Learn 3D Rendering by Lighting a Daytime Interior Scene: Developing Skills in Blender

1. Introduction: Hi, my name is [inaudible]. I'm a lighting artist in the animation industry. In this class, you're going to learn how to light an interior daytime scene using a render. I've about 10 years of experience in the industry. I've worked on a number of shows that aired on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the Cartoon Network, to name a few. Your benefit from this course, if you're looking to learn about the Blender lighting toolset. We also going to be going over my entire process that I would go through, the light scenes such as this, from the ground up. We'll start by establishing a vision for the project by going over reference. Then we'll familiarize ourselves with the scene file we will be working with. After that, we'll start by creating the natural lighting setup, then the practical lighting setup, and finally, the character lighting setup, before finishing it off with some volumetric effects. Then we'll finish things off by compositing the final renders for final output. Thanks so much for checking this class, and I really appreciate it. If any questions along the way, feel free to ask. With that said, let's jump in. 2. Establishing The Vision: Hey there. I hope you're doing well. In this first video, we're just going to quickly go over establishing the vision for this project. We're going to talk about the reference that I've gathered here which can help us push towards that goal that we're setting out to achieve. Now, for this tutorial and project, I've decided to head in more of that typical animated film, light direction for this project. Just because for this project, I want it to be more about the fundamental process of lighting a daytime interior, and less about establishing any stylized look or anything like that. To help us get there, I've collected these reference images from live-action film, an animated film, and then also just from some photography. These should help us stay on that path to help us get to that goal that we are trying to achieve. The first movie that I've got reference from is Spider-Man Homecoming. You see there's a strong key light source, which is the natural light flooding in from the side of the room giving a good sidelight on the characters, in some cases acting is at most a bit of a rim light. You can see it here, it's side-lighting Peter well and keeping him separated and keeping the focus on him, lighting the room overall pretty well as well. 21 Jump Street doing the same thing here. We've got a lot of light flooding in from the side of the room, from these big windows, side-lighting Channing Tatum in this shot, he's standing out quite a bit. Over here, he's picking up some light hits from the window. Might be some top lighting too, you see some highlights on his hair. Reverse angle teacher same thing you've got that stronger side light, darker on the screen right side. School of Rock, same thing. Light flooding in from the screen left side here and down here, highlighting Jack Black shaping him out, keeping them separated from the background. Keeping things bright overall, to comedy makes sense. You'd want it to be brighter, probably. Inside-Out, same thing. Again, what a surprise. We got a lot of light coming in from the one side of the room flooding in from the windows, especially the first portion of the scene , it's warmer predominantly. Again, in that first portion of the scene, it's suits the story. To have it warmer because you'll see she gets into that happier mood by the end of it. The later part of the scene, he goes blue because she gets sad. Sadness takes over inside of her, the character Sadness is blue, so the lighting goes blue. A cool way of getting it done there. Then we render the photography reference. You see me whereas images very bright overall, camera's exposed for the shadows, highlights and blowing up windows are blowing out. Realistically probably be a little bit darker than this. But if we're going for what we'd see in the camera, it wouldn't be necessarily bad thing if some of the highlights and blowing out a bit. We'll just have to be careful if we did go for more of this look has the characters could start blowing out too. But anyways, just good to keep in mind that it can be pretty bright if you have a strong and large primary light source from the natural light. In the classrooms same thing in his classroom photos. Again, like larger light source classrooms are fairly bright, not as bright necessarily as the warehouses because there's such a massive windows, but here it's still pretty bright. Then here too, we've got the top lights though too, so it's a little brighter here. Then here you've got some top light action going on too, so overall pretty bright though, evenly lit. We've got some top lights here in our scene. We'll go over in the next file, they'll probably real more incandescents. We can use some of that warm blue complimentary colors to make things pop and make it a little more appealing to the eye. But overall, that's look, we're going to go for a little brighter overall, typical animated movie look. Maybe a little bit of complimentary color action going on, and that's that see you in the next video. 3. File Overview: In this video, we're going to quickly go over the file that we will be working with for this class. If we start over here in the outliner, first of all, you're going to see we have four collection set up a set collection, lights, cameras, and the character collection. We just start at the top and work our way down. Let's open up the set collection. First of all, you're going to see that I have created this light GO collection at the bottom here. Typically things wouldn't be organized like this in any production scenario, but I've taken all of the emissive geometry within the set, and I've grouped them in their own collection here just so it's easily accessible to us there. We can quickly adjust materials on any of the objects within here as needed. Now, if we close that up and then go into the lights collection, this is where we will be spending most of our time. First of all, you're going to see we have three sub-collections. Whenever I'm working with the same type of light. For example, the ceiling lights along the ceiling here. I like to keep them in their own group altogether. This is also the case if I have multiple lights that are used for the same general purpose, for example, character lights, they're all used to help the character standouts. Here I have rim lights, a top light, and a highlight light. They're not all the same type of light, but they're all being used for the same general purpose. I also like to keep those all grouped together. It helps keep things organized and less cluttered and also when you're testing along the way, it helps a lot to be able to turn on and off for groups of lights like this. If we open up the camera's collection, you'll see we have four cameras set up. Close-up, which is this one. Then the medium camera, which is this one. For final output, these are the two cameras that we will be working with. Then I also have two cast cameras set up wide angles from opposite ends of the classroom. Whenever I'm setting up lighting in a set for my own personal workflow, I like to have at least one wide-angle camera setup pulled back within the environment set to a wide-angle. Something around 16-millimeter is typically good. I believe that's what I have this set to, yeah, 16 mil. This helps you get a wider perspective of how the lighting is looking as you're building it up. I'll bounce back and forth between the render camera and this wide-angle camera pretty often just to make sure that the lighting is looking consistent and natural as I'm building it up. If you can get it looking good from this wide angle, your chances on maintaining that quality throughout subsequent shots goes up immensely. I find it as essential part of my workflow and I would highly recommend it as you do your lighting as well. Which close up that camera's collection. Let's go down to the render settings tab. Here, you'll see I have the render samples set to 32. Typically for final output, it would not be this low, but since we're going to be testing to start, so we can iterate quickly, I've set it to 32 and then turn denoise on. Then now if we go down to the output properties, I have the render resolution set to 960 by 540. Again, this is just for testing initially. For final output, we'll typically do a 1,080 resolution and if you're doing a [inaudible] I'll even do 4K. But 960 by 540 works for now. It'll help us to iterate as quickly as possible. If you have a beast of a machine, by all means, feel free to bump that up to 1,280 by 720, but for my purposes and for my use, I'm sticking with 960 by 540. But that goes over the basics of the file. For now, I will go over more detailed aspects in the following videos. I'll see you in the next one. 4. Making the Sunlight: Welcome to the first video where we'll be creating the first light within our scene. We're going to start off here by building up our natural lighting setup. Now, any natural light setup will consist of two types of light. Direct light, which would be your sun or moon, and indirect or ambient light, which would be your sky contribution. In this video, we are going to focus on creating and refining our sunlight. To create a sunlight within Blender, you go Shift A, and you go down to Light, sun, and then you'll see that it gets created at the world origin. Now, you can use this handy Gizmo tool here to manipulate it in 3D space. You can use the arrows to move it, the cubes to scale it, and the rings to rotate it. Alternatively, you can use the G hotkey to move it, the R hotkey to rotate it, or the S hotkey to scale it. I will usually move this light up above my scene so that I can easily see it later if I need to select it and make adjustments to it. I'll also make sure that Use Nodes is turned on for it. This just gives you maximum control over the light properties. Let's delete that light for now. Here we go. Because as you can see, we already have this light in the scene that has been positioned, and rotated into place. The first step that I will take when refining the sunlight is establishing the light direction. To do that, I will turn on the Viewport Shading mode. First of all, I will make sure that I'm at my wide angle perspective camera, and not the render camera. This will just give us a better pulled back, wider perspective of the set and of the scene to ensure that it is looking good overall. Let's activate Viewport Shading mode. There we go, immediate feedback. However, it is taking up this entire editor panel. Let's go Control V and drag over that camera frame to constrain it to the frame. There we go. Now, you could also go Control V and drag over a smaller region if you wanted to test just a smaller region within that frame. But we do want to see that whole frame for this, so let's drag it back over the camera frame. Now, if we go to the output properties and uncheck the render region box, it will go back to the way that it was. Now, to reconstrain to the camera frame, we can just check off that box again. Now, let's go to the Render Properties tab and turn on Denoise. This will just give us a more refined look a little bit quicker. There we go. Now, to rotate it and establish that light direction, what I will do in my perspective view, I will go and start rotating the light on these z-axis by using this blue ring and dragging along it. There we go. Now, we see it update in that viewport to the right. Now, you can also rotate it on the y-axis as well to get that look. There we go. Again, you can use the R hotkey if you'd like, and constrain it to any axis by hitting Z, X, or Y, the corresponding axis hotkey. But I like this rotation, so let's just keep it here. Now, we can move on to refining the light intensity. From there, I would refine the shadows softness and then finish it off with the light color, but I will show you that in a minute. Moving on to the light intensity. Sometimes I will establish that low-end value and then do a render within the render view and catalog that, so I have it to compare back to. Now, first of all, I should say this render panel here, I've created this in a custom way where I've dragged out a new panel by going to the bottom corner of an existing panel, dragging out and then pulling out an image editor like that, and then just searching for render result using this drop-down. There we're go. Then I went to the Image tab to see the slots. If you do render it again and you go View Render or Render image, it will bring up the render image window again. I'm just going to collapse that. This is just to show you guys my process. I have that initial value rendered out here at one. Now, I have that to compare back to. Then what I will do is set a top-end value to start halving down from or stopping down from to use the probably more technically accurate lingo. This is what it looks like at 100. That's what I established my top-end value to be. Now, to determine that, I will just drag up that strength value using my Viewport Shading mode until it starts to break and look unnatural, and the highlights start to go over bright. The shadow areas start to look like they're being overly filled out considering it's one light source contributing to the scene right now being the sunlight, and then I will just set it at that. I determined 100 to be a pretty good top invaluable, not 1,000, 100. Then I started halving down from there. Let's pause that. Now, as I do this, I will always be holding it up against the reference that I've gathered as well to make sure that it is lining up with the direction that we want to be headed in as well, just to make sure that it is looking natural. Then I have to down from 25 or from 50-25 because I thought this just looked a little bit too bright still considering again, it's just that one light source. Now, worth in a bit more of a working range, so I have to down again to 13. I felt like this was better, maybe a little bit dark. But considering again, it is just the sun, I thought this was better. Then I inched it up to 15 and settled at that with the final working value. Then I moved on to setting these shadows softness up. This is what it looks like at the default. To change the shadow softness, you just adjust the angle attribute of the light here. This could work. If you're doing a still image of a very realistic render, maybe an architectural visualization shot or something. But considering this as for animation, if we had a character moving across the scene, the shadows from the blinds here, from the window frames could get distracting so I thought it would be good to soften them up a bit. I did that here. I up that angle value to 1.7. That'll look nice and soft and a little bit more subtle throughout the scene. Just to sell what that effect is doing, I boosted it to six here. I wouldn't use this. This looks too splotchy and unnatural, but it just shows you more clearly what that value is doing. This is it back at 1.7. Then I moved on to refining the color. This is what it looks like with this black body here connected to the color of the Emission node. The artist who created this file had that connected. I just ran with that. I thought it was nice, added some nice warmth to the scene, so I kept that in place. Realistically, it would probably be more of a white light coming in, given the angle that the sunlight is coming in here. But again, we have create a freedom, so why not add some warmth to the scene? Alternatively, you can use the color picker to establish that color. You could probably get it within a similar color range if you just did this, and then brought the saturation down to say 0.2. Bring that strength down to our final value, and it's similar there. But using a black body node is just a quicker way to get to that natural looking result since it's based off with color temperature. If we up this to say 9,000, it'll cool off things. The lower the temperature, the warmer it will get like that. That's more of a sunset color clearly. If we bump that back up to 5,000, make it a little bit more subtle, and then we can run with that for the final working value. Once I did that, now we have the direction, intensity, shadow softness, and the color finished off here to move forward with. I did a few renders on the other angles. I did one from the reverse test angle, the close-up and the medium, and I thought it held up pretty well from all of these angles. Clearly, we want to add more light here to make the character stand out. This is obviously overly moody and dramatic, so we will be building up the lights in the following videos. I will see you in the next one. 5. Making the Ambient Light: In this video, we're going to finish off our natural light setup by building up the indirect or ambient light coming from the sky. As you can see, we're going to pick up where we left off in the last video with just the sunlight active. Now, I've done a few base renders so that we can compare back to them as we progress with this light. I did one from the close-up render camera angle, and then one from the medium, and then one from that wide test cam 01 angle. Stick it up, pulled back perspective of how it's all coming together. Now, you can approach this using a few different methods. The most commonly used method would be to attach an HDRI image to the world light or in any other 3D software, usually a downlight. Then you'd create portal lights to cover the openings of the set as a means to funnel that light information or those light rays into the set, which would result in less noise and typically faster render times. I did quickly test out within this file, and I have tested that before within B Blender as well. However, I felt like I got comparable results using just an area light with an HDRI plugged into it. That portal light, though, I did create it here within the window lights collection. Then I also have the world's setup to work with that portal light. All you'd have to do is make sure this has a strength value and then just turn on the portal light and turn off the area light to try that method out. By all means, feel free to test this out for yourself, should have set this back to zero, so it's not doing anything within this scene. There we go. There's a lot of resources and tutorials out there that go over setting up portal lights within Blender, so by all means, feel free to Google that. I may do a course myself at some point on the various methods that you can use to set up a natural lighting setups within your scene. But for now we're just going to go with the technique that I used here within this class. The second approach, though, there is another one that you could use, which would be to create a plane to act as an emissive card to push light into the scene. You just go "Shift A", create a plane, and then rotate it and move it into place to cover these four windows. The original artist had used this method within his file, so feel free to download that file off of the Blender website and you can kind of break down how he did that for yourself. But just to go forward with the technique I ended up using, I'm just going to turn on the area light. Here it is here. Again, I scaled it up just to cover the four windows. Since the windows are so close together, we just need one light here to cover all four of them and then just make sure that it's facing inward. From there, I plugged this HDRI image into the color. First, I did a test with it at its default values, with the color at one or at zero and the strength at one, and this is what it looked like. I'm just going to turn off the sun. This is the equivalent here in the viewport shading mode, and that's exactly what that looked like down here. Next, what I did was I plugged in that HDRI to the color. That's what that looked like up here and that's what that looked like there. Obviously, it gets quite a bit darker with that plugged in, so we need to definitely increase that strength value. What I did next was determine a top and a value to start having a down from like we did previously. To do that, I just dragged up that strength value here and looked at it within my camera view, and then I just kept dragging it up and increasing its value until it got to the point where I felt like it was overly bright for what we're going for. As I was doing this too, you've got to make sure that you're comparing it against reference, just to be mindful of that, at least, as you're progressing. If we go back to pure ref, looking at these photos, these two would probably be the best to look at when building up this light because they don't have any direct light coming into the scene affecting the overall exposure. There's no sunlight coming in and there's also no practical lights turned on either. Now, unlike this image up here, we have these top ceiling lights turned on. Then this image down here, we also have these lights above them within this room turned on as well, affecting the overall brightness of the room. I would stick with something like this to compare back to and to reference as we start building this light up and just be mindful of these images as we refine the light. Let's go back to Blender. Here we go. Just based off of those reference images, I felt like 1600 was a bit too bright, so I started halving that down, so then I brought it down to 800. Down here, here's, again down in this window, what it looked like at 1600. I'm just going to turn that on for a second. Here's what it looked like at 800, the equivalent to that. This I felt like was more of a working range closer to that reference images that we were looking at. Then just for good measure to see what it would look like, I have that down to 400. It looked like this. This I felt like it was a little bit too dark. I would up it more than this for sure. I settled with 800 as my final value. You might be able to get away with maybe a 700 or 600, but I just ended up working with 800. Then what I did was I desaturated the image overall, just a bit, to remove a little bit of those cool tones. I felt like it was overly blue for what I want to push towards, so what I did was I created this hue saturation value node. You can just go "Shift A" and then color hue saturation or you can just search for it. Then I just dragged it into the color there. The default here, the saturation, again, was one so I will just bring that down to 0.7. There you go. To see the effect that's having as well, you can hit "M" to mute the node, and then M again to activate it. There you go. But I just settled with 0.7 within this scene. I'm just going to pause that. Then I turn the sun on to see how it's all coming together and I thought this is looking quite good. Then I did another test from the reverse camera angle and still hold it up quite well, I thought. Then I did another render from the close-up. Looking good. We're going to get a good indication of that side light coming in from the windows. She's being shaped off quite well from that light. She's popping off in the background pretty well. Then I did another render from the medium. Again, looking good here. Maybe a bit dark in the shadow side, a little bit dramatic. But not too bad for starting point. We are going to be adding the practical lights on top of that so that might feel around a bit too. Now if we compare back to those initial base renders, we can really see the progress that we've made here. This is it with just the sun on and then with the added ambient light looking much better. The close-up, way too dark. Here it is with the ambient light, huge difference. There we go. The medium angle, just the sunlight, and then with the ambient light on, much better. We've made a lot of progress here. This is good for our natural lights. I'm happy with this. You can always go back and tweak it later as you build up the rest of your lights. But I'm happy with this for now. In the next video, we will start building up the practical lights, starting with the ceiling lights. I'll see you in the next one. 6. Making the Ceiling Lights | Pt 1: Making them Glow: In this video, we're going to start building up our practical lights by making our ceiling lamps start to glow. First of all, let's jump over PureRef and look at some reference. As you can see, I've gathered some examples from some films and this photo here as well. Now, in all of these images, really I accept this one. The light sources themselves within the images are extremely bright, if not blowing out. Now that's because if you're exposing for anything outside of the light source itself, the light source itself will then in turn start to get extremely bright, again, if not start to blow out. Here, this is a separate scenario where they are exposing more for the light source itself as the subject is looking up at it, and so we start to see more detail within the light. Then everything around the light is falling into shadow. But in the rest of them, there were more exposed for everything outside of the light source, and so the light source is getting extremely bright. That's going to be very much the same in our scene here. We're going to be exposing just for the classroom and the character as opposed to the light source, so we'll be expecting those ceiling lamps to start glowing very bright. Let's go back to Blender. First of all, to make an object emissive within Blender, for example, if we go Shift A, create a cube. Let's scale it down, hit S and then just drag down, move it up. Let's move it this way a little bit. Now if we apply material to it, go down to material properties, we'll see it doesn't come with the material at first, so just go to New. Then if we just go down here and change the emission color to white. Now let's turn on Viewport Shading. Turn off the overlays for a second. We'll see that it starts to give off light here. If we just make that more noticeable by selecting that cube again, changing it to 10 in the emission strength. There you go. Now you really start to see that effect come across. Now an alternative way to do it, which is how the ceiling lamps were set up. The original artist had set them up this way in the set file. If we just delete this, this is what was done, which created an emission node. It's just a more simplified setup for it. You just plug that emission to the surface. There we go. Set that up to 10 to show up a little more clearly, and there you go, we have a glowing cube. Let's delete that. That again is what was done to turn the overlays on here. That was what was done here for the ceiling lamps. As you can see, this emission notice plugged into the surface, and it's set to two. Now there's also a black body plugged into the color, keeping them a little bit on the warm side at 5,000 for the temperature. I just kept that in there, again, it was a nice way of just keeping some warmth within our scene. You could probably use, alternatively, if we turn on D4 shading here, the color value, and then you could just desaturate that, bring that down. But again, just a quicker way to get to that result is just by keeping this black body plugged in there, so I left that plugged in. Now the next step that I took here was again, I'm just starting with that single ceiling light, and then I'm going to add the rest later. Starting with that and just starting with these base renders to compare back to with just the natural light setup. I did an initial render with the emission value here, left at two, which was the final strength that the artist who made this file was using, so I did a test at two just to compare back to that. Then I tried at one, now at one, I felt like it was getting a little bit too dark and dull on the lights, so I did go back to two. I felt like that was a better value to have it at. I also turned them all on here. Then I did another render just to compare with them all on at one. You can clearly see here they're looking very flat and gray. I just kept it at two here. We are getting a little bit of light contributed to the scene from these light sources now that they are emissive. If we compared this to this, we can clearly see that. That is okay, it's not giving off a ton of light. It is definitely giving off some light, but not a ton of it. I do like to rely predominantly, if I can, on an actual light itself. Later on, we're going to be adding point lights to these. I would like to rely mostly on those to give off the majority of the light into the scene. But we are going to have to settle with a little bit if we want them to glow, so again, since it's not a ton of light, I think this is totally fine. I did another render at the closeup angle here, looks fine, feels a little shadow side a little bit, which is cool, takes away some of the dramatic effect, which I think is good for the direction we're going in. Here it is at the medium, holding up quite well. It looks good. The light itself is at a good level, I think looks great. We compare that to the base renders. There it is without it, there it is with it. Looks good from the wide without it, with it. From the closeup, without it, with it. Looking good; adding some warmth and some of those complementary tones to the scene as we're getting some warmth here on the left side as we cool tones on the right side. Let's run with this. In the next video, we're going to talk about some tips regarding adding the point lights to the ceiling lamps. I'll see you in the next one. 7. Making the Ceiling Lights | Pt 2: Essential Tips: Before we jump into going over the point I had set up for the ceiling lights and the process that I went through in order to determine the final working values for those lights, I just wanted to go over a few essential things to know when developing, creating light setups such as this. The first thing to know is whenever you are positioning any light within a light piece of geometry such as the ceiling labs, you have to make sure that cast shadows is turned off on the object. This is so that the light can pass through that object and affect your scene as you want it to. If it's not turned off the light will be confined to within that object and it won't be able to get out and affect the scene as you'd like it to. In order to do that in Blender, you got to make sure you have the piece of geometry selected. Then you go down to the object properties tab, the orange box icon down here, click that and then you go down to the visibility drop-down ray visibility and then make sure the shadow checkbox is not checked. Now the light will be able to pass through and do what you want it to do? The next thing to know here is just going over the point light itself. First of all, we do want these lights to be pointless because they are omnidirectional lights. They will emit light in all directions, unlike an area light or a spotlight, so these are ideal for these types of lamps. Now going over some of the properties of it, the radius which is just the size of the point light. The larger that is the softer the shadows will be, and the smaller it is, the more hard edge the shadows will be, works the same as an area light. Now to create a point light, you go Shift A and you go to light point. Once you do that, it'll create the light of the world origin now to move it into place, if we hit seven on the Numpad, it'll bring us into the top orthographic view. Now if we hit the Z key, this flyout menu will come up. Alternatively, we can hit the four key or just select wireframe. Now we can move that light into position so that it's centered within that light from above. We just do that here. You can just use the arrows. Alternatively, you can use those shortcuts G, R, and S, G to move it and if you hit Z or X or Y, it will confine it to that axis. We could just go like this, and move it into place as well. Now if we hit three on the Numpad, it'll bring us into the right orthographic view. Now we can move it into place through this view so that it's actually centered within it because before clearly it wasn't, it was on the floor, so that wouldn't work. Now it is where the original point light was there. We can see it in there, there is a little dot. There we go. Now it's centered. Now if we hold Alt or Option on our keyboard and then hit the leftmost button and drag, it'll bring us back to perspective or we can get one on the Numpad. There we go. The next step that I would do here is, you can do one or two things you could start refining via period. It'll focus on that object if you're having troubles painting like I was. Now, you can do one of two things here. You can start refining that light, the intensity of it, the color, etc. Once you have that light refined to a better more established working value. You can then duplicate that light around and then position it into place within the rest of the ceiling lamps. Alternatively, once you've positioned a single light, you can duplicate it around and then link the light data or object data so that the rest of the lights adopt any adjustments that are made down the wire. Let's do it that way. I'll show you how to do that. To duplicate the light, you go Shift D and then you click, and then you can move it. If you don't click and you go Shift D and then move your mouse, it'll just start moving it around right away, so what I do is I go Shift D, click and then I'll move it, I'll start moving it and now we can move it into place. Hit seven again and you can start moving it into the center of that other lamp light. There we go. Now we'll do that until I have enough lights that cover all of the ceiling lamps and they're all centered within them. I'll just delete that for now. Go back to perspective. As you can see, I've already done that or the artist who created the file, actually I should say, has already done that and they are already, all positioned there for us. Look at that. Now what you would do before refining things and starting to iterate and test and do renders as you link the object data, so what you do to do that is you shift select all of them in that liner like this, or you can Control click to select all of them like that, either or. Once you have them all selected, you go Control L in the viewport and then you go down and link object data. Now once you do that, if we bring up another panel here and go to the shader editor, you can see it already is the setup in place and notes setup that the original artist had created for these lights. The value he had as his final working value for the strength was the seven. See them here currently. They've already been linked to to object data. Again, Control L, link object data. Now whenever we change an attribute, for example, if we click this ceiling Light 001 and change the strength to 20, it'll change that on all of the lights that we've linked the object out of for. Now, this also is true for any disconnections or reconnections of any nodes within that setup as well. If we disconnect the blackbody on one, it'll disconnect it on all of them. As extremely helpful and it makes things way more efficient as you're working and testing down the line. That's it for now. In the next video, we'll actually go over the process of refining these lights and getting the look that we want to get before we continue on with the next lights in our scene. I'll see you in the next video. 8. Making the Ceiling Lights | Pt 3: Point Lights: In this video we're going to try to quickly go over this point light setup for these ceiling lamps. Regarding the look and the overall intensity that we want to push them towards the color. First of all, we want to look at our reference to figure out a general direction to heading before we figure out what's a good final value to settle on. We'd go to pure ref. Look at these inside-out images. This provides a good amount of warmth, so something in this range in terms of the warmer tones, I think would be nice. It's got a little bit of cooler colors or tones within shadowy areas on the edge here. Something like that would be pretty good I think to shoot for. This image over here is good too, or it's got these warmer practical lights and then these cooler colors coming in from the window. That's also nice and isn't complimentary good stuff. Now, these live-action frames here, it'd be nice to maintain a bit of this side light that we're seeing, even these movies here. Just to help the character stand out, we can try to get some of that cooler ambient light to come onto the character's face and keep that character, pop it. Let's go back to Blender here. Now as I build it up, I've done these three base renders from where we left off in that last video where we refined the mission of the actual late geometry. Now, we can compare our upcoming renders to these to see the progress that we're making. I did a base render of the white test angle, a close-up, and one of the medium. From there, what I would do is start with the light at a low value such as one, that might not be one maybe a bit higher than that, because as you can see, if we compare to that base medium render is barely any difference at all. I might just turn on the viewport shading mode and if we have this selected, bring it down to one here, which again is like nothing. If we start dragging that up, I might do something more like something around seven or 10 as my base and then start tweaking it from there. But for now, we're going to use one as our base render. At least we know that it's on it's not having much of an effect so we do know that then it doesn't need to be boosted much higher. We just need to find our top-end value to start having a down from, as we did previously in the past lessons. The top-end value that I found worked well for this light here was 100. Also, as I'm doing this, I will do it just using one light. I will hide the rest in the viewport and then render ability, I will turn it off, and then I will refine a single light before turning on the rest of the lights. That's what I've done here now. This is what this render is. It's with a single light that went above her, and with a strength of one. This is it with that single light strength at 100, too bright for sure, especially once we turn the other lights, and then this is it with the light strength half down to 50, still a bit too bright I thought. I have to down again to 25. This is more reasonable, a little bit more and working range. There, I turned all of the point lights on. Just by doing this again in the viewport and the renderability, I turned on and now it's brighter. A lot more warmth overall. Depending on the look you're going for, this may work for me and a look that we've set out to achieve based off of the reference. I just felt like this was too much overall, so I brought the value back down to a more reasonable level, which was seven, and that was the final working value that the artist who made this set had settled on and I found it to be pretty good value as well, so I settled with that here. This is with all of the point lights turned on with their strength at seven. If we compare this medium which is no point lights on at all compared to this one with them all on with the strength at seven, I think it's nice. Do some good things, it's pretty subtle, but I think that's a good thing. The key sometimes is subtlety. So it does a nice job of just introducing some warmth into the sea, and it brightens up and fills things out just a bit. I think it's doing some good stuff for us. This is it with close-up render, that strength still at seven. Again, nice. It's feeling you're out of bed on the screen left side, some warmer tones still maintaining that cool sidelight, so is working quite well. Then I did another render at 25, which was that single light test here that we had before. This is with all of them on now at 25 with a close-up angle. This is just still too bright as I anticipated before, and there's just too much warmth flooding the scene for what we're going for. I went back to seven for the strength. There is this issue that we're seeing here. I find it to be an issue anyways. It's just distracting this shadow under her mouth. It looks like a sole patch or something. The way that it transitions to that shadowing or channel is just unappealing. To fix that, I just looked like what could be causing that something above her for sure because the shadow is under her lip, and it only came about once we increase those lamp lights as well. It's probably not any of this cool light from the screen, because that's the ambient exterior late. It's probably above her and to the screen left of her because that's the closest lamplight. As we see in the perspective view here, there is that lamp light just above her, in front of her, and to the left. What I did in the next render here is I turned off that light, which is this one ceiling lamp for the viewport and the renderability. To track that down, I just clicked it in the viewport and then I hit "Period" in the render, and then that showed me which light that was there, and then I just turned it off. Then I also turned off the point light for it. That gets us this result. We lose some warmth, we lose some brightness. But it's not a big deal. It's still in a pretty good place, I think. We get a strong indication still even more so I would say of that sidelight, which is nice. She stands out even more now. Those cool tones are still showing through and we get a little bit of that warmth up there in the background, which is nice. Now, I tried to take up the strength from 7-14 and I just doubled it up. Just out of curiosity, because you don't know until you try it again. So I tried it at 14. I thought it was a bit too bright here, a bit too much warmth. So then I have that down in between 7 and 14 and brought it down to 10. I thought that was pretty good. This is at seven, this is it at a 10. It's not too bright and there's not really too much warmth, but it is a little bit brighter and there is a little bit of more warmth. I stuck it 10 here, and we're going to go ahead and use 10 as our final working value. I was liking that, but again, use whatever you would like of course, but based off the direction we're headed in, I'm liking 10. Then I did a render a medium angle. Scan it's still nice, pretty subtle, looking good, and then I did one from that wide test angle and it's still holding up quite well. We're going to roll ahead with this. Again, you can't see that top ceiling right here, just above her. But in this case, that is totally fine. We're not going to be seeing that in these final render camera angles anyways. A lot of the time you won't be seeing ceiling and most renders anyways, so it's not a big deal. If you did at any shots in a production scenario or in a personal project, you could just keep that geometry on, and then just turn off the point light. The majority of that light is still cut out and that would probably still fix that shadow we were seeing under her mouth. But again, not a problem in this case. All that is said, I think it's looking good, I'll see you in the next video. 9. Making the Blackboard Light | Pt 1: Making it Glow: In this video, we're going to go over the emissive blackboard light geometry, which is this blackboard lamp geo over here inside the light geo collection, within the set collection. The original value that the artist who made this file had settled on for the strength for this slide was one, and the color is white. There's no black body connected to it and it is white. I'm assuming because these blackboard lights are typically white and they are not pushed either towards the cooler or warmer colors, so why not just keep it white? Makes sense. As for the strength, I actually ended up increasing it to two. I did these initial baseliners as always, with the blackboard lamp turned off. So I had just turned off the eyeballs so it's not visible in the viewport and turn off its renderability. Then I did a render at the medium angle and at the close-up angle with it off. Then I did render the medium and close-up angle with it turned on at one, and then at two. I settled on two and my reason for doing so was because the ceiling lamps also had an emission value of two. The light source and the white value that it will be sitting out within the render will be consistent if we leave it at two rather than, one of them at one and one of them at two. If we just turn on the viewport shading mode here on perspective and we bring the strength value on the blackboard light down to one which already is that, now let's turn off these guys, the overlays. That again, bring it up to two here. You'll see it does make a difference, it does make it brighter here. Yeah, it's giving off a little bit more light but again it's at least consistent with the ceiling lights and it's not giving off a ton of light, so I think it's good to stick with it at this value. We turn that off again, we compare these renders; the medium with it off, with it on at one. It does look like it's on there, which is good and we can compare the close up with it at one, it looks on. For all intensive purposes at the camera angles that we're rendering it, with it being at one, it would be fine to be honest. We could isolate that using the emission pass and a crypto mat and then boost it up if we needed to, but I do think one could work. But it's better to be safe and sorry here. In a production scenario, and you would want it to be consistent and you wouldn't want it to unintended issues where it's like looking doll because you have a camera angle that works close to the chalkboard and the teachers in front of us and then the cameras looking up at it. Then the strength value is at one. It's looking a little flat. You want to play it safe. Although in our scenario, one might work technically in a production scenario or if you were doing a personal project, look it up I added here. You know that it would be to flatten doll if it was at one. Why not keep it consistent and keep it at two? That said, let's keep it at two, roll with that. In the next video, we are going to go over the area light that we're going to be using for the Blackboard light to push a little bit more light down into the scene and it'll act as the primary light source for this blackboard light now that we have the light itself glowing. I'll see you the next one. 10. Making the Blackboard Light | Pt 2: Adding the Area Light: In this video, we're going to finish off the blackboard light. The first thing we need to do is figure out what type of light would we want to use here as our light source to emit light from, to emulate this kind of blackboard light. So just looking at the model, clearly, it's a light that would just admit downwards in one direction, right? So based off of that, it's pretty clear the kind of light we would need to use. It would not be a point light because those emit light omnidirectionally, in all directions. It would not be to sunlight, would not be the spotlight. And it definitely would be the area light. So that is what is already in place there. Just hit period to focus on that. Hit period again to focus on it again and zoom into it a bit. Then to move it around, again just the arrows. Use the cubes to scale it in or S hotkey. And then the X or Y hotkey to isolate that scale in on a specific axis. Then once you've moved that in place, ensure that it is facing downward, as it is here. We can start refining the value of that light. Now, unlike the point lights on the ceiling lamps, we do not need to put this inside the light, like that. We can just leave it just outside of it. Because of just the nature of the model here, we can just inset it just below that geometry. That should be fine. Now to test the intensity. The final value that the artist had who had created this file was 20 for the strength, and I found that to be a good working value. This is it at 20 here for close up and medium. But I did want to just confirm that this was the value that I wanted to use. I would recommend doing that if you are ever handed off a file or using a file that already have any lights in it. Just to confirm that that is the value that you want, especially when you're headed in a specific direction regarding the look. So I did first create a couple base renders to compare to as we go back, just without that area light on at all. And then I did a couple renders again with it at 20 for the medium and close-up. Here, I did a couple base low-end renders. And I found the low-end value with five to be a good value to start at. And to determine that, I just turned on viewport shading here, up in that camera view. Now, let's resume it. Then, this is it at one. Again, one is really low. You can't really tell that it's even on. So I just started to drag it up to the point where you could start to at least notice that the light is doing something. And I found that around three to five was a pretty good range where it would become more visually noticeable. So I just settled with five as the low-end value. And then I had to find the high-end value to start halving a down from, right? So I did the same thing there that we've done up until this point. So re-initiate that. And then I just dragged up the strength to the point where it looked like it was just too bright for the scene that we're working in and a little bit unnatural for this type of light. So I settled with 100 as the final topping value to start halving down from. Pause that. This is it here. It's just too bright. It's a little bit distracting. It's taking your focus away a bit from the character. So definitely wanted that darker. So I halved that down to 50. So 100, 50. Definitely better. Still a bit too bright, so I halved it down again to 25. This is better. A little more workable, I find. But then I just halved it down again to 12, just to see what it would look like. Here, it's a little bit too dark, I found. You just don't really notice the light doing anything enough. So I did want it higher than 12, but maybe not quite as bright as 25. So that's how I figured out that 20. It's probably a good value here to keep it at. Brighter than 12. Not quite as bright as 25. There, it's good. It's not distracting, it keeps it subtle, and it shows that that light is doing something at least. So I kept it at that. But that's it for this light. In the next video, we will move on to the next practical light. So I'll see you in the next one. 11. Making the Hallway Light: In this video, we're going to go over the hallway, or corridor and light. Because as you can see where we left off last time, that hallway is still looking pretty dark. That is a result of the blocker here that I had to put in place because there are these openings are some reason in the hallway which otherwise allow the light to just flood in through the back. When I was testing out the world ambient light setup. Either way, whether you're using a world to bring an ambient light or this area light, you're still going to want to fill in this hallway with some light. That's why this slide is here. Now the original artist again had placed this light there, and now we just had two test and refine the value of it to confirm that it is the right intensity, and color. The first thing, that I would do here again, I set up these two base cameras, did a render the media, and close-up camera angle. Again, since these lights that we've been testing recently, we left the blackboard light, and the hallway light. They're more isolated, and constrained to a smaller space within the set. It's unnecessary with these lights to do those wider camera angle renders, using those tests cameras because they're not going to affect the whole set by any means, not like the natural lights with the sunlight or the ambient light. I just did a couple of these to compare back to. Then I did a render with the values of the artist who made this headed to finish it off. For some reason you use nodes was not turned on. I typically turn on these nodes pretty much all the time for any light in Blender. It gives you more control over what you're doing with the lights. But for this light, for some reason it was just not turned on. Maybe because it's just in the hallway, and a background light that you don't really see much of. But either way it wasn't on, it was set to 60 watts for the strength of the power. Use nodes with all this is what that looks like. Then I turned to use nodes on, and I did a render with a strength on at one, and it's set to white, and it looked at the exact same. Then I tried connecting a black body to it with the temperature of 5000, like this, and the strengths still at one. Just to keep it consistent with those ceiling lights. Because it is a point light, and omnidirectional light. It is similar to those lights. Just to mimic that. I tried it with a black body at 5,000, for some reason it was looking a lot warmer in here, and it was kind of distracting. That may be due to the surfacing within that hallway. I'm not sure, but either way it was very distracting. I unhooked that black body and kept it out white. Like so. Then I cut the strength down in half to 0.5, started having that again just to see what that would look like in there. Because I just felt like it was a little bit maybe too bright in their taking your attention away from the center of the frame. I tried to having it, but that just seems too dark, a little bit unnatural for hallway lighting outside of a classroom. A little bit spooky side, so I tried copying that and more again, I've found the middle ground between 0.51 and try 0.75. I felt that to be a better value, a little more realistic. It's not too bright, but it's also not too dark, and it just provides enough light for that hallway. That's kind of what I settled with. Their kept the color at White, and brought that strength down to 0.5. That's that for that light. In the next video, we're going to talk about some character lighting. I'll see you in the next work. 12. Adding Character Lighting | Pt 1: Rim Light: Here we're going to start building up some character lighting onto the character. We're going start with the rim lights that I've created here. Now, the first thing to talk about is whenever you're thinking about character lighting in a shot, you want to assess the light geography within the scene, within the shot. That is the practical or physical lighting placement within the set that you can use as motivating light sources to sell any rim light or fill lights or any extra lights that you can add to further influence some light onto the character to push the primary or key lighting bit further as well. When you're looking at the frame, this doesn't only apply to light sources that you can see visually within the frame. You can also use any kind of light source that you see a visual indication of within the shot as well. For example, this is side light that's lighting up the character from the ambient exterior light. It's pretty clearly, it seems like she isn't getting some light coming onto her from screen light. From a light source being windows that we know obviously. In this case, you could add a spotlight or an area light to isolate that light to the character and further strengthen that side lighting on the character while keeping the set lighting the background the same as it is. Alternatively, if she was closer to the hallway over here and if you go to the medium shot, maybe there was another shot that was maybe a close-up with her standing next to the hallway, the door was opened. If that hallway light wasn't lighting her up enough, we could use that at least as a motivating light source to create another light, to push some extra fill light onto her. Or maybe if she was on that side of the room, you could maybe even use it as more of a key light as well. But going back here, building up the rim light, I used a spotlight for this rim light. It's a good way in blender to isolate light onto a specific area and in this case onto the character. Then I just opened up the spotlight size or the cone angle of that spotlight, turns out to be 58. I'm just going to drag it up, 58.6. Then I just dragged up the blend all the way, so you don't see any hard lying transition from the spotlight cone within the spotlight to the outside of that spotlight? Basically the falloff of the light. Then what I did after that was that I started to refine that intensity the same way that we always do it. I turned on a view-port shading, then go back to the close-up camera. Then I would just drag up that value I find that top-end value again. I found a good top-end value here was 40. I definitely wouldn't want it brighter than that. As you'll see here, this is what it looks like at 40. That is just too bright. She's not standing near a light source. Visually, just doesn't look like she's standing close enough to any light source for it to be that bright. She's also getting that really strong subsurface coming through on her ear, which looks weird since there is no light visually like right behind her. Then I have that down to 20, still seem too bright. Half it down to ten and then half that down to five, a little better now. Then I have to down again for good measure to 2.5 there and I thought that was good, so I ran with that. It just looks subtle enough. We're not seeing any of that extreme subsurface coming through. I think it looks like a good, well-balanced value for that rim light. It's making her pop. If we compare it to the one without any character lighting, she is popping pretty well here, but it still looks like a believable amount of light that's coming onto her. That could again be motivated by that blackboard light or maybe one of the ceiling lamp, so we don't see what we know is there as well. Here it is at the medium-angle shot. Again, this is a good shot to show with it because we see that ceiling lamp. Visually tells the person looking at the shot that maybe there's another one over here because you see that indication of there being a light up here, any top-down lighting could potentially come from an off-camera light that we just don't see. Or could just be again from the blackboard light. Here it is from the wide test angle. Because it's a spotlight again, you don't see it affecting any area of side of the character like the set or anything. If it was an area light, you'd see it spilling onto the ground probably and stuff. Spotlight is a pretty good job of isolating it while keeping a consistent look throughout the set. So if there was any wider angle shots or shots where you can see the ground, the spotlight could potentially still hold up, so it's a good safe light to use for any isolated lighting. Also a good point to go over here is if you're using a spotlight, you can turn on the show cone checkbox, and then you can see the area that is covering more precisely, which is definitely helpful, and I've used myself a number of times. There we go though, that is the rim light that we have set up. In the next video, we're going to go over the top life. I'll see you there. 13. Adding Character Lighting | Pt 2: Top Light: Here we're going to go over the character top lighting here that I've set up. First of all, I just want to say that you don't necessarily need this lighting like all of the shots by any means if it calls for it and if there's like an influencing light source around her, then by all means you can test it out and see if it works to help the character stand out or help to tell a story in any way. But it's not always needed, sometimes the practical and natural lights or even enough by themselves. But that said, let's jump into this top light so I can show you my approach if I were to create a light such as this in a scene. The light that I used here was clearly an area light. I've squared it off and positioned it above her head. I've also moved it a little bit in front of her just to make sure that some of that light picks up on her cheek and on her forehead and just helps to shape or out a bit. If were moved back more, I probably just hit the top side of her head and it might start to shadow or face more or you might even get some more shadows of her eyes or under her nose which we don't really want in this case. You also have to be mindful of the size of the area light if it's too small, you might start to get more hard-edged shadows coming down onto the character. That's why I have sized up a little bit bigger here to ensure that we get some soft shadows as if it were, again like a softbox. Then the next thing that we need to do once it's positioned, again, is just refine that intensity to get into the ideal place. As we progress forward, I do want to try to retain some of that stronger side lighting. Well, at the same time, shaping her off a bit and helping her to just pop out of the frame a little bit more apart from the background. To do that again, we've got to try to find that top-end value, and here I've done that base render to compare back too, from where we left off last time with that rim light at 2.5. If we do that, this is it here, this is where we left off last time. Then, now the first thing we got to do here is to find that top-end value to start having a down from or stopping it down from to find that ideal range to work within. The ideal top and value that I found when testing here again, just by doing what we would typically do, activate the Viewport Shading mode and I just drag up the strength value. I felt eight was a pretty good top-end value to start having down from. I just set it at that and inserted cutting it in half. Obviously, I wouldn't really want it any brighter than this by any means is already super bright. This is what that looks like right here. Again, super-bright probably would've never really have this bright. Again, it depends on the situation if the story calls for it, you very well may want that top lighting to be brighter if you're highlighting a specific item or character that needs to stand out within that scene. The story may call for it, but in this case, we want to be more natural and we want to maintain that sidelight. We just wanted to help sheep around a little bit and keep it subtle. I have to down to four here. That's still too bright I found for what we're going for half that down again to two from four. Still a bit too bright over on her forehead, still a little bit too flat overall I find and we're losing some of that sidelight, so I have that down to one. This is better, so she's standing up more of this might be a good value. We can potentially go with this, but I have to down for good measure 2.5 here and I liked this more. It was a little bit more subtle for my liking. We get a little bit more of that side leg back. It's darkening the screen left side of her face a little bit more as we turn it down. She's still getting some of those highlights on her hair there and she's still being shaped out pretty nicely overall. If we compare this to how it was before, it's pretty good. I like it. I like what it's doing here. Either or I really think could work. This could also work. Just looks a little bit more natural with just that simple look to it where it's just that sidelight that she's being lit by, which I do like, but since we are tweaking of this top plate and we have it in here. We might as well roll with it and it is helping to shape or out and helping her pop a little bit. Let's keep rolling with that. Then I did another render at the medium just to make sure that it is working from this angle as well and it is she is popping if we compare to the old render from that medium angle without it. It is doing some good stuff for us to make it pop shaping around like what it's doing. As you'll see though too we are also getting some light showing up here over on this desk. It's just the area lights spilling off around her. It's got a big deal though, it's not really killing the scene by any means and it's barely noticeable so that's totally fine. If we go to the next one, I did another render at that test angle, that wide-angle just to see again what it's doing around her which it's always good again, like I've said before, to do renders as you're adjusting things from this wide-angle just to see how overall things are being affected. Before this is with it off, this is with it on. You see some light hits showing up around in the set. Not a big deal though, it doesn't look disjointed by any means because the light is further away from the wall, because of the size of it, you don't really see that transition area up on the wall here even so it totally looks fine. We can totally use this. Let's go forward with this. Set the strength to 0.5 and in the next video, we're going to go over the I highlight. I'll see you there. 14. Adding Character Lighting | Pt 3: Eye Highlight: In this video, we're going to go over the eye highlights light. To start off, I again did a base render of this close-up camera angle, so that I could have something to compare to. As you can see, she's looking a little bit dead inside. You can't see any reflections on her eyes. She looks a little bit empty in there, so just getting a single highlight could help a decent amount at least. To do that, we can create an eye highlight light, just add some depth to her eyes. To do that, what we do here is, here's the light that I've created, the eye highlight light, let's turn it on. As you can see, it's just a point light. You are going to do that, go Shift A go to light point, and then there we go. What we do is we move it into place, which is just right in front of her face, between her eyes. Then you can just keep the color white, that's fine. Then the two attributes, you're going to be adjusting the most refine this light is the radius and the strength. Again, I'll turn on use nodes as I typically do for any light, just in case you want to adjust it more later to keep things consistent. From that point on, what I would do here, I'm looking through my close-up camera view in this panel, as just turn on viewport shading. Then to refine the position and the size of it, what you can do here, is drag up the strength, like that. Maybe just put it at two, it's probably good. As it resolves we'll zoom in a little bit on it. To do that as well as a pointer, I don't think I've mentioned this yet, if you hit "N" and you go to the View tab, you're going to make sure that under View Lock, make sure the camera to view checkbox is not checked. If it is checked off, it'll lock the camera to your view. Instead, whenever you move around or zoom in, it'll zoom the camera in, and when you pan around holding Alt or Option, it'll carry a camera with it, which you don't always want here. I just turn that off here. If we just hit "N" to close that up and we zoom in, we'll see the highlight on her face here, on her eyes. Again, you really want to keep this strength value to low value because you don't really want this light to be affecting her face. The primary use of this slide is just to get that highlight on her eyes. We don't really want it to be affecting her face much at all. But again, this is just a good way of testing it to see the position of it and to refine the size of the light. I felt like 0.02 was a good size for it. But this is at 0.8, so I put 0.8 here. You see, it's not very strong against just so that it wouldn't affect her face. But you do see that it is larger within her eye there and there. You would have to have the strength to see it more at that size. But I felt like 0.02 was a good size. If we change that here, we go 0.08. That'll resolve for a second. We'll see that it does get substantially bigger. I'm not really fan of this look though. Yeah, it's a bit distracting to me. If you like it, by all means go for it. You can use that radius right there, 0.08. But I'm going to go with 0.02. It's a bit more subtle. There we go. Then the strength ahead, again, pretty low, 0.04. We let it resolve. We will start to see it again. It is subtle, but it is there. We can certainly see it show up there and there, and here's that render with it on there. Here it is off, and then here it is on. It just adds a little bit of depth to her eyes there, liven things up a bit. It is subtle, but it is supposed to be subtle. We don't really want it to be distracting. It's just a fake highlight as a word to add some depth. I think that works as is there, and we could try, say you are putting into 0.1, but you do really want to be careful with this again because you don't want to add too much light to her face otherwise. Feel free to experiment with that and test increasing the strength of it. But I'm just going to roll with it adds evaluate I had it at which 0.04, just to keep it subtle. That is the eye highlights. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward, not much to it. In the next video, we're going to go over adding volume metrics to a scene such as this. Now typically you could add it and you'll probably would add it before doing any character lighting, but that would've otherwise slowed this process down, and I wanted to keep this going as fast as possible. We'll add the volume metrics in the next section here. I will see you in the next video. 15. Adding Volumetrics | Pt. 1: Creating Atmosphere: In this one we are going to go over the volumetrics for the scene. In Blender, there's a couple of methods to set up volumetrics. You can go to the world in the shader editor. Then you would just go Shift A, search for a volume scatter node. Then you can just plug that into the volume input on the world output. Then you would just adjust the density here. I don't typically just the anisotropy, that'll just change the look of the volumetrics depending on the light direction coming into it, but I'll just leave that usually at zero there. I wouldn't worry about that. The other method is the one that I used here for this class. It's also the method that I would typically use myself. That method is by creating a volume box. To do that, you just go Shift A here, create a cube. Hit S to scale it up, hit S again and then X or Z to scale it down on that axis and then hit S and then Y to scale it out. You you scale it and move it into place until it's confined as much as possible to the bounds of the set. This is just to maintain efficiency and to ensure that you're not really rendering any volumetric outside of where you're going to be seeing it. Once I have that scaled up and positioned, I will also make sure that it is named properly there. Then I will go down to the Object Properties tab, down to viewport visibility or the viewport display dropdown. Then I will make sure the display as dropdown here is set to wire rather than textured. If it's set it to texture, it'll just be solid. Having been set to wire just makes it easier to work here within the viewport quite clearer. My blender is almost freezing. Oh, it didn't. Amazing. Once we have that position though and setup, we want to refine that density of the volume scatter for this volume box. To do that, I use pretty much the same method that we use for setting up the lights. I'll find a top end value for the density to start halving it down from. To do that again, I'll just go turn on viewport shading. Then I'll just drag up the density value here until it breaks and starts to look like it's clearly too much. You wouldn't want to go too far beyond that breaking point because then you'll just be halving it down for far too long. I settle on 0.2 as that top end value to start halving from, it looks clearly like it's too much here, but it shouldn't take us too long to narrow down that ideal value either. That's what I settled on there for the top end. I'm just going to go pause that. Then I also did these four base renders to compare to again. The two from the Y test camera angles and then one from the medium and one from the close-up camera. Then here it is with the volume box set to 0.2 and the density here. This is where was set to there 0.2. Clearly, it looks like it's too much, like the room is on fire. That's not going to work. Half it down to 0.1 there. This is what it looks like. Clearly too much again, and then half that down to 0.05. This is what it looks like. There's still too much. We're making progress, but it's still too much. Half that down to 0.025 from 0.05 and it's getting better. But it's still a bit too much. If we compare back to the original without it and with it's still definitely too much. Half that down to 0.015 and that's what that looks like. That's more of a working range, but still I found that it was a bit too much. I half that down again for good measure to 0.008. There we go. That's more subtle. It's there, creating some atmosphere, but it's not too much. I settled with it there. The one thing that I felt like it was lacking is, I wanted to see a stronger sense of those sun rays coming through the windows. To do that, I just took our original sunlight and then went Shift D to duplicate it and then made sure I clicked, otherwise, again, if you don't and you go Shift D and then move your mouse, you'll accidentally move it. I went Shift D, clicked, intentionally moved it over a bit just so there's some separation of it in the viewport and you can tell it apart from the original sun and more easily select it if you need to within here. Let's delete that. I'll turn on the one I created previously. There it is, as you can see. There's the original. Once you have that set up, what you need to do is, well, first of all, name it properly. You can see that it was just affecting the volumetrics as I did here. Then you'll want to make it so that it will only affect the volumetrics. To do that you go into the object properties for the light, go down to re-visibility. Then make sure the volume scatter attribute is the only one with its checkbox checked off there. Now when you adjust its strength, it'll only adjust how much it is contributing to those volumetrics. The top end value that I settled on, again, by using the same method of dragging up that strength in the viewport , for that was 60. Then I started halving down from there. There it is 60, already looking pretty good if we look at it without anything, that's 60, it could work. It's looking a little splotchy because the quality is lower. If we have more sampling maybe at a higher resolution would probably look better. Half it down to 30 though just to make it more subtle. That's looking pretty good. Half it down again just to see how it would look at 15. Here, I felt like it made it too subtle, you don't really notice it enough anymore. Then I did up and back up to 30, what it was here. Then I did renders of the close-up and medium camera to see how it was looking. Now I thought it was still a little bit too dense. Looking here, a little bit too smoky. I brought the overall density of that volume box at this point, I brought it down to 0.005. What it was here was 0.008. Working with this added volume sunlight. I brought it down a little bit more, almost in half, not quite to 0.005. Then this is how that was looking. I just brought everything overall down a bit and just made it a bit more subtle and less smoky looking. Then what I did there was, because you still couldn't see those sunrise very clearly from this camera angle, was I opt that volume sun intensity backup to the original 60 value that I started with. It won't have as much of effect as it did here because the overall density of the volume scatter is now lower. But it is still working here. It's working better than it was before. If we look at that and compare it to the medium without any volumetrics, I think it is looking better. It's looking nice. It's pushing the objects in the background further away and creating some nice depth. That's what the volumetrics will do, any objects closer to the camera will have more contrast as opposed to the objects further away. Here it is with a close-up, without it, with it, very subtle, especially in that camera angle. But I think it is working nicely for what we're using it for. Here it is in the wide, without it and with it. It is still holding up quite nicely from all the camera angles, adding a bit of atmosphere and creating some separation. That is the volumetric setup for this file. I'm going to go over a few more things regarding volumetrics in the next video, so I will see you there. 16. Adding Volumetrics | Pt. 2: Refine and Isolate: Here we're just going to touch on something else regarding the volumetrics and the approach that you may want to use in your scenes as you set them up. Up until now, the volumetrics, they've been affected by all of the lights within the scene. Now, to more clearly see that I'm just going to go over here. This is the pass drop-down menu. As you can see, there's all these render passes that are being output and rendered. To do that, I went over to the view layer properties and then just check them off here under the light drop-down. We'll go over that more in the comp and final output sections. But if I just switch this over to the volume direct pass, and we can see that, here we can clearly see all of the lights have been affecting the volumetrics up until now based off of this and this is the latest render I did. Here it is before with all of the lights affecting, again, the volumetrics and this is it with the updated render. How I did it is to isolate the sunlight, was I went to all of the lights here and then I went to the object properties and turned off volume scatter for the light visibility. I did that for all of them, blackboard light, window light, all of the ceiling point lights here. Then I also did it as well for the emissive geometry for the ceiling lamps. Now it doesn't seem like that actually did while I was hoping it would do. It seems like those are still contributing some to the volumetrics from that emissive attribute. But it is pretty subtle, you don't really notice that much, especially compared to that sunlight coming in. It shouldn't be much of an issue if you did bring this pass into comp to adjust it. But this does generally give us that isolated sun ray volumetrics here. Now what you could do is bring that in to comp and then just gain it up or down to increase or decrease the effect of those sun rays without globally increasing any volumetrics throughout the entire scene here. That's a good way to isolate it off like this. But now if it's a steel frame, you could probably just roll with what we had before and then just try to [inaudible] section if the camera is still or if you're just dealing with a single image. But if it's ever a moving camera or something, that would be more difficult, especially if you're dealing with it across multiple shots. But I just wanted to touch on that just so you're aware of the full control that you can have over the volumetrics within the scene. But that's it for this one. In the next video we'll be going over the settings for final output here. I'll see you there. 17. Final Lighting Adjustments: In this video, I just want to go over some final adjustments I decided to make to the final renders. Now's a good time, I find, to assess where the final image is at and see if there's anything you'd like to change about it. What I did here was I, again, did these base renders to compare back to. I did one from the medium and close-up camera angle, and then the first thing that I noticed was I just wanted the sun to be a little bit brighter. It's looked a little bit too dim for my liking, either or could work, but I just wanted it to be a little bit brighter. I increased the sun up to 40 from 15, and I like that a little bit more. Then after that, I wanted to add some more cool tones throughout the image. I just did that by increasing the saturation of the ambient light that we have set up right here, I just increase the saturation value here from 0.7 to 0.8. I did try 0.9 as well, but I felt 0.8 was a little bit more subtle. The next thing I did was I warmed up the ceiling lights a little bit more. I did that on the point lights. I just brought the color temperature down to 4500 from 5000, just to add a little bit more warmth into the scene. Then here it is from the close-up angle. We're getting a little bit more complementary color contrast going on here because we've increased the saturation of that blue or ambient light. Then we've also warmed up those ceiling lights as well. If we look at the before and after of the close-up, you'll see we get a little more bounce light coming up onto the character from increasing the intensity of the sunlight, and a little bit more warmth as well, which could come from the sun or perhaps a little bit from the ceiling lights as well. Here's the before and after of the medium. We see more of a difference here because we can see that direct sunlight in the frame. This looks like that, but I'm liking where it is at so far. Next, I decided to add a screen left side or rim light. This would be influenced by the ceiling lights above her or perhaps a little bit from the hallway light as well. Primarily from those ceiling lights, as we can see, the ceiling light within the medium shot here. This could be a good selling point for having that light on her. I just started halving down that intensity as we would typically do the top end, I found 100 to be a good value, and then I have to down to 50, 25, 13, six, and settled on that for the time being. I also have the color temperature at 4500 to match those ceiling lights. Then I just moved it up a little bit so that it was coming up and down on her some more, and then I moved it again slightly in front of her, and then I brought that strength value down to three and then to two to just to make it more subtle. To create that light, I just selected that rim light and then duplicated it, shift D clicked, moved it, and rotated it over, and this is it over here. The next thing I did is I created a key kick light. I created that the same way as I did that screen left side rim light. I just selected that rim light that we had already created in the previous lesson video, duplicated it, and then I moved it over and rotated it, and this is it here. Also, it turned on show cones that I could easily see where it was lighting just to make sure that it was on her. I liked what it was doing here. I settled with the strength of 40 for it. I also plugged in the hue saturation value node and the HDRI that we were using for the ambient window light. What I did there was I just selected that light, drag selected them, Command C copied it, and then duplicated light here. I just Command V pasted it in here and then connected this into the emission, and then we're good to go. Now the color for the light will be consistent with that motivating light source. I also made sure to name them accordingly, so we get the Key Kick, Key Character, Rim, Screenwriter, and then Screen Left as well. Then I did a render from the medium to show what that looks like with everything pulled together. If we just compare that with the original one, there it is. We are getting a little bit of light spilling off onto some of these objects here like the desk, this desk over here, from those character lights. They're not a big deal though. It's very subtle, and it's not too noticeable to any degree. Overall, I do like what it's doing though we get a little bit more noticeable Volumetric too, in the background, which I don't mind. The light sources that we've created for her, I think they look totally fine. They look even more believable here. Well, maybe not more, but they do still look believable because we have these light sources around her that act as motivating light sources. I think this works. In the next video, we will talk about preparing the file for final output before we comp it together. 18. Setting Up for Final Output: In this video, we're going to go over the render settings for final output before we comment. Here, you can see that I've done a couple of renders here. Actually, I'm just going to rename these, close-up so it's more clear as to what they are, medium. They're both rendered at 1080 with 256 samples from the 32 that we were using when testing. To change these samples, I just went to the Render Settings here of the Camera tab icon and then changed these samples here, the render samples up to 256 from 32. Then all I did beyond that was change the resolution from 960 by 540 to 1920 by 1080. Back to the Render Settings here. For the light paths, this stuff you might change sometimes, depending on what you're doing for testing or for final production output. Here, I just left them as is for the testing setting, having the overall samples at 32 and the resolution in 1960 by 540, I was good enough with output fast enough renders, so I just left those as is for testing and for final. Then beyond that, I had also set up these render passes, which I showed previously here, which we can see in this drop-down menu, which we will composite together when we do the next portion of the class. To turn all these passes on there, I just went to the View Layer Properties tab and then I turned on the Z depth, the mist. The D as in data, as well as all of these light passes. Now we won't always use all of these, sometimes you won't even maybe use any of them. But I find it is better to have them turned on at least because when you have them there, they're accessible if you do decide to adjust anything after you've rendered the image and then you don't need to re-render it for anything. Since we've gone over that, the next step would be to go to your actual render window here, and then go to Image, Save As, and pick a directory. Here, I'm saving them to a renders directory in the project folder and then you just go to File, Format, and make sure this is set to OpenEXR multi-layer so that it outputs the passes that we've set it to render out along with it and then you just name it whatever you want. Here I've named it the close up, Camera 1 close and the medium Camera 2, medium. I've just saved them out and then we'll go onto the comp section after and I'll show you how to assemble all the passes and make some adjustments in comp before opening it from the comp file. See you in the next one. 19. Composting | Pt. 1: File Overview: Welcome to the compositing portion of the class. We're going to composite this thing together. This portion of the class is split up in two parts. In this first section of the compositing lesson, we are going to go over just how to achieve this compositing setup and then in the next section, we're going to go over how to create some of the more precise adjustments that I've made here to our final images. To start off here, how do you get this compositing workspace available to you? Well, what you can do here is if you have another layer here within Blender, then you can just click this "Compositing" button, and then it'll put you into compositing mode. Another way to do it, if you want to do it in a custom way is you can pull up panels, so if you just bring the mouse to the bottom-left corner of a panel, it'll pull out a new panel. If you have it set to something else, such as the UV Editor, you can just switch it over to the compositor [inaudible]. Now if you can't create nodes or you can't see any nodes here, you just check off Use Nodes and then to create them, you should do Shift A and search for it or create one from these fly-out menus. Let's merge that back over. Right-click on the divider, join areas. There we go. Now to get the Image Editor again, you can just drag it out from the corner, and go up to the Editor Type button, and then select Image Editor. Then now to make sure that you're viewing it from the Viewer Node, if it's not already, select this drop-down button in this top center and then select "Viewer Node." If they don't have that option available, make sure you have one in your scene or your compositing editor. To do that again, just create one. You can search for it, viewer, and then there it is there, create it, hit "Enter." Then what you do, you can just manually drag any node within your node structure here into it and then it'll then preview that within your Image Editor as it did there. I'm just going to merge that back over. Another way to preview these is if you hold Control Shift left-click, it'll preview any node that you click on at that point within your comp tree, like so. Another way to work within the compositor is if we join this backup like that. If we hit the "Backdrop" button, your render will appear here. Now if you middle mouse, pan around, this is how you move your comp tree around within this view. If you just middle mouse hold that and pan around, it'll do that. If you hold Alt and Option and middle mouse button, drag, it'll move your render around. If you middle mouse, scroll forward or backward, it'll zoom in and out of your comp tree. If you hold or press V, it'll zoom out of your render. If you hold Alt and Option and press P, it'll zoom into it. If you hold Control and hold the middle mouse button and then move your mouse left and right, it'll zoom in to your comp tree or out as well. I'll typically just use the scroll wheel though as that is faster. I'm going to undo that as I typically work with two panels like this, and then go back to the Image Editor. For me this is just a little bit more functional as you don't have to continue panning around to make sure that your node tree or comp tree isn't overlapping your render. The next thing you touch on here is the renders themselves, so I just dragged it in here. You can just drag in your render from your Finder window or Explorer window and it'll just bring it into Compositor Editor like this. You can also go Shift A and search for image and it'll create the image node and then you can load it into that. Alternatively, you go input and there it is. Now we will see all of the passes within the image node here that we specified for it to render out as outlined briefly in the last video. Again, to do that, you just go over to the View Layer properties and then you'll see them all there as well. They're not checked off here because we only render this out from that node file as well the comp file, so we don't need to have these checked off here. If you don't see them as they are here, your renderer maybe set to EV, so just make sure it is set to Cycles. In order to preview these passes again, you just Control Shift, left-click, and then it'll preview those passes. Now, you'll see this complicated setup here. I'll go over this more in the next video. This is just breaking apart these passes and then recombining them to equal these combined pass. This makes it so you can make micro adjustments to any passes here if needed. I also have a render that I put in here. Now this render I saved out separately and within this, I made a new light file, and within that I just made it so that the sunlight is the only light affecting volumetrics as we've went over in that second volumetrics video. This is just a way to have a little bit more control over the volumetrics and the look of them within the final render and I'll go over that more in the next portion of this lesson. But that is it for now. I will see you in the next video where I'll go over this comp set up a little bit more in depth. I'll see you there. 20. Composting | Pt. 2: Applying Adjustments: In this video we're just going to go over the adjustments that I made to these final renders here in the CAM. First of all, what I did was I added a bit of a glow or a glare effect to this light in the top of the frame, and then I have also increased the intensity of some of the sun rays coming in on-screen white. That fix is not noticeable here, we will go over that and do that in a minute. First of all just to go over these crazy node-setups over here. This is just me breaking apart the render after outputting the multilayer EXR with the render passes that we specified to output in the previous lesson. What I'm doing here is I'm breaking apart these passes and then recombining them here. Now if we look at the denoise result of those passes broken apart and recombined, it should look the same as this final combined pass, or beauty pass here that we output from the light file. It'll take a second to load., we're working at tiny resolutions, so it's going to take a second depending on how fast your computer is. But I believe it's loaded now and it looks the exact same and that's what we want. Here, I just broke them apart using a couple of mixed nodes. You basically add the indirect and direct passes for these three primary passes, the diffused glossium transmission together, and then you multiply over the color pass for it, which for the diffused color looks like this and the indirect, direct. So again, you add them and then multiply the color over top, and that's what I got. I did that for the diffuse again, the glossy and the transmission and then I added those together. Here's the diffuse, diffuse with glossy, with transmission, with emissive, and then with the volume. I'm just having these here available to you, and it's just good in case you want to make any micro or sub adjustments down the line, so they don't have to go in and re-render anything. If you want to adjust the specularity on even a specific object, you can do that. That's why I like to do things like this, it gives me more control over the final image. I will typically put the image in this way and then recombine it together like this. Now you don't always need to do this, sometimes you're combining result will be good enough, in a perfect world. Then what you can do there, maybe if you just need to make a volumetrics adjustment, you can help with that pass. Have your main initial light pass come out, not denoised, then you can subtract the volume and add it back on top. But that's all I want to touch on for that. Let's go into the adjustments we made here. All we really did was make a volume change with some lens effects so let's do that. Now, as you can see, the volume indirect is black, volume direct is the only pass here where we have any visible volumetrics. In this one, I did just go with just the render result that we went over in that second volumetrics video in that lesson where for the rest of the lights in the scene, I turned off their volume scatter for the array visibility and I only added on for the sunlight. If we have that combined here, this is what that looks like, a little noisy because it's not been denoised yet. Let's look at it from the denoise result, and then if we want to increase the noticeability of those summaries, all we have to do here is increase the factor above one. This might not be the technically correct, "way of doing it", but it will get you the result that you're looking for. You can also create a color balance, if you just go shift data search, color balance, arrow down to color balance. Move that over that pipe and plug it in. Now if we just change this to ASC power slope for a standard color adjustment here, we can alternatively use that. If we set that back to one, and then take the slope and then up the value from here to say five, just to make it noticeable. It'll have the same general effect here, just using a color balance instead. Now if we do this, we can also change the color of the volumetrics, if we wanted to that is. It's taking a second for it to load, should hopefully load up in a second. There we go. We can't do that, if we want to do that, maybe you want to push it a little bit warmer, it's up to you. But I was just going to push it back down to white. Now, if we went with the original volumetric setup where all of the lights were affecting the volumetrics, which would be totally fine and workable as well. We could use that to get an overall sense of atmosphere and the scene. Then what we could do to make the sunrise stand out more is we could create a rodo shape just by going to shift A to make a mask, like this. Then what you do is go up into the mask mode, so make sure this is set to mask and then just go new. Then from here, you would just create the shapes. So you just to go hold control and then click the general area that the sun's coming in. Make that general shape of the rays. Click around until you get the shape. Hold alt option and then C to close it. Then what you will get if you go to the mask node and select that mask node, then control shift, click it. That's what it looks like. A little too hard-edged, so what we're going to do is create a blur node, and then set that up to say four or say 300. See what that looks like? There you go. Then what you would do then is plug that into the factor, the mask input as it were. To make that more noticeable, to show you what this mask is doing, I'm just going to select these points and move them down. So hit the G key here and then hit "B" to drag-select, and then hit the G key again to move them down. I'm just going to wait for it to update, taking a second here it seems like because it's 1,080. I should be able to hit the X here. There we go. Now if we hit the X here, it'll make this outline of the mask go away, so it's easier to see what's going on. Now if we up the value here to say 10 or let's say 20, just to push it to the extreme. Now we'll see what that mask is doing. There you go. If we had that original setup going, this would be another way to achieve the increased sunrays within this scene. Now if we do it with a rodo mask here in this shot, it's not as effective across multiple shots, or if you have say, a moving camera, it's not going to work as well. If you have a locked-off camera or it's just a steel frame you're working with, this would be totally fine to add some of that volumetrics into the scene. This is part of the benefit again if rendering out separate passes like this because now you're just applying that to this pass as well. But let's delete that since we've rendered it in this way to just have the sun rays come through. We can just plug those into here. There we go. Then let's just use that factor to increase them. For our purposes for this file, this method should be fine. If you're working in a production scenario where you have other shots, other artists on the file, you may want to use a color balance, it will be more evident that no change is then being made in that part of the captury, as opposed to the artist having to zoom in to these mixed nodes to see if they're being changed in any way to achieve that result. But that's the volumetric adjustment. Then down here, I applied a glare or slight bloom to the overall image using this glare node. This will isolate the glare to the highlight areas of the frame. If we look at it, again, control shift, left-click. There it is. It's isolating into those highlight areas. If we put the threshold down to zero, it'll be an overall glossed-over effect almost as if there was like vaseline smeared over the lens. If that's the look you're going for, then great, go for it, but not usually the look I'm going for. I usually start at 0.1 and then adjust it up from there. But I found that 0.3 was a decent value for this. By default, the glare node is set to streaks, so make sure that's set to fog glow and high for quality, and then put the mix up one. The size I usually go with, somewhere around eight or nine. But that's the glare and that adds a bit of a glow effect to the light and a bit of a bloom on the highlights here, which I find to be nice effect. Then I added a bit of a top glare coming from this light at the top of the frame as well. To achieve that, I just made a mask. There it is up there. To do that again, I made another mask. This time it is this one. I just created a new mask and then I went, "Add Circle" and then what that does is it will create this circle and then I hit G to move it and then S to scale it. Then I just moved it into place and that's all I did for this guy. Then I plugged that into this blur, set the blur strength of 400, and then I changed the color to a warmer color that we set on for those ceiling lamps and the light file. Then I just desaturated a little bit and I brought the value down. The value here can work as a way to just make the effect less noticeable. Almost acts as a bit of an opacity setting as well so I just lowered that down to 0.5 to make it more subtle. But that is that's what it for all of the adjustments that I made to this CAD file. Now what you would do is use this as a base, now this has been established. If I have any wide shots, I would typically set up that wider CAD file first and then, use that as a template and then I would bring in the close-up render and adjust whatever needs to be adjusted beyond that point. For the close-up, for example, we might be able to potentially even remove the layer that's on the top of the frame for this light, because that light is not visible in the close-up or you could at least reduce the effect of it or just move it out of the frame a little bit more. Honestly, it doesn't even look too bad here, so we could maybe just leave it there. I'd maybe take down how noticeable it is, so you can maybe take that down to 0.25 and that might make it better. The glare seems like it's holding up though, and then the volumetrics look fine overall as well. I think that's good to go. Now to save this out, what we could do is just go, render image. It'll pop up here. We would do this obviously for the medium first as well and there we go. Then I will just go save as and then from here, we can save it. We don't need a multi-layer EXR obviously here because we're not opening any passes. So you just save it as a JPEG or a PNG or whatever you'd like. Name it, whatever you'd like. This is not 960 by 540, so you can just call it version 1 or something like that to a separate directory probably as well. Then there you go. 21. Composting | Pt. 3: Applying Adjustments | Final: Would you look at that, here we are for yet another compositing video. You may have thought that the last video was the end of the class, sorry, the audio cutout abruptly. But after I had wrapped up that final compositing video where I did some adjustments, I decided I want to make a few further comp adjustments to the final renders here. I had done those and then I applied those adjustments to the final renders that you'll see in the about section for this class and at the front end of each lesson videos. I thought, why not show you guys those final few adjustments that I decided to do. What I did here was first of all, I made a few cryptomattes. I'll show you how those were set up and how I did those. Here they are here. I framed them off to organize them within the comp file called it cryptomattes. Then I have one here called a scarf cryptomatte. I just changed that label by going over here. I typed in scarf cryptomatte. Then I did the same thing for the eye cryptomatte, you see I titled that and then the character cryptomatte. Now what those look like here is this. If I go and go control shift left-click the scarf cryptomatte. That's what that looks like, so it isolates as you'd expect, the scarf. Then I'll control shift click the eye cryptomatte. As you'd expect, there are just the eyes there. Then in the character cryptomatte, yes, you guessed it, it's the entire character. What I did with those cryptomattes was first of all, I decided to increase the intensity of the eye highlights. I just thought that they were too dim for this shot especially since there's not really any other noticeable highlights within her eyes. I decided to kick those up a notch. To do that again, I just created this here, legacy cryptomatte, so it's like shift legacy. You can search legacy or cryptomatte. There you go. It looks like there's a newer one. I'm going to use this, so I just stuck with the legacy version. How you use these is, what I did here was I just took the object 01 and 02 cryptomatte here to be output, sorry, from the light file. Again, how I did that was I went over to the view layer tab and then there's cryptomatte drop-downs, so you can just check off whatever ones you want to output. It also gave me a material one as well. I didn't end up using those, but better to have them, than not have them, I find so that's what I did. I just plugged those all into there, the corresponding cryptomatte input for that node. Once those are all plugged in, you could just go pick and that's what you'll get. You'll get this multicolored looking image up here. Then when you go plus, this eyedropper will come up and then you can just click on whatever object you want to be added to that cryptomatte. If you're using the material cryptomatte outputs, if you click on, say the desk, I believe it would just select then all of the desks within that frame for you, since they all would have this same material applied to them. The object one is more individual object based selections. Since I'm not making that many selections, the objects that I am selecting typically do have different materials anyways, I just stuck with the object one. The scarf one was an easy one to do. I just eye-dropped just the scarf and then if you select the mat as you select things, you'll see that the mat gets updated with whatever you select. It's just a way of creating a custom mat to isolate your adjustments too. This is what I did the same thing here for the eyes. I just eyedropper tooled each eyeball and that gave you that, we do that. Then for the character, I did the same thing. It took me a little longer because I had to eyedropper tool like all of the parts of the character; her pants, shirt, scarf, arms, eyes, eyelashes, hair, all of that stuff. The way I just kept checking to make sure I got it. I just kind of kept switching to that cryptomatte to make sure that I was getting everything that I needed until I had this. But now what did I do with them you ask? Well, let's go to the scarf one first. First of all, I clogged the color balance just after the diffuse result, again, which looks like this. Then again, that diffuse results is going into the glossy connection there, where the glossy is being added to it. Any adjustments I'm making in this part of the comp tree will be applied only to the diffuse result. That's why I put the color balance here. What I did was I just wanted to change the color of the scarf. To do that without changing the specular highlight color as well, I've just put the color balance here just after the diffuse results so that the specular color remains as white and that doesn't change as I push it towards more of a blue color. That's what I did. I just made it look a little bit more blue there as you can see. Again, I just plugged that cryptomatte, mat up into the factor, which again is that mask input of your nodes. Then it just isolates that adjustment to that scarf. Then for the eyes. Again, that's what it looks like. I isolated that to the glossy result to push up the specular highlight further. Here's the glossy result. I just wanted to isolate those eyes so that I can get this highlight information boosted up a bit. That's what I did. Again, I use the color balance node, set both of these stuffs, at power slopes and forged to standard color jest. Then I plugged that glossy result. I put that in-between, sorry, the glossy result where it's being connected to that diffuse result into that pipe. Then I plugged that, eye cryptomatte into the factor, and then I just increase the slope value to five from one. What that looks like, is this. I'll just turn this off. There we go. That's how much we kicked it up. There we go. Pretty noticeable difference there. I was liking that. I'll add that transmission so you can see it a little more clearly maybe now. There you go. Definitely helped. I thought so ran with that. Then in the character adjustment. Again, this is what that looks like. I just plugged that mat into the factor here of this color balance, which I plugged in-between the emissive and the volume so basically after the entire combined result, minus that volume being added, then what that did was it just boosted her up globally for all of the passes, I did needed to be isolated to a specific pass. I just wanted to increase the gain on her just a bit. Now you have to be very careful when you make an adjustment like this. I would typically not do this, especially if it's a moving camera, since these are still images though. I decided to do it just for the final render, for what we're doing here. What I did here, I just kept it subtle. I plugged in that mat into the factor. Then I just increased the value of this color balance that I added there from 1 to 1.1, a very subtle. That's the difference that's being made there. Just kicks her up a little tiny bit. There you go. Typically, I would probably go into the light file and try to increase her in the actual light file itself as opposed to making this isolated comp adjustment. It can make her look like she's pasted on if you're not careful. It's like a light linking in any other software. But you have to be very careful and subtle with it to make sure that it looks natural and realistic still. But those are the only kind of cryptomatte changes that I made. I re-frame these lens effects into a global frame here that encompasses the two adjustments that I made to better organize it, I named it lens effects. Then I think that was it. Yeah, that's it. I added this RGB curve as well actually at the end. This is just kind of kicks up the contrast of the overall image. I'm just pulling it down the bottom and adjust the shadows. It's like a tone curve you would find in Photoshop or Lightroom. The bottom portion here is the shadows. This center area of the curve is the mid tones, and the upper portion up here in this corner is the highlights. Here I've brought the highlights up a little bit and clamp them down, slightly. I lifted the mid tones and then brought those shadows down a bit just to add a little bit more contrast and depth to the final image. That's what that's looking like right there. Let's turn that off and see what that looks like. Probably going to take a second to update. But let's see the difference here. There we go. That's the difference that I made. I like it, it crunches it down just a little bit there. Either or it works stylistically. I prefer it with a bit of this tone curve applied to it so I stayed with that. Then this one here, this is just adding a little bit of warmth to the final image. I just pushed it a little bit towards yellow. Very subtle, and that's very desaturated as you can see, where that dot is positioned there on that color circle or whatever you want to call it. That's it. That's the final adjustments that I ended up making here to these images. Then I just again brought in a close-up render and then saved out both of those JPEGs and there we go. That's how I finished off these guys. That's it though, that about wraps up this class. Thanks so much for sticking to it here with me, at Following Along, I really appreciate it. Hopefully it wasn't too painful for you and hope you learned a thing or two along the way as well. I'll see you in the next class. Have a good one.