Transcripts
1. Introduction: What's going on guys? It is Patrick again, good to see you for another class yet again here at Skillshare. Today we're going to be working on some pretty fun, using soft body dynamics. Usually, we're working on rigid hard body stuff and usually not even dynamics, but we're going to implement dynamics into this form, and actually have these forms physically bouncing off of each other, kind of blowing up and forming into these invisible shapes that we made within Cinema 4D. We'll do all that and then finish up texturing it, lighting it, doing all that stuff from front to back so you can see how exactly we make the finished product. Then we'll jump back into Photoshop as well to do some post works, coloring, and adding some grain to make it more realistic. This is a fun one. We're using dynamics and Cinema 4D in Photoshop. Let's jump right into it. I think you'll enjoy it. Let's go.
2. Creating Geometry: Hi guys, were back here and we're going to get started in two seconds here but I wanted to show you again what we're making here. It's this trend that a lot of 3D artists have done with a lot of the big ones, and so I noticed that there was nothing on SkillShare that specifically showed how to do this in cinema 4D. So I thought maybe give it a try because I got a few DMs from you guys, and seemed like you guys like this style. It's really cool, and usually when you're doing something that's more specific and has a lot of hard edges. That's definitely a style but another really popular style is something like this, where we can make our own fluid, organic looking forms. I think as a style it does really well on social media platforms such as Instagram, and we're going to give it a shot here. So we're going to start off here in cinema 4D, and as you can see this is a blank layout here and yours might look differently because I've customized some windows here, but not to worry, you will not get lost cause I'll be explaining every window that I'm using, and we can get started here. So the very first thing here is we're going to want to make sure we start with a sphere because looking at all of these, these are very organic looking shapes and what better to use than a sphere. The first thing you want to do is go to display after creating the sphere and going to something like gouache shading with the line so we can see the segments and it's not really the best for this dynamic simulation to have the segments in standard position. So we're going to go to the attributes manager and go from standard to icosahedron and as you can see, these are a much more evenly, these segments are much more even. So that's what we want here and the next thing we're want to do is make the enclosing shape because if you'll see all of these look like they are bounded by an invisible shape like they can't go anywhere. So this one was a sphere and this one was a box and I think for this we may just go with the sphere as well because once you get that one down, you can do it literally to any shape you want. So we're going to start here by going with the, we going to make the invisible sphere here. So we're going to click another sphere here and make this one much larger, again we might have to zoom out here just a little bit and here is now the enclosing sphere. So we have two spheres. We have the sphere on the inside, the sphere on the outside. Just so you remember, we can name this enclosing sphere, and we can leave this one titled sphere if you want but you'll notice we can't see anything inside and that's because it's not quite hollow, so just so we can see it easier, we're going to go to the basic settings and choose x-rays so we can see what's going on a little easier and from that we're just going multiply these spheres inside to create a nice even amount of objects that blow up and get scattered throughout the thing. So the one thing to notice here is that you don't want anything touching. So you really got to be careful looking at what's touching where here. So something like this is fine. Let's make another one and the way I'm multiplying these are simply holding down command and dragging on the axis here. So we're just going to make a bunch of random spheres here. Might take a couple seconds. Nothing's touching, that looks good. We're going to make another one. This looks good. I'm actually going to kill my camera here cause we're not yet talking about that. So let's see. Let's create another one. Sometimes it's easy to lose track of which spheres which here, but for the most part we're looking good and don't be afraid to change the sizes up. You want these things to look pretty organic. So if everything's the same size, unless you're going for that, try to make everything look a little bit different. So just keep multiplying these things here. Again, this one's popping out a little bit and you'll see why we can't do that in a little bit. Let's keep multiplying and it doesn't have to fill this whole thing, guys, just remember because what we will be doing soon is inflating all of these spheres. So it's not like you have to, that would take the fun out of it if we were done as soon as we finish placing the spheres and again, just do this how you want whoever you guys want to placement to be. Looks good and we should be good with a couple more here, I think, it looks good. While we're at it actually lets take the enclosing sphere and change this segment layout as well. Why were there? So we're starting to look good. Let's just make a couple more at the bottom. You actually take this guy and make it a little bit bigger, a couple more, and there's really no right or wrong way to do this part. As I mean, you'll see some of these things start deflating weirdly and that's when we can go back and change some things but for the first go at this, we're looking pretty good. So as long as nothing is touching either of the sides and or other spheres, I think we're looking good here. Let me park back the grid so I know exactly where we are, got you. That's why I like to work without the grid cause sometimes it gets distracting. So we got everything pretty much where you want here, hopefully everyone's following along so far. I think we're looking good. So the first thing we'll want to do is we placed it and now we're going to flatten everything. So what I mean by that is, now that we have everything where we have it, we're going to want to take all of these and make them editable and so that'll come in handy once we actually, so this is going to make it so you cannot edit these spheres anymore as far as adding or taking away segments, but that's fine. There's not too many segments, but for the dynamic simulation we're about to do, takes up quite a bit of memory and we'll be filling these gaps with the subdivision surface, my bad. We filling it with that in a second just to get these things smoother. So let's start moving on to dynamics. So the first thing we're going to do is take the spheres that we put inside this thing and group them. We actually left one out. So let's group all of these and to do that, just click Option G, and now these are all in its own little model. So you can move these around however you want, it's technically one object within a folder.
3. Dynamics / Camera Placement: That looks good. The next thing we want to do is go to, Tags and go Simulation, Soft Body and this is now telling Cinema 4D that these things are going to act like a soft objects here and they're going to be affected by dynamics. Now, the one thing you also want to make sure we did is, because we put the Tag on the null and not the individual elements. We're going to want to go over here to the Tag and go to Collision and the go to Inherent Tag, apply tag to children. That pretty much means affects everything within this folder here that it's attached to. If you'll see, if you press Play, they all start to drop, which is what we want. But if you'll notice they're not falling inside the cage, so we need to tell Cinema 4D that the cage is in fact a hard service that is enclosing all of these things. We're just going to go to the Cage here, go to Tags, Simulation tags, and Collider body. Now the one thing you want to do is before you play anything. Cinema 40 doesn't recognize that this thing is hollow, when you press Play, it might do something funky and it's going to mess everything up. Within the Collision tab, you're going to want to go to Shape, Static Match and that pretty much tells Cinema 4D that this is in fact a hollow object that will catch all these spheres. Now if you press Play, all of these things start to react and fall down and go everywhere. So that's fine. But one we have two problems. One of them is they're falling down. We don't want everything to collapse at the bottom because then we would need a great deal of atmospheres to do this and two, we want these things to blow up so they get stuck where they are. The way to do that is let's go back here and after we do that, we're going to want to click Shift V, I'm sorry, not Shift V, command D. That's pretty much going to bring up the project window and we're going to go to Dynamics and go to General and we're going to take the gravity and go zero percent and when you press Play, nothing happens because there's nothing affecting these anymore. There's no gravity, but that's a good thing. The next thing we want to do is make these spheres blow up individually and fill in these gaps. We're going to click the Dynamics Body Tag here and that's applied to everything. You're going to go to Soft Body and we're not going to mess with too much here, but these are now the controls to tell these little squishy ball things how to act. The first thing we're going to want to do is go to Pressure here and the more pressure you apply here, the more these things are going to blow up. If I type 10 here and press Play, they all get a little bit bigger and start bouncing off of each other, which is cool, but we want them to be much bigger. Let's go to a 100 and press Play. Now these are all bouncing off of these things because they grew quite a bit and that's already a pretty good start, but I think we need to blow up a little bit more. Let's go to 200 and see what happens and now we're starting to get lot of these things bouncing off each other because they're all blown up and I think we're ready to start working. Now that we know that everything is part of the, nothing's touching and everything's perfect and they're blowing up correctly. I can show you what happens if they don't. If you were to mess up and place one of these things a little bit outside or touching another one from the start, it's going to mess up and you can clearly see, this is not what we want, because they start to glitch out. But if we did it correctly, you're not going to see any mess ups and here's where you can see after testing it a little bit. If there are some areas where you could probably add another sphere. Right here it looks a little empty, right there looks a little empty. But depending on the camera angle, you don't need to add too much. Maybe we can add one more little guy right here. Let me just shrink in a little bit and it looks like it's not touching anything. If we press Play, looks like that fixed our problem over there. It looks like we can definitely use something here. Let's move one of these guys right here. Press Play and again, you can see why we don't want to use a ton of spheres and a ton of segments, because that will quickly start to slow down your computer and I'm not using any kind of monstrous machine here, I'm just using an iMac 5K display. It's a little bit spec'd up, but as far as Apple goes, you can only do so much with certain amount of money. That looks good. The next thing we want to do is, let's now setup our camera because I think we have what we want here. Actually before we do that, we're going to want to make this sphere invisible and although we can see it here, because the X-ray tag, what we would really be seeing is this. To do this, we're going to delete it. We're not going to delete it like this because that would totally get rid of it. We're going to hide them. Just double-click these guys right here, this is hiding it from the view port and this is hiding it from the render. This looks good. It's not completely filled, but I'm happy with that. If you guys want to fill it in more, that's totally fine. Just move spheres as you'd like them and let's start setting up our camera. Let's create a new camera after we have everything where we want it and let's place these guys here. Oops, let's jump into the camera here. If you'll notice, I've two render views here and I go over this with another one of my classes, you're called layout, I believe. But to get this second view, you're going to go to Panel, add New View Panel and just add that wherever you want. Using this thing so you can staple it wherever your feeling. Once you have this placed, if you click View here, use as render view, then you can control hopping into the camera at a certain spot. If I want to go here now and I don't want to be in the camera and move around. This will still be here. Let's hop back into the camera and no matter where I move now, it will move within both windows. As long as I find a pretty good, decent place, I guess what I usually do is go to the Camera and zero these all out except for Z, zeros, zeros that we're centered. I'm just going to take Z and move it all the way back, until we start to see this object because it should be centered. We didn't move it anywhere crazy. Notice I'm moving it pretty far back and I'll just point out it's really small because I know I'm going to change the lens. We can do that right now, actually, let's go to Classic, Let's go to Portrait. For people who aren't photographers, you may say, "What's the difference?" But perspective wise, it's going to look much cleaner and it's going to allow us to use a shallow depth field. This was actually pretty hard for me to find out until I actually start messing with the stuff. I want to flatten all of these and right now if you'll see, if I go back, we run at risk to have this thing lose it's shape and I know that can be very annoying. If you've gotten really far, you textured it, you did all this stuff and then you actually went back a frame and it's not rendering right anymore. That's one of the reasons why we had to make these editable. Because once we have a position we want, something like that. We're happy with how that looks. What we're going to do is because these are fully made editable, we're going to kill this tag and now, no matter what we do, these things can be moved to wherever you want. That's really useful for, let's say you want to make this whole thing hollow. You delete just the middle one, or you want just this one revealing something, it makes it much easier. With that, we can take the whole structure and rotate this at a better angle through what we previously saw. I'm happy with something, maybe like that. That's cool. I like this and you'll notice that these are still low poly. If we render this, they're not the most beautiful thing. The one thing that we're going to do to spice that up and add some realistic looking folds is do something very simple. Just add a subdivision surface. We're just going to click that guy right there and I'm going to move the camera all the way below and we're just going to drag this whole folder underneath here. As you can see, that's pretty much smoothed, everything out, looks much nicer, much more organic. Even if you're not happy completely as what this looks like, it's going to make all the difference once we start adding textures and rendering this thing. I think we can move on to the next thing we did, dynamics, camera placement, so it's time to move to lighting.
4. Lighting: The first thing we're going to want to do is we're going to want to make sure everything is centered and our interactive render region is on. Let's move this whole thing over a little bit to where we think this is centered. Looks good like that. I'm going to go with my mouse hovering over this window. I'm going to click Option-R. I'm just going to scale it up till we can see generally the whole thing. That looks pretty good. The first thing we're going to want to do though is click Edit Render Settings, mine is already here. I prefer it being like that. Before we get too far so we can start to see these things pretty fast. Well one, we're going to go to the physical render. All my renders I do within the physical render, people think I use Octane. I don't, I never have. Maybe I will in the future, I don't know. But I try to give people good results and show people that you can make pretty good realistic looking things using the native plugins. We're just going to go to physical here, which will allow us to use the depth of field feature later. We're going to go to Effect and go to Ambient Occlusion, which I already have up there, should be here somewhere, and Global Illumination, which is already here. You're going to check ambient occlusion, that's going to give us a nice shadowing, and global illumination, which will kill all the lights because now we rely on lighting this thing ourselves. The first thing we're going to want to do to light this thing is let's create an HDRI. What we're going to want to do is create another sphere and we can title this thing HDRI. This is really what stands most of these things out from the other and makes them really look realistic. We're going to drag this thing all the way until it's past the camera. Even then some, because we want this thing to be big, we want this thing to emit light and for us to be able to add lighting to this thing, we just want it to be big. As long as that thing is pretty big, and you can hop out of the camera and you can see, we turn on the lines here. We can see how big we actually made this thing. We're in this big dome now, so that's what we want. We're going to actually light this dome from an HDRI image, and what that is is a 360-degree panoramic image that one lights the thing and gives it correct reflections. It's like putting it in its own little world. As you can see, there's no lighting here, we're going to add that now. We're going to create new material and just drag it on the HDRI or just drag it on here. Notice it still is not lighting it because we have not put the Luminance on. Let's uncheck color, we don't need that, uncheck reflectance, we also don't need that, but check luminous. It is now lighting our object from all angles and it doesn't look too bad, but it's pretty flat literally because we are using light emitted from all sides. That's not good if you want any contrast. We're going to go to Luminance, Texture, Load image. Within here I actually have a bunch of HDRIs I've either taken myself or have gotten online. We can take one that I've used earlier, something like this [inaudible] is my rooftop. It really doesn't have to be anything specific, just wrap it around and you are now officially laying this thing realistically. Number 1, we want to get rid of the background. To do that, we're going to go on the HDRI layer that we made. Go to Tags, Cinema 4D tags, and Compositing. Within the Compositing tag that we just made, we're going to click Seen by camera, uncheck it, and now we don't have to worry about it. Anytime you render an image now it's only going to render this part and everything else will be black or whatever color you add. The second thing we're going to do is add another material just off white like that, the basic material. We're going to add within this sub menu here we're going to go to Background. As you can see, it gives us a blank background here, but we're going to drag the color we just made onto the background. That's given us like a nice little clean backdrop here. Notice this little arrow here. A lot of times if I'm making something pretty simple like this, I want to go all the way up, and this is pretty much the quality at showing your pre-render. If you go all the way down, obviously that is just horrendous. I guess you'd only use that to see how light is hitting something, maybe, something you don't have to see anything detailed. But if you go all the way up, it'll give us this really detailed image that we're making, and that is what we're going for. Each change we make, we can see pretty clearly what's going on here. The next thing we're going to do to light this thing is at a pretty harsh key light almost like a sun but something to give this thing a clear contrast like light coming from this side, so it will create some nice shadows going over here so it won't look quite as flat. We are getting realistic lighting right now, but it's still, I think, lacks some really intense key light. The easiest way to do that is create a spotlight, of course. Before I forget, you guys should each add this one button right here, Set active object as camera. It's probably one of the most used buttons I've added on my own. Pretty much what that does is it allows you to go POV, point of view, of the camera or light or whatever object you want and move. So wherever you move, the object moves. To add that we're going to go to Window, Customization, we're going to go to Customizable palettes and type in Set Active Object, it's already there. You found it, you're going to drag that anywhere you want, just so you can click on it whenever you need it. I suggest you save your layout like that so you always have it. The one thing you want to make sure is, click anywhere in this Viewport, just to have this one because sometimes Cinema 4D thinks you're talking about this Viewport and it'll lock you out of the camera. Just make sure you have this Viewport selected. Then you're going to click the light that you want to drop into and click the button. Now you are officially using the light everywhere you move and you can see on this Viewport, whenever I move the light, it's actually moving. You can see if I zoom in and out, I'm zooming out as the lights. That's one of the most helpful things I've ever learned in Cinema 4D. This is a million times easier than placing the light manually. All you got to do is going upward angle, this is the camera looking at this thing. Look at already what a tremendous difference that's giving us with contrast. The only thing it's not doing is giving shadows, which we'll add in two seconds here. If you want, while you're in the light, you can actually add the shadow. You can go to Shadow, let's go Area. Now we're getting some realistic shadows from this thing. Based on where you want this light to hit, if you want to hit more on the front, by all means, do that. If you want this thing to be more of a backlight, it's also a nice technique. It's really whatever vibe you're going for, whether you're going for sunlight, this could be like a sunset thing, then you can make the light a little bit more orange. It's all what you're going for. For me personally, I'm probably going to go something more on top like this, maybe a little bit curved. Something that really gives this thing some nice crush shadows along the object. If it's got our shadows all about it. Something like that. I think that should be good. I do want to get a little bit more of the, that might be good. This is where you could go all day trying to figure out what lighting you want, but that looks fine for me. It's giving us a nice key light here, by giving you shadows in other directions there. I might even actually brighten this thing a little bit just to make it a little bit more intense, maybe 115. Notice how when I revolve around the object. Now anytime I have an object selected, I'm revolving around just that object. You just go to Camera, Navigation, Object mood. That pretty much allows you to navigate much easier based on the object you actually selected on. This looks good to me. I'm going to hop back into the camera just by clicking the square. Yeah, I think that should be good for now lighting wise, we can start texturing this guy.
5. Texturing: The first thing we're going to do to texture this thing is create a connection name, this one we already made Background or BG because it's small. I'm going to create another material here and this will be called base. I think this is one of the first times I've ever tried to do Alpha channels within Cinema 4D or in a Skillshare class. We're going to use an Alpha channel. This will be the base layer of all this stuff. We can place that on the null, and this will be the bottom layer. We're going to texture this thing with two layers. The first thing we're going to do that's the base and we can duplicate it and call this one Top layer. You'll notice really quickly what's going on there. The base, I think we're going to use subsurface scattering. I believe we're using the base, the base layer's on. The first thing we're going to do here is kill the color channel and turn on Reflectance. We don't want this thing to emit light, so we're just going to go to the luminous channel and go to effects and go subsurface scattering. Already that makes a huge difference, especially because we have a strong key light and you can see it's actually affecting this thing really nicely already. But we can hop in there and go, let's take the path length down to five centimeters. It pretty much means the light that's coming from this direction will die after five centimeters, or it will start to die after five centimeters and we can see what that did. Again, subsurface scattering does increase the render time a little bit. Matter of fact, let's go to eight. It has some time to die out. Let's see, that looks nice. Then we can go to something like 150, to brighten that white subsurface scattering material. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit too bright. Let's go 120 and that should be good. Let's start working on the top layer here. What we can really do is just place this on top. Now the top layer is overpowering the layer below that. You'll see there should be no more subsurface scattering because we're covering it. But we're going to use the Alpha channel to reveal some of that texture in the bottom. Before we start messing with the Alpha channel, let's make sure we're on the top layer, the top material, and we're going to change the color. Let's go to services and tiles. Within tiles, were going to go to lines too, which will give us three kind of colors we can make a tile from. Let's go with the first color being CU skill share colors went on always, so let's go to, found this really cool color picker. I've never actually used this thing before making this class. But if you click this guy right here, I have a skill share logo that's just bringing up dip these colors from, it'll allow you to take a color picker and choose a color based on whatever image you bring in. In this case, this was a logo, so we'll make it the skill share orange and then we'll take the second one, will make it white and we'll make the third one the skill share blue. I think this is an extremely cool application to pick certain colors that you want and that'll be good for this. That looks pretty cool. I think we can master UV because we're getting some weird artifacts there. Once we click the UV tag here, let's go to something maybe like cubic and that might help us with our lines a little bit. See how that looks. Yeah. This comes down to whoever you guys want to make this. I mean, I'm just showing you different ways you can mess around with this. I'm not even certain on which one I want to use, a spherical might be cool. For organic shapes, spherical works well a decent bit of time. That looks pretty cool and maybe actually work off of that. If you go to length and go to like 60 percent and take the length v 60 percent. Based on geometry and how it curves, that seems like a cool way to mess with this thing. That looks actually pretty cool. Yeah, I'm actually pretty happy with that. I think we can stay with something like that. Now we can start to rebel way at the texture below. What we're going to do is because we already have the base on there. We're going to run away this top texture revealing the subsurface scattering material which will end up being pretty cool. What we can do here is click the alpha channel and we can select texture, let's just go to a noise. You can see right off the bat what that does is reveals little parts of this. It's a little bit hard to see there because the noise we're using is really soft and it's given us like a gradient thing. But if we go in here and click the noise and choose something a little bit like, let's see nudice something like that, it brighten these things up. Take the high clip and bring that down, so we get much more than this actual texture showing and then bring the low clip up. This will make these really hard edges and you'll see what that does in a second here. It reveals the subtleties underneath. We can still see what's going on there, but underneath reveals the subsurface scattering material. What we're actually going to do is because this is really fine, I think we're going to bring this up. Let's go to texture, maybe 500 and see what happens. There we go. We can see the crackling texture that's revealing the material underneath, which ultimately looks pretty cool. I think we can improve this a little bit. Let's try another texture, let's go to something like Luca. Maybe bring this down to a 100 and mess with the values again, revealing a little bit more of the subsurface scattering. That looks pretty good it looks a little uniform for me, but I think it definitely works. I think what we're going to do is, I'm happy with this texture, but I think we can mess with this UV because we've separated these, changing this UV will not affect the other. An easy way to view this is let's just go to quick shading with the lines, now you can see this material much cleaner from this view at least. Although it is not a 100 percent accurate to what we see on there it's a good idea, so let's go to maybe cubic, oops, wrong material actually. We're actually going to leave this like this, and let me actually see what we got here, okay that looks good. The next thing I think we can do is, start messing with some bumps. Within the top texture here, we're going to go to bump, and we can give it actually the same noise, we can just choose a different version, let's go to something like Luca. For this I'm actually going to view it here because I like to see the very intricacies of this noise because, you can only tell so much with a small screen like that so to make up for the render time I'm just going to make this window very small. Let's see what we're getting here, so we're getting a little bit of bump it's hard to see might have to move just a little bit to an area that's being affected by the light a little differently. I think what we're going to do is, take the bump and increase it a little bit maybe 53 because it's hard to tell, and what I think I'm going to do is take the alpha channel and I still want to mess with this I'm going to go to maybe 400, because I'm not extremely happy at the way this is looking as far as the what's shining through and what's not. Let's take the bump now it's getting a little too much let's go to 25, and we're going to actually add the same bump to this guy here. I can just go to the bump on this right-click copy, and go bump here, right-click copy or paste, and that looks pretty good, let's see what these things look in like from afar. It always takes a decent bit a time when we're working with subsurface scattering, and that's starting to look better actually, I'm not mad at that so I think that's looking good. But I think what we can actually do is, let me see if this works I'm literally testing this out as I'm making this. But if we go within the alpha channel, and I want to break this up a little bit more I'm going to go to layer, and then within the layer I'm going to go to shade around here go to gradient, and I'm going go darken, as you can see this changes quite a bit what's going on here. If I just turn up the turbulence to 60, I want to see if this affects this thing a little bit more evenly, to randomize this noise texture that we're blowing off here. It didn't quite work and I'm still trying to figure out why that is, let me take off image alpha that might have done it. Let's see what that did here, I think that actually would have made some of the stuff soft so that's actually helping a little bit, but I don't want too much share being rubbed away here then we're losing the detail. What I'm going to do here is change this from, you might go 2D circular and move this thing I actually want this thing to be pretty, I don't want really any soft edges there. I think even something like that to roughen up the amount of material being taken away, just rough it up a little bit, I think that helps just a little bit just to make some stuff a little bit less even, oops let's take that away, maybe something like that. Let's try maybe 2D radial, no definitely not radial. Let's go back to 2D circular, and maybe take off cycle, again, it's just messing with these values, messing with the turbulence, and seeing how much you actually want to take away from this stuff to really get what you're going for so maybe put on radial, we can take a little bit more off maybe. Let's see what that does, cool, it's actually working quite well I'm not mad at it, if anything I might invert this so we can actually have this stuff in the middle showing and the stuff on the outside is rubbing off because, what I did like was the areas around here being shown. As you can see, let's see, let's move this down a bit, okay cool, because what I did like is seeing some of this stuff, and maybe having some of the stuff rub off a little more. So again just combining, since we're in the alpha channel just combining different noises to rub these materials off a little bit more, so now this thing is looking weathered and that's really what we're going for. Actually I think we can move this back a little bit, that might be good, so and again, this is stuff you can manipulate how you'd like, but for this tutorial or this class I should say, it's just the techniques I'm showing here that you can use any way that you want so I think I'm happy with that. The lighting looks good, we're getting good lights bouncing off of each other, we're using the Skillshare colors because of course, this is being taught on a Skillshare platform, and I think this is really good so let's mess with the camera settings, render settings and get out of here.
6. Camera Settings: We want to make sure we do is, once we hop out of the camera, that we're focused on this object correctly once we start adding depth of field. Actually first what we can do is you go to the physical tab within the Render Settings and check on depth of field. Because we're actually set to portrait, we have a suddenly shallow depth of field. But if we render this now, actually you'll probably be in focus a little bit, but let's take this f-stop down. Remember the lower the number of f-stop, the shallower the depth of field, which means the lower the number, the more blurry in the front and back, if you're not a photographer. You'll see this will probably be very blurry now, and it's pretty blurry. I don't know if you can see that, but it's being pretty blurry and that's because the focus distance is right here. We need to make this hitting the front. The best thing I like in renders is when the fronts and focus on the backs are a little out of focus. It just shows like a shallow, but the field makes the scene look a little bit more cinematic, and as you can see, when I move this, this number should change. That's all you got to change is the focus distance or you could use the easy way out. You could just hop in the camera and click this little guy right here and click a place you'd want to focus and automatically places the focus distance right there, which is by far the easiest way to do it. Let's make sure we are at proper depth of field here. I don't think one's going to do it for us. Yes it's not going to do it to us. Let's take this f-stop number and go to 0.4. This may be too extreme, but, you'll see what I'm going for here. I'll just render a sliver out here and you'll be able to see what I'm talking about with this depth of field stuff. 0.4 again, that's not even a realistic f-stop and cameras can't even do it, can't even render things that shallow. But you can see towards the back you actually getting some blurriness and depth of field there, which is exactly what we're going for, and I think we can actually dim that on the light a little bit, it's got like 105, because we're actually getting some hot parts of this object. Even taking this thing to maybe 0.3, we should be good. Let's just run to this thing, let's see how this looks from afar. Make sure nothing looks too outrageous. I think we're looking pretty good. The background, or another background. I think the back of the renders are a little bit blurry and that's what we want. Really the lower the number, the more, the crazier the difference will be from the depth of field. Let's see, let's get a last close look on the background of the image or the back of the image. Those back sphere areas, and it looks like we are getting soft in the back and that's what we're going for. Again, very subtle, but you'll be able to see if I do, here, I'll show you a pretty crazy example is got a 0.1. This is going to be very crazy because the lower you make it, at a certain point it starts to get crazy with the amount of depth of field, and sometimes that's the look you're going for, but you'll see now, the background is very blurry and I don't think we need anything crazy like that. Maybe 0.25, and I'm going to leave it at that because I think I trust what we did there. Really all that does is allow you to understand visually, even unconsciously, that this thing is small and other delicate scale. Just to make sure you're centered, the last thing we do here before we look at Render Settings, you shift v, make sure you're on the Viewport and go to opacity. Now we can see clearly the outlines of this thing, and if we want to center this thing, that looks good, again, refocus our camera to make sure we're all good. Click somewhere like right there.
7. Render Settings: Then let's go to render setting. So, output, let's make this thing square. Because I like to post my stuff on Instagram. I'm go to lock the ratio once we know at the square and we're going to just going to go for this. Let's go to 1080. I usually do that for my Instagram images. 1080 by 1080, that looks good. Everything here looks fine. We're going to make sure our physical tab is not set to progressive anymore. Apologies if I didn't mention this earlier. When you are testing these numbers out, you're going to make sure your render is set to progressive and all these numbers are low like two. Human inclusion makes share value transparencies on global illumination. Make sure your custom sample count of 20. Again, that's going to be awful for getting splotch numbness in your image. But you know it's going to speed up your pre-render time very fast. If you want to make something and see the results pretty fast, you're going to want to do that. Yeah. You're going want that. You're going to go to sample count 20. That should be good for your pre-render stuff. But since we're rendering out now, you're going to bump all these numbers up. So let's go to 150. For the global elimination, everything looks fine there. Everything's fine here. Physicals go back to fixed. Let's go to five for sampling sub-divisions and take everything else up to four. So that should be good and we should be good to go. Save it how you like Photoshop to file 16-bit here because we're going to be messing with it in Photoshop and a second. Everything looks good. I think we're going to render this out. Let's take it to the next step. Let's render this thing. It shouldn't take too long. The longest part of this whole thing I think will be the subsurface scattering because as you can see, it's looking like it's rendering this thing pretty decently so far.
8. Post Work (Photoshop): All right guys, so it looks like we're good here. It only took about eight minutes 55 seconds. That's not too long, especially just relying on the physical render off a basic machine like mine. But this thing turned out pretty good and it's good even without Photoshop editing, but we're going to take it to that next level to give it that realism that we all like and strive for. What we're going do is take the image here. Of course, don't forget to save your file. We didn't quite do that, but that's why this is untitled. We're going to save as a 16-bit TIFF here to give us a little bit more latitude and just save it to a folder that you're good with. We'll title this soft body. We're going to go to Photoshop here and we can now begin our image. What we really need to do is drag in the soft body image onto Photoshop and it'll size everything according to the image, because we already know it is 1080 by 1080, and that'll work fine. The first thing we're going to want to do is drag this guy onto a new layer. All it does is copy it. You want to do that because the more you can edit non-destructively, the better you can always go back, you can do things, so always have the image underneath. The next thing we're going to want to do is make this a smart filter and the reason we did that is so again, we're editing non-destructively. Even though we're about to go into Camera Raw, we'll be able to go back and adjust the settings within Camera Raw again without flattening the whole thing. Let's go to Camera Filter within the Smart Layer and the first thing we see here is it looks a little bit flat. Obviously, we have our key light hitting it here, but we can add some more color and do a bit more with this image. The first thing we want to do is take the Vibrance up a little bit and you can see all the way it's a little bit too much, but this looks a little bit grayed out, so let's take this to around 60. That looks pretty good. Now we're going to want to take the Contrast up. Almost every image I bump out is a TIFF on Cinema 4D is a little bit flat and lacking some contrast. We're going to bump this up maybe to around 33 for now. As you'll see, the background is completely white. There's no noise or anything and if that's what you're going for, that's totally fine, but we're going to add some noise here. Let's go to Grain or grain, I should say, is a better word because every photo technically has a little bit of grain and realistically, if you're shooting something, unless it's on ISO 100 on a DSLR, you're going to see a little bit of grain. Grain is associated with kind of bad sometimes or most of the time, but you can't forget that too actually make things look somewhat realistic, you need to add a little bit of grain. This set now has grain. It looks a little bit more realistic than this. Again, you don't want something like that because that looks a little bit ridiculous, but these numbers look good. As long as we see a little bit of that grain in there may be at 21, that should be good. I think we may go back to this basic panel here and take down the Shadows a little bit to again, create that contrast that we're looking forward to this time, going to be 30. Let's get 28. Just feeling out the image how you think it best fits. Again, we got the Skillshare colors, we're looking good. Let's go to Split Toning. I like to add a little bit of warmth to these guys and sometimes seeing what works. Let's see how the highlights work if we were to color the highlights. This is the part where you get to add a little bit of character and really the vibe you're going for. I mean, If you're going for a nice happy sunny vibe, that's where you'd go for. If you're going for a cool metallic vibe, it's really what you're going for. Right now, we're just on this middle ground vibe. I don't like to make anything too crazy, but maybe mixing the two and seeing what you come up with. Again, it may seem like we're making subtle changes, but if you go back looking at the before, we're really bringing this thing alive here and this has some character with the grain now, maybe a little bit too much grains. Let's go to 18. The background is literally bluer than what we started for because we're messing with the split toning. Whether you think that's necessary or not, I'll let you guys make your own decision on that, in that respect, at least. Let's see what we're going for. I do like the cross between the chill and orange or blue and red, I should say. Something like that. That looks pretty cool. We're getting this thing that looks pretty. I mean, this thing looks nice. This thing is textured. It's got the grain. We got some soft shadowing here and even some harsh ones down there. We're getting the whole spectrum here. Just playing with everything, making sure everything looks even. Again, to undo Command Z. Once you're happy with everything, you're always welcome to create presets and saving everything you want. We can go back, but since this is a smart layer, I'm not even going to create a preset. I think we should be actually pretty good. If you guys want to add any more details or any kind of contrasting elements, it would be maybe in the Curves panel, split toning in your own way with the curves. This is how you create some really cool lots or looks, different vibes. Let's see what we can come up with here. Something like that. I'm pretty happy with that. I'm not going to complain. Texturing looks fine. If you want to make this thing look grittier at the last step, you can always add some clarity, really makes it look much more rugged. Every once in a while, I use that, maybe seven. A value of seven to it. I'm pretty happy with this. You can always make some last-minute changes. Because we're adding non-destructively, it is so easy to just go back and change all these values. Let me see. I don't think I actually need a lot of these changes that I made. We should be pretty good. Maybe a little bit here. Again, now we're just getting nit-picky, but you guys get the idea. Going from before and after, it's a tremendous change. It really just goes down to how stylistic you want to make this thing. We definitely popped the colors. We went crazy with it, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Just messing with all these values and I think we should be good. I can messing with these values ever so slightly and it comes down to there's no right answer, as long as you would think visually, these things look good. To me, they appear to do so. Maybe take the Highlights down a tiny bit and we should be good, so let's click "Okay". Because again, it's a smart filter, it added our camera raw filter right there, so we can tag that on and off. You can see the difference we made there. If you double-click it, all these settings are completely the way they are. Non-destructive editing is the by far best way to edit. You can always go back. I think we should be good here guys. I appreciate you guys watching. To save this out, you're just going to go to File, Export, Save for Web. That's the best way I get cleanest results that I usually post on Instagram. Everything here looks fine. Make sure the Quality is set to a hundred, 1080 by 1080. You can save this wherever you want.
9. Conclusion: So I hope you guys liked the class. I really appreciate you guys taking the time to watch it. You'll get a lot out of it and I can't wait to see what you guys come up with. Please submit to me your projects within this file, and I'd love to get back to you with my feedback, and what you can improve right away if you don't do well. As always, please leave a review on these classes. I can't thank you enough for all of you guys who leave reviews and it really helps me get my name out there in Skillshare as well. So that as well as giving me feedback on future classes to show. So I have a couple more lined up that you guys will like, so we'll see you next class. Let's get it.
Patrick Foley, 3D Artist
