Transcripts
1. Introduction to Redshift: The Basics: Hey. How's it going? I'm Derek Kirk, and welcome to an Intro to Redshift: The Basics. The basics is the first part of a series of Redshift tutorials that I'm going to put together. It's just going to introduce you to the Redshift render engine and hopefully show you how to navigate around it, how to use the user interface, had to add some lights, how to add some materials, use the material node editor, some cameras settings, as well as most importantly, the render settings to get a super-fast, clean render. You're just going to see, we're going to provide you with the scene and you're going to light, add materials, and render out and then sanely clean fast image that's going to look beautiful. It's going to be this nice little abstract piece of art. A little bit about myself is I'm Derek Kirk. I am a full-time videographer, an editor for University. I have worked at studio production houses in the past, so I have been a 3D generalist for two years as well before that. Then before that even, I worked in production for another studio as well and I've done lots of things from national commercials to huge sporting events. I've done floor projections, video boards, intro videos for sports, and things like that. I've done all things, but throughout all of my career of being behind the camera, in front of the camera, whatever I've been doing, my favorite aspect of it is 3D. The reason I love 3D is because basically I get to control everything. You're not bound by reality. If you want to create a set and actors, you do it, you create it. You want to push your camera through a wall, no problem, you got it. This course is really good for anyone who's just looking to speed up their workflow. If they are a freelancer, a side hustle, they're just a hobbyist. By the end of the class, you're going to have this really cool abstract art scene with your own personal touch on it. I really encourage you to do that. I really just can't wait to see what you guys make and just see what you guys think about Redshift render engine, how fast it is. Once I used it, I honestly couldn't go back to anything else. I'm just super excited to introduce it to you guys and hopefully share honestly the software that I love and it's made rendering and doing 3D a possibility as a hobbyist for sure on my own and I hope it can do that for you as well and help you out. Let's get started.
2. What is Redshift?: Okay, let's get started. The first thing I want to discuss is just what is Redshift? Maybe you've heard about it, maybe you haven't. But what Redshift is, is a GPU renderer and here on redshift3d.com you see it appears as Redshift by Maxon. If you get on Maxon and you go to the Buy, you actually can bundle it now with yearly subscription or a monthly subscription, which is amazing, super awesome for new users and stuff. If you want to just try it out, you can, you don't have to commit like $500 to buying a product, you can just try it out. Also if you don't have it yet and want to try and just follow along under their website here. You've got up here in the top right says, "Free Trial." You can click that. Scroll down and you see you've got a demo for Windows, demo for Linux, and demo for Mac. Now one thing I will say is that Mac, there are some hoops you have to jump through right now. Redshift is working on making it metal friendly, so that's the Mac GPU. But right now as you can see here, Redshift requires an NVIDIA GPU to operate and when you're looking for GPUs, for Redshift render, you want to have what's called CUDA Cores. You want a high number of CUDA cores. One thing that's really cool about Redshift is that it actually supports multiple GPUs. So if you have a motherboard where you can hook in multiple graphics cards, you'll see inside a Redshift it actually will support it. Let's say instead of having one GTX 1070, you had four GTX 1070s so literally your renders will literally, sound like the [inaudible] , literally it will be four times faster. If you want to buy the product, you can buy a node-locked version. It's a permanent license. It's going to be tied to your machine. This can be deactivated and reactivated. Floating license is $600 per license with the five license span order. It means that it can float around between computers easily. So you can have multiple machines with Redshift on it. I would go for the subscription with Maxon, but if you're not buying for Cinema 4D, the good thing is, this actually works with Maya, 3ds Max, Softimage, Houdini, Katana. All of these things work and you just buy the one, it's not like other renders where you have to buy one license for one 3D software, one license for another, like one render for this, one render for that. One Redshift install will install across all of them for you. The thing I love about Redshift is for inexpensively, for just the price of one GPU to upgrade, which is a lot cheaper than upgrading a CPU. I now can render out things fast and actually have animation again because my frames are rendering so fast, it's not going to take a week to animate out a minute-long thing or anything like that. I suggest keeping an eye on this because they will do sales and you can actually get this for about $400. I've seen that in the past, that's how I got it. Just keep your eye on that, subscribe to their newsletter to find out that kind of thing. They also offer support, they've got all the documentations, video tutorials, all kinds of stuff. It's just this really cool program that will keep adding a lot more. Things that used to take hours now taking seconds and minutes. It's insane, it literally is. Crazy fast how well it handles fog and hair and I just love it. I honestly just want everyone to use it because it's amazing and it's so easy to use. I can't wait to get into it and show you guys some more about it. So that is all I'm going to say about Redshifts. That's how you get it. There's galleries, there's forums. You can try it, then you can see all these things to use it. I mean, Redshift is awesome, but basically it's a GPU render. Make sure you've got NVIDIA GPU. All right, let's get into it. I'm done talking about it. I'm just excited. All this things firing me up. Let's go.
3. Redshift User Interface: Once you download Redshift, you'll see you have the Redshift setup EXE file here or DMG if you're on Mac. But you just have your version. I'm going to use version 3.0.12 for this video. But by the time I'm recording this, 0.13 comes out. Like I said, they're always updating. It's pretty awesome. You double-click that, install that, it'll find Cinema 4D on your drive already. You can choose to put it in there and it'll automatically or whatever software you use, you can install it across all of them, [inaudible] all of them the same time. You'll see there are few tiny new things. They're not super obvious at first, but here they are. Right up here, you'll see Redshift. There's a little Redshift button here and that's pretty much all you're going to see that's different right off the bat. One thing you need to do is click your Render Settings. Under Render, it's going to be set to standard by default. You can click that and go down to Redshift. You can see already these changes. We've got Redshift Post Effects, which we'll cover later, and we've got Redshift, and we've got all these settings. We've got Basic, AOV, Optimization GI, Memory. One thing I will say you definitely need to do and it might be automatically done is Automatic Memory Management. You need to definitely make sure that is checked. That's going to be very important, that's going to basically optimize your graphics card to render for you. But right now we don't need to worry about that. What we need to worry about is what all is new in Redshift. If I click "Redshift", you see we have all of this. Now, this is everything to do with Redshift. We've got Objects, which we're not going to cover any of these in this basic tutorial for all of these things are a little advanced. The environment is really cool. We're definitely going to cover that in the future series where we're going to talk about lighting for Redshift. So be on the lookout for that for sure. Also, we'll do volumes at some point as well. But we are going to cover lights. You can see under the Lights here, we've got Infinite Lights, Point Lights, Spot Light, Area Lights, Dome Lights, IES light, Portal Light, Physical sun. So what we are going to do is we're definitely going to talk about the Area Light and the Dome Light. These are going to be your two lights, so you're probably going to use the most, and they are super powerful and very, very cool. We are going to talk about those on this tutorial. Then for our Camera, we've got Standard, Fisheye, Spherical, Cylindrical, and Stereo Spherical. This is like VR goggles, 360 images, 3D as well, stereoscopic. Cylindrical is a weird one. Spherical is 360. Fisheye is literally a fisheye lens like an old skateboard video. That's just a stylistic choice. Standard is what we're going to use in this. Then we've got Materials. Actually for materials, what I like to do instead of dealing with them up here, I like to deal with them down here. So I say Create and then you go to Redshift. You've got this Redshift here. That's where you have Materials, Lights, Utilities, and Tools. So we've got all this. Now, the best thing is the Help. There's an online manual and video tutorials you can find. You can download the latest version, all from right here inside of Cinema 4D, which is very nice. You can report bugs or the forums, have a workflow guides, everything's here at your fingertips, which is really nice. There's a Getting Started tab, which is nice. But the main thing and the best thing is this Redshift RenderView. This is going to be our best friend. We're going to click that, and already you're going to see this little window pops up. We're going to go over everything in here later on in the render settings of this tutorial. But right now what you need to know is this is an IPR renderer. So that's progressive renderer. If I hit this Play button, you'll see we've got no textures or lights or anything. Boom, already instantly, an image pops up, and you can see down here in this little corner, it's doing a progressive render, which means once this gets to 100, it'll be up to the full quality of the settings we set in here. Now, this is really cool because this updates live. Very neat. It's incredibly fast. I know we have nothing on the scene but what gets really cool is when you start adding materials and things and you realize you can actually edit your materials live and see the changes you make instantly, which is really, really cool and really my favorite part. It just makes working on things and tweaking things so much faster than if you had to sit there and wait for it to bucket render. You can actually hit this render which will bucket render like a normal render that you might be used to. Another way that you can do the same thing in a progressive way is actually hit this grid, this Bucket Rendering icon. That's going to bucket render. What's cool about this bucket render is that it will update if I move and go ahead and bucket render that right out. You see it takes longer, but it's going from nothing to a final image. There's no progressive look and everything. I like to save that for the end and leave it on without the bucket render for now. We'll talk about the rest of those buttons in a bit. This is going to be what we're going to use. We can close that or you can grab this and pin it wherever. A lot of people would like to shove it in here sometimes so they can see stuff while they work on their thing because they just leave it open live all the time because it is so fast and so helpful to see. The rest of this stuff, the Viewport IPR, I don't use much. What that does is, let's say we didn't have this open, it basically opens up this little tool thing that's like what you saw at the top of that and instead of opening up a separate window, it'll just do it here, which is neat, but I'm not really sure why you really want to do that over having it on a separate window, except maybe you don't have a lot of screen space. I like to keep my render window on a separate monitor. But this is pretty cool that you can just see exactly what you're looking at here in the render window. That is almost it. There are a few new things. If you right-click on an object, we've got Redshift Tags, we've got Redshift Camera, and Redshift Object tags. We're definitely going to cover this in a later tutorial. Very cool, especially some of the stuff you can do with splines. These are going to be very, very nice. We'll cover the camera tag later in this tutorial as well actually. Lastly, as far as the user interface goes, you've got your Preferences, which you can load up, which is really not something you're going to need to mess with but if you're ever curious about what version you have and things like that. That is going to be your user interface. Let's go on. We're going to talk about lighting next, and we're going to light our scene before we make materials. Let's see you in the next video.
4. Lighting Our Studio: Here we are in our first scene. We've got our scene loaded up. We have no light, no materials, and I'm going to show you some quick things and the workflow we're going to go through to create this object. Now, sometimes I like to do with the lighting first, and then the materials. Sometimes I like to do the materials first. It really depends on what I have the clear vision for or what exactly I want. But for this, we're going to do the lighting first because our end goal is to create something that the materials can be changed. Our lighting needs to be something that we can adjust slightly if we need to, but preferably, we would love to have a lighting setup that doesn't need to be adjusted based on the materials. If we can create something that's just a nice studio setup. You've got our scene file Intro to Redshift the Basics 001. That's the file we're looking at here, and you can seen we've got our geometry here. We've just got some capsules we've created. They give this nice little look here. We want to always know the framing and resolution of your project first, which it can be set up here in the Render Settings. The first thing we're going to make sure we have is we're going to make sure we have our render set to Redshift. Normally, it's here under the standard I think by default, so we're going to bring this over to Redshift. The cool thing about Redshift is, if you open up your project and close it, it keeps all these settings exactly how you had it, when you last save the project. If you make a bunch of crazy tweaks and settings and get it all tuned in just right, everything will stay there, which is really cool. The lights, we've got lights here. These are all Redshift lights. Now if you use other renderer's lights like if you throw one of these in the scene, it will work, it's just not going to be accurate. You can see it does work, it does light your scene, so that's good. If you have a scene that's not Redshift, you're still using Redshift to render it, but you're not getting the benefits of using a Redshift light. I'll show you the difference between the standard light and Redshift light and just how amazingly customizable and quick it is to get an amazing result. We've got lights now. These are awesome. All of these are really cool. But my favorites and what we're going to talk about with our video is the area light and the dome light. We're going to use area lights to create our studio lighting setup. Basically, what an area light is, is like if you use physical render or anything like that, like if you use area shadows, is like that, the actual dimensions of the light affect how the light reacts. It's not just coming from a point, it's as if it's coming from a space. We've got this rectangle here, you can see in our view port here. You can just grab it and scale that up. You can see our scene gets brighter because our light is stretching out wider. If you have a bigger light, the bigger it is, the brighter it is. That is by default but not always the case. We've got this big area light right now. If we go here, click our "Area Light" we have all these settings. There's a lot of tabs, there's a lot of settings. It can be a lot to look at. We're going to go over just the basic ones that help you figure out and troubleshoot some issues if you might have some along the way. Firstly, what we are going to want to do for our scene is create a studio-like setup. We've got this large area light. Where we're going to position this, middle mouse click to get to our four views here, I'm going to bring that up. I'm going to light this like I would a real studio. Basically, if I had a big Cyc like we had in our studio, we had a row of lights above and the top and then we had a big silk. We will put a giant silk up underneath the lights but above whatever we're filming and basically that is just a big white piece of fabric that's going to allow light to go through it, but when the light hits it, it diffuses it. When light diffuses, it makes all the shadows softer and things like that. The best example is, if you look at something with like a flashlight and you can see there are spotlights, something like that, you're going to get these shadows that are really harsh and really intense. I'll show you that real quick just so you can understand what I'm talking about here. Let's do an infinite light. This is going to act like the sun. We've got this light which has a constant speed and it's coming from a point. If I go over here to Redshift and this is going to be your best friend, Redshift RenderView right here. We're going to pop that up and we're going to hit this "Play" button and what this is, is the IPR. This is the IPR preview, you can tell right now this is crazy bright. We're going to go under our infinite light, and we'll go over all this in just a little bit, but just to show off what I'm talking about with soft shadows and things like that. We're going to send this back down to one. Now you can see, if I rotate this light, then I'm just rotating it in the point here, you see all of our shadows are really harsh and really sharp, and that's in the infinite light. That's not an area light, that's an infinite light. Now, one thing you can do with Redshift infinite lights is you can actually go under the Shadows tab here and soften it up. You can actually make that a little softer and make it act like an area light if you want to. Really soften that up. It's not even really an infinite light anymore, you've lost the effect of that, but you could use it to light your entire scene. But you can see the difference already. Here's our infinite light, super sharp, super harsh. We'll get rid of that. We'll hit this button here and we'll go over all this stuff inside the RenderView as well. This is going to provide us with a snapshot, so we have this image to go back to for reference. We're going to delete that. You can see already our first lighting has changed. We're going to add that area light back in, just a square, and we're going to bringing that back out here. You can already see that the light from this, it just looks more natural, it feels real. It's pretty nice, it's just got a nice softness to it. The bigger we make it, the brighter it's going to get for right now, but the softer the shadows it's going to be. What we can do is, is we can turn down the brightness of this area light and that's the same thing. Under the General tab is where we're going to adjust the brightness and almost all controls we need for this light. There's two things we can do. One option, is we can go in here and we can turn down the intensity. We'll take that about to 10. That looks nice. That's a nice light. You can see the shadow is really soft. It's hitting it, it's wrapping around it nicely. There's no super sharp shadows you can see, that's what we like. It's a good feel diffused light. You can see already just how clean that is and how fast it's rendering with a nice area light. Another thing I mentioned is that we could do a different option to control the exposure of this slide. By default, it's at 100. By default, if I zoom out here, the size of my light determines the intensity of my light, even though my intensity multiplier is exactly the same, unless you hit this button down here called Normalize Intensity. What that's going to do, and you can tell already that you're going to need to add some more intensity to this, a lot. It's built wild. All of a sudden, these numbers which to me, these numbers have always been just arbitrary, they don't represent any real unit types. First one on the Unit is Image. Now, if I actually understood the luminance and luminous power, and I knew exactly what wattage I wanted things to be, that is all going to be right here in the unit type, but we're just going to leave it under Image for now because we ain't getting into all that. But as you can see, now, we have this lighting effect, and let's just double this, maybe more. Here you go. We've got four times. If we didn't have the Normalized Intensity on, if I make this bigger, it should get a lot brighter, but it doesn't get brighter. That is a really cool way to get a nice, soft area light. Let's take this. Let's normalize it because I like to work with just the size of it. I'm going to take it back to one which is much less than the million or so we had. I'm just going to drag this up and bring this over, and this is just going to be my nice, big, and I'm holding Shift to rotate by 10 degrees. We can look at it from multiple views. We just want to really cover this whole surface area because I want just a really nice giant silk over my scene. We're going to zoom in here, and we're going to take a look. We're going to frame it up so that our scene is in case. Here we go, we're not seeing our cyc or anything beyond our cyc. I'm going to go Redshift, RenderView. I'm going to hit this "Play" button here. You see, the infinite light was really harsh and really sharp, and you can tell, it's really harsh across all this stuff. But with this, this is a nice soft light. We're going to up this to about four. That looks pretty good. It's still a little dark but that's not the only light we're going to add in the scene. But you can tell, it's just got this nice, everything is pretty nice and evenly lit, everything is looking pretty good. That's our first light. Now, we're going to add two more lights, and the focus of these lights are going to be for the cyc wall to create that infinite floor look. Right now, you could tell in this render image that our cyc wall has this shading right here which is just from the light. We don't have a global illumination on which we'll talk about, which that's going to help get rid of that as well. But we want to separate the background and our object a little bit. One thing we can do is add a backlight, that's going to put a rim around our object here, and another light to just light the background back here up a little more evenly. It's pretty evenly lit but I just want a little bit more of a spotlight on there. We're going to add a area light. We're going to grab this. They always start as a default little rectangle here in the middle at zero, zero, zero. If we're going to rotate that, and I'm going to rotate it maybe a little bit that way so you can tell, it's just a little sideways pointed towards the back here. We're going to bring that up, and we're going to stretch it out. We're not going to make it as big as the other one, but we are going to stretch it out and have it be pretty wide. By default, I think it's at 100 so it's going to be extremely bright. Yes, that's very bright. You can tell, that's going to create a really bad hotspot, so we don't want that. We're going to have to take it down to 20, that's a nice amount there. We still got this whole area right here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lock this in to perspective mode right here and exit out to another window. That way, I can still move around. In this scene, I can move my object around but it's going to lock it down to that first window we have at the perspective view. I can take my light and we see, we can move it closer to the wall, we can get that harsh highlight on the wall, we can pull it back from the wall a little bit. I'm going to take it out just a little bit wider. Because we really want it to just spread across this wall and just fall into this space a little bit more, we're going to make it a little bit bigger. Here we go. We really just want to fill this space nicely. We've got a giant silk. I'm going to tighten it up a little bit and bring it closer to the wall. Yeah, I like that. That look like there's an accent light splash across this wall here. Then to create another one, we're just going to hold Control, and drag this over here. Now, this one we're going to rotate, hold Shift, rotate it 90 degrees, and then we're going to rotate it so that it faces towards our object. We're going to grab this little yellow dot and scale it in, and then we're going to rotate it this way so that basically, this angle adding back at our objects here. I'm going to bring that up. Here we go. We've brought that up above our cyc. We have this light, and we can turn the other lights off so we can see exactly what this light is doing. Now, I wanted to provide a nice little highlight rim across the tops of these. Let's take our light and just bring it down just a bit. We've got this little rim it's creating on the backs of these cylinders here, and it's really bright here, but we're going to turn this down. We're going to go back down to about 10. We can see how easy it is to make real-time adjustments with when you have this IPR render window open. It's amazing. We've got this render and you can tell, it's going to clean up over time. This is just the draft image, but until this goes to 100, it's not going to be almost render quality. We're going to turn on our other lights. We've got a nice light here, we've got a soft light here, we've got this overhead light, but we don't have any light all coming over this side of this, this is all in the dark. But in real life, with this big old silk over top of this, you would get some in that white cyc wall, you'd get some bounds from that, and that's called GI. But here, we are with three area lights, and we've got this nice clean look to it. The reason I like to use area lights is I can change them, I can adjust them, I can move them around, I can tweak them, I have more control over them. But let's say you wanted to do something super fast, and you wanted to use a HDR map. We'll talk about that in the next video.
5. Redshift Dome Lights: We've got our area lights in here, but we're going to turn those off and we're going to look at what's called a Redshift Dome Light. The dome light is going to be a light that's going to use a texture map or image to create the spherical lighting around your scene. When I have it set to spherical, which is normally what we got. That's what we're going to cover today and that's what a lot of HDR maps are for. Right now with the dome light, we can see all it's doing is providing this big soft shadow 360 degrees all the way around it. There's no good contour or definition or any contrasts really going on it, but we're going to use an HDR map. If can you get something like a studio or something like that, I really recommend Greyscalegorilla has some really nice dome studios and that's what I'm going to use. You can use something from HDRI haven or wherever resource you want. I'm just going to show you how to do this. We're not going to use this for the final render, but you can see the color of this scene is very orange. You have a few lights and with just the dome light up the exposure here. Then we can lower the saturation, so you can make all kinds of adjustments. Then all we have to do to rotate our dome light is literally, we'll grab our dome light and rotate it. It's just going to pivot your scene around and you'll be able to rotate wherever your scene looks like. We can use a nice dome light and we have instantly this really nice scene. It's got pretty nice lighting. It's got a slit in the front. The back wall, this little k has got nice soft shadows. It's looking pretty good for adding one light and a texture map. If you have like a variety of texture maps have lots of different looks. It's a really good way to bring in something and just throw it on there and you can create your own texture maps and lighting setups if you want. You can see this is nice, it's very simple and you can just kind of a quick way to throw on some lighting if you don't want to design it and set it up yourself and get some really neat looks, and it's still customizable here. You notice I adjusted the exposure and adjusted the saturation. You can also adjust the hue. You can change the colors of things that are colored. You can use different looks. If we get rid of that, we choose something else. Like, let's say we went back and we used something from HDRI haven is derelict highway, I think is one. Do not copy to my search path. Now we've got a blue sky with some concrete below and you can set it just the blue skies. It's just going to introduce that color from the image into our scene. We can brighten that up, but because it's got the sun is so it's got one sharp spot. It's going to react as if there's only one light in the scene. That's where you have these harsh shadows again. Now, the other image had multiple lights in a gray over map. That's the cool thing about HDR, this not only does it one light you put in your scene but just based on the image you use is basically like faking, setting up your whole point of it is it can speed up your process a lot. The same thing with the scene, since it has the one light as you rotate it around, that one sharp light is just going to rotate around. You can rotate it more than just on the y-axis. You can rotate it this way. You can make that light really low and to this guy, and so now it's almost like the lights below or object lighting up. You can see just how fast this is real-time. Really cool, and very nice. You can get some cool dramatic shadow shading and lighting and stuff like that. Pretty neat. The dome light, very cool. There's a light, you can do animations. You can enable backgrounds, Alphas, all this stuff. That's one thing I will mention really quick, with a dome light. We have our cycle wall back here, we're going to turn that off real quick. Now you're like, whoa, that's pretty crazy, and it will reset this. There you can see our dome light. Well, that's cool except when I render it, I don't want to see my dome light. So you want to do something with Alpha. All you have to do within Redshift is there's two things you can do. One, you can do a backplate. If you want to have an image show up the dome light. If you want a live background, the background setting inside of Cinema 4D, this is where that is. It's called the backplate and it's under the General tab of a dome light. You can insert your image or your animation JPEG sequence, whatever there. We can turn that off. One thing you can do to do this is we can say Alpha Channel Replace. Then we're also going to say Uncheck, Enable Background. Now, we've got this Alpha Channel and our background is off. We've got our scene, we've got the lighting from that dome light, but we don't have. If I click this right here, this RGB, switch it to the alpha, it'll switch when you click it. That's going to show you that this is in fact Alphard out. If you export this as a PNG, you're something with an Alpha Channel, this is all it's going to save. All this will be transparent, which is fantastic if you want to put it on a different background or anything, and you want to customize it, and control it separately. Without Alpha Channel Replaced, it's going to look like this. It's basically going to come out like this. You're not going to be able to cut out your shape from your background. If you enable Alpha Channel Replace it will put this on there, but you'll also have this in your regular render and you'll have to apply the Alpha Channel to remove this from that. It's just easier to turn that off so you can just ignore that step and post-work. There you go. That's a cool thing about the dome light. I like them. I don't use them a whole lot except one thing I really like to use dome lights for, is for reflections. When I have a shiny object, this [inaudible] spherical or anything like that, it's really reflective. When you don't have a dome light, there's just dead space and if your scene isn't set up to make sense with that, it can look weird and fake to have shiny things that are just reflecting a few lights and there's just nothing in between them, but if you can create user dome light in HDR image, it's going to fill those shiny spaces and with this other information like these trees and this blue sky and how this blue face till it gets brighter towards the light like those, things will reflect, and it will help things look more natural when things are reflective. Very important to use with reflections needs really good for compositing three things and stuff like that as well.
6. Global Illumination: We are back with our three area lights on, our dome light is off. Let's turn our sync back on. What we can do is we hit "Redshift" and then go down here to RenderView, we hit "Play". We're going to notice this is what our scene looks like and it looks a little dead. Honestly, I don't like how dark this is. It's almost like we didn't light it all there. What I want to do is introduce you to GI. Now GI is not gastrointestinal, it is global illumination. That's not a funny joke, sorry. What we're going to do is this is the secret source of Redshift. This by default is set to 16 and these are set to none. What we going to do is we are going to choose brute force as our primary and brute force as our secondary. Now sometimes you can do irradiance cache if you want. Instead, now irradiance cache will go faster, but it will not be as accurate. But honestly this doesn't take that long in a scene like this for it to worry. I use brute force whenever possible. The number bounces is default to three, and we're going to up that to six. I'm not loving how this isn't getting filled in as much. What I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to take this big whole area light. I'm just going to turn it just a tiny bit inward and then put back so that maybe it gets a little more in front of this object. Let's take a look at that and really watch right here and see that, that up at all. It did, but we want to make this just a tiny bit brighter. We up this to 10. Might be a little too much to get back down to six. Because I really want it to be back-lit. I think that's nice. Let's take a snapshot of this just so we can tell the difference with the GI on and the GI off. Go ahead and rotate this off and we'll watch it render again. Again, we'll take a snapshot of that. I'll go back and forth, so off, on, off, on, you can tell especially right in here on the inside, there's no light bouncing around in this image. In this image, there is light bouncing around. You have this where it's extra dark is now not quite as dark because light is filling it up. What we can do is increase the number of rays and we're going to go to 512. Sometimes when you do GI, you can get these little speckle dots. If you increase the number of rays, it's going to help reduce the speckliness of those dots and those points where the light is bouncing back. I'm liking the way this is looking, is looking nice and dramatic, but not crazy. But here's the best part is now we get to do materials and adding materials to this scene is going to change how our light bounces around now that we've added GI. Once we add the colors or any reflectance or anything like that, the light is going to act differently than it is across this gray mat object. Here we go. Let's get into the materials. See you in next video.
7. Redshift Material Node Editor: Now, onto one of the coolest things of Redshift and my favorite thing that really shows off the speed of the preview RenderView is not just the lighting but also we can update our materials and things live and see them and how they're actually going to look in our scene. One thing what I'm going to do is I'm going to leave this window up. You can grab this little icon and move it around and plop it in. You're seeing here, a lot of people like to do setups like this. You can look up what a lot of people like to use. This way they have their RenderView action was crusade in beside here. This way you can have like a nice RenderView window and also you still have space to work with over here, but you have a good window here that it's always there and you're not moving it around and stuff. You can just slap that in there and then you can undock it when you're ready to pull it back out. Lot of times I'll have mine on a second monitor. I'll pull it off and then plop it in. That way I can look at that full screen as big as I can while I'm working so I can see things like that. What we're going to do is talk about materials. This is where the material setup is down here. You can either do down here, you can go create, Redshift, which is new. Since you have Redshift installed. Redshift Material and there are a lot of materials here and there are a lot of things you can do down here besides just materials. Now, this is all we're going to cover in this is the material. But there's hair, there's incandescent, there's multishaders, skins, brights, subsurface scattering, particles volumes. Then we're going to add material. It's going to create this RS material. If you look over here, we've got our little preview window here, and you've got an edit shader graph. Now you can edit this by clicking this and that'll open that up or if you somehow lose that, you can double-click this and it's going to automatically open that up for you. Double-clicking this is the same as clicking this and then clicking that. This voila is the shader graph. As you can see, there's a lot going on. We have all these words over here. They can twirl down, twirl, twirl, twirl, and all these colors. It can get pretty overwhelming pretty quick, if you start messing around with a bunch of stuff, got all this math, you've got color, we've got all these things so we're not going to mess with right now. These are a little advanced and right now we're just talking about the basics and the crazy thing is, you don't need all these things to get really cool, great results. You can get amazing results with just some basic knowledge, and then we're going to play around with. Firstly, here's your material. This is what we created. We have these Redshift Materials, this little square here and you can adjust the size of these, you can move them around. If you zoom in too far and like hold Alt and middle click, and move around and you get really lost and you're like, where the heck am I? Hit ''H'' on the keyboard and that's going to frame everything that's in this window up for you so you can get back to where you were. We've got these spaghetti noodles. You've got all this linguine out here. To create an object, you have to have a material and these are normally default labeled with a red, which you can change that if you want, if you'd like to organize things, color code things so you can keep things more organized, you can. We've got this, and then in this plugs into an output and this output color, which is going to be all the information within this Redshift Material, is going to go into the surface of this output. Under this output thing, there's not really much we need to worry about. There's just this basic and there's this node for now. If you want to connect something up, if you say you double-click something and all of a sudden you're like, I want to connect, I can't connect things. What have I done? Double-click this. That's going to open up everything that you need, basically, anything you have plugged in or anything, the minimum requirements to plug something in, it's going to open that up. Same with the output, double click that, it brought our surface back. Then we can grab either this little circle here and quick whip it to the surface over here. You can tell it's being honoree. Sometimes if you're zoomed out and you have a lot going on, it's really hard to grab these little circles. Like, we'll shoot so you can zoom in and do that. You just quick whip that. Now, I have attached it, you can tell when I disconnected it, that the output here became yellow and this became bright red. What this is doing, and this means that if I apply this material to an object, it doesn't have any data to actually create it. It's just going to default it. It's like, hey, something's wrong, this has no information. Please put something on this. Here we go by default. Now, if we take a look at our Redshift Material here, we can. There's so much to go into and now there will be a series entirely on materials and we will cover a lot of these things. If you right-click, you can create all kinds of new things inside here. If you go up here to edit tools, create texture nodes. There's a lot you can do and it can get overwhelming really fast. We're going to keep it super simple and we're not going to go over a lot of the details of a lot of stuff, but we're just going to go over the basics of what you need to understand what you're looking at. Inside of our Redshift Material, we have these tabs when this is selected. We have basic, which is where you can name your material. Like mat 1. Change the color like I did. Remark, we can say like this one is cool, goes on the ring. That way if you're working with somebody, they're like, what's this material is supposed to be used for? You can leave them a little note here. Then under that we have base properties. Now, under base properties is where we have the diffuse, backlight translucency, reflection, refraction transmission, subsurface. The color of the diffuse, the diffuse is going to be the color of the object. Now if you want to add a texture map for the diffuse map. If you go over here under textures, we have a texture map here. We can drag this out and then load our texture, which we're not going to do or if you actually you have a texture like a picture and you open it up in like Explorer and just drag it in. It'll automatically create this texture node for you, which is amazing because I'm lazy and I don't like extra clicks. I just drag and drop. I'll download something and drag and drop it from the bottom of Chrome where it just says it finished downloading because that's how lazy I am. I'll drag it right in there. It'll create the texture node and I'll plug it right in. If you want to plug something in, just for the sake of example here, you'll see this created a yellow instead of the red, a yellow thing and that's going to be under this texture, so they're color-coded. This, you would take this output color and you would, since there is no dot over here, you're like, well, I can't connect it to anything because there's no dot. When there's not a dot, you go up here and add it to the blue and see how the line turns green there. When you add it to the blue and let go of the mouse, it's going to open up all these options. That means you can take this texture and plug it in to any one of these datas to use it as a reference. What we do for the diffuse would be the diffuse color. That would take, since there is no image, it turned it black and you can see it right there. If you had an image or texture or something, you could do that. That's how you add things to this. But we're not going to do that for that. We're going to go and we're going to add a white, and we don't want pure white. We're going to back it up a little bit, do like 96 percent here. We've got this a lighter gray. Then we're going to look at Redshift here, show it off. Let me get my window out of the way. What we're going to do is we're going to apply this material. Well, actually, we'll just wait a little bit. We'll turn on our live preview and we're going to apply this material. Boom, all of our lights, everything are crazy bright because we added a reflective material. Right now this white is super shiny. That is because we have, as you can see here, our reflection weight is one. This is binary, one or zero. The closer to zero it is, the less reflective it is. As I turn that down, you'll see it adjust. What's happening and the reason it looks so bright is because we added a white material instead of this gray. Since we have global illumination on, it means that more light is going to bounce off because this material is lighter. It's easier for that light to bounce off, and affect our scene more often. We've got our light here on material. What we've done is we've turned the weight of the reflection all the way down. We're going to turn this back to gray so you can see what I'm talking about here. We've got this gray and you can see it's just not reflecting any thing where the lights are hitting. It's just really super matte. If we turn that reflection back up, you're going to see is reflecting everything, all these weird curves of my scene here, reflecting all those lights back at us. It looks really bizarre. What we can do is add the roughness. If we turn the roughness up, that's going to be the same as a glossiness if you're familiar with that. A roughness of one is very blurry. If we see this, maybe step this up, we see a really clean clear image with zero roughness as we go up. Step this up, you see our reflections get a little rougher as they go and then all the way up, their very rough and it's spreading that reflection across the surface area a little more. But really what we want is the roughness all the way up and really just the weight all the way down because we do want a matte material. We're going to take this and bring it back to the white and we're going to go about 88 percent. We're going to adjust our lighting because this is too bright, but this is the look we're going for. We've got our lights here. Let's take this down to one. The good thing is with aerial lights, if as long as they're all aerial lights, you can actually adjust the intensity of all of them at once. If I say I want them all to be one, I can do that. But I don't. I want my big overhead light, which is this one. I want this one to stay at about four. I want it to be my brightest light. I like that. Now this light is 20, I think it's going to be way too much so let's take it down to five. Lets take it down to one. Here we go. We're getting softer on our back here. These area lights, here we go. Now, as you can tell we've got four for our big all light up here and then one and one for these. We turn off this light, you can see what these lights are doing. This light is lighting up our background nicely and this light isn't really providing our rim light like it was. Now, keep in mind that it will be affected by the material we put on, this. What we can do is actually just apply this to the ring real quick so that way we can see how that light is going to hit that. We can drag this on this object. It's going to let us see what that light's doing. Let's turn on our other lights. They're going to fill in this space and all the sudden our scene is so crazy bright. We're going to go ahead and add this texture and we're going to hold Control and drag. Now we have our texture on everything and it's not reflecting, it's just bouncing off because of the GI. In accordance to that, let's adjust everything. Take the overhead down to one, maybe two. I like that. We'll adjust that a little bit. But I'm liking the way that it is looking. Take that down to two. I can look at these lights. This light is doing that, this light is doing that, and this light is lighting the whole thing up nicely. These are just helping separate the background from our object just a little bit. We've got this white material matte object on everything and because of the GI, we've got this nice light bouncing off. You can see here this isn't quite near as dark as it was. Everything is really just nicely evenly lit. It looks like a weird little studio. You've got this real nice soft shadows. Very pretty. That is aerial lights and this material here. One thing I want to do and I love to do is create a gold material. Here we have a matte material and what we can do is change the color. You'll see if I change the color to something really saturated, this is all going to update live. Our scenes getting really weird. They go darker. Instantly look at facet and adjust. So you can use some really new things, a clay look or something like that. This is how you would do a clay render or something like that. You'd have it on a probability of 50 percent gray or something and just let it be. We want to do this kind of a white look and we have our reflection weight all the way down. That looks nice. I like the way that's it's looking. I wouldn't go pure white. Nothing is really pure, pure white. Now let's take a look at creating a shiny gold material with some roughness. That's the cool stuff. We've got a matte object which is really popular and we can change the colors we need. You can adjust reflectiveness on it and all that stuff. But let's look at making something a little more photorealistic.
8. 7. Making Gold: To create something a little more photo-realistic, you think we're going to look up gold, textures, and things like that. We're actually going to build it all 100 percent inside of Redshift procedurally. It's super awesome. To create a new material, you're going to click Redshift Material. Let's go ahead and label this basic. I'm going to call this gold. We're going to double-click our gold, and that's going to open it up here. You can see sometimes when you open up a new object, a new material, you'll realize that this is black and this isn't working and you can change it and it doesn't respond. What's happening is because sometimes if you have the IPR, RenderViewer going, it will put computing power from your GPU, it'll put priority on this over this. If you added this to your scene and then made changes to it like if we go to our presets here and this is what I want to show you. What we're going to do is we're going to choose gold. We're going to take it off of our psych. I'm going to put a white back on there because it's awful looking. But we're going to take our gold and we are going to throw it on. For now, let's throw it on the ring so we can see what we're doing. We have this nice gold. Already you can tell that's looking really nice, you can see with the GI we've got the light bouncing off that affecting our white ground there. We've got this really cool ring, but something about this just isn't right. It's too perfect. By default, we've got our gold here, we've got the roughness is 0.12, which is why you have this little blur. If you want it to be super polished, you would do no roughness and then you're going to have this. But that always looks really fake to me because nothing is that clean. But so you can see with the roughness up all the way, you've got this nice matty gold thickness. The thing you can notice here is with our reflections because we're under the gold preset, we actually have this GGX and this color plus Edge Tint. You think you'd be under metalness for a metal, but it's actually under color edge tint. This is what gives us that golden look. What we want to do is actually add some imperfections into this. I actually like the roughness of this. I might bring it down a little bit. We have a little bit more. Yeah, there we go. In between the two. What I want to do is actually create this natural distortion to it. Underneath the textures here, there's something called noise. This is going to be universal for all software that we can create a noise. Now the cool thing with Maxon Cinema 4D is it now supports Maxon Noise. We're actually going to grab that. You can use noise if you're using something else besides cinema 4D and plug that in. We're going to drag this line over to the blue and we'll plug this into the reflection roughness. What that did is inside of this where I was adjusting the roughness to point whatever, it's actually going to take the values of this noise and if you plug this into our surface here you'll see our black and white. So we can see what this is actually doing. When it's black, that is going to be super shiny, the reflectance. The roughness value will be zero and when it's white, the reference value will be one. We're going to just fill around in here and play around in here. One thing we want to do is we're going to increase the overall scale over here within our Maxon Noise. We're going to do about five. Okay, so we've got this bigger look and it's all fuzzy and foggy. We're just going to scroll to this noise a little bit and we're going to come across some weird looking shapes and things. There we go. I like that turbulence. Okay, so we've got this foggy-ish noise where it's white means it's going to be rough. This means there's no pure black, so there's nothing that's going to be purely reflective. But this might be just a little too much contrast for me. What I want to do is I'm going to grab this black and just bring it up to a dark gray. I'm going to grab this white, and I'm going to bring it down to a middle gray. There we go. Now nothing is super rough and nothing is super shiny. When we plug this back in, you'll see we have this nice roughness that is the same value we had. Basically, now instead of zero to one, it's black to white where black is shiny, white is rough, so black is a roughness value of zero. White is the roughness value of one. If we want it to be closer, a little more rough, we're going to increase these two a little brighter. One thing that we also want to do is we want to grab this, hold Control, bring that down, and that's going to copy that. We want to add this to the bump. Okay, so under utilities, this is important, there's a bump and there's a bump map. We're going to grab that, bring it in. We've got this noise. We're going to plug that in to the texture and the input. Map input and that output is going to go up here to the blue. I missed my little blue, I go to the blue, then we go to overall. Why bump is in overall, I'm not sure, but it's going to go in overall and then into bump. What that's going to do is that if we plug this straight into the surface, we're going to see what this looks like. If we go and make this more contrast, so we have black and we have white. You just scroll down here and just up the contrast so we can really see the difference between the black and the white. If I take this bump and I plug this in and this is the bump, you're going to see it actually creates where it's white is going to be raised up and where it's black, it's going to be flat. That is just going to add this hammered look to it. That might be a little too much. This is where you really start just flicking around in the noise isn't really cool. Bumps and things like that. This is going to provide this wavy turbulence. This looks like it's providing this wrinkly gold as if it was a gold leaf on there. Now that's a little dramatic. We're going to actually tighten this up and go to a scale of one to shrink that down. Then inside of that, we're going to go into our bump map here and it defaults to a height scale, which is why we're using a height scale. Because we're using a black and white image. If we're using a normal map one of those purple things, you would change that to tangent space. But we use a height field. We're going to bring this down to 0.1. That's going to bring that down. But you can see here in these little details, you still have these little bumps, that just make it look like it's just not quite perfectly polished and brushed. But if we really want to make this look like a brushed gold, what we can do, I'm going to turn this back up to one. If you want this to look like a brushed gold, you can take the scale of our noise here. Let's plug this into our surface so we can see what's going on here. Let's add 10 here add 10 here, see what that does. Let's take this and do 0.1. There we go. Now we've got these really wide lines here, these really thin things. What that should look like is almost a brushed metal look. Yes. We've got this brushed gold. But this is awkward. I don't like the way that wrapped around there. What we need to do is reverse these, I believe, 0.1 and then make this 10. That'll make it go this way. Now it looks better. Okay. You've got this brushed look, but it's a little too intense. We're going to take this down to 0.1. Now we've got this gold, it looks like it was rolled out of a machine. It's got these grooves in it, but it's also got some roughness in it, so it looks more realistic. I like that. Do you like that? Okay. We'll leave it at that. We've got this nice scene here, but let's take our gold. You can tell down here it does not look right. We're going to plug these into a few of these little cylinders. Let's just rotate around this a little bit. That's looking pretty cool. There we go. We've got this nice gold material with these textures that we can control and choose, clearing out those bumps really makes something really neat. Yes. Let's now take a look at adding a camera to the scene, and then lastly, rendering it out. Okay, see you in the next video.
9. Redshift Cameras: We've got our scene here. All we want to do is add a camera. We'll go to Redshift, Camera, Standard camera. This is the only camera we're going to look at. This got some different camera options such as spherical, fisheye, stereo-spherical, cylindrical. These are for VR, and this is like a skater dude video for like in the '90s, the fisheye lens. But one thing we're going to look at our Redshift camera here. It creates the camera and it adds this Redshift tag on here. We've got this camera now. Let's click this button so that we can look through our camera. One thing I like to do is I like to choose a Redshift camera and then lock that. Now if I go out here, and I want to move around my scene I can uncheck my camera and I can be like, okay, well, let me look and see what this is looking like here. I can move around, and I can click Okay. My renders are missing up, but I wanted to move this up, see that look like. That's what that look like. That's it there. Let's move that back. If I made this ring rotate in another way. I can edit my scene around without changing my view here. It's really cool when you switch your camera setup. Perfectly there. One thing we can do is, I always like when I set my camera, almost defaults to 36. Act either do with 35, because that's what you would use, and actual lens would be probably a 35 or a 50 millimeter. Now, I'd like to do a 50, and I'd like to zoom out, because 50 is most like the human eye as far as the field of view and stuff of it. Let's look at it, but honestly, I like to do that a lot, especially for archivists and stuff like that, 50 is a really good choice. Let me go with the 35 for this case, because I think it looks nice. For this just to show off this extra empty white space, I think that's important to have here. When we have our camera selected and this toggled, we can hold Alt and middle click to drag around. One thing I like to do when I'm framing up my shot, is pretend there's the rule of thirds going on here. I really want my focus, so my shot to be this left side of the screen, and this empty space over here on the right. It's this off-balance image but everything is lined up. Nice, we've got the ring here and then the dots up here. It's all flowing across this space, so your eye is going to be drawn to this space. We've got that in our camera, and honestly see good to go with our camera now if we want to. One thing I will show really quick, is we'll open up our render viewer. It's going to be looking to the camera. One thing we can do is, with this, underneath the object tag, we can set a focus distance. Let's say we focus on this centerpiece here. Now if I go to my Redshift camera tag, I turn on Bokeh, override, and then enabled here. We'll go more into detail about this and what these are doing. But let's say we want to turn up these real quick. It's going to be easier to see if I actually zoom in. Let's move my camera, and I just want to look across. Well, I have this depth of field here. I move my camera in, I'm going to click this right here. I want this ring to be in focus, maybe a little more like right there to be in focus. Now you can see, we're getting very noisy and blurry at here, but we have this depth of field applied. The things that are further away are getting very blurry, and this spot right here within the normal camera object, since it is in focus, and then we're controlling the depth of field based on the CoC radius and the power here within the Bokeh system. I can tell you it's a really cool, just nice micro camera stuff. Stuff you can't get with real cameras. Like you can make it at the field so small, you can zoom in, pretend you have a macro. All this stuff within Redshift and it looks really pretty. We're not going to use this for this scene. We don't need it, because our background has no detail at all, but just wanted to show off just how cool the Redshift Bokeh is and how nice it looks, and how quick it renders as well. If I move around, and we'll see that change. Very cool. Very fun. Let's undo. We'll go ahead and we'll take this Bokeh and we'll just uncheck that. We can back this up, we'll back our camera backup. If we align our scene real quick, I think some of these dots are a little off, and perhaps like this. Looks pretty good. Rotate it a bit. There we go. Well, one thing I will say real quick about the cameras, is that anything you can do with a normal camera in snow 40 you can do with a Redshift camera. You can do camera cranes objects, create any camera you want and then just right-click, and go to Redshift tags and apply the Redshift camera to whatever cameras in the scene, and you can instantly make it a Redshift camera, which is very cool.
10. Render Settings: Lastly, we are going to talk about Render settings. Before we get into the settings, I want to show something that's very important with this IPR Redshift render viewer. One thing to note is with this render view, you can only do still images. You can't look at animations inside of here like you can within the render viewer. There are a few options here that we're going to go over, but we're not going to cover everything. We've got bucket render, which we will talk about. We've got Freeze Tessellation, which is important if you're using a Redshift object tag to displace things. We don't need to talk about that yet. We'll cover that within the material render and also the Render settings video of this series. The Freeze geometry updates, which is really good for using displacer and things with a lot of geometry, that way it doesn't have to load all of these calculations up every time. It saves that and it skips that and goes straight to rendering everything else. Few quick things I do want to show about this is, one, is this crop, this region window which you can hit R if you want and that brings up this square. If you're making changes to something, but you don't want to wait for it to render out the entire scene, you just wanted to do one part, let's say we made our ring white here instead of the gold and we didn't want to have to wait for the whole scene, we just wanted to see what that's going to look like here. That's pretty good, and you can just render that. Then you go, okay, that's neat. You can tell, do I like the gold or do I like the white better? I like the white, but I'm going to stick with the gold for now. That's just going to allow you to make these tiny little details. Sometimes if you have a floor like want privacy and you're making tweaks to the lighting tube it's not affecting the other parts, this a good way to use that and just get a quick preview there than going to wait for your entire scene to render. This is also very useful when using the bucket render option. Now, the bucket render is what you're going to get when you use a final render. When you hit this "Render" button here, it's going to bucket render because we have progressive rendering off. All this time, this IPR has been progressive rendering, so it's been loading in. It's really good for getting quick little previews of what you're going to see. But if you want to see what it actually looks like, you're going to need to use a bucket render. What that's going to do it, if we click this button, and it still can update. Even though we're bucket rendering you see this little bucket here. It's going to go boop, and it's going to be hard to see against this white background. But it's going to give you the final image and what that looks like. It's going to go piece by piece by piece, around, around and around until all the buckets are full. This is what you're used to seeing. It's going a little slow now because of our GI. We've turned that up a little bit. But you can tell up here we are getting some noise here, and that's because of the GI as well and the lighting samples, and things like that.. We certainly see things where we're going to need to do some work. Up this up a little bit. As that goes, even if I rotate around, it's going to automatically start to be. I want to "View", "Undo View". There we go. It's going to update again. We go back around This is what you're going to need to do to render. This is why I like to use render regions because if it's something really detailed, you need to see what it's going to look like in the final. You can just render region that off and it'll put the buckets inside there. You can see we're getting some noise in here, and this isn't very clean. As you can see here, we've got this noise here, and that is most likely due to our light samples. By default, all the lights have a sample rate of 16, I believe. Instead of going in here and up in this unified samplings, the mins and max here, that is going to do a lot more calculation, power, and pull more resources from your computer than you need for it too. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to twirl down this sampling overrides menu. Right here you have the samples for reflection, refraction, occlusion, light volumes, singles, all those stuff. If we turn these up, that exponentially updates all of these as well, every single one of these. But sometimes you don't need to calculate these and up the calculations on these, we just need certain things. For instance on this, we need to upgrade the amount of light samples, but we don't need to increase the amount of volume samples or refraction or anything like that. We just need light. Let's do this, and this can default 8. We're going to turn this up to 128, and we're going to see already that cleaned that up instantly, and it was fast. Crazy fast. We're going to move that up and just see already it cleans all that up. That's just light samples, that's all we needed. Let's look at somewhere else in our scene. We can see all that's getting cleaned up nicely. Let's take a look at these shadows down here. These might need even more. Those are cleaning up pretty nice too. It's a little noisy, so let's turn this up to 256 and see if that cleans that up anymore. Not really, so that means it's something else. Go back to 128. Actually, let's go up to 512. Bump it up even higher. That's pretty nice, but it's still noisy. We're going to go back down to 128, be careful. These shadows here at 128 are pretty noisy, we definitely saw a difference when we put it up to 256. That's much better. Let's go and let's up our light samples even more. Let's go 1024. That's pretty clean. That's pretty clean right there. But we're going to go up to our GI and increase that to 1024 as well because this shadow is really getting affected by the GI. That's looking really good. Really clean. Obviously, every time you go up exponentially, the reason I'm doing those weird numbers like that, it's powers of 16. It's like megabytes and gigabytes and all that stuff. Megabytes. How I get 1,000, it's actually a 1024. It's 64, 128, 256, 512, [inaudible] like that times two. One thing we can look at is see if there's any weird little specs from our reflections here, which I don't think we will since we don't have too intensive reflections, but we might have a little noise here, and it might be from the [inaudible]. But what we can do is turn our reflection override on to 128 and see if that cleans that up at all. I think that's just our noise. That did up a little bit, so we'll turn that up to 512. Now we've got our light samples and our reflections samples turned up, but we've still got all this is set to default. Let's turn off our render window, and this is going to give us a good estimate of how long this will take to render. We will see here and watch this renders slowly, and it's going to be super clean, nice image. I say slowly compared to the IPR view, but not compared to a CPU read or something with my CPU at least. But let this go and we'll come back to it when it's ready. There we go, a minute 28 seconds to render this all extremely clean. This is all very clean, everything's looking really nicely. If I was going to do an Instagram post or something, I wouldn't even worry about making it this clean. You're not going to see these little details. If I zoom in this far, you're not going to see that on iPhone or something. So keep in mind. But I wanted to show you how to increase your cleanness without increasing your render time so much. If we just left all this default and jacked this way up, it would take much longer. It's important to use these values over these values when you don't have to. Honestly, for me, the only time I touch these values, is if I'm using depth of field or motion blur. Or also if you're doing a VDB like a volume render, these actually affect that more than the volume tag down here does. This will affect environment volume. Sometimes I'll take this down to 0.003 just for some accuracy, but, honestly, you don't even need to for this scene at all. This is looking really nice, really good. That's really fast still, and that's extremely clean and how fast it is. That is how you would render that out. You've get view of what that's going to be like. Now, if you wanted to do an animation or something, all you have to do is go "Period", go to "Output", and you would choose "All frames" or wherever animation settings, preview range, whatever you want, and that'll do your frames. The main thing to do if you want to save your image, you need to check this save box. Choose the format. I like to do JPEGs or PNGs depending you can do EXRs, things like that. But let's say you just sat there and you let that render inside of this render viewer and that's good enough for you. Well, real quick, I'll show you. What you can do is go to "File", "Save Image", "Save Image As". It gives you these options where you can save it as EXR, you've got TIFFs, you've got JPEGs, you can choose quality. You can save your image from here, which is really cool. Or if you want, once you have this saved, you choose your output, you choose your file type. You will now just be able to use the render view like you would normally, and that'll just build it in there. You'll have your layer information and all these stuff. There you go. You've got it in your timeline and all that stuff right there.
11. Post FX: One thing that's really cool about Redshift is they have what is called, underneath the Settings tab, the Post Effects panel. Inside of this, let's turn this back on. If you have LUTs, you can apply those straight to your seen. If you want to just use some basic color correction, increase the contrast, lower the contrast. Increase your exposure, lower the exposure, that kind of thing. You can literally do that right here inside or as soon as it's done, so you can add a little S curve to this if you want. I always like to do that sometimes, not always. Sometimes, I don't think I need some S curve. But if you do these things, you'll notice under the Render Settings that it adds Redshift Post-Effects, and checkbox it. Then you have these same options, all right here as well. One of my favorites, let's uncheck that, is bloom. Photographic exposure is nice, it's a good way to adjust your scene as if it was a real camera. Lowering your f-stop is going to increase the brightness. Raising your shutter speed is going to let less light in, same as ISO it's going to digitally enhance your noise. You can adjust the white balance. All this cool stuff. You've got all that, all built-in. You can adjust the vignetting, you can add up a vignette to your scene really easily, let's bring the shutter back down a little bit. Get this nice vignette which is a neat look and use Edit and Post, and you can just take that right off, no big deal. But I like it now that I've seen it. I'm going to edit in there a little bit. You can adjust saturation, you can desaturate it. I really like that silver look with that actually. We can up it just a bit, punch it up a little bit. One of my favorites is bloom, and I click it and nothing happens. What bloom does, you have this threshold and it's going to take things that are very sharp highlights and it's going to add a little glow to them. It's like glow and aftereffects if you use that. You can adjust the intensity of it. It's really nice cool romantic-looking shots and stuff like that, and that's going to react to any highlights within your scene. Flare is really cool, flare is really neat if you have a light in your scene. Right now, we don't have anything, so it's just going to say whatever light's entering the camera, this is going to create a flare in the middle. But what's cool is if had a light in the scene, it would move around and react to that light. You wouldn't have to do any post-work and track that flare on your light, it will automatically build it in. You can adjust the chromaticness and the softness and all this stuff, really cool. You've got all these really cool settings as soon as your scene is done. You've got the settings on here and we'll apply those when we hit Render. Now, if I was going to render this out, I probably would just render this out in the render viewer and click this button right here to do a final render. That's going to be the same as if I hit play and then hit bucket render. The difference is, I've hit final render. Now, if I move this around, it's not going to live update. It's going to just leave it from where I hit Render, that's what's going to render. If we let that render up, we'll see how long that takes. It will automatically apply these post effects settings. But what I'll do is just to show that it's the same, I will hit this render right here. This will render it out and then apply all the post effect work, right after it's done. You'll see once that finished rendering in here, it started off looking like this in the render. But when it finished, it will apply those post effects and it made it brighter and looks like this now. I noticed I have my little corner down here, which drives me crazy. This is a good instance where if I had done this within the render viewer, let's just open my square here. I'm going to set render. You can see my little spot is down there. This is what my image looks like, I've got this little gap, but I could've taken this and grab this plane, this line here and pull that out if I wanted to, and then just move this back down and fixed it. But really I'm just going to push in and fix it that way, the correct way. I'll just adjust my camera. We can hit Render again through the Render Settings up here or in here. I like to do it in here because that's how I like to adjust the post effects and play around with them a little bit when it's done rather than trying to deal with it in post and stuff like that, I just like to control it here. Minute 24, we're going to save that and snapshot that. We're just going to go in here and we're going to tweak our settings and see if we can get away with doing a little bit faster of a render even. We're going to go to Redshift, we're going to go GI, we're going to take it back down at 512. We're going go to Basic, we're going to go over reflection, we're going to take that down to 64. I don't think we really need it to be up that high. The light, we're going to take down to 512. We're going to see what difference that it makes in our image in our render times. There you go. Doesn't really look that different, this is the original image. Don't see that big of a difference honestly, and we've got the render time down to under a minute for this really nice scene. Even on the cone here. You can see if we zoom in real far, you can see a difference there. This is clean, this is dirty. But if I'm posting this on Instagram or something like that, if I'm just doing a daily abstract art, I mean that's totally clean. The main thing, if I was doing a still image, I would go the higher quality one. But if I'm doing an animation and I can shave 30 seconds off a frame and the quality difference is minimal, I'm going to want to definitely do a min-max kind of a thing on that. I'm going to say, if I can save 30 seconds off of a minute animation, that's hours, hours you're saving. It's very exponential, but keep that in mind when you're rendering. What your end goal is. There's always where you want to be perfect and then there's good enough. You really want to land in the good enough and make it be quick as possible and efficient. That's my tip, is try to get your render time down as low as possible, but also keep the quality up. Play around with those settings where you can take away and what you can add on and get those settings really where you want it. Hopefully, you can understand how to render out your scene, what your render settings did basically. What I really hope it did is it fueled you to want to learn more. That's the real goal of this class, is I want you to want to go deeper and really push the limits and figure out what all Redshift can do. If you sit here and you think, "I'm not good enough.: or "I hope I'm that good one day." Look, the only thing is practice and time. The only difference is that some people may know what to adjust to create correct stuff and make stuff look cleaner and how to add some lighting and stuff. But really, like art is art, and the main thing is you have fun creating what you want to create. If I can help you make your vision come true, that's all that matters. It doesn't have to be something that gets a billion likes on Instagram or something, it just needs to make you happy and make it for whoever you want and for yourself or whatever. It's not a reflection on who you are as a person or anything, it isn't linked in to your identity, it's literally just art and it's just something to have fun and create and just have a good time doing. Really, Bob Ross it up and just have some happy little accidents, create some fun stuff, and just really can't wait to see what you guys create and share. Thank you so much for taking my class. Be on the lookout for more classes coming for sure. Thank you so much for just supporting me and watching these videos and I really hope it helped. Thank you again, you're awesome. See you later.
12. Bonus Examples: For an example, of materials you could do. Let me show you what you can do. Hold CTRL and drag this over. We've got this white material. This is a really cool trick I learned. If you go over here, let's say we grab this light pinkish color, we like that. Now let's grab this and drag that over, let's take this original one and put it on the background. We'll just turn this to the renderView and we'll take out them back at rendering. You've got this really nice, pretty pink color that might be a little too saturated, but it's okay for now. Let's open up the one that is not the pink one, but the copy of the pink one. I want to do a complimentary color to this pink. It's a really easy way to do that within Cinema 4D. We're going to click this color and then you'll see this little wheel right here, we're going to click that. Inside that we're going to click this. This is going to choose the color that's exactly the opposite on the color wheel. Meaning it's complimentary. So if we go on here and click this, we're going to get a color that we know is going to look good with this pink. Let's throw that in on these little objects here. All of a sudden we're getting a pretty nice, I actually like the ring thing in the material. We're getting a very nice little shape and then we're going to take this gold and we are going to mess with, we could choose a different preset, but we're just going to mess with the edge tent and we're going to make it more of a copper. We're going to make it more pink and red and well, let's take a look at that. That looks like a very cool, almost like a rose gold really, that's what that would be. I think honestly what might look best is if we did almost like a metal, like a silver. There's the tiniest bit of pink, it's a neat color right there. Play around with that, play around these presets, choose which is platinum, whatever you want. Tinted glass is a pretty cool one. It's going to be pretty interesting but don't get too bogged down in trying to make things look perfect. Glass is pretty cool if you take this roughness map and this bump map off, we'll see the glass is just going to be this super clear object so if you're going to do something that's reflective, I really suggest adding a custom roughness map to it, as well as a bump. I really think that just takes it to the next level and makes it just look a little nicer. It's going to be pretty cool, it's pretty cool. Play around with that and then post and play around different color combinations. If the ring is a color, the background is a color, I suggest leaving the background a matte finish though. It's just going to really look a lot better than if you do something that's purely reflective. If you use something that is reflective, I really advise you to use a roughness map and play around with noises and things and see how that interacts.
13. Your Assignment: So now you know how to add a camera, lights to your scene. I want you to do two things. I want you to make materials for this and change what this looks like. Two, I want you to play around with the lighting. I want you to delete these lights, add a new lights, create your own area effects. Just move these around, just play around with lighting and materials and see how they react and just get used to how these things interact with each other, okay.
14. Congrats!: You did it. You finished the course. If you're watching this video, you are awesome. Hopefully you learned a little bit about Redshifts or you feel more comfortable with it and it ignited this flame that you want to learn more about it because we have barely scratched the surface of this powerful tool. Hopefully it can work into your workflow and help speed up your innerism, because it really changed the way you view 3-D and just open up all these opportunities for the speed and the power that it presents. I'm going to continue to do more classes and tutorials, so please be sure to follow if you like the content or if you want to learn more about Redshift and I cannot wait to see what you guys create in this class and get to know you guys as artists and just really see what you can do, and travel along with you in this journey of learning Redshift and in creating 3-D art. Thanks for watching again so much. I can't express how grateful I am. See you next time.
Derek Kirk, 3D Instructor-Effectatron & CGshortcuts
