reflected water. And now we're seeing the reflection of the world, right? That's also going to be quite, quite nice. We can maybe add a little bit of refraction. You said that it's not like super, super perfect. That yes, you can see this looks quite, quite nice. So that's the first slide and that's our key light if you wish, or it's one of the key lights that we're gonna be using. Now we need to think about what other lights I would expect there to be here. And if we're going for this, I want to go for it. This very like Misty and foggy result. I know that right now we don't have as much ****, but I would expect there to be some sort of like a moon beam hitting the character. Now, here's where we need to be a little bit. We need to think about stuff, right? We can just start adding things just because it looks cool. In the previous shots, we had the first shot. If you guys remember. First shot, the character was here and the light was coming from this side. In the second shot, that character was here, a close-up and the light was coming from this side, right? Because the camera Phillips, where we are now seeing the front of the character. So now if we want to follow, if we want to think about this environment being the same, we're actually following this thing right here, right? And the sun was, it was a sunset and the sun was going down this way. So the moon should be going up this way, right? Because usually when you have them on this, on this on the opposite side and they're just like dance together. You're not going to have the light from the moon coming from this side. You're going to have the left front of them coming from this side. But since we're in do my thing. Oh, yeah, that's fine. So that means that the light is going to be here, but no, it's not gonna be here because remember there's one was flipped. So we're back to the original sort of composition where the camera is watching the environment from the back. So in this case, the light of the moon that should be coming from this side right here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a light, Arnold light, area light. It's gonna be a small light in a really powerful life because I wanted to, the Moon, moon beams to be really, really cool, quite high, something like this. And let's try something like 20. We're definitely going to use color temperature. And again, usually the light of the moon should be warm because it's reflecting the sun. But from a cinematic perspective, we usually associate the light or the night with this sort of look at that beautiful. We're definitely going to make the spread lower, quiet lower. Because I want to have this sort of beams, like some really strong beams going there on the character like this. And now you guys remember the Goebbels that we used a while back. We're gonna just one similar to that. So I'm going to use a plane. What I'm gonna do with the plaintiffs, I'm going to add a couple more divisions. And then I'm just going to randomly select some faces. And then the select, and then select again. And then just delete those faces. And what's going to happen is we're gonna get this very weird shaped like square shape. And I'm going to use the shape to create some light rays. So remember that closer This thing is to the character, the more intense the rise to the race are going to be. So let's try something like this. We of course don't want to see this on the actual element. But as you can see, now we get this very cool effect. We're just a couple of race that are going straight through the element. And we can make them even more exaggerated. If we were to graph this thing and make the spread even lower. So the lower we go with the spread, the more focus their race are gonna be. And look at that. So very, very nice effects right there on the character. Now it looks like he's on the K Bright. Which is quite nice. I'm trying to find something interesting here. Another thing we can do, by the way, we can multiply this, like have two of them. And they're going to work like, I don't know what the proper word this in English, but when you cook pasta and in the end you drain the pasta in the sort of like pan. That's the stuff that we're getting here. I'm going to move this because I definitely want to hit the character's face. To get this very interesting. Look, like, nice shine right there. But you can see how the beams of light are reacting in a different way for the, for the overall scene. And that's it. I mean, we already have two very, very good lights that we're making. The whole thing looks quite nice if you asked me, let's add one, the noise or a lens effect. And what I wanna do is I want to do the vignette. Let's render this. Let's add like 111 per cent of vignette. Just one, just a little bit of vignette here on the edge, maybe like two. Can we go for two? Really makes it look quite nice. There we go. Now, now that we have this, this is again where we need to think about the shot, right. What else can we add to make this thing look a little bit better because it looks quite nice. I love this super dramatic light that we have right here. Eventually on the background we can have the stars or the sky or a moon or something. But this one right now, it looks really, really nice. One thing we can definitely do, and we did this before on the, on the on the first scene. I don't want this to look like a cave right now. It looks like he's on a cave and it looks great. Don't get me wrong, but I want to make sure that didn't reach that he's like outside. So if this ray of light is really working, Let's reuse it and hit other parts of the scene, like back here, you see, or like back there. Now of course, the exposure and this one should be a lot lower. Blade definitely want to to hit other parts of the scene on the background specialty. Let's bring this breadth backup. I think the folks really dense and this one can say I'm not really seeing anything. Let's stop. Let's duplicate this one and move it to this rock formation right here. Like you see this dark stuff right there. That's a place where we could definitely play with the light. There we go. Just a little bit of light information there again, indicating that there's this sort of like very foggy situation and there's like clouds or something. I think we can increase the spread right there. And this is going to illuminate the scene in such a way that's not going to make it look like it's let me get rid of this one for now. And it's really slowing it down. It's going to make it look like he's not only here as K, right? It's gonna look a little bit more interesting. I do think the exposure a little bit high. Let's bring this down to like 18. There we go. When a balanced thing is, we don't want things to be overblown, are overexposed. We want everything to be quite, quite symmetrical. So if the light back here, it's softer than the character should also be receiving some soft lights. Now let's see this again like a lot of dark space right here. That's when we can grab one of these guys again. Duplicate, have this hit the top of the mountain right here. Something like that. And that's going to help us eliminate the whole scene. We didn't have this like little o, but some of the shadow and the shadow of this thing, That's why we don't see it as much. Let's break the rules. Let's break the rules a little bit and eliminate this corner right there. You can see the little indication of light right there at the back. That's that's the kind of stuff that we're going for. Now. This one definitely looks a little bit too focused, like you can see it's a little bit too, too much, I would say. So let's bring the spread back up. And that of course means that we can bring the exposure, backup a little bit less. Go back to 19. There we go. I know it's a little bit difficult to see. The more you do this and the more experience you get, you'll be, it'll be a lot easier to understand what's going on. But usually when I see the whole noise, I can already tell how things are going to be looking. I don't really need to wait until the final, the final result right here. There we go. Now something that we can definitely do again, this is a fake light, but it will definitely help with the overall character is a ring-like, like having a little bit of a rim light here on the character would be amazing. So let's stop this real quick. And let's grab this one is it has to be a soft light. And again, it's kind of like the bounce light that we're gonna get from the rocks into his face. So coming from the back of the rocks, it's going to be very, very faint, soft. Look, definitely have a little bit or less spread so that we don't, we don't want to eliminate the rocks when they illuminate him. See that? This is one of the problem is though, since we have the ****, we're immediately going to be seeing the the, the light shape. That's not something that they want to be honest. Let's take a look at the reference, using this one as a reference and it's quite dark. There's not a lot of rim light to be honest, so maybe we can just ignore it. Let's just ignore it. It's just ignore it and see how this looks. Because I really like this composition. It's a little bit darker, It's definitely darts, definitely like contrasty. But I think it's quite, quite cool. Another thing we could do is we could add some sort of like a warm light coming from here, like the end gene or a fire or something like that. But I think we'll just get rid of a lot of the cool stuff that we have right here. If we had a fire here, then would definitely see a rim light. But I don't want to add another, another prop right now. So I think this is, I think this is gonna be, it's gonna be good for this shot. Now, what we can do is we can move to the next shot which is shut number ten. This is gonna be our cow boy shot, right? Like we're really close to the character. And now, since we're closer, we need to analyze whether or not the light stuff we've added so far work at this distance as well. And you are welcome to add more lights or to change a couple of things in here. So for instance, right here, I think it still works, like I definitely see potential on this image. But I do think we need a little bit more light, to be honest. Here, I'll probably go to the main light that we were using and increase the exposure a little bit. So right now we're at 19. So what we can do is we can go to frame one, right-click exposures set key, and then go to frame ten and say, Hey, you know what? When we get this close-up, Let's go to 20. That's gonna give us a little bit more light. There's gonna be a little bit more fog as well. But it's going to make more sense for that, for the shot that we're going, you should always, always look at what the shot needs. Now if this was a continuous shot, you can actually do, in a real-world said, you can definitely control the intensity of the light as the camera goes. In. All of these things are done via computers nowadays because you don't want to depend on someone messing up while the shutter is going. But yeah, this looks good. I really like this shot right here. And finally, the shot number 29, which is the close-up. This is probably the weakest one. And the reason why it's the weakest is because there's only one light source like the lightsaber. We know it's there, but we're not really seeing it. So here's again where we can play around a little bit with the composition and be like, You know what? Like maybe S. As the camera gets closer, he moves the lightsaber up and it illuminates his face a little bit more. Now, we unfortunately don't have the what's the word? We don't have the rig and the ability to do so. But what I can do here is let's hit through the book point. We can just literally move the light. And even though we won't see the arm because we're in a close-up, which is just like get an idea of where this thing would be, which would be probably something like like this. So now when we render, since the light source is gonna be closer to him, while we get a super, super nice composition is just two lights. In this case, it's this lightsaber illuminating his face. And the, what's the word the Moon illuminating the rest of the element. And as you can see, we get a super, super cool, a super cool effect. I think I've seen this kind of like stances before. We can go for like a horizontal or vertical effect like this, kind of like if he was holding at both with both hands. It looks a lot nicer. And yeah, that's it guys. With this, we've pretty much finished the three images. So again, if we go back to frame 0, this is the big image D, the domain like establishing shot of the scene. Then we got a cowboy shot the close-up cameras as punching in. And then it's like a portrait of the cinematic effect. So we're gonna be adding a couple of effects. I want to add some more smoke and then things like that in, in post-production in Photoshop to get a really nice effect. I am going to be focusing on one shot to keep things brief, which is this one right here. But all of the things that we're gonna be doing can be applied to all of the different shots. So just keep that in mind. And yeah, I'm just going to wait for this to finish. Let this render and I'll see you back in the next one. Bye. 38. Last Scene Post Production: Hey guys, welcome back to the next part of our series today we're going to talk about the post-production for this scene right here are the words. How did they call it the crown jewel of the crown, right? Like that. The most bad as the one that we have so far. I love this one. It looks really, really cool. And right now, what we have here is we do have an alpha channel, as you can see right here. But unfortunately, if we were to graph this alpha channel and get rid of it, we're also going to get rid of the ****. That's a little bit unfortunate, but the cool thing is since we're doing a nine-hundredths, we can actually ignore this. And this is a concept that I want you guys to be aware of. When you take a picture and you expose to picture to a specific parts of the scene, other things are not going to be visible. So even though we might want or we might have the temptation to add stars and things like that in the sky. We can add them on top of this thing and it's really not going to change that much because you wouldn't see the stars shining with the same intensity as how we see everything else here on the scene. So the first thing I need to do is I need to change this to a layer mode That's a little bit easier to work with. So I'm gonna go mode and we're gonna change this to 16 bits. In this case, we can actually keep or, or play around with exposure and the Gamma if we want to. There's a couple of things we can do here. Or if not, we can just go most 16 bits per channel. And in this case we're gonna do exposure and gamma, and we're just going to leave it like this. Now as you can see, the colors will change a little bit. This is an unfortunate consequence of going from 32-bits to less bits. We can get a little bit of rid of the gamma, changing it here, for instance, like increasing the exposure. Just a little bit. Because what I'm a little bit concerned about this, the sabre now it looks really, really thick. So as long as it looks, it's something that we can work with, that, that's fine. So let's start with something like this. We're going to start with our traditional layer. So I'm going to double-click here and let's start with our balanced color balance and then curves. So we're gonna start with a curved pattern. Where is it Right here, curves. And as you can see, most of our pixels are right here. So here's where we can push the light pixels a little bit more towards the light side of things like this. And everything's going to light up a little bit more because we don't want this thing to be super, super dark. That's going to like break things a little bit. Let's go to the red channel and let's see what we can get here. Ooh, that's really cool. I think I'm going to add this thing right here so the shadows are a little bit greener. And then we're gonna go to the blue channel here on the curvature. And we can play around here with the color balance as well. There we go. Now remember, all of these guys, we can change how much we want these things to affect the image. So we can go for a 50%. So it's not like super, super intense exposure wise. Exposure wise. I'm wondering if we want to change something here. I think just a little bit more exposure. No offset, a little bit of gamma correction there. That looks good. It's always going to be dependent on what kind of look and feel you want to go for the image. And if you give this image to like ten different competitors, everyone's gonna do something slightly different. So don't feel pressure to always do some specific things as long as it looks good and you like the result, then you're gonna be in a good position. I do think they'll save us a little bit too thick. But that again, it's an unfortunate consequence of the, of the, um, when the colors and the intensity of the elements become a lot more, they get crunched into the 16 bits. That's when we get this sort of stuff. Let's bring, of course, our cheat table right here, the 3D glutes. And then we'd go real quick to our data folder here we have dilutes. Let's try something. The Django, Ooh, that looks good. It looks really, really good. Now, at the end of the day, remember guys, what this lookup tables are? Nothing more than what we just did with the colors, but in a more advanced way. And as you can see what it gives us a very nice effect right here. Now, on top of this, we can still add more stuff. So for instance, we can add another curves element here. And we can push some of the colors up because I think it's looking a little bit too dark and I'm scared at it when we see this on a cell phone and things like that, elements might look a little bit different. So there we go, That looks good. Now one thing I definitely want to add is a little bit of fog because we already have some fog on the upper side of things. And now I want to add fog on the other parts of the elements. I'm gonna go fog right here. And if we look for, for a texture right there, we're gonna get this sort of stuff whenever you are looking for this elements. One of the best things we can try and get are things that have a little bit of three-dimensionality like this thing is right here. And you definitely want a white and black background or white and black image. So let's start with something like this. We're going to add this one over here. And we're going to set this to screen because this is going to get rid of the elements. And then we'll play around with the opacity to just add this sort of stuff. Now we're gonna go, we can duplicate this one. Let's Control T and invert this flip horizontal. We can even like crunch it. I'm really pressing Shift and crunch this one which is Shift and just stretch it out. And since this fog is gonna be kinda like covering some parts of the elements, we can do something like this. For that, we can do a little bit blurred. So Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, something like that. And then of course, the very soft brush can just get rid of some of this. Play around with the opacity as well. We don't want to overdo it. Couple of details here and there. Let's go for something a little bit more wispy. Oh, this one looks pretty cool. And since we're going to do a lot of light layer effects, one of the cool things about using this row of elements is that they can get, they get, they get hidden very nicely. Because for instance here which is going and we'd screen and that's it. Just lower the opacity a little bit. And that adds another sort of effect. And then I saw this one. This looks very cool because as you can see, we also have water reflection. That's great. Because we can just have this one right there on the center of the character. And the water reflections also going to be quite useful. Let's remove a little bit of this. There we go. Now, I want to use a little bit of like **** creeping out from behind the stones. So for that, we need another sort of like smoke. I think here it looks pretty cool as well. Even this one looks very nice. I think this one would look quite, quite nice. That's a sort of just like a general fog on this side of things of great cancel. And then we just some more this out a little bit because we don't want to overdo it, right? Like it's a detail that we want to add. And since we already have the atmospheric fog on Arnold, it kinda helps everything is it unifies everything into a single image, which as you can see here, it looks really, really good. So, yeah, that's, that's it. Now, we were talking about stars and things like that. I'm thinking about like the Death Star, right? Like that's a great detail that we can add. So if we look for the Death Star and we look for a picture of the tests are where the light is hitting from the same side. That will be very important. We need a picture where the light is hitting from the same site and we can just have it very apparent like hidden kind of like this. It's kind of like what we're going for. But important, very important that the light is hitting from the same side. So we can grab this one, for instance, copy paste. And we're going to bring this over here. Flip horizontal, so the light is hitting from the same site. We're definitely going to set this to screen. And then you can press Control L to play around with the levels. So we get rid of pretty much all of the blacks effects. And of course, it's gonna be really, really, really, really faith. Like a nice little detail there on the, on the back of the scene. There we go. It's just one of those like kick out and look at it like a hidden Easter egg, right? Other than that, I think we can definitely add a little bit of vignette. So here's another trick. You can press Control and delete to fill this with a black image and then fill a mask with this. And then on the mask, paint out. Paint out where you don't want the vignette to be like this. Maybe it was one like this street corners. That's it. We can again set this to overlay. Play around with this elements right here. You can even blur this one. So Filter Blur, Gaussian Blur, and go a little bit crazy there. Play around with the opacity to get this very, very cool transition. So, yeah, I mean, this is, I think we have a really cool effect right here. I've seen some renders where they add like this, like fire particles on the sabers. I don t think I want to do that to be honest on this one. But yes, you can see this is looking quite, quite nice. I'm going to add my two little letterbox can East that I like to add to my compositions. Going to keep this one's a little bit though. So something like this. We're going to have this one right here. So yeah, that's that's pretty much it. I'm thinking about like, what else can we add? We can add a little bit of Cameron, Cameron grain. Again, we've done this one before. I really liked this one. Let's see how good it looks stretched. One thing we can do when you paste an image, you can right-click and convert this into a smart object. And technically, when we scale this into a bigger size, it should kind of respect to the pixels. It will try its best to respect the pixels and give you a better result. So it's definitely going to go into screen mode. And it's going to have just like a 5% or 10%. Just a couple of particles here and there. I don't love it because they're like really, really big particles like this big splotches right there. I'm not sure I'm completely happy with that. I will love. The texture was a little bit lighter, like this light bloom that we have right there. That's, that's kinda cool. So what we can do is we can keep that. Lets rasterize, right-click and rasterize layer. And just like use that as a little bit of a light blue right there. So see the difference that we get there. That looks Quite, quite nice. As I've mentioned before, something that we can definitely do is give you a sharpened to the image because E in 3D images things tend to blur out a little bit. So we can go Filter, Sharpen and smart sharpen. And as you can see, that's going to sharpen the character a little bit. It will crunch some of your pixels as though so be mindful of how strong you want the effect to be. I think that was a little bit too much. Straight again, sharpen, smart, sharpen. Let's do just like fifty-five percent. There we go. Yeah. That's That's pretty much it. I think we've managed to get to the end of our journey. Let's open the other images. I want to see how this guy looks with the ADA image. So let's save this one real quick. Let's save this at jpeg. Let's call this night scene the JP CA, because the first scene. And then let's open night a, b, c, b, c, a. And then we have save them as JPEGs. Okay, That's fine. Night CB, let's open nights. See z, this one right here. So this is ones look good. I do think they look a little bit to CG. That's why I think this were like filters that we talked about are really, really good. One thing that's definitely going to happen, or I'm definitely going to have to do is I'm going to have to remove some of the images. Although to be honest, if we really wanted to sort of cinematic look, the best option is to, to re-render them and which I have the file here. I think. I'm just gonna re-render them with opening the XR and get this one's already. So yeah, that's it for this one guys. We're going to jump into one final video before we wrap this whole thing up. But hopefully, hopefully you like what we've done so far because I'm super happy with this result. And I think you guys now have all the necessary tools to create amazing renders for your own works. Hopefully, all of the information that I've shared throughout this course has been valuable. And I'll talk about a little bit more about this in the next video. So hang on tight and I'll see you back on the next one. Bye. 39. Final Words: Hey guys, welcome to the final video of this series. And for me it's been a huge honor and a huge pleasure to share all of this information with you after this, I think it's about ten hours of content. Hopefully you guys now have a way bigger understanding of how to properly use lights, properly use cameras, do a little bit of magic during the post-production section to create this amazing looking shots. And I was looking at all of the things that we did and I mean, I think is really, really cool that we were able to go from some very basic, just like fruit writers right here, all the way to this amazing cinematic shots for our character. This is of course not everything that's out there. There's a lot more things that you can reference it. My best advice for learning more about cinematography is to go and watch movies, watch movies, or watch TV series, play video games, and see what people are doing to emulate that and incorporate that into your toolkit and create amazing looking compositions. Tried to grab your phone, go outside and take your own pictures, tried to frame things in different ways. Tried to capture interesting lights yet scenarios where you'll see them and all of that information, all of that like living experiences that you're gonna be having. All of those will help you create amazing looking pieces. For me. This is it, your feedback and any support is always appreciate it. Thank you very much for investing the time in this tutorial. Thank you very much for following along and you now have no excuse after this, all your renders have to look amazing. I won't accept any more, like see brushes, screen grabs, or just like a print screen from Maya. Now you have the tools, at least throwing a very basic three-point lighting setup and NHGRI, and you're going to have amazing looking portfolios. Thank you very much guys. I'm super happy to be here. I'm super happy to share all of this information with you. Thanks a lot for the support. Thanks a lot for being part of this. And that's it. My name is Abraham Leo, and I'll see you back on the next tutorial. Bye bye.