Transcripts
1. Introduction: Some of the best ideas are often very simple. Here is a train station, but it's in space. It's a very simple idea, but there's something about it that struck me as very interesting and creative. It became the inspiration for this piece which I made shortly after that. My version is animated with a few extra elements and it's what we're going to be creating in today's class. Hi, my name is Don Mupasi, and I am a freelance artist from the UK. I make mostly retro and space style visuals and most of my work are just my own personal projects, and when I'm finished, I post them to both my Instagram and YouTube pages. Today we are going to create and animate this space seen in Cinema 4D and render it with Redshift. For those not familiar with Redshift, it's a different render engine for Cinema 4D that uses your graphics card to do the rendering. Unlike the standard render engine which just uses your CPU, it also only runs on NVIDIA graphics cards. So that's going to be a hardware requirement if you want to follow this class all the way through. For the project itself, we are going to begin by building the scene in Cinema 4D using various modeling tools. Then later we will also be using some pre-made assets to fill out the rest of the scene. After this, we will then animate the scene and then do the lighting and rendering with Redshift. For the final part, we'll finish the project with a few color adjustments in After Effects and the final output for both Instagram and YouTube. As stated earlier, this is a cinema 4D and Redshift class, so it probably puts it into the intermediate and advanced category. However, just like with all the previous classes, we do go through everything in detail. So it should be easy to follow even for users with less experience. As usual, if you get stuck on any part of the class, you can post your question below the screenshot and I'll be able to help you out with your question. Anyway, there's a lot to cover, so let's get started.
2. Which Version of Cinema 4D to use?: The easiest way to follow the
class is to use a version of Cinema 4D most similar to what the original
class was recorded in. Now this is Version 2,122.23. You can see there's
a very similar. And if you use any
of these versions, then you will be able to
follow the class very easily. Especially if you
are a beginner. You can get these
older versions of Cinema 4D in your
max on account. Some of them are
listed on this page. This is on the downloads page, down to Version 23. But you can go back even
further if you click past versions and we still
have 22.21 available. Also, for this, you
just dropped down the application
installers and use the offline installer
for Windows or Mac OS depending on your own system. And that's the same for R21. Version 24 changed
things slightly. Icons look different and they're in different
places and so on. But this is still broadly the
same also and you shouldn't have too many problems
with this version either. However, when we
get to Version 25, you can see at a glance that
the UI is very different. And if you are
using this version or later than certain
things that are used in the class are going to
be in different places and it may be harder
to follow along. For this reason, I would
recommend using 21 up to 24 because those versions are most similar to the
Version used in the class, which I believe was either
21 or 22 at the time. But as you all know, Cinema 4D does change every
year and every soft and there'll be a complete major
shift like we have in 25. And up to the most
recent version. You can make things
a bit easier in 25 by going to the
layouts at the top. Switch off new layouts and then you want
to choose standard. And this is somewhat laid out similar to
previous versions, although the icons is still in different places,
they look different. And several of the
tools have been renamed and we'll work a bit
differently in the settings. Also. Once again, just
to go over that, you want to use 21 up to 24 for a Version which is
most similar to the class. And then After 25, you
will want to use one of the older standard layout for just a bit less friction
to the new class.
3. Tips & Tricks to Work Faster in Cinema 4D: Before we begin the actual project, I want to show you a few tips and tricks which are going to help you to work faster in cinema 4D. This is the train we are going to be using throughout this class. It's a 3D model that I downloaded from 3D Warehouse, which is a library of millions of 3D models. You can find just about anything on this site. Now, they originally made for a program called Google SketchUp. It's a different 3D application, but you can open this in Cinema 4D also. There will be a bonus lesson after all these other lessons in the class where I go over the process of bringing in SketchUp models into Cinema 4D. But everything you need for this class is already included in the class files, and if you're wondering where the class files are located, under the class video you're watching right now, go to project and resources, and under resources over here is where you will find everything needed for this class. You can click "See more" to see all of them because sometimes they will just be one or two displayed here. The first tip is all about movement and how to move around your scene quickly. If you press the number 1 key one click anywhere and move around your mouse, you're going to pan around your frame. If you press the number 2 key, now you can zoom in and out, and the great thing about this method is you can target exactly where you want to zoom into. If you press the number 3, you can orbit from where you were clicking from. Once again, if you click over here, you can orbit around that point. Another tip related to moving around the scene is if you suddenly can't see anything, click the object in the object manager over here, and then press "S" and it's going to frame that object in the viewport no matter where it is. You can also do this the opposite way around. Let's say you want to find the object in the object manager, and you can see it in the viewport. You click the object there, go to your object manager and press "S" and it's going to open up any trees that are in here, and go directly and highlight that object. This next one is a plugin which I use all the time. It's called Magic Solo, and I have it in my interface. What this does is I can select any part of my scene or any part of an object, and isolate only that thing. Let's say the Windows once again, if I click "Magic Solo," it's going to display only that thing I had selected in the viewport and in the object manager. When I'm done, I just click that again, and it brings back everything. This is a plugin. To install it, you would go to preferences and open preferences folder. It's going to bring you to a location similar to this. There is a plugins folder right here, and you can see this is where I've placed Magic Solo. I will include this in the files too because it's a free plugin and there'll be a link to the creator of this very useful plugin for Cinema 4D. Let's close this down. Once you have it installed in that folder, you do need to restart Cinema 4D. Then to place it in your interface like this, you go to Window, Customization and Customize Commands. Under name filter, let's just search for magic, and we have Magic Solo right there. I can drag this to anyway in my interface. I just have it as the last icon in the top part of the menu. But since I already have it, I'm not going to have it two times, so I'm going to click "Edit Palettes," which creates these outlines and separates each icon so you know you're in this mode. Double-click to remove anything, and then untick Edit Palettes, and then close this down. The final step is to make sure this is there the next time you open Cinema 4D. You have to go to Window, Customization, and then Save as Startup Layout. Finally, I'm going to Edit and Preferences, and you may have noticed my time is displayed in seconds. This is because I went to the Preferences and under Units, I changed my animation unit from the default frames to SMPTE. I prefer this method of displaying time because I never have to do in the conversions based on my frame rate. Anyway, it still displays the number of frames above here in this timeline section. Whilst you are working in Cinema 4D, keep those shortcuts in mind because it's going to save you a lot of time in the long term and just help you to generally have a fast and efficient workflow. In the next lesson, we'll start building our scene.
4. Modelling The Main Platform: We are now going to start modeling our scene using various modeling tools inside of Cinema 4D. Think of this as the broad outline of the scene and then later we'll add more detail and other objects. We're going to get a plane. I will switch to Gouraud shading with lines, so I can see the segments which on the plane are going to be set to one and one. The width is going to be set to 10,000 centimeters. Let's click our plane and rename it to platform, and then I'm going to hit "C" to turn this into an editable object, which means now if I go to the left side of my user interface, we can switch from the default model mode, which you use to move around your objects like this, and rotation, and so on. But we can also go to point mode, which allows you to change your geometry at the point level, so if I get this point on the corner. Edges mode does the same thing except for edges, so you can grab this one, for example, and polygon mode does the same thing for individual polygons. Let's go to edges mode. I am going to select the back edge, hold the control. You'll see my icon changes from just a simple pointer to this one with these two small white squares, which means I am now extruding this edge. If I hold control once again and just click and drag, we are now creating the back wall part of our platform. Now, that shot up to some random number there, so I can just select that edge, and set the position to 500 in the y position. I'm going to grab that same edge again, and create the roof section by extruding back toward the front of the station. This needs to be five meters long too, so I am going to hold shift halfway through the extrusion to lock the increments on, each movement it makes here to five centimeters, which means I'm going to quickly select 500 centimeters, just like that. Let's continue the shape. We want to come down by a meter, then go back in by 20 centimeters. Then we are going to go up. It may be easier to use one of the side views, so if I go to this icon and then the right side view, we still have that edge selected so I can just continue the extrusion, hold shift to go up to about 80. Then let's go back to the back wall, all the way over here. I'm moving this freely now because I want to set the z position to 200, and that's going to be touching the back wall. Let's go back to the 3D perspective view. I am in the normal model mode, and I'm going to click on the platform here. I want to move this anchored point to the front of the geometry. To do this, I will go to this tool, enable axis mode, or modification, and we're going to move this anchor point to the front of the geometry. Adjust by holding shift as we move that, we can select that point very easily. Then, if I exit the enable access modification tool, we can now zero out this value, and it's going to move the zero point to be at the front of their geometry, right there. The last thing I'm going to do to this very simple platform shape is, select the front edge, and then just extrude down one meter, and end right there. That was it. Just a very quick introduction to some of Cinema 4D's modeling tools. Let's move on to the next lesson and continue with this idea.
5. Modelling The Columns & Beams: Let's now continue building the scene by adding some columns and beams to our train station. For this, we're going to start with a cube. This is for the beams in the roof. The X-size for this is going to be 20, the height is going to be 80, and the size is going to be 500. Let's put this into a Cloner. The way to do this, by the way, is to select the object you want to clone and then hold the Alt key as you bring in the Cloner, which means it's going to automatically be a parent of the thing you're trying to clone and that's how you clone things in Cinema. We don't need any clones in the Z-direction, so in their Cloner Object tab in the settings, the count for the Z should be set to one. If we continue down, we have the size. This is the distance between the clones. In this Per-Step mode, the size should be 500, which means these are going to be in five meters apart. Once again, this is XYZ for the count, XYZ for the spacing. Let's move these back and up, so the movement up. By the way, I am not seeing my position update because I'm still in this Edge mode. So let's make sure we are back in Model mode, and then we can now see what's going on. I'm going to go to the right view so I can use that to position this correctly. The Z-position is to be 150, and then the Y-position needs to be 440. I can see it's intercepting with the front part of this overhang, but it is just touching the back wall. That's correct. We need to shorten this by 20 centimeters because that's how wide this section is. If we go to our cube, let's set the Z-size to 480. If we go back to this view, we now have to compensate and move this further back, and I just tried to move the cube itself. The Cloner just ignores anything you do to its clones. You have to move the actual Cloner. Let's move this to now 160, so it sits perfectly in that space that we created for it. Also, I actually want this to be slightly higher. If I hold Shift and just move this up let's say by 10 centimeters, I'm going to go with that. It can intercept with this section up here because we won't be seeing that anyway. If I jump out, this is what we have. Now we just need more of them going in either direction. Because the Grid Array mode adds clones from the center, we can just increase this and it's going to spread out to the right position or to the right amount of clones, which in this case, we want 20. We end up with something like this, or maybe 21 so that they go all the way up to the edge. Next up, we're going to get a cylinder. It's a good idea to keep naming things correctly. This is the Cloner short beams and our cylinder here. If we throw that into a Cloner, so hold the Alt key and throw that in there, this is going to be our Cloner columns. Let's go back to the cylinder itself. The radius is going to be 20 centimeters, the height is going to be four meters, and then we need to move it back. Let's move it to three meters into this platform, so 3m for the Z-position. I'm going to move it up so that it sits on top of the floor, which is going to be 200 centimeters in this case. The spacing in the Cloner for this is going to be 10 meters or 8,000 centimeters, so every other short beam, we have a column attached to it. The count, we need to raise this in the X-direction until this go all the way across the station. Also in the middle here, I want there to be a space like this. Right now we have a pillar in the middle, so I need to reduce the count down to 10 to create this space right here. You will see why later I did it that way. Anyway, let's continue. We are going to get another cube. This time the X-size is going to be, let's say just 10, and the height 10 also. This time the X-size is going to be 100 meters, which is the entire length of the station. The Y-size is going to be 10, and the Z-size 15. Let's also drop this into a Cloner. This time we are cloning into the Z-direction, which is this blue axis. We're going to have four of these, and just one in the X-direction. The size-Z or the spacing is going to be 30, which creates these four beams like this. Imagine this is some vent system or wiring system. Just another detail to add to our train station. We need to find the correct position for this in Z-space because if I go to the right view, I want it to be roughly in the middle of where this little lip ends and to where the pillars begin. From doing some tests before that was at about one one in Z-space, and their position in Y-space is going to be 405. One final detail I will add is just this steel girder of some sort, which holds the columns in place. For this, we're going to start with a cube. I'm going to set the Z-size of this cube to 60, the Y-size is going to be 30, the X-size is going to be 10,000 centimeters again. We're going to move this to the same position as the columns, which is 300 centimeters, then move this up to that point. For this to just touch the other beams, the position, you estimate by just moving this yourself and then you find the nearest whole number. I think it's going to be 395. I'm going to turn this into an editable object, so hit "C". What we want to do is click this polygon underneath. In polygon mode, let's right-click and go to Extrude Inner. This is some other tools we can use when we are modeling. What extrude inner does, as the name suggests, is when we click and drag the mouse, you can see based on our polygon selection, it's going to extrude that selection inward and you can adjust how much by just moving your mouse, or you can also change this offset control once you begin the operation. We just want to bring this up to where the columns begin. Seems to be about 10 centimeters in. Let's confirm that offset. Now I can just make that selection once more and I can either right-click and extrude. If I click and extrude this up, it creates this opening where my columns are going to be attached inside like that, or as we did before with the edges, I can just hold Control over the axis over here and just move that up. You can also extrude lines as well as actual polygons. Let's just move this in by 20 centimeters and leave it there. The scene is coming together nicely just by creating a handful of objects and then putting them inside of the Cloner, we can start to create a bit more detail and structure to our train station. We're going to continue along the same lines in the following lesson.
6. Modelling The Lights & Screens: In this lesson, we're going to create our lights and screens and just like in the previous lesson, we'll start by creating the object and then cloning it into the scene. Let's start with the lights. I am going to get a rectangle, let's solo this, change the plane to XZ, so that it's flat like this. The width is going to be 100 and the height is going to be 15. This is oriented in the X-direction. Let's take another rectangle. This time it's going to have a width of just one and a height of five. Take a "Sweep" nubs. But essentially the "Sweep", what that does is, if you have two splines, it takes the smaller one and sweeps it along the length of the longer one. Now if I go to the smaller one, I can change it's width, or its height and it's going to change what the geometry looks like. If I change the longer piece, that's the overall shape. Anyway, let's really bring this down to 0.5 for the width and 2.5 for the height. I'm going to make a copy of their larger rectangle. This time we're dropping it into an extrude. Let's go to lines again, so we can see the segments. But by default this is being extruded by 100 centimeters. We just want this to be something low like two. The difference between this extrude object and the extrude in the modeling tools is that, this one you are always extruding splines like this whereas the one in the modeling tools, you're always dealing with the geometry that's already set. Anyway, let's go to the "Caps" tab. We're going to have in the "Bevel Shape" set the size to 5. It creates a cap at the top and at the bottom. We only need the one at the bottom which is the "End Cap", so disable the "Start" one. It resets the whole setup, so we have two type in five once again. We can smooth this out, go to the "Segments" and let's do 10. In the "Object" tab, I'm going to lower the offset to one, so that it starts right there. This bevel, that is, if you increase this, the bevel is always going to start after your initial offset. Let's copy the whole extrude setup and flip it. In the offset, set that to negative one. Now it's just going in the other direction. Then change this "Bevel Shape" from "Round" to "Curve" and lower the size to 2.5. We don't need as many segments for this one should be one. Just a basic cover for our fluorescent light. One other thing I can do here is select the large rectangles and click "Rounding". Lower that to 2.5, just to round off the edges. Let's get a cylinder. Give it a radius of 1.5 and a height of just 100. This is going to be the holder for our light. I want to place this to be just on top of the cover. Then let's move it 30 centimeters back make a copy, and set this position to be the opposite. Instead of negative 30 in the X position, this one is at 30. Create a null object and drop everything into that. This is going to be our light. Let's un-solo to see the rest of the scene. Hold the "Alt" key, get the "Cloner" and drop our light into the cloner. This first group is just going to be the three lights in a row. In the cloner, in the grid array mode, the X count is at 3, 1 for Y, and 1 for Z. The size, which is the distance between the clones by default is 200 always. Let's go to 120. Now we're going to clone this set of three lights, which we should name before we move on. Clone Lights 3 Set. Let's get another cloner. We're now cloning a cloner. It's like Inception or something. This time we want two in the Z-direction like this to create the two main rows of lights. The spacing in the X-direction is going to be 500. Let's move them roughly to where they ought to be, which is up here somewhere. The Z-position is the same as these beams, so we want them to be aligned. That was 100 in Z space for those beams. We shall do the same for our lights. We're going to always double-check in their right view just to make sure things are lining up. We want the lines to be just touching this part of the roof, so around about here, this dark line right right. We can also just [inaudible] this up in the viewport itself. As soon as they start to stick into the roof, you stop there. It seems the red value there is about 375 for a nice whole number. I'm going to go to the "Cloner" once again. Let's put the spacing at 250 just for a wider arrangement. Maybe even as far as 275. Let's do display with lines, just to see things a bit easier. The count is going to be whatever it takes to fill out the entire length of the station. It seems 20 is correct. Once again, the spacing is 500 centimeters. Everything kind of just lines up here because we have been using numbers that sort of divide into each other. Our train station is 100 meters long. This columns are 10 meters apart. The beams are five meters apart, and likewise, the lights in the groups of three are also five meters apart. It just means that when we line everything up, it's very easy to quickly arrange the train station into something like this. Next up we're going to model their screens. For this, we're going to begin with a cube. Let's give it an x size of just 10 and the y height of 40, maybe 50. Let's move this up roughly to where it's supposed to end up. That's 100 for the z position and I think that's about the right proportions. Let's bring it back down to continue building. So zero out the position, it's always easier to build in the center of the scene. Let's solo this. I'm going to hit "C" to make it into an editable object. Let's select the front face. This is in polygon mode and we are going to extrude and as the name suggests, when we start clicking and just dragging, this is going to extrude our selection inward. But what we're going to do is that extrude let's do that to 2.5. We're typing this over here. Then let's get extrude and extrude backward into this. You can't go too far because you end up sticking to the other side. Just negative five, probably too much. Let's do negative 2.5. I think it's too small actually from the beginning so let's do five extrude inner and then 2.5 extruding back, that's better. Let's select our screen and get some more texts which is found under the cloner icon. When I hold shift this time to bring that in as a child of what whatever we have selected here. Alt brings it as a parent and holding Shift brings it in as a child. Let's set the alignment to be middle and also press "R" to rotate this 90 degrees. Bring it down to about here. It's too large obviously. In the font, I am going to use Bahnschrift. I don't remember installing that font, so I believe it's a default font in Windows 10 anyway, but I could be wrong. Let's lower the size down to 12. I'm just going to type out 01 and let's do all caps for ANDROMEDA and put a fake time 01:17. I will set the space into four centimeters between my letters. Let's push it back just so it sticks out of the screen. I am going to make a copy of this. Hold Control and drag down and then this second one is going to be a different location and time. 02, let's do WHIRLPOOL, which is another galaxy, the time is going to be 12:12. If I really wanted this two to line up perfectly, what I would do is have a different mode texts for the number, the destination, and the time, then you would line up the two rows like that. Let's take the whole screen and move it 15 centimeters this way into the x-direction. Press "R" for rotation and I'm going to angle it down by 15 degrees. I'm going to instance it. Just making a copy of with the screen selected, let's get the instance to form up here, which creates this copy. This one is going to be positioned at negative 15 for the x position, and I'm also going to rotate it 180 degrees using the heading so 180, the screens need to be held up by something. Then scrap our cylinder once again, a radius of two, a height of 150 and then I'm just going to move this up to float in between the two screens. Now if this was something that was going to get close to during the animation, I would model a bit more detail, for example, something actually attaching this to the screens. But for what we're doing, you never really get this close to it, just up there and it should be fine. The z position of this bar is currently at negative 80. Let's flip it to create the other side on this copy of the same bar and drop everything into a null object and call this our screen. Let's un-solo to bring back the rest of the scene and once again, we're going to clone. This is going to be the cloner screens. Our viewport may be a bit slow with all these signs. Once again, let's use render instance, then I'm going to go to the cloner settings itself. Let's have one in the z-direction and seven in the x-direction. The spacing is going to be 1,500. Let's move it to 100 in z space so it's lined up with our beams, and then move it up until you see this is going maybe around the same level of the lights or just under that. Three-fifty seems to be correct. The reason I chose seven clones with a spacing of 1,500. It creates this pattern where we have a screen coming out of one of these beams or attached to one of those beams, and then you skip two and then we get another screen, and I just liked that arrangement the best. That's it. Once again, with more objects in our scene, it just continues to build up and look more detailed and interesting. In the next lesson, we're going to take a slightly different approach because we are going to be using assets rather than creating them from scratch.
7. Bonus - Entrance & Station Sign: This next detail is not too obvious, especially with this camera move that I do here. But there is an opening halfway down the platform and we're going to model that now. With the platform, geometry is selected, I'm going to go to edge mode and I already have this loop cut tool enabled. To get this just I right-click and go to loop or path cut. As I hover over these edges, you can see where the cut is going to be placed. Let's hold shift to lock it to the center of the geometry. Then I just click to make that cut. In edge mode, I just want to select that new edge I have just added to the geometry. If I press, "U" followed by "L" for loop selection, let's now select that new loop. Then I'm going to bevel this out, which is going to create two lines at the side based on the original line. I'm going to stop just when we go past these two pillars. This is the reason I wanted to have that open area in the middle here instead of having a pillar right there. I am going to make another loop cut. This one is going to be just underway the lights or screens come up too. I'm just going to add this up in the viewport, it seems to be roughly here. Let's go to the right view. In rectangle selection, I can select that point, that new cut I have just added. If I go back to the 3D perspective view and you can see I've now selected all the points along that new cut. I'm just going to position these at about, let's say 375. Then in live selection in polygon mode, something odd has happened here, which is my normals have been flipped. We are now facing the wrong side of the geometry. It should be yellow like this. It's not a big deal. Let's get U and the L once again for the loop, selection and select these three sections. I guess that one up here too. Right-click and reverse the normals. Moving on, let's now select this new face right here. Extrude this backward using the control key. I'm going to go to meters on the first run and then let's do that again this time by three meters. If we go behind, I'm going to select these areas and extrude with the tool this time, you cannot use the shortcut when you have two opposite sides selected like that. We have to do it using the tool, but that's fine. We're going to go to negative 1,000. Then I'm going to move down the whole thing by about 350 or so. This is going to be like the staircase leading up to this entrance area. We can do another extrusion. Let's say another negative 10,000. This detail is not really going to be that visible, but you could position your camera differently in your own animation where you do see this open area a bit more. But I just thought I wanted to add that detail anyway. Let's go to modeling mode and live selection. We're going to grab the lights, which should be named as such by the way. Clearly I missed that, so let's make a copy of our lights here. We only need maybe two in the x direction. Let's move these to be under this new section that we have just cut out. Then obviously we just need to bring them out attach maybe 275 for the Z size. This will be cloner lights 2, the cloner screens also should be labeled from the previous lesson. There was another section which is a bit more visible at the beginning where there is this cut-out and the sign saying Earth Station. The cut-out for the Earth Station sign is going to be in this area. Right here on this side, on the opposite side, it's going to be this one. We needed to add some cut-outs for it. With the loop path cut selected once again, we want to cut about a meter up from the floor and I can tell that it's going to be roughly somewhere here. Because of the columns, is a four meters and they're split into four segments. Roughly about there, that's a bit too low there, so let's go maybe a bit higher. I just chose one of the segments that came up when you hold Shift it always splits it into six equal parts. Once they're out of the way, they're this close enough to one meter. Let's select this whole edge we have just cut and we're going to bring it down just a touch. Let's get another loop, path cut. This is going to be closer to the top. Maybe if I hold Shift and use this edge. Now at this point, the geometry is actually symmetrical. So if we were to draw a line right down the middle here, it's the same either side, just flipped over. We can save some time in the future by actually using asymmetry object. Let's say I select down the middle here and make a cut. Then I'm going to get loop selection and press "U" followed by "L". Then if I get loop selection for this end piece, I can then get U and F for full selection to select everything that's in between those two initial loop selections. I can delete this whole side, get our platform, and I place it in a symmetry object that is found under this icon and symmetry make our platform a child of that. By default it puts it on the correct side. But if not, you have to change the mirror plane and see how to get the right result. So Z, Y was correct. Now anything we do to this side of the platform will be replicated on the other side automatically in polygon mode here, I'm going to extrude out this section inward. You can just see in the distance, it's doing the same thing because it's asymmetrical representation of what we're doing over here. This is going to be just a foot deep. Then I'm going to delete to create the opening right there. If I tried to just scale this out, is going to create a cone-shaped piece of geometry. So let's do a zero extrude, this is when you extrude something, but use a value of zero. If I hit "Apply", there's no changes visually, but that's created a new edge, which I can now scale out like this. It looks a mess back here, but from this side, everything is actually fine. The actual Earth Station sign, we're going to start with a cube. Let's make it about 700 in width and about 75 tall. Let's move it to roughly the correct position with a depth of just 10. If we place it at four meters into Z space, it's going to be right where this wall begins. Let's move it back just a touch. It's in the middle of that cut-out, let's see to make it editable, I'm going to make it a bit taller actually. Let's go for 80 centimeters and then make it editable. Select this face in polygon mode. Extrude in a five centimeters will do, right-click and do an extrusion backward. This is only 10 centimeters thick, so let's go five centimeters deep. Let's get a cylinder, hold Shift as we do this, to make it a child of the cube. To also bring it in the roughly the correct position, a radius of 2.5. Let's undo that camera move. This can be just one meter tall. Relative to the cubes position, we're going to move this out two and a half meters. Make a copy and just flip that exposition to create the other side. With the cube selected once again, let's get some MoText. Hold Shift to bring it in as a child aligned to middle. Let's bring it down here, give it a depth of five. Relative to the position of our cube, we're going to bring it out to the front by five centimeters. Also let's type out earth station and the font is going to be the same as our andromeda sign, which is that bond shrift. Scale it down to about 60, it seems is the correct number there. Move it up a touch and increase the horizontal spacing. I'm going to go for 15. In the caps we're going to go for just the default round with the size of just one. We could throw this into the symmetry, but because we have some readable text, and I guess the symmetry only respects the first object. I didn't even know that. It doesn't just do everything that's in here. It wouldn't work anyway because the text would be flipped backwards. What we should do instead, let's name this Earth Sign. What we should do instead is use an instance and then just reverse the position of this. Negative whatever we had before. It seems it actually moved the touch by accident. This should be negative 3,000 to be in the correct position over there. This sign over here should be at exactly 3,000, I think I knocked it by accident at one point.
8. Adding Benches, Bins, Vending Machines & Faregates to the scene.: In this lesson we're going to be adding more objects to our scene, but this time it's going to be some pre-made assets and free 3D models. These are the models we are going to now throw into our scene. We have a vending machine, a faregate bench, and a bin/trash can as it's called in America. Over here is our example, once again, that's these details that you see scattered along the length of the train station. These models were downloaded from 3dwarehouse.com. Once again, at the end of the class, there will be a bonus lesson showing you how to get those models to open in Cinema 4D, but for following along with the class, you can of course, just go ahead and download these models. But by any means, feel free to use your own models for something different. One important thing here is to make sure that our models are roughly the correct scale as close to real world scale as possible so that when we arrange everything together, it just fits and looks natural because if these were too small or too large and we drop them into the scene, it would not look very convincing. To check the overall size of any object in Cinema 4D, you can click it. Let's say the vending machine, it's inside of a null object, so the size down here is not registering as anything, it's just coming up as three zeros. What we have to do is change this size control to size plus and now what this is doing is it's looking to see what's nested underneath our null object and it calculates the total size of all those things. It's always being measured from the lowest part of the model to the highest and it gives you the overall scale of values like that. You may also have noticed down in the material manager that we have these different tabs, they're all named correspondingly to the models we have in the scene. Each tab shows you the material just for that one thing, and this is just a way to organize our materials to make sure that it doesn't get too confusing. If we go to the all tab, I'm going to double-click to create a new material just as a test, I'm going to call it that. In the layers tab, I'm going to double-click to create a new layer. Let's just call this test, and let's just drag our material into this. Now that creates an extra tab, so each time we have a new object or a new group of object, we can continue organizing our materials like this. Okay, let's move on, let's copy all of these into the main project. After coming back to this I noticed that it's a bit laggy and a bit unresponsive and after turning off a few things, just to check what was causing the slowdown, I found out it was the screens. I had to disable the cloner for the screens and as soon as I did that, the performance returned and it was quite fluid once again. Anyway, I copied those 3D models from the previous scene. I'm just going to press Control V to paste. I'm going to start with the bench, so if I hold the old key and just hide, these are the objects, they start by going green, so I have to do that a second time. Now I can get the bench and throw that into a cloner. We're going to have two in the x direction and one in z. The default spacing of 200 works here, so I'm just going to leave it. Then I'm going to move these benches to the left side, starting with this main open section between the first two pillars, just roughly in the middle. I can tell by just eyeing this up, first of all, that the number I am looking for in this case is negative 4,000. That puts these two benches right between these two pillars and then their movement back. If we do 300, then I'm going to clone these two benches from this location. Hold out and get another cloner. Let's call this cloner benches. We want to have three in the x direction because this is the first one, second, and third, there won't be any benches either side of the entrance. Three in the x direction, which is already the default and one in z. They are all intersecting with each other in the same place there, so we need to grab this handle here to spread them out. It's going either direction here, which is what happens in the grid array mode. Let's change that to linear and by default it clones in a upward linear direction, which is controlled by this position control of 50. Let's set that to zero on y and then put x up. The actual value, I'm not too sure, but as soon as it seems like these two benches are also in the middle of here. That seems a bit correct, so it's clearly meant to be a 1,000 and that makes sense because the pillars are 1,000 centimeters apart too. Once again, just easily arranging objects by using similar, numbers. We can now instance this collection of three benches. If we go to our instance, this one is going to be way over here somewhere on the right side. It seems the position is going to end up being 2,000. It's the same arrangement that we have on the left side where we have benches in front of the earth station sign and then to either side and exactly the same thing there. Next step, let's do the bins, there's one either side of the pillars. If we get one of the bins, move that at a relative starting position. Inside one of these pillars, negative 4,500 seems to be correct. The anchor point of this bin is not in the middle of the bin itself, as you can see there, so that was a mistake, but I can show you how to fix that. If we solo the bin and select the geometry for that, let's go to Mesh, Axis and the Axis Center, which allows us to just hit execute. It's going to move the anchor point to the middle of the geometry itself. Let's move y to minus 100 so that it sits. That's supposed to go to the floor. But it also seems the geometry is rotated 90 degrees and I can just see it there. Let's go to the axis modification to enable that and zero out this rotation, so now it's facing the correct way, the y direction pointing up z backwards and x to the sides. Okay, so clearly I missed that one I prepared this particular model, but now if I exit the access mode and then execute once again, It's going to move x and z to the middle and y to the base because we set y to negative 100 here. If you do the opposite, it's going to go to the top. Once again, let's go to negative 100 percent. Now if I do set it to be at minus 4,500 it's going to line up with our pillar and the same for the z position of 300. Then I will drop this into a cloner we are going to have two in the x direction and one. The spacing can be 135. So the reason it's important to have them lined up properly is so they can be either side of this pillar. Now I can clone that a second time. Once again, we're going to use the linear mode and the spacing is going to be 1,000 in the x direction. We are going to have four up to this point then let's call these cloner bins and instance that as well. Move it way over here somewhere. The position for this one is 1,500. Once again, we have the same thing on this side, just being instanced over onto the other side. This only works because we've built this in a symmetrical way so everything just lines up. Next step is the vending machines we briefly see right there and a bit over there. If we bring that back, this is anchored in the correct place at the base and the three axis directions are pointing the correct way. We just need to put this into a cloner, it's going to be three and they're all going to be right next to each other like this. If I space them out by 1, 1, 0, they're going to be in the middle of these first two pillars counting from the entrance. This will be right by the wall, so I'll just move them until they just touch the wall there. Let's go with 350 so there is a slight gap. The exposition is clearly going to be negative 1,000. We can just Instance this, it's just as easy as cloning it in a grid and spacing it out until it goes in the middle. But if we just Instance it, we can reverse the exposition to be 1,000 instead of negative 1,000. The last thing here, the detail is the faregate this is going to be on the entrance. Throw that into a clone, r grid array. Let's have five of them in the x direction and one in z zero out the exposition, so it's right in the middle, and then move it back. We have a nice guide for this to just end up right there about 465. Maybe reduce the spacing in between to about 140 or so. But once again, these details won't be too visible in the final animation. As the train goes by, you will see some reflections from these lights and it's just small little details like that, which will just add a bit more interest to the overall render and frame. There we have it, I use assets like these in my scenes quite often and it allows me to save a lot of time and focus on things which I am better at, such as the lighting, texturing an animation and so on. If you look below the lesson, there'll be a bonus video which I recorded separately, in which I'm going to show you various places where you can get some free 3D models to use in your own projects too.
9. Importing Train, Earth & Galaxy: Before we do the animation, let's bring in the rest of the objects into the scene. That's our train, and there are two background images of the Earth and the galaxy. Here is our train. We're going to bring this into our other project, so we can go to Window. Any open projects will be here too. It's still very slow because of those screens. Once again, I think it's because of the text part of that screen, its very heavy, a lot of geometry. Press "Control V" to paste the train into here. I'm going to rotate this 180 degrees. This is the side we're going to be looking from, so we want to see the front. Then to align this up next to the platform, I am looking at where the door is, or the step up to the door. If you happen to be using something different, that's how you want to align this up too. This is already to scale and is the right size, it's just going to fit quite well. If you have something different, a good way to measure how tall this should be is just to look where the platform's floor is, and the roof. The train shouldn't be about maybe two-thirds or three-quarters of the height between those two areas, and that should look like it's supposed to fit. Anyway, I've done this before, so I know the Y position is going to be 100, and then negative 150 for the X position. We have all materials for the train over here, they're not in a layer. Let's go to Layers and make one double-click to create one, call it train and then drag them into that just to keep our project as organized as possible. Then I'm going to Instance the first carriage, let's move it back, there's going to be three of them total. Of course, you could have more for your own animation if you wish. This is just what I had in the original. In Attributes Coordinates we're going to get close to this detail here. It's a nice detail on this particular model where you can actually link the two carriages together, but if you don't have that, you can still just line them up next to each other, it's going to look fine either way. For the third carriage, we're going to have a copy of the original, because we want to change the lights to be red at the back. You can't change in Instance. This needs to be an actual copy of the original geometry and it's going to be the third one. We can flip it back to be facing backwards. Get close to this point just to make sure it lines up nicely. Then I'm going to create a null object. Let's call it train. Position this to be in the middle of the train, which is going to be negative 150 for the Z position, and then take all these trains and put them into that one null object. Now this will move as a single object. Next up I want to bring in my two images, the Earth and the galaxy. Here they are, they are just two PSC files. I'm going to drag these into Cinema 4D and I'm just going to click "No" for both of these. I'm going to make a new layer for them, call it bg, for backgrounds, and put both images into that layer just to continue to stay as organized as possible. Here are the two images in Photoshop. The galaxy will be part of the project files but unfortunately, I cannot share the earth image with you because it's a purchased image from Adobe stock. However, I will link it in a text file in case you guys want to check out the same image. I made a few changes to it to prepare it for my project. This was the original and then I put a circular Mask Layer around it because I just wanted the Earth part of the image. Then I put this outer glow effect, which is just a Layer Style in Photoshop. You turn this on and off. That's the difference. I then faded the image from the bottom left corner, I just wanted to put more attention to the top part, it seemed to be a slightly but composition. Then above that, I just made some color adjustments, a bit more contrast and tone changes. Let's create some geometry for that to go on. It's going to be a disc shape. Let's apply the Earth image to it first, which I'm going to name as such and this is our galaxy. Apply it to this new disk. Solo it, it's laying flat, so go to Attributes and change the orientation to X plus. The image should be in the Luminance channel, remove it from the Color channel. You can drag it from here, hover over Luminance and then just let go. Turn on Luminance but disable Color and Reflectance. Also, the quantity is a bit murky. If we go to Viewport, the Texture Preview Size should be 512 or higher, maybe even 1024. This used to be called the editor, I think, this tab in the older versions of Cinema 4D. Anyway, let's also rotate this 90 degrees. Let's call the disk the Earth and solo. It's going to have a radius of 50,000 centimeters, the outer radius, which makes it really large. The X position, which is back that way is going to be negative 50,000. That it's going to be this massive object in the background. Later we will refine the positioning and so on, but for now we can just leave it like that. Let's make a copy, call this one our galaxy, and just give it a similar treatment. If we go to that Galaxy Material, put that on there instead. Take the image out of the Color channel and go to Luminance. Turn that on, disable the other two channels and in the Viewport, let's put the quality up to 1024. It's going to be on the opposite side. Let's go to the Galaxy and reverse the X position and also actually make it even further. This is going to be 100,000 centimeters. That's one with five zeros after. When the camera spins around from this direction, you will be seeing the galaxy out there in the distance. If you start to move around and you see your objects flicker or disappear, it's because of this control in our project settings called the View Clipping. Press "Control D" to bring up the project settings, mine were already open and in View Clipping you can increase this from the default medium to one above that, so large. Now we should be able to see further. Now with everything in the scene, we can move on to the animation itself.
10. Train & Camera Animation: In this lesson, we're going to do the animation starting with our train itself and then in the second part, I'm going to show you how to do a smooth camera animation with just two keyframes. The train and camera animation go hand in hand because the timing of one affects and the other one. Let's see how that works in a cinema. We're going to start with the train. Let's go back to the preview a second again. We can see where the train begins, it's about in line with where station sign is in this pillar, that is further down this way, about here, so it looks the closest whole number there is 1,500 for the X position. If we go to frame 0 and our timeline is only three seconds right now, let's make that 26, that's how long the original animation was, but, of course, you could make it shorter or longer. To save that keyframe, let's just hold Control on the position X, click this dot, when it's red, it means the keyframe has been set, go to the end of the animation and we just want to move the train out here somewhere. Now, this is a bit like cheating because I've done this project at least two or three times before when I was preparing for the class, so I know the X movement I want goes up to 20,000 centimeters and then I keyframe that. For reference, the amount of distance the train covers after it leaves the platform is about the length of the entire platform. If you look these guides we have 250-meter sections and then the train travels through two of them fully and then it's out here somewhere. Maybe that's a quick guide if you guys are trying to get similar movement but with different models and so on. Anyway, at the beginning the animation eases in, continues to accelerate in the middle, and then towards the end, it's going to ease out and then slow down and stop. We want some constant acceleration, so we have to go to "Window" and "Timeline Dope Sheet" to view those keyframe and make changes to them. You can navigate in the timeline like you do in the viewport, so pressing one and clicking can then pan in the timeline, and then two and zooming in and out can show you more or less of the timeline. You can also click a track, hit S to frame just that track. Let's open up the X-animated position here. Now, you can see that ease in and ease out. What we want to do is grab this handle on the right side and bring it down so that we have a constantly accelerating animation like this; and that's exactly what we have in the final version. Starts off real slow and then slowly gets faster and faster. But that's it, it's quite simple for the train. For our camera, we are going to have a starting position and an end position, and then we're going to morph between those two cameras. Let me show you how that works. If I get a camera, let's call this camera number 1. Let's look through it and in the Object tab, by the way, to look through it or to know when you're looking through it, first of all, you won't see that camera in the viewport like this, but also this little square will be turned white like this, so now we are moving through that camera. The starting position is going to be somewhere at the front of the train, this angle. Also, the focal length is going to be 24 millimeters, so much wider, I want to see more of the scene and also make more space for our Earth, which is going to be somewhere over here. Once again, I've done this before, so I know the numbers I'm going to use, It's 3,500 for the X position, 100 for Y, and 100 for Z. If we jump out of the camera, we can see it's just floating on the platform there. There's not going to be any pitch rotation, so zero that out. If I set the heading to 90 degrees, now the camera is pointing right down the center of the platform, I want an angle more toward the train, so I did this by about 15 degrees; so that would be 90 plus 15, which is 105. Once again, just when we enable the background later you will see the Earth will be about roughly in this area. In fact, let's bring it back for a second and move it to where it's supposed to end up. I'm just eyeing this up, I want this curved part to cut halfway between the top of the train and the platform, so right about here, and I'm also just going to bring it a bit closer in, so negative 27,000 on Y and the same for Z seems to be a good place. The shading in our scene here is not very helpful, it's very dark in a lot of places, that's because of the default light in this Gouraud Shading mode, so let's change it to Constant Shading with lines. Let's continue. We're going to make a copy of our first camera; let's call this one camera number 2. Let's look through that one, scrub through to the end of our animation, and we want to spin this one around to face the train, so that's the heading rotation; it's going to be exactly 270, which is straight down and then we would zoom toward the train, I'm using this zoom up here instead, so this kind of framing. Now, the disk shape is clearly not large enough to contain the whole frame, so the galaxy at this point needs to be larger. If I double the size of the outer radius to 100,000 that might be too large, maybe 85,000 not 850,000, that's definitely too large. Let's go back to our camera here. The final position is going to be 7,000 centimeters. Whatever you set this to, make sure it's not too far back obviously because you don't want the camera to go backwards. So when we jump out of both cameras, we can just have a overview of the whole scene. This is going to be our camera angle at the beginning. As the train travels, we will end up with this camera angle. The way we do that is by selecting both cameras, go to our camera icon and get the Camera Morph. Because we had both cameras selected, these two link boxes on the Camera Morph tag will automatically be populated by our two cameras. Now if we look through them off camera, we can blend between the two. That's how the animation is going to work. At frame 0, let's keyframe that, hold "Control" and click that dot. Go to the last frame, go to 100 percent, and then confirm that keyframe too. So very quickly, we now have our camera animation. You can even see it as it leaves that initial position where the first camera was and when we head toward this second position. Now the timing is all off. The camera spins around too quickly before the train gets close to it. So we end up just looking at nothing for a moment and then it appears in view again. We will fix that with the keyframe curves. Looking at the example for reference, there's a point at which the camera is facing 90 degrees toward the train. It's at about 10, 11 seconds or so, right at this point. Let's time our camera right now to do the same thing as we just saw there. If I jump out of it, right now, that 90 degree point is at about 13 seconds. That's when the camera is facing right this way. We want to shift that point to be at about 10 seconds. If I type in 10, that's frame 300. This means I am in 30 FPS mode. I never go above 24 for most animations. So press "Control D", go to the Project Settings and the FPS should be 24, which is standard film FPS. Anyway, at that point in time, if I go to the timeline, we can now see our Camera Morph blend in the list of different tracks we have. Lets expand this. What I'm going to do is simply get this last handle and pull it back this way. The point at which that camera is now turning or turned 90 degrees is going to be at about 10 seconds. Let's make a bit more room for all of our different elements. This handle, by the way, I want once you start to move and change this around, it's very sensitive so you'll have to be very careful. But you can also use the keyframe properties on the right side. The length of this, that's this right time control. You can see right now it's at 12 seconds and 16 frames. Actually, this is the left handles time because this handled is on the left side of our keyframe. But by default they go hand in hand. So when you change one, it affects the other. The value is how far you've pulled it down or up to change the curve. We're going to leave ours flat, so put that value to zero, which will affect the timing. We also have to fine tune this until it's closer to 90 degrees. It seems about 12 seconds and five frames is correct. Let's leave it at that. Now at 10 seconds, our camera is going to be facing directly toward where the train's path is going to intersect. The problem now is the train is just too slow to begin with, so we won't even see it until this point. But it's not a big deal. We just need to go to our timeline once again, let's go to 10 seconds. I'm just going to type it here. Go to the timeline window and the position for the train. I will get the last handle and I'm just going to pull this up to change the timing of that slow is in. It was too slow basically. I'm making it less steep or more steep, rather it's going to arrive sooner. It seems to be the correct timing. I'm using this door as the reference point. That seems about close enough. Let's look through the camera more of this time and play it through. We're interested at this point where the camera pans around. I would say that's pretty close. From this point, you would just be doing some very minute fine tuning. You could be doing this on either keyframe tracks. What you do to one is going to affect the other, so just be careful. But once you've done this a few times, it becomes quiet intuitive, I think. I think that's even closer. Kind of want follow this door as it goes by. I would say, that's it for our train and the camera animation. All of that movement really is just two different keyframe tracks, which is something I'm a big fan of. I like to simplify things as much as possible because it's just a more elegant setup. As we have just seen, we tried to simplify our animations as much as possible, particularly on the camera where we used the Camera Morph tag to combine the camera rotation and position into a single keyframe track, which makes it easier to create a smoother animation. Anyway, let's move on to the next lesson.
11. Bonus - Galaxy Spin Animation: There is one more animation we need to do at the end, which is the galaxy spinning slowly, like this. In taking note of this particular detail there, I want to use that as the reference point. Right now the galaxy is backwards, actually, so let's go to the object tab. Set this to x minus on the orientation so the swirls are going to be spinning down this way, in the same direction as the rotation. That's going to be the pitch. The element I was looking at, I believe, is this thing right here. That's going to be at negative 90 at the end. Let's keyframe that. Now I know it's spinning down, so let's see which direction we need to go in. We need to go for a smaller number. Let's start at about negative 20. Keyframe that. Now, obviously that's halfway in the animation. Let's click that keyframe, select it. In the keyframe time, I'm going to drop to zero so it jumps to the beginning. Now, we have this galaxy slowly spinning. Now, it slows down at the end because of the Easy Ease. Let's go to our keyframes. Galaxy rotation, that's the one you would track. Select both, and then just click linear. Now it's going to have a constant speed throughout the entire animation.
12. Redshift Lighting, Materials & Settings: This is the Redshift lesson and it's also the longest one. That's because Redshift is a very powerful render engine with a lot of various sections to get through. So we're just going to jump right in and see what we need to do. Whenever we do lighting in Cinema 4D, there's always going to be a lot of back and forth between various sections of the project. We're going to be jumping between light settings, material settings, set an objects, and even the render settings. It may appear as if we're all over the place during this lesson, but that's normal. I'm going to do my best to keep it as structured as possible. We're going to begin by getting the Redshift Render View. We need to put this in our interface. I'm going to grab these three horizontal lines. That's how you move these into different parts of the interface. I'm going to place this one above the materials. Then if I right-click the same three lines on the materials section, I can undock this. I'm going to move the materials to be above the coordinates section. Then I can enlarge this area, so we can have as big a viewport as possible. Normally, I would have just thrown this entire render view onto my second screen. But I am recording this lesson, so all of it needs to somewhat fit on this one side. The next thing is to send our scene to the render view, so I click this "Play" button. After a few seconds, the scene will now be active in Redshift. By default, there isn't much going on, so these renders are going to be quite fast. I happen to have a pretty powerful computer as well, so generally all of my renders are fast. There's a few ways to display our render. The original size just takes whatever you have in the render settings in output. So right now it's 1280 by 720, and because my screen is 4K resolution, this is the entire 1280 by 720 frame. It fits here quite easily. I can even go up to 1920 by 1080, and that's still going to fit at 100 percent zoom level. For the most part, I like to work like this and see my actual final resolution. We can also do something like fit window, which means it's going to scale dynamically as I change the size of this section, but I'm going to go back to original size. Another thing here is this is using the default progressive random mode, which always starts a bit noisy, and then slowly refines the image over time. I would say this is the best mode to stay in if your computer isn't as powerful. But personally, I just like to be looking at final render quality all the time. So I go to the render settings in Redshift. Let's change the renderer to Redshift first of all. Then go to Redshift, and in the basic tab, under progressive rendering, I always turn this off, the Force enable for IPR. This is the IPR; we are going to disable it. Because the final render is always based on the unified sampling, which does the standard sort render pattern. But once again, if you need to use the progressive method, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's quite good. Personally, I'm just going to stick with a unified sampling even in the IPR. Then throughout the lesson, I'll be showing you guys some tips and tricks to help you to speed up your renders as much as possible without sacrificing too much quality. To continue, the next thing is we need to convert all of our materials from standard to Redshift. So if we just go to the top menu under Redshift, let's go to materials, tools, and convert and replace all materials. Our previews may disappear for a moment, so we just have to open up any one of these. It's a weird glitch that happens sometimes in Redshift. But you can force it to show us the previews by just clicking through them whilst one of the materials is open, so you just cycle through and eventually they will all load correctly. Let's go to our preview. We want to start with the materials on the train platform itself, so that's mainly the flow and these other structures we see. We have this very shiny tile material, and then also a shiny concrete material on the walls. These are a few materials which are included in the class files. I have opened them in a different project, so you guys can go ahead and do the same thing. Let's copy this null object out of here. Go back to window, and let's go to our station once again, and then edit and paste. Let's look out of our camera, and go to a view somewhere like here where we can see the pillars and the top part of the ceiling. Let's find the main geometry of our train station that's this symmetry object. I'm going to quickly apply all the materials onto it so that when I solo, the materials get to come along with that. Also I'm going to switch to constant shading so I can see a bit better what's going on. I'm going to remove this from the object and apply them properly one-by-one. Starting with the concrete main 05 material preset, I'm going to apply that to the station. By the way, these three materials are just a handful of presets from my much larger Redshift material packs for Cinema 4D. Here's a few examples, so concrete. These are the couple of presets we've brought in here and we have tiles further down. That was this preset right there. So altogether, this is a collection of over 1000 different presets that I made for Redshift, and I sell these on my other website called Motion Squared. I will put this on the screen now if you want to check this out and get a bit more information. There's some preview galleries, and you can check some of those out too. If you scroll down even further, you can download a free sample pack with 23 samples. That's it, just a bit of self-promotion. I'm going to move on now. By the way, these are also available for all of these other render engines too. Let's get back to Cinema 4D. We have just applied that concrete material onto this, and it's tiled all incorrectly. So let's go to the material tag. Their projection should be cubic. We are also going to enlarge the length to 250 on the length U, and 250 length V, just to tile it a bit larger. There's this section, which is more visible at the beginning, this sliver of concrete, and then we have their tiles. So we need to make that cut in the geometry. If the response up here is too slow, you may just have to pause your IPF for a moment, and then when you're done, you can re-enable it. Let's go to polygon mode. I'm going to right-click and go to loop/path cut. I'm going to [inaudible] this up, maybe about so. Now I can go back to polygon mode and normal selection. I'm going to select the other part of the floor, and directly apply our tiles material onto that, and also change their projection from UV mapping to cubic. I also want them to be a bit smaller, so let's go to the length U, drop that down to 80 percent. It just so happens, these lines up perfectly at the front here, but in case it doesn't, you can go to the offset V in this case, and move it until it does. Offset U, by the way, goes the other way. That's it. We can re-enable our render view. It's going to update. Let's un-solo to bring back everything. Looking through our camera again, we can see those two new materials we have applied to the floor and the walls. We need to have an actual light in the scene because right now we just have the default. So let's go to Redshift, lights, and dome. When that comes in, it's this general ambient white light. Let's change it to a blue color. So in the general tab of this dome light, under tent, set that to about 205. A saturation of about 40 and then a brightness of about 50, it's going to create this blue ambient light. The reason I chose that color is because it's the same kind of tones we are getting from the Earth in the background, and also my galaxy on the other side. Whatever images you choose to use, make sure you use a similar tone to make it seem as if that's where the illumination is coming from. If you have something completely different, maybe that might work in some creative way, but I think it's a good idea to choose similar tones. We also don't really want to see the background itself. Let's just scroll further down and enable background. Let's turn that off. We're just left with the illumination. If we momentarily go back to our final render, you can see there's a lot of reflective and immersive surfaces, and that's really what brings this whole look together. Because in reality, there was just a couple of lights, and the rest is just the effects of those reflections I just mentioned, plus all these other things being reflected. I would say in a way, this is not a very realistic lighting style, but that was not my goal to begin with. I just wanted to make something that looked cool, and that's the approach I took in the end. Let's continue and see if we can produce similar results again. I'm going to slowly work my way up this list of far objects and applying various materials. Starting with that, a short beams, columns, and long beams, they are also going to have that same concrete material, and once I apply it to one of them, I can just copy the tag to the next object. Let's select all three and change the projection from UV mapping to cubic once again, and it's also going to be length 250 on U and V. Next up in the list is our lights. Let's create a new redshift material. We can open this up in the RS material node. Let's go to overall, in emission, let's set a pale orange colors, so about 35 for the hue, maximum brightness, and then may be about 15 for the saturation, and then the emission weight itself, that's how bright this is. Let's make it about four integral to base properties. We're going to change the diffuse color to be black or set the weight down to zero. Either way it does the same thing, and in the reflection we don't need any reflection, so I'll just bring that down to zero. This is our lights material. If I click on it and go to the Basic tab in the attributes, we can change the name there. Let's call this slides number 1. In the geometry itself, let's open up the cloner. It's one of these two extrude shapes, I believe it's the first one in the list. If I just drop it onto there, we need another material for the part that holds up the light. This going to be another new material. We're going to edit this in the Node Editor, and this is my preferred method, but also you could be doing this over here in the material, in the attributes, but I find it easier to work with this bigger window. In the diffuse, let's give the brightness of about 35 or 40 percent. In reflection, the roughness, I'm going to put to 0.1 and there maybe about two for the IOR , this controls the overall reflectivity of the entire thing. Let's close this down. This is going to be our shiny metal number one, but that's going to be attached to the two cylinders that holding up our lights. We can also apply this to the top part of the light, and that's small edge from the sweep object. We also have these lights, which in the entrance, if you recall, so we need to replace them with the one that has the materials. I'm going to copy the one we just applied the materials to bring that down and then delete that old one. Now if we were to go down to that section, we should see those lights also now have their materials, just trying navigate to the general area. There we go. This is the kind of stuff I may have mentioned earlier, where we just have this small luminance, which I'm just going to turn up in different reflections, and they just help with the overall detail and look of the scene. Let's look through our camera again. This first angle is very important, so let's rewind to that point. I'm going to copy that shiny metal material. Let's call this one shiny metal number 2. We can open this up, and in the color channel, I'm going to drop it down to about five, so almost completely black and the roughness then maybe bump up to 0.15. It's a very sensitive value, even that small change will make a difference. I'm going to apply this to my signs, the TV screens we made earlier and watch this as soon as I turn this back on, the scene is now very lively once again and denote W, with the render taking place. I came up with the solution, it was basically to make these two text objects editable. It means we can no longer change this moving on, but I wasn't really planning on doing so, and you can always make a copy of the text, leave it out here somewhere turned off just in case you want to use it again. Anyway, that new black material is going to be applied to the screen. Then I'm going to clone our lights material to just control, click and drag, and this is going to be our text. Once again, in the Overall tab, under emission, lets choose a very deep orange color, maybe about 20 degrees on the hue slider and then max saturation. Still four for the strength. Let's apply this to our more text, and when it re-renders that, now we'll see our text being reflected all over the scene. Let's put shiny metal 1 on the two cylinders holding that up, and the next thing in this list is the Earth sign. For this one, we're going to do a couple of different things. Let me press "S" to jump to it. Once again, we are going to apply the black material to it. Now it's being applied to everything, so we need to once again copy one of those luminant materials. Let's call it Earth_1, and we need to make it a blue color so in emission, let's change it to about 205 degrees. The weight is just going to be one for this one, and let's apply it to our text. We want to make another copy of that, and this one put the strength up to four. Earlier when we made the text, we put this beveled edge on it. Now watch this, if I apply that material to the text, the second one, click on the "Texture" tag, and under selection, we can type in R1. What this selection tag does is, it colors the front bevel. The back one would be two, this front part of the text would be C1. Just to show you how this works, if I change it to C1, we get the material being applied just to that section. This selection times are very useful, if you're trying to have multiple materials on text. Let's once again jump back to this angle, and just another thing that's now being reflected. Now some of these other materials are already applied, such as our train. If we go to that, instead of applying them, we're just changing the settings. There's a few silver materials that make up most of the color of the train. Silver number 1 is the main one here. Let's open that again. We want to go to the RS material node, and in base properties, let's go to the reflection. For some reason, when we converted these, the weight of the reflection was 0.7, it should be one, because we want this to be very reflective. Then I'm going to set the IOR to four, and you can see what that does. Much shinier now, and the roughness and the reflection should be 0.1, and then we're going to do this to these other two materials. Now because we're making the same operation on two similar materials, we can do this in the attributes manager instead, and they will both change together. The weight is at one, the roughness at 0.1, and let's do an IOR of just two this time. This is a darker silver material, you see it on the front part here and then some of the detail on the sides, like these parts of the door. But really this can be anything, as long as it's reflective, it's going to look pretty interesting in the scene. The under body material, that's the stuff you see below the train, I don't want that to be too visible, so I if we jump into that, we can go to the reflection and drop that down to 0.5 on the weight. The roughness, I'm going to 0.2 to diffuse those glossy reflections, and that's all I'm going to do there for that undercarriage material. I've tried to just focus on the materials alone for the last few minutes, just so we could keep this as structured as possible, but I'm now going to do a lot of jumping around between various things and just making several adjustments. Starting with the number of samples I am looking at here, this just isn't really enough to show me a fine render. Let's go to the Render Settings and in the Unified Sampling section under Samples Max, I'm going to put this up to 64 for now. I think for my final render, I went to all the way up to like 128 or something, but just for preview purposes, 64 is fine. I also want to adjust my lighting in two ways. I think the train station itself is a bit too dark, but I think the train is too bright so especially when we look at it from this angle. I wanted this part to be darker so that the reflections would appear a bit more contrasty. The way I went around this was, I just went to the Dome Light and under the Project tab, I excluded the train or all of the whole train setup. Let's bring that in here. Now you can see the train is no longer casting a shadow all over the platform, so it just gets a bit brighter generally. When we go over to this side, you can see the train is much darker, but the problem now is that it's just too dark. To fix this, let's call the first light dome all, make a copy of it and call this one train. This time, instead of excluding the train, we're going to only include the train, so change the mode to include. Now we have two lights doing two different things. The first light is only lighting everything else except for the train and the second one is lighting the train except everything else. But you can see you that it's too washed out. We have to go back into that second light and in the tint, we want to lower the brightness to about 20. When we do that, that's going to rebalance out and look a bit better. Now I have the best of both worlds. My platform is being lit well enough and so is the train and also because the train is not casting any dark shadows up here, that's going to help with the overall noise level. Before continuing to make further refinements, it maybe a good idea to just have a look at the two main materials on the platform itself just to see what's going on. The tiles, you can see there's a bunch of nodes here. This is the normal RS material. The diffuse color, that's this tiles diffuse map. Just black and white tiles with a bit of granite texture to them and then we have the bump input, which is creating the tiled effect between the two different colors. That's this image which I originally generated for the displacement, but we're not using displacement here. However, I just rerouted that to go to a bump node and then use that for the overall bump input, but it's already linked, so I don't need to do it again. What you're seeing over here are just leftovers of other parts of the materials so the bump map was a normal map before. It was like this, but I thought it looked a bit too rough and I knew I had a clean black and white map which is why I chose to plug that in instead, so I just switched the two around. Then for the reflection, we have the same color channel in the reflection. Once again, previously that was a more of a black and white map across the board like this, but when it was like that, if I just plug that back in, this is how the preset was by default. You can see it's reflective all over and I didn't really like that too much. I preferred having a more broken up reflection. I just took the same color image, made a copy by dragging and holding Control and I put that into the reflection color and that split it between the bright and dark tiles to create this more broken up effect and I thought that looked a bit more interesting. The concrete material I also made some changes to. If I grab the original from the preset, which are made to be more realistic in this form but obviously for this project we are going with this very reflective style. If I just start by selecting the one that's currently applied, let's select material tags or objects of that material and then just replace it with the new one and as we do the render, you see the difference. It's a lot more matt, like concrete would be in real life but we're doing a stylized scene here. All I did there was I disconnected the bump completely, just clip that handle to break it, as well as the reflection map. Then I just went to the reflection itself, put the weight to 0.5, but I dropped the roughness down to 0.1. That's how I came up with this shiny concrete material. That's it. That's all I did there. I just wanted to show you a quick breakdown of what's going on in those two materials. Once again, they are obviously part of the project files and I'm going to throw in a few others in there to give you guys a bit more options to work with. Let's continue to work on our train. To the windows' material, we need to brighten this and also make it more saturated. If we go into that material, go to the overall tab and set the emission to about 25 or 30, for the hue, the saturation is going to be about 60 and the weight, let's start with four for now and see how that looks. Pretty good. It ends up illuminating or appears to be illuminating these other objects but really it's just reflections. Now to continue developing the look, we have to start looking at our camera as well. If we apply a redshift camera tag to our Morph Camera, let's go to the Streak tab to start with. If I override and then enable and lower the threshold to say one, that's probably too extreme and the streaks are a bit too long, so the tail, I'm going to drop that down to 0.35 just to bring them down a bit. We can even increase the intensity here, but I tend to use the material itself to brighten it because then you can have varying levels of the streaks on different materials just by increasing the strength of the emission. We can even go to the Bloom effect, Override and Enable that's like an overall glow effect on top of everything. If I lower the threshold to about eight, you can see how strong that can get, so use this a bit sparingly because you don't want to have it to be too strong. Also, right now we're losing a lot of color when we blow out these materials. Let's go to the Exposure tab and override that too and enable and immediately you'll see a slightly different look. There's suddenly a lot more color to this bright luminate materials that's due to this Tone Mapping section. If I lower it even further to, let's say 0.1, you can see it restricts the highlights and then gives us a bit more saturation. I'm looking at my render time here and that last frame took about 8.3 seconds. Let's see if I can slightly improve that in the settings. If I go to the Optimization tab, I haven't changed the maximum trace depth yet, so by default it's 4,6,6. Let's drop that down to 2,2,2 and let it run through. We we're on eight seconds before, now it's on 6.1 seconds. I just shaved off two seconds of that frame and you multiply this by 600 something frames in the project. When it comes to the rendering time, that's a pretty significant decrease. It's worth to just tinker with this area. Basically, it controls how many times reflections will bounce around and continue to be rendered. Two works quite well actually here, but you don't want to go too low. If you go down to one, it's going to drastically change how this looks and possibly not in a good way. Now we have lost any second-level reflections. That was too far. Let's bring it back up to level two. Watch the beams, particularly you can see we regain those highlights. Let's continue to work on the train. Our headlights, they need to be brighter. Let's open that up. I'm going to go to the overall tab once again in emission. Put more saturation into this may be about 40 percent and the hue bring that down to about 30 and the weight, let's go to about eight to really brighten those lights and you can see the glare coming off them. We can even play with the windows a bit more, let's say five for the emission. The green lights. We're just going to bump up the strength, somewhere between maybe six and seven, I think that works. A couple of details still missing, the departure sign in front of the train and also making sure that the rear carriage has red lights. Let's start with the departure sign. I'm going to stop the IPF for a moment. Let's jump out of our camera. The front part of the train is actually made up of a single piece. If I go to this object, it's this face geometry. So I'm going solo it. This section is where we want to put that departure text. Let's select the whole face, go to MoText, bring that in with shift. It comes in at a general correct location. Change the alignment to be middle, and then rotate it 90 degrees. Let's bring it up here into that sign area. The font is going to be bahnschrift once again, and I'm going to type out departure. It's the height to just 10 and the depth to 1. So we can really just bring it up to the front, and horizontal spacing of 4. I'm just remembering this from when I did it before. Am going to copy the green light material here, rename this new one to text or departure text because we already have something else called text. Quickly apply that. This is going to be an orange, but maybe about 30. The strength is fine. I'm going to make another copy of that material. Call this one; Departure Background. It's going to be more of a red and also an emission weight of maybe 0.5. So not too strong. I am going to re-enable the reflection though. So in the weight, put that up to 1 again and have a roughness of 0.10. also. This is going to be applied to just that piece of geometry. Go to the face and in polygon mode, apply the red to that part. Let's bring back everything within just quickly. Check to see if that has worked. If I re-enable the IPR, I think that column might be too bright or too orange, so that's the text. Let's make it more red about 20 or so, and I think I prefer that. For the red lights at the back, we have just made a modification to the main train. The one at the back is the same, but without that new sign, so we need to copy this new one. Let's go to the third one and look at its position, its negative 3840. I'm going to copy those coordinates, put them onto this new copy. It may help to be looking at an overview of the scene as I do this, and let's zero out the heading once again, so it's facing backwards. We can now get rid of the original without the sign. But on this one at the back, we want to apply some red lights all over. Once again, I'm going to pause the IPI and let's select the face because that also holds the light. I'm going to solo this once more in our materials. Let's copy just any, say the green. Copy that, makes more sense to copy the red one. Call it red lights, and in this one we're going to the emission and bump it way up, maybe six or seven once again and I make it really red. Also remove any reflection this time round. I could just go and apply it to the geometry by selecting it. This is in polygon mode, probably the quickest and easy way. Just like that, we are going to have lights at the rear of this train, red lights that is. Let's bring everything else back once again, look through our main camera and re-enable the render. When it goes past, we can see the red lights at the back. We're getting very close to the end. Next step is just refining. These are the materials for like the bench, the vending machines and so on. Just going up the list, let's start with the bench. I'm just going to select both of these and use the attributes window. Put the weight to one and the roughness to 0.1, and the IOR to just 2. So subtle changes, but it just makes it so that we catch more reflection on those benches and the vending machine is also very subtle. It's quite far. Let's go to the buttons and body material. Just do the same thing basically. So 0.1 for roughness and about 2 for the IOR. Same for the bin. I'm going to make those bins silver. If I go to the diffuse, [inaudible] about 40 percent. I don't no why it converts it to 0.77, the IOR, let's try 8 and see how that looks. I think it's going to be super reflective, and the roughness at 0.1 to really get those nice highlights. It's very close to what we have here, so that's great. I guess the far gate has a couple of fair materials. If I go to the blue and green light, maybe bump up the emission weight of those to about four, just in case they show up somewhere, but I don't think they will here. Let's go to the material 2, and IOR of 2 once again. Our two backgrounds, I think we're going to make them just slightly brighter. Starting with the galaxy, let's open that up in the overall tab. Put the emission to 1.2. Not a big difference, but not simple, maybe 1.25. When we open these, we have just plugged in a material. It was converted by Cinema 4D, so it was done automatically. It's just the out color of that texture going into the emission channel. So instead of having the color controlled over here, it's an image, and that's the setup. The Earth image works exactly the same. We are going to open that up and put the emission weight to 1.25. You don't want to go too high because if you do it blows out all the detail and the highlights. Also, I think our lights could be a bit warm up here. They're clearly a bit too cold right now. I'm not sure how much of that is down to the final color adjustments are made in after effects, but just to be sure, let's just warm that up slightly. The saturation, I'm going to go up to about 20 [inaudible] , massive difference but I think that's slightly better. As we have just seen, there's a lot of things to consider when lighting in Redshift , but I think it boils down to two things; one, is we want to render that looks as good as possible and two, we want to keep the render time as low as possible. We're actually going to continue along those same lines in the following lesson and optimize or render and get ready for the final export.
13. Bonus - Edge Light & Galaxy Fade Effect: The final effect is a subtle one. You may have missed it, but on top of the train, especially when it goes past the camera and then goes this way. You can see this nice highlight on the top. It's the same color as the galaxy, but that's not their reflection from the galaxy itself. That was a big area light I placed to reflect above the train. Just so we would get a bit of separation between the train and the other elements around it, particularly the two background images. Let's do the setup for this, I'm going to shut off the render for a moment. Go to frame zero before the train starts moving, let's jump out of the camera too. We're going to get a redshift area light. Now we won't see any feedback because of the constant shading mode we are in. But let's switch to gouraud shading for a moment. Then I can see the effects of that area light. I want to position this above the train directly, so that's going to be at negative 150 in the z-direction. Also I want to rotate it to face down on top of the train like this. We can just lower it. The idea is we're just going to stretch out the size of this to cover the entire train. It needs to move with the train. Make it a part of that train hierarchy. When the train moves now, it will bring the light along with it. Now that it's in place and roughly the correct size, I think that's fine. We can safely go back to constant shading and also our camera and re-enable the render. You can see it's too bright, it's the wrong color and so on. Let's change all of that. If I go to the color, that's just going to be about 200. Once again, we're just using similar tones throughout the whole thing, 50 percent for the saturation and click "Okay". The intensity should be about 10, or maybe even lower, maybe as low as one. I want to bump this up to about 205, I think that tone maybe too different. But of course the area light is being reflected in too many areas, I just wanted on the train. Go to the project tab and we are only including the train in this. Drop that in there and then reverse that to be include. A quick comparison with and without. When I capture a snapshot that's with and disable that area light, and then take another snapshot. This is with the light and this is without. I prefer the version with just because you get that nice extra highlight on top of the train and then also even just on the roof section right there. I am going to go with this idea. When the train goes past our camera, you can just see this nice highlight on top of the train. That's with, and once again without. Now there is one thing I forgot. Because this lesson is so long anyway, I don't think there's any harm in including it. But our galaxy here if I were to drop the size of that disc shape just for a moment, let's say about 70,000. I would very quickly start to see the edges. But there are some things you can do to help with that, such as opening up the material, go to the nodes and find a ramp node and bring that in. Just ingredient and the mapping is going to be set to circular. Let's just size this down so we can see our preview. I'm going to take this and apply it into the RS material under overall and opacity color. You can see it's in reverse, the middle is disappearing. We want to make the edges disappear. Go to the ramp and invert the gradient. Then we can pull in the black handle. The further these two are apart, the more gradual the effect is going to be. I'm going to bring in the white handle a bit more in this continual adjusting until they can no longer see any hard edges. That's the important thing I'd say, that is pretty good and that can maybe compensate the lost luminosity around the edges by going to the weight. Put that up to 1.4, or there about, I think that's fine. Now this wouldn't be too bad if you were to have a smaller circle in the distance. Overall, it's just a nice transition from galaxy to the dark part of the sky. I would still make this the original size, which was 85,000. I don't really get to see the edges all that much. But it also means that anywhere the galaxies being reflected, the fall off is going to look nicer in those areas.
14. Optimizing Redshift Render Settings for Quality & Speed: This is the second Redshift lesson in the class. We are now going to optimize all Render settings and get ready for the final export. With our project finished, we now want to look at the final Render settings, starting with just making our frame look as good as possible. Right now there's a bit too much noise in the reflections. Let's go to Render settings and under Redshift in the basic section and unified sampling. Now for this, you need to disable progressive render for sure, so go ahead and do that. This force enabled IPR. Turn that off. Also, Fast Preprocessing should be at All. Anyway, in the Samples Max, this is where the noise is mostly controlled. If I double it to 128, it's going to clean up the noise in those reflections and shadow areas. Now I don't know how well this would translate watching on the compressed skill share videos, but if you're working on your own project, you'll see the difference with the more samples. For this project, 128 should give you a relatively clean image. Now it's also worth considering where this video is going to end up and most likely it's going to be a platform like Instagram or YouTube. Maybe we don't necessarily need the finest Render in terms of noise. We just need it to be a pretty good and then because on those platforms, the video gets compressed down anyway, and you won't really see the noise when it's being played back in those places. As I said, 128 should be okay here. That's taken about 5.6 seconds per frame. I might even go to 256 to clean this up even further, and let's compare the Render time and see if it's worth the increase in Render time for the slightly improved image. That took about nine seconds that time. It really wasn't all that much cleaner. I would say in this case, not really worth it all that much. If we continue further down, there's a Denoise section down here and you just open this up. This can be useful sometimes, especially when you're dealing with like still Renders, I think it's particularly great for that. However, personally, I don't like the Denoise section as much and I only use it when I really need to because it does do a good job. But I find it almost does too good of a job. I don't know if that makes any sense what I'm saying, but it does so much smoothing that we lose a bit too much detail, in my opinion. Now, I don't mind a bit of noise when this detail in the frame compared to a smoother looking frame where everything gets a bit smudged out. Also, I have never really understood the deep down on all these settings, are a bit esoteric in how they're labeled. Like what's kc1, what's kc2? I'm not really sure what that is. I prefer to keep it as simple as possible. But I've also had that dual pass would do a better job because it's two passes of noise suppression. But once again, I just think it's going to take out some of the detail, not only in the noisy part of the Render, but if you have fine details in your textures, this definitely has an effect on that. Use with caution and dual pass will be better than single pass. Optics is another section which again I think will give you good looking results, but it's a different way to Render and personally I run into all issues with their stability. So I just avoid it. Of course, any denoising you do here still largely depends on the samples up here. If the samples are higher than the denoising engine, doesn't have to do as much work, so it will end up doing a better job. You want to balance those two things out. Personally, I'm going to turn this off, 128 samples cleaned up my image enough for me to be happy with that result. That's a lot of time talking about denoising. Let's move on to something else. The motion blur. I'm going to just do a test Render without it first. Let's go to about 11 seconds when the train is going past the camera. Let's go to the output tab and I'm going to change the frame range from current frame to a manual range from 11:10-11:12. Let's Render this to the picture viewer. The reason for this is in the IPR, we cannot see motion blur. You only see this in the actual final Render. Now it clearly isn't there because I think I forgot to actually turn it on just now. Redshift, Motion Blur and Enable. It's fine because now we can do a comparison with motion blur and without. If you look at the straight lines in particular and closer to the camera where the motion is more emphasized, we can see the difference. This is before and this is after. Without motion blur, our frames can look a bit choppy. Whereas motion blur will help to smooth out the over a motion for a more natural and cinematic looking image. I would say it's one of those things which you may not consciously notice, but your brain will notice it and the motion will look smoother, if we have some natural motion blur and baked into the Render. If you want to change the strength of the effect, it's controlled by the shutter start and shutter end. The lower this is, meaning closer to zero, and the higher the shutter end is closer to one, the stronger the effect is going to be. I like to visualize how this looks. The range between this handle and this handle will indicate the overall strength of the effect. If I re-Render this, you're going to see it's going to be a lot stronger now. If you look at this bright area, it's much more stretched out compared to before. Then if we do the opposite and bring those two handles closer to each other. By default it's at 0.25. Let's go 0.4 and the shutter end 2.6. Now that range is narrower and the effect is going to be weaker than before. You would obviously adjust this based on the overall speed and motion of the objects in your scene. If you feel like they're too fast and they are getting stretched out too much, then you lower the effect, and adjust accordingly. In this example, however, I think the defaults were okay. So 0.25 and 0.75 for the end. Here is another section which is worth checking out under the system controls. You want to scroll it down to this Bucket Rendering section. Let's go back to the beginning. I'm going to set this to Render from current frame first. Then let's go up to do the first four frames. I've noticed this is in 30 FPS for some reason, this should be 24 to match our project Render settings. That's control and D to bring that up. We can see the project FPS is 24, so match those two together. Anyway, as I was saying in this system, Bucket Render section, the default bucket size is 128 pixels. That's the size of these Render boxes or these Render buckets as the spiral and Render the frame. Let's Render that first set of frames at the default settings. These first few frames by the way, are the heaviest to Render in this particular project. When the camera spins around later on, those frames are simpler because there isn't as many reflections and all that stuff with that camera angle. They'll be faster naturally. But we can see the first frame took about 13 seconds. Then it speeds up a bit for the second frame because it's not having to process as much of the preprocess part of the Render. It's already in the memory and now it's just doing only the Rendering itself. Overall that is going to take about 50 seconds for those four frames. Let's go to the Bucket Rendering and change the bucket size to 256. That's how we've changed. Now I'm going to run the same exact Render. We can see the buckets are much larger this time round. Each chunk is doing a bigger portion of the frame. Already we can compare the first frame, 13 seconds versus 10, and then eight versus nine. This is going to be quicker. So for all five frames, we have 50 seconds with a the bucket size of 128 and 41 seconds with a bucket size of 256, notice a very significant drop in render time, and when you stretch this out for all 625 frames that we have, that's a massive amount of time saved. Now, I think it's dependent per project. In this example we have just proved it is much faster to use the bucket size of a 256 over the previous 128. So I would definitely use it in this case. But it may also be dependent on your hardware and setup, so just do a test and you just go with whatever gives you the faster render. Here is another optimization we can try. In the Optimization tab, let's go to frame 0 and I'm just looking at the reflections in the scene, I'm going to snapshot this so I can do some comparisons. The maximum trace depth is currently at 2, 2, and 2. Let's bring it up to three, and what we want to do is compare the render time versus the difference in the render. Now, with more bounces, I think we're going to get a few more highlights in our frame, and I would say that's a good enough improvement and the render time wasn't that different, so it's telling me the first render time took 1.4 seconds. That's not right. I think I just didn't complete the render, so let's complete it properly, and then compare, so that's 4.7 seconds. But I would say the frame with more bounces, definitely it looks a bit better. We just have a bit more detail in some of these areas and particularly on the train itself. You get a bit more highlights on the doors there and then just also on the platform. So I would say it's worth it going up to three in this case, we can try four and see if that gives us any extra improvement in snapshots there, so we're comparing snapshot number 1, which is three, three for the trace depth, and then this new one which is four. Now once again, there is a slight improvement in some areas. So on the bins, if you look, we just have a bit more of that orange being bounced from somewhere. But the render time went up from 5.3 to 5.9, which isn't a crazy amount, but that could stack with the whole sequence, and I don't think that was really much of an improvement between three and four, but the improvement between three and two was significant. I think I'm going to keep that and just do that for the final render. As you can see, it's a constant amount of tweaking in all the different sections of Redshift and just trying to get the best possible looking render while still keeping the render time as low as possible. So the next thing is the final output section. We have 1920 by 1080 for the frame size and a frame rate of 24 FPS. The frame range is going to be all frames. Then let's go to the Save tab, and the format I'm going to use is PNG and 16 bit, and this is enough for basically all of the renders that I ever do. I think PNG and 16-bit has enough information for anything that I can ever really want when I get to the compositing stage, and the file sizes are very reasonable, and then the output path, you can see at pre-rendered some frames before just to do a test. But this is my folder, it's in a folder called main. I'm going to just save this has main once again. I am going to be overwriting those frames. Anyway, once that's ready to go, this can be rendered to the Picture Viewer, where you can watch the whole thing happen. But personally, I like to use a different method, but let's just watch one of these frames go. It starts with the main render and then does all the post effects on top of that. If you had de-noising enabled, that would be another stage in the rendering of each frame and it would take longer. If I press escape to stop this, my preferred method of rendering is to use the Render Queue. So if I go to render, add to Render Queue. It's going to ask me if I want to save the project before adding it to the Render Queue, and of course, I'm going to click "Yes", and in here we now have that one job, it's position one of one into queue. So you could line up several renders, if you are working with, let's say different scenes or different camera angles in such. Once our project is ready to go, we can just go to jobs and start rendering. We can see the overall render time as it goes through, and how long the last frame took. So that was about 13 seconds for our first frame and then eight seconds for the following frame. The first frame is always going to be one that takes the longest, because it's processing a lot of staff at the very beginning, and then moving on, it's just rendering. In standard render, you would get an estimated time based on how long it's taken to render the frames so far. But I think with Redshift, at least here that isn't working. If I open my calculator, I can do seven seconds times 675, which is the total number of frames to give me the total number of seconds this is going to take, and then if I divide that by 60, that's how many minutes, and then divide by another 60. So 1.2 hours based on seven seconds per frame. But of course, Redshift is dependent on your hardware, and it's going to be different for everyone. But either way, even with some lesser hardware, Redshift in general is a very fast render engine. If this would have taken longer, I would line it up to render overnight or maybe just take a break from my computer for awhile whilst the render is processing. That's it for this lesson. Once again, we were hopping around different parts of the engine, and this is something you will be doing a lot if you continue to use Redshift, each project is different. But now you know some of the ways you can optimize your scene, and get the best possible results every time.
15. Color Adjustsments & Final Export in After Effects: This is the final lesson. We're going to take our ended frames into After Effects for some color adjustments. In the very last section, we're going to do the final export for both Instagram and YouTube. To import our sequence, we just double-click anywhere in the project window to open up the Import or File and Import does the same thing. Get any of the frames from the sequence and just make sure PNG sequence is ticked, and then open. We need to interpret the footage as 24 FPS. By default it's going to be at 30. Then let's just drag this to a new Composition button. I'm going to drop the quality to half just so I can do a faster preview. Press the Space Bar to play that. Here is the full thing at normal speed before we apply any color adjustments. Before we do anything, let's also make sure that our color space is correct. Under this icon, under Set Project Working Space, the depth should be 16 bits like our rendered frames. The working space would depend on your own screen. But for me, my screen is sRGB calibrated, and this is the color profile right there. That makes sure that all of my colors will stay consistent from Cinema 4D all the way through to the end of the project in After Effects. Let's see how close we can get to this example. The effect I'm going to use is called Lumetri Color. It's found under Color Correction and then Lumetri. Let's go back to full quality for this. I am going to start by warming up the whole image. In the basic correction, let's put the temperature up to about 25 or so. That makes a big difference in the tones. Also, I am going to change my view to fit, to have a bigger frame. We can bring the highlights down to maybe about negative 20, just to show a bit more detail in the really bright areas. If things may be a bit too dark, we could adjust the shadows to go up. But we want to be careful not to add too much noise to the render. Further down in the Creative section, we want to go to Vibrance, make this 25 and the overall Saturation, let's say 125, for that. Also, the final render was a bit more sharpened, so that's this control right here. You don't want to make this too strong because it's going to sharpen the noise also. Then if we carry on in the curves, I want to tone these colors a bit more to be cyan or teal. The Hue vs Hue, let's target that blue range, create a couple of handles either side of it, and then one in the middle to adjust the tones. Now, don't go to file, of course, otherwise it's going to look a bit crazy. Quite subtle but it does make a difference if we activate that on and off. I am just trying to get similar tones to what we have here. This looks darker than this. I think that was down to the RGB Curves I put on this. If I go to red, we're going to just pull red down a touch, not too much. This is on the shadows side. At the same full green, maybe about half the amount we did for red. Then in the overall curves, I want to bring down the shadow area, just to darken the whole frame a bit, make a bit more contrast, so a very shallow S curve. We can also bring up the black point to fade the shadow areas just a bit. Or this could be done in the Creative section and under Faded Film, put 20 there. It's going to have a similar effect in the shadow area. The highlights in my final version are a bit warmer, so if I go to blue, put a handle about halfway and bring down the top handle, maybe about halfway in this first quarter square, and I would say that there is very close to this and that really all there was to the color adjustments. Now we just need to export our render. Let's go to Composition, add to Render Queue. This are the settings that I always use. The format is always QuickTime, and under the format options, I use the Animation Video Codec. This creates a very large file which contains a lot of the color information. It means that I can always come back to it and make adjustments later on. Next up, we just want to define the output path. Click the Output To section, hit save into my Skillshare folder and hit Save, and then just hit Render. If you press the Caps Lock key, it disables the preview whilst you're rendering and processes even faster. For the final output settings, I'm going to create a new project in Premiere Pro. Let's call it Final Output. It's already going to that same location as the rest of the project. I will double-click to import the sequence and then just right-click this and New Sequence From Clip. This is where I would do any further color adjustments if I wanted. Because that file contains so much information, we can still go to the color tab. This is Lumetri Color just in Premiere Pro this time. We can still make a lot of adjustments in here without degrading the image because it contains so much information. But we'll leave ours as it is. What we want to do now is just the final export. Let's go back to the beginning here and under File, Export and Media. That's going to bring up this dialog. For YouTube, I go to the Format and use H.264. The Preset, if you open that down and then scroll down all the way to YouTube 2160p. This is a 4K resolution, so we are up-scaling. But I find that uploading this resolution to YouTube results in an overall better quality playback than if we just posted this at native 1080p. That's the reason I do it this way. Then for Instagram I use the exact same preset, except I copy the height and make sure that the ratio switch is turned off, then go to the width and paste the same height number. Now we just need to go to the Source Scaling and change this to Scale To Fill, so we have a square frame. Now, once again, this resolution is too high for Instagram, so it will be crunched down to 1080p. But still from my own experience, that seems to result in a overall better quality when the file is played back compared to if we just used a 1080p times 1080p video. That's the reason I do it this way. The audio settings can stay the same, but we just need to make sure that the output is going to the right place. If I hit Save, I can hit Export and then the project will output.
16. Outro: That's it. That's the end of the class. This may be the longest class I've done so far, but it's also my favorite one just because we did something different than usual by using the Redshift render engine. I hope that was a good introduction to that aspect of Cinema 4D. You guys can leave some feedback below and also ask any questions you have regarding anything in the class, or anything else I suppose related to Cinema 4D, and I'll do my best to get back to you as soon as possible. Take what you've learned, and I'm really excited to see what you guys can come up with your on ideas and so on. But once again, thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
Don Mupasi X Visualdon, Visual artist.
