Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm just percent del and I'm a three d designer. This is the first course in a series of four where will explore how to create abstract shapes and cinema 40. The goal with courses is to provide you with a broad set of techniques and skills that you can apply to a wide variety of projects and styles. So in this course will tackle this shape. We'll use procedural techniques where everything will remain. Edit herbal change, a few settings and you'll have a unique new look. We're gonna touch a little bit about the interface. For those who are brand new to the application, we'll look at how toe work with primitives or parametric objects. We'll explore geometry in three D and also how to manipulate and deform objects. We're gonna work with noisy eaters to create precise displacement, and we're gonna go through three point lining and how you can change the mood of a scene and also explores some of the camera options. We'll create a multilayered material and will also dive into how to use the layer. Masks for fine control over both material and displacement will render our work. The final step is to bring the cinema 40 render into after effects for some further enhancements. As you follow along, try to experiment as much as possible. And don't forget to post your work in the project section below. Okay, let's start.
2. Cinema 4D Interface Overview: If you're just starting with Cinema 40 you might get a little intimidated. At first. There's a myriad of buttons and menus. Cinema 40 is a powerful three D application, and with that power comes complexity. But one of the great things about Cinema 40 is that you don't have to know everything to start creating really cool stuff. And once you've started, I think you'll find that the workflow is logical and easy to pick up. Let's just look at a few things. It's gonna help if we all have the same layout. So in the layup drop down, set it to a standard layout. Now you're Cinema 40. Interface may difference likely for mine, depending on what version you have. I am running Cinema 40 the studio addition and released 20. So instead of an empty scene, let's add an object. Just gonna go and click on this button, which is gonna add a cube to the scene when we add the Q becomes in at the center of the world world zero and this window here is called the Perspective Window. We can see it on the top left, which is a three D view, and we're looking through a camera that we can move around in the scene and to move the camera around in the scene. We have three dedicated buttons on the top, Right. This button here is the pan control. Then next to it, we have the dolly which allows you to move in and out. And then we have this one which allows you to rotate. Now, navigating the camera in Cinema 40 is such a vital, essential task that you really should learn to shortcuts for it. And they're super easy. It's number one and left mouse click is gonna allow you to move. That's the pan tool to allows you to Dolly in and out. And then number three and left mouse click is gonna let you rotate or orbit in your scene. Now, you also notice that the Cube has an access attached to it and the look of the axis and what it does depends on the tool you have selected on the top Here. I can see that right now we have a tool cold and move tool enabled. And as I rolled my mouse over the button, you can see that tool tip that pops up So it tells me the name of the tool, the move tool. It also tells me the shortcut for it E. And then we have the scale tool and noticed that the axis changes to look of it the rotate tool. And as I'm changing the tools you can see in this button here, it also updates to reflect the currently selected tool. Now next to their move tool. We also have some selection tools, a few different options. Let me go back to the move tool. So with the move tool selected by click and drag inside of the editor here, I move the Cube. Now the problem is that I move it on all directions at once. So it's really hard in a perspective. You like this to move objects precisely. So I'm gonna undo control or command Z, or you can use these little arrows on top. Undo. So instead of just really moving the cube, I'm gonna move it on the individual access instead. So the red axis here is X or right and left. And then the green one is why up and down. And then we have the blue one, which is Z back and forth and are seen. We also have these little gizmos on these air called axes bands, which allows you to move on two axes once. Now, you can also notice that at the bottom here we have something called the coordinates manager. So as I move my cube around in this scene, you can see how the coordinates manager is updating now. Of course, you can also enter these numbers numerically. So if I wanted to say, Reset this to it's default position, which is zero I can hit zero Tab zero Tab zero. Now it's back to its default position now. We also have size and rotation. Now in the rotation, we have H P B, which stands for heading pitch and bank. On the left hand side, we have a bunch of different modes. We have moats related to polygon modeling. We have a mode related to text Oring. We have a mode related to moving the axis or the pivot point of an object. Weaken solo objects we can enable snapping and snapping has a little triangle in the lower right corner. And that means that if I click and hold down, I can see a bunch more options. We have X, y and Z up here and there, highlighted in blue, which means that they're active but say that I wanted to move my cube, for example, on the Z axis on Lee, I could disable do X and Y axes. And now that I click and drag in the view port, I move it on Lee on the Z axis. Let me reset this 1 to 0, and that's re enable the X m y. Now these clapper icons are referring to rendering and rendering settings and rendering. Is the process of creating the final output Say that you make a still image or an animation or a movie? I'm going to skip thes icons. For now, we're gonna dig deeper into those in the projects. I do want to point something out, and that is that all these buttons, all these modes, you can find them in the menu system as well. So if you prefer to work with the menu system, you can find them. For example, the move, the scale and then rotate tool are right here. The accordance that we just looked at our right here or the modes on the left hand side. They're here. So if you prefer to work with the menu system, go right ahead. You might have noticed before that when we added the Cube to the scene. It also showed up in this window right here. And this is the Objects manager. The Objects manager is to control center for all the objects in your scene. Now, if I have the Cube selected, I can also see all the settings for the Cube down here in something called The Attributes Manager. And it's organized right here under these tabs, and you'll see more or less, depending on the object you have selected. The Attributes manager is context sensitive, meaning that it will show the properties and the settings for whatever is currently active . So, for example, if I would go and click on the move tool, it would update to show me all the settings for that move tool or, if you go up to edit project settings, is going to show all the settings for the project. Now I'm gonna go back and select that the Cube. So that's just a quick little interest of some of the interface elements. We're gonna learn a lot more as we work with the projects, so let's move on to those next
3. Adding the Torus: Okay, so let's go up to this menu here with a cube. Now all we see is a que But I know that there are more options available to us because there's a little triangle in the lower right corner of that button. So if I click and hold down, I can see a lot more options here. You know, I'm gonna let go my mouse on the dotted border on top, which creates a floating window for us. This is the Primitives menu, or you can also call them Parametric objects. And they're really great toe work with because you don't use standard modeling tools and said you control them with parameters so you don't need to know how to model and all the settings remain lives. You can go back at any time during the project and just weak and change and update the settings just creates a very flexible workflow, and it allows you to experiment a lot. The one we're interested in is the Taurus, right? Here's I'm going to click on it and then I'm gonna close this window. So the settings that we're mostly interested in for the tourists are in the attributes Editor and the object tab. And we have ring radios, ring segments, pipe radius, pipe segments and orientation, the ring radios and the pipe radios we can control directly in the editor If we want I just dragging these little orange squares, um, we can, of course, type in a value in these boxes, so type in 200 for example. Um, you also have a scrubby sliders. You can drag up and down with the mouse, and if you need greater increments, you can add the shift key. And if you need final control finer increments, you can add the alter, the option key like that. And if you ever need to reset a value to its default, which I tend to do the whole time, right, click on the parameter name and just choose reset to default. There's also an option to do. Reset all. Now, let's do reset to default, and I'm gonna do the same for Pipe Radius reset to default. The orientation is just what plain that the Taurus is facing right now. It's facing straight up on the why, and the green axis here is why, um, we consented to whatever access we want now later on is gonna be helpful to have this two plus X. So I'm going to set that two plus X. The ring segments and the pipe segments are a little hard to see. We need to change the display mode, and we do that up here in the view port and the menu system. There's a display menu, and we want to choose one of the moats that has lines appended to it. So guru changing lines or quick shading lines or concentrating lines. I'm gonna do guru shading lines. And now we can see the geometry off the tourists. We can see the building blocks now this the rectangle areas would be the polygons, and then we have the edges here. And because this is a primitive, we don't have access to the polygon faces and the points, but the point would be right here on the intersection. Um, so if we go to the ring segments, if increases, you can see that it's getting smoother them, or segments we add to smoother. The object becomes, and if we go the other way, so if we if you take down account here, we can go all the way down to three. We can do that for pipe segments as well. Now we get an object that does not resemble a tars at all. And that's because we don't have enough geometry. And a core principle is this that a single polygon edge cannot be bent. The way that we get smooth geometry is by increasing the polygon count. So as I go up here is getting smoother and smoother. And let me do that for pipe segments to, and now we're getting our tourism back. So the more details you want on the finer the details you want more segments we need to add . Now I'm gonna set the ring segments to 220 the pipe segments to 175. Those are just values that came up with after experimenting. Of course, it's not written in stone, but there you have it. So next up, let's start to forming. This tours with the former's
4. Deforming the Torus: Let's take a look at what we're gonna end up with at the end of the lesson. So if I go to the window menu and I can see other files I have opened and let's open this. So this is what we're gonna end up with the 1st 2 former, this kind of curled up shape. So that's got started. Let's go back window and lessen 02 The first thing I'm going to do is to turn off the wire frame, gets a little distracting to look at that. So, under the display menu, let's set it back to go. Rude shading. Now we're gonna added a former. So let's go to the D formers menu here, de formers. They distort in the reshape that geometry off other objects. And they do that in a nondestructive way, which means that you can always go back, turn it on or offer change to settings. They are incredibly flexible. The one we're after is called a spline wrap right here and just like the name implies, but it does. It takes an object, and it wrapped it along a spine, so that's click on it so we can see it now in the View port. This cage here and one of the characteristics off the former's is that they're purple, but we haven't applied it to the tour's yet. The way we apply the former's is by either making them a child off the object or you take the object and the D former and you group them together. I'm gonna make this plain wrap a child of the tours, and to do that, I'm gonna take spline wrapped in. I'm going to drag it. And when you see that the arrow changes to a downwards pointing arrow, let go. Now it's a child of the tourists. We've applied it, and we can see that the cage here in the view port has updated to reflect that we don't see in a deformation because we need a sline to drive that. So let's go up to the spine menu. The orange spines on the left. Here are the type of spines where you controlled the points directly or work on the points directly. The pencil, for example, is very similar to the pen tool you find in Illustrator the Blue Spines or Parametric splints. So just like we have Parametric objects. We have Parametric spines and you don't work on the points directly. Instead, you work with parameters, and the one that's gonna work perfectly for us is called Psych Lloyd. So let's add that now I want to tell this blind rap to use a cyclone. So let's select a Splain rap. And if I go to the object tab, I can see that the top field here is called a spline field, and it's expecting us to point it to a spine. So let's take the psych Lloyd and just drag it and drop it into this field. And now we have some sort of deformation. It doesn't quite look right. Um, that's because the deformation is happening along the wrong access. Right now it's happening around X. But if we changed is to why we're starting to get somewhere. See that tourists is actually following the contours of this curve. Now, this psych Lloyd Now I want to look at this psych Lloyd on its own. Without the tourists, I'm gonna temporarily hide the tourists. And to do that, I can just click on that stop light here the top one. If I click on it twice it's gonna hide the tourists and that we see that the cage of the spine wraps of its click on the psych Lloyd to hide that. No, I want to look at this head on. This is to prospective you, but we have more views available to us and to see them. Let's go up and click on this button here. This gives us four views. So we have the perspective, you here, which is to three D camera view that we've been using up until this point. But then we also have a top view. We have a right view, and we have a front view to go into or maximize any of these views. You can see that they have the same corresponding button here on the top. And if I click on this button, for example, it's gonna maximize the top view. And if I click on that button again, is going to bring back to four views. There are short cuts off course that you can use for this, and probably you should learn them, and it's F one through F five, so F one is going to give you the perspective F to the top have three. The right F four. The front F five is gonna take you back to the four views. The one I want to work with is the front view. So let's go in and maximize that view. The psych Lloyd. It's based on a circle, and it has three different types Psych Lloyd, Episodic Lloyd and hyper Psych Lloyd. And they do variations of the same thing. They're all based on a circle, and you can see that it's a circle if you take down the radios. We just were left with just a simple circle, and then a here would be controlling how large or small the circle is on. Then we have start angle and we have an end angle. But what I want to do is I want to stretch it out a little bit, and I wanna have the ends curl in a little bit, and I wanna have this side curl in a little bit more so I'm gonna increase the size of the radios and a two and start angle. I'm going to start, bring it into the negatives. Maybe that's too much. Um, in the end, I used 4 69 for this side. I used minus seven for the start angle, and a is 1 32 is just fine. So let's take a look at that with a tour is enabled and ah, sent quite hard to see. So let's go back to the perspective, you and maximize that. And, yes, we are making progress. This is looking a lot closer to what we want. Um, I'm gonna make some changes to the tourists here. Something that select the tourists, and I'm gonna make the ring rate is a little larger. His, um set that 2 to 22 and let's make the pipe radius thicker. Set that to 94. So now we have it kind of a pillowy looking thing, but I'm also gonna adjust the scale. And if I go to the coordinates tab, I have the X y and V scale the y scales not gonna do anything, so let's leave that one. But the X scale is gonna allow us to make it thinner or thicker and disease going to stretch it out or tighten it up. Um, so let's set this 12.78 Z two point six, and now we have that kind of shape. Now, what we're gonna do next is that we're gonna create the ridges that that run alongside the object. And we're going to do that by using yet another two former and this time the displaced, the former.
5. Overview of the Displacer: next, let's add these ridges that we can see Here I go all the way around the object and the way we're going to get these is by using another D former. And this time we're going to use the display, sir. So let me show you the displays, Er in a new file file new. And in this new scene, I'm gonna add a plane, and I'm gonna increase the segments. I'm gonna set this 2 200 by 200 so I have more geometry to work with. And I'm gonna add the display, sir. Not quick way. To added a former to an object is to select the object first and then go up to the D formers menu. And here's to display, Sir, before I let go, my mouse here, I'm gonna add the shift key. And by adding the shift key, the display, sir, automatically gets placed as a child off the plane. Now, the display, sir needs a source to drive the deformation just like display in rap. And the displays were once a gray scale map of some sort. Now, that could be an image that could be a greedy int. Ah, and In our case, it's gonna be a noise. So to add the noise, let's go to the shading tab and click on this, drop down and go in at a noise, and now we can see that the plane is displaced here, and if we go into the object tab, we can see some of the settings. Strength is pretty self explanatory height. It's gonna displace it more or less, and you can see that the displacement is going in two different directions. It's going up and it's going down in the noise. White values is pushing the geometry up, and black values are pushing it down, and then all different grace in between. So 50% gray has no effect whatsoever. Now it's pushing up and down because we have the type here set to intensity centered. If I changed out to intensity, then what happens is that Black no longer has an effect on Lee. White has an effect on why is pushing it up and you can see that's only going in one direction now so you can go down as well like that. Let's go into the noise and take a look at the noise itself. so under the shading and I can click on the word noise and it takes me to the noise and we can see a thumbnail on the top with a visual representation off the noise. And we can change the colors in here Color one color to black and white. Um, seed is too random distribution off the noise. So as I changed a seat, I'm gonna get a different noise every time. A little further down. We have this scale. We have a global scale where can make it a lot larger or smaller. And then we can scale it on the individual axes as well. So we can do it on the X y and Z x here, for example. Let me undo that. And under the noise type here by click and hold down because he that there are lots of different noise types. Um, just by looking at the names, unless you worked with cinema 40 noises before, they're not gonna make a lot of sense. So there's a little menu on the far right here for click and hold down. You see that we can have a little thumbnail for each noise and that just makes a lot more sense to see what they look like. So this is displaced of or annoyed. For example, that's one noise in here that I like. And that's Nahki. And let me bring up the global scale on Naki a little bit, and it kind of looks like a moon landscape of some sort. There's a setting called octaves and octaves control the amount of details that you have in the noise. So if I set this to to we lose almost all the details, 20 is the maximum settings, and then at the bottom we have some contrast controls. We have low clip, which is gonna clip the blacks. And then we have high clip, which is gonna clip the whites. And then we have an overall brightness slider, and then we have a contrast slider and take a look at what we have. So let's go up to the main settings for the display. Sir, I'm going to get there by clicking on this up arrow. So as you can see, there's several factors that determine what the displaces going to do. It's the grayscale map that you're using in our case, a noise and all the settings in the noise. But it's also under the object have the height. Something that also plays a big part is in the plane itself here or in the object itself. The amount of details that you start with. Right now we have 200 by 200. If I were to set to stand to 50 by 50 you can see that now it changes the result dramatically. And if I were to set this up to a really high number say like 1000 by 1000 now we have something completely different. So with a display, sir, you can create some really unique looks and next up, let's apply this to our shape.
6. Creating the Ridges with the Displacer: Let's add the display, sir, to the Taurus. Before I do that, I want to hide the cage here. I don't need to see that. So let's go to the spine Rap And as click on the traffic light looking twice. So now this blind rap is hidden and I'm gonna hide that psych Lloyd to We don't need to see that anymore. It's still gonna be active on this blind wraps. I let me hide that. Okay, Now let's go up to the D formers menu and add the display, Sir. Let's add a display, sir, as a child off the Taurus and I'm gonna I'm gonna place it underneath the Splain wrap. The order here makes a difference. So the spine rap now is applied before the display, sir, And that's the way we want it. So in the display, sir, let's go to the object tab. And in the height, I'm gonna set this to minus eight because I want the ridges to go inwards. And instead of intensity centered, I wanna have it set to intensity. So it only goes one direction in words. And now let's add a noise. So let's go to this shading tab and in the shader, Drop down select noise and let's go into the noise. And, um, black and white is fine. I'm gonna leave it. Add just a regular noise and a global scale of 100 is good. Now, I wanted to go on Lee in one direction. Eso I'm gonna set x two zero. I can see in the thumbnail that it's working. It's just going from one side to the other, but it doesn't look quite right on the Taurus and we need to change the space. There's something here called the space, and right now it's set to texture. But what we want is to set it to something called U V W two D. What that's gonna do is that's going to wrap around the Taurus, and it's gonna follow the flow off the polygons. So see, now it's starting to look right. I want to go a lot more aggressive with this. I'm going to go down to the contrast and I'm gonna boost a contrast right up. So now, at 100% we have something that looks like this and we're pretty close now. Um, so we can dial in a particular kind of look that we want by changing the seed now. And I know that I want to use 6 54 and I like this kind of layout so the big ridges are done, but we're gonna add a lot more fine details to this. But before that, we need to look at something called a phone tag, and that's up next.
7. The Phong Tag: we have a bit of an issue. Let me show you what I mean. If we look here, we can see that the edges are for the most part hard. But right here they look different. They're soft and they're soft here up until here, where there's some sort of transition, and it looks a little weird. And what's at play here is the phone tag, and in cinema 40 you can add properties and behaviors to objects by adding tags. So if I go up to the tourist and I right, click on it and you can see here, for example, we have cinema 40 tax, a lot of tags on. We have even more tags here, and you'll have more or less depending on your version of Cinema 40. And when you add me selected tourists and select Stefan tag, when you add a primitive object in cinema 42 a scene, then Fanta gets added automatically, and what the funk take does it adds smoothing to an object, and it does it without adding geometry. So it's an illusion. And if we look at that properties here, what really controls the amount of smoothing that we're gonna get is this setting here the fung angle and what it does. It looks at adjacent polygons and the angle between them. And if the angle is above 40 degrees, we get a hard edge. If it's below 40 then we get a smooth edge. So if I set this down to zero here, for example, we can see that has quite an impact. Now we have hard edges everywhere, but we can also see the individual polygons, which you know is one of the reasons you want to use the font tack to smooth those out. Now, you could use that to your advantage. If you let me go into the tourist here and set the pipe segments down to 25 we can create some pretty stylistic looks by using the funk tag in this way. And this is how you create the low Polly look, which is quite popular now. I want to set it back to 1 75 which we had and I'm gonna set the phone tag the angle here. I'm gonna set it all the way up 220 which is 180 which is the maximum if I zoom out here and compare. This is 180 and this is what we had before and has quite an impact. So let's set it back. 280 and next up, let's prepare a shape to add even more details, and that's up next.
8. Subdivision Surface: in the next few lessons, we're gonna add these fine ridges to our shape, zoom in and look closer. We can see that there's a lot of details here, fine ridges. And while having those fine ridges would still have some patches or stretches with no ridges at all, there are completely flat. So let's see how we're gonna achieve that. To get that detail in, we need a lot more geometry. And this time, rather than adding more segments to the Taurus, we're going to use something called a subdivision surface in a subdivision surface. It's adds geometry, and it smooths the object at the same time, and we can find it up here under the generators menu and to apply it. The tourist needs to be a child off the subdivision surface, and a quick way to achieve that is to select the tourists, hold down the option or all key and then click on the subdivision surface, and that automatically makes it parent off the tourists. And to appreciate that we can enable and disable the subdivision surface by clicking on the check mark here and you can see that it gets a lot more defined now with the subdivision surface enabled. And to see how much geometry we've actually added, Let's go to the display menu and enable guru shading lines and you can see that it's almost black because there is so much geometry in there. Now, let me turn that off for now. So in the subdivision surface, under the object tab, we have subdivision editor and Subdivision render and the editors. What we see here and the render is what we get. Women render, and they're they're different results here. So I want to set the render to be the same as the editor. And the higher the number we have here, the more subdivided the object gets We're gonna leave it up to That's gonna work just fine . So we're gonna add a second level of displacement now, but I don't want to add it to the tourist. Instead, I want to add it directly to the subdivision surface, and you can add informers in two different ways either as a child of an object or as part of a group. And this time we're gonna add it as part of a group. So we need to create the group first and groups in cinema 40 are cold notes, and I can find them here under the primitives menu. If I select null and dragon all down and I'm gonna take the subdivision surface and I'm gonna make that a child off the no. And I'm also gonna twirled it up so I don't need to see all these. So twirl it up. So on Eliza Group. But it's a lot more than that. If I select a nun, I can see that it has a coordinates tab. So it does have position, scale and rotational data so we can move this thing as a whole. Nose in general, are a vital part of the cinema. 40 workflow. So next stop. Let's go ahead and actually add a second level display, sir.
9. Adding Finer Details: Let's add the second display, sir. So from the diff or mirza menu at it. Display, sir. Then I'm going to make it a child off the null, and it doesn't really matter if you put it above or below this subdivision surface. The results gonna be the same. But I prefer to have it at the bottom, and you can add several diff or MERS to this. You can make a deformed stack if you want, and that just creates a visual hierarchy that makes sense, at least to me. Okay, so let's go to the object tab. And instead of intensity centered that sent changed its two intensity because I want us to push in one direction only. And I wanted to push inwards. So we need a value in the negative and one is going to be enough. And now we need to add a noise to this. So under the shading tab and shader, let's add the noise and let's go into the noise. I'm gonna leave colors as they are and seed and the noise type two, the space we need to change from texture to UV. So it follows to flow of the polygons I'm going to set the global scale right down to 15. So it's a lot smaller now and I want the noise to go in one direction. So I need to take down the X scale to zero. And now we can see in the thumbnail here that is goes in one direction only. And if I zoom in here, we can start seeing that something is happening. Um, but let's make this a little finer. So in the UAE scale, when I set this to 45 now we can clearly see the ridges, but we need to increase the contrast. So in the low clip, let's bring that up. So we're clipping the blacks spring that up to seven. The high clip. Leave it almost the way it is, but set it down a little bit to 98%. But then contrast. That's boost that. So bring that up to six day. Let's typing 60. That's easier. And there you have it. So we have the fine ridges, and I like the fact that it's a little bit more subtle in this area here, but very defined here. In fact, it's too much. I want to break up the evenness of this. Um, I wanna have some sections that don't don't have any fine ridges that are flat, and we're gonna achieve that with a layer shader, and that's up next.
10. Using Layer Shaders: when we first looked at the display. Sir, we created this this landscape kind of look And I think this is a good place to show the layer Shader as well. So let's go into the display, sir, and to the shading tab. So right now we have a noise. But if I go to the Shader, drop down and go down to layer Here's the layer Shader What's gonna happen now? It's gonna take The channel is currently active, which in our case is a noise and it's gonna place that into a later Shader. So let's do that now. Nothing happens here, but now we can go into the layer shader and there's our noise. And if we ever need to update the settings for the noise, just click on this thumbnail And then here's all the settings for the noise. Let's go back up by clicking on this up arrow the layers Shader works in a very similar way to photo shops layer system. You can add layers and have them interact between each other by using capacity or by changing the blend modes, having them blend together with different blend modes and then you can turn them on and off by clicking on this I switch, but you can do a lot more than that. You can add images if you want to hear is the image loader. And then here is the Shader menus. You can add whatever shader you want, but then we also have effects. We have brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, colorize and more, and we can take several layers and combine them together inside of folders. And then, of course, we have remove layers as well. Now let's add a shader. Let's add a Grady int. This one shows quite well what's going on on the left side. Here we have black, so there's no there's no displacement at all. And then on the right side here, where there were those white, we have maximum displacement. So now we can have this, Grady and interact with the noise. We can lower the capacity. Um, but I'm gonna do this with a blend mode. So instead of normal, I'm gonna set this to a multiply. And now we start getting this really nice, gradual transition here, and I can find to in this by going into the settings for the greedy int so here I have the two color Knauss and if I dragged a black a little bit towards the center, we're pushing the transition and there are lots of different types of radiance. We have several different to degrade E INTs as well as three D Grady INTs. So this one is going right left. We also have to TV which goes up and down. And in a case like this, I think a to D circular will be look pretty good. Although I think the white should be on the left side and then we can adjust it like this and let's drag this a little further. You can also introduce a little bit of irregularity in the transition. We have a turbulence here, so if I set this to say 10 you can see that it just breaks up that perfectly, even transition, and then you have some settings for the turbulence as well. So let's go back up here. So now that we know what the layer shader is about, let's go ahead and add it to our shape, and that's up next
11. Control the Level of Detail: back to our shape. Let's go into the display, sir, and initiating Tab lets now drop our noise in a later Shader Shader and later shader. And let's go into the lay Shader. So what we want to do is that we want to create sections that don't have these fine ridges , and we could use a noise for this. We got a just a scaling and seed until we get something that we like. Or we could also use a Grady in, which gives you some more control. It's a little bit more art, direct herbal. So let's do that under Shader, Select a radiant. And because I want to hide the ridges, I'm gonna set the blend mode to multiply by rotate here I can see that it doesn't. It doesn't quite look right. Let's go into the Grady in settings and see what's going on and the type of set to two t you. We need to switch that to a to TV, and now it looks correct. So in the grading, we have black toe white than this long transition. What we want instead is several small sections, and instead of a smooth transition between them, we want a hard transition between them next to the word Grady int. There's a little triangle, but click on that. I can see more settings. I'm running. Cinema 40 released 20 which is the latest version, and they made some changes to the radiant editor. So if you have a prior version, the interface is gonna look just a little bit different, although you're gonna be able to achieve the exact same result. So I want to change the interpolation off the dots. So if I select the dot here the black dot under interpellation right now, it says, smooth. I'm gonna click on the drop down menu, and I'm gonna set this to step. If you have a prior version, this is gonna be called none instead of step, this is going to be called none. And if you're using a prior version, setting the interpretation for one not does it for all the other ones. But with the release 20 we can now have individual interpolation for the knots. So if I want to set the interpolation for all knots, I can right click and select interpretation of all knots and then set that to step so Now, if I take this white slider this white, not drag it, you can see that we're gonna introduce Mawr and more ridges, black areas. We're gonna hide the ridges and white areas are going to show them. And I want a lot more sections and to duplicate I'm not. I can control or command click on drag on them. So in a real project, this is where you would tweak it would try things by trial and error until you get a result that you like. Ah, for continuity. I'm gonna use the settings that I use before and spare you from watching me. And just week. So let's plug in the values this one I had set to 7.4 something the not position here in prior versions. This was just called pos, but it's the same thing for position. So 7.4, and then this next black one here I'm gonna set to 23 and then this white one I'm gonna set to 41 and then I'm gonna make a duplicate of the black and the white and this black one here I'm gonna set to 51.5, and then this one I'm gonna set to 54 and then again duplicate both those the next black one here, I'm gonna set to 69.5, and then the white one's gonna be a 1.8 0.8. And let's make another black and another white. So that last black one here is gonna be 87 and then the whites gonna be 92. So that's it. So here it is. And that's the final tweak we're going to do to our geometry. This is how we're gonna leave it. And the next step is to add a camera to this and lock down the framing, So let's do that next.
12. Working with Cameras: Let's add a camera to the scene. So let's click on this icon here, which is gonna add a camera to the scene. We can see it showed up here in the view port can see the outline of the camera. The camera is an active yet to activate the camera. We click on this button. The view looks exactly the same, and that's because when you add a camera, it's going to be added at the editors camera position. But now we can navigate with our camera, and we have the added benefit of being able to go back to the editor camera. And we do that by clicking on this button and again. And that means we can work on different parts or different objects off our scene and then at any time come back to our camera. So one way to create some unique looks is to go into your cameras object tab and change the settings of the focal length By default. We have this 36 millimeter lens, but we have a lot more options. So if I go to the drop down here at the bottom, we have long lenses, So the super telephoto lens. The 300 millimeter lands, for example. Let's choose that now resumed way in. Let me dolly back. It takes a while to Dolly because these types of lengths is we need to be far away from the object. And to help with this we can go to the view menu and choose frame geometry. So cinema is gonna frame up the shot for us, the short cut is H and let me go to the four of us here and me, Zuma in the top you. So now you can see that the cameras all the way over here is really far away from the object. That's how long lenses work. You need to be far away from the objects. And that also means that the type of shot that you get with the look is very, very flat. You have very little angular distortion now. The other extreme is to go with a wide angle lens. So let's try that in that I said it to super wide angle of 15 millimetre lands and how this our shape is really, really small. Let's frame the shot again. Let's go up to view and frame geometry and let me, uh, maximizes view. Now, with wide angles, you can get really, really close And because you can get really close, you can get extreme angles and distorted angles as well. Yeah, you can get some really cool shots that way on. One thing that is really good with long with wide angle lenses is that you can go into geometry and get these kind of cool tunnel shots, which you can light and render. And that that would look really, really good. Now, in this project, I opted for a default 36 millimeter land. So let me go back to that 36 millimeter, and I'm gonna use the keyboard shortcut age to frame the shot. So now we're back. Now, we should set output dimensions at this point. So let's go up to the render settings here and under output, the within the height, I'm gonna set up a render of 2048 by 2048 or a two k square. Render so 2048 2048. So the dimmer areas here are out of the camera's field of view. I want to make these areas darker, and we can do that by going up to the options menu configure. And under the view tab, we have something called tinted border and the color is black, but the capacity is only 10%. So let's increase that to 90. And that just makes it a little easier to frame the shot and the type of shot that I want. I know what I'm going for. So I'm gonna set it up here. I want something close to this. Once I'm close. I like to find Tune using the numerical controls. So in the camera, let me select a camera and go to the coordinates tab. The X Y and Z position are easy to fine tune, but the rotational values not so much the shape is moving away from us. And let me go into the four views to show you what is happening. Zoom in the top. You here when I use these controls here or these, um, these fields. The camera is rotating but is rotating around his own axis. And what I would like to do is I would like to be able to rotate around the center or the approximate center off the object. Now, one way we can do that is by parenting our camera to a no. So let's do that. Before we parent to camera to the Naldo, I would like to zero out the coordinates. It's just easier that way. Avoid some confusion later on when you parented, so a quick way to reset it to zero, which is his default value, is by right clicking on these little scrubby sliders, and that sets it back to zero. It sets us back, too, to the default value. Whatever the default value for the field is, is going to reset it to that. So now the camera is in the center of the scene. That's Adam. No, and let's call this cam controller and let's make the camera a child of the cam controller and the camp controller is right at the center of the scene, which is approximately in the center of the object and whatever positions, whatever the values of the position scale invitation is for the camp controller. The camera's gonna follow because it's parented to it so we can still use the camera controls. Just stay away from the rotation so we can still Dolly, and we can still used a pan but the rotation I'm going to do with the cam controller now, when we rotate, you can see that it is rotating around the object. It's a lot easier to set up the shot this way. So I know the type of shot I'm going for and you should come up with your own values. But this worked for me before, some for consistency. I'm going to set it up the same way. So this is gonna be minus seven and, uh, for the camera itself that set this up to B minus 93. And it's 2 37 and minus eight. 31. And let me bring this up in full view here, and that is the shot. I want to make sure I don't accidentally move the camera once I have the shot in place and we can do that by adding a protection tag. So on the camera, right click and ah Lek Cinema four d tags and protection, and that essentially locks the camera now I can't move it by accident. So the framing is Their next stop is three point lighting
13. 3-Point Lighting: we're gonna light are seen using a three point lighting system. So let's take a look at how to set that up in this scene here with this bust. And let's look at the lighting set up, let's go to the top view and for I'm gonna enable the standard three point. So this is that main set up. We have the bust here in the center, and here's to camera and we have three lights. And this light here is illuminating the bus from an angle. And this has two strongest illumination so that we call this one the main or the key light . And then on this side we have another light that fills in the shadows off the key light. And so we call this one the fill light. And then here we have another light. We can't see that from this view, but this light is sitting above the bus. So is illuminating from the top, and its primary purpose is to have the subject stand out from the background. So let's take a look at that in the perspective, you so in the perspective and to see the lights, we need to look at a rendered view off this, and one way to do that is to go up to this menu and down to interactive render region, and now it can see a rendered view. Now the interactive Render region. You can make it larger or smaller by just dragging these handles. There's also a quality slider here. I have mine set all the way up to the top. If you go all the way to the bottom, you have the lowest quality, and then I think by default it's set to 50% But I'm gonna drag it all the way up to the top . So let's take a look at the lights. One by one, me. Turn them all off a first. Now, when I do that, Cinema 40 activates its default light and let me show you where that is. Under the render settings on options, there's something called a default light. So if you have no lights activated in your scene, then Cinema 40 is going to turn on the default light. But we can disable that if you want, and this close is so even if I hadn't disabled the default light, Um, the moment we turn on one of our lights. The default light would have been turned off anyway, but it's good to know that that setting exists. So let's take a look at the key light first. So the key light all myself does this. It clearly illuminates this side, Um, but we have lots of shadows on the side that we need to fill in, and that's where the fill light comes into play. So let's look at the fill light all by itself, so you can see that the fill light is a lot softer. It fills in the shadows. We can see the details, but delight itself is a lot softer, and then we enable the key light so both together look like this. So now one more light to enable, and that's the rim light, and you can see that the shoulders here are kind of getting a little bit dark. So the purpose here for the rim light is to make sure that the subject doesn't bleed into the background too much. So let's enable the rim light. I'm gonna enable the rim light by itself so you can see how it illuminates the shoulders and the top in the back of the head. So if we look at all lights together, we get this. And all in all this is a fairly, well, it or even the lit scene. Um, scenario you would see and say, a photography studio with somebody taking a head shot. It's not the most dramatic lighting, so we can play around with this a little bit more and create some more drama. Let me disabled the standard three point, and I am going to turn off the interactive Render region and let's go up to the top and let's enable the dramatic three point. It's not that dramatic, but so here we have the difference that similar set up. But the lights are much more at an angle almost coming from this side here, the key light and fill it or but are much more angled towards the bust. The rim light is in pretty much the same location that hasn't changed. So let's go back to the perspective, you and take a look at this and we have to enable our interactive render region and there you have it. So this time around, this side is ah, lot more illuminated. We can still see details on this side, but barely. Let's look at the lights all by themselves. So the key light here and in lots of situations you can get away with just using one key light. This creates a lot of drama. Um, but let's look at the fill light. So the fill light here is even softer than the last time. It does the same kind of thing. It feels in the shadows a little bit more, but it's even softer. So we see it. But it's very subtle, and both together creates this type of look and you don't necessarily always need a rim light. But if you wanna have him stand out a little bit more from the background, this could be a pretty good effect that he bleeds into the background. But if you want to enable the room light, we can look at that. So a lot of contrast from this side to this side, we can play with this even more by adding some colors. So if I disabled this light and enabled the dramatic three colored light which has a very similar set up to the dramatic three point. But I've added some colors to it. So now we have even more contrast. We have, well, it dark. We have one color versus another color. So there's even more contrast here. And that could illustrate good versus bad or other things. So there's no right lighting. Um, but you can see how you can dramatically changed a look by changing the lights set up. Let me disabled the interactive render region. If you want to play around with this practice, um, this bus I found it in the content browser. I'm gonna I'm gonna make this file available for download, but I can't give you the bus because I don't think I have their rights to distribute that, um, But in the content browser, the bus I used was under sculpting based meshes, and I think I might have used to female bust. Probably now, not all versions of Cinema 40 has the sculpting tools. I believe the studio addition on Lee has it, but you can use, say, primes three D objects, humans, for example, or any other model that you have. Okay, so now that we know what three point lighting is, let's go ahead and light our scene and that's up next
14. Lighting the Scene: Let's add our first light to the scene. So let's go up to the light menu and click on the light bulb, and it's all dark. We have display set to go rude shading, and that reacts to lights as well. The others don't. A quick shading, for example, wouldn't react to that. But the group shading does, but I want to enable the interactive render region. So let's go up here and enable that and let's make this a little larger. Okay, so we've added the light. Let's move it a little bit out to the side here, and let's look at some of the light settings in the general tab. We have the type of light, and right now it's set to an Omni light anomaly. Light is this tiny little spot that illuminates in all directions similar to a light bulb. But we have more types, so we also have a spotlight, which allows you to focus in on one area similar to what you would see on a stage, say, a theater stage. An infinite light simulates a light source in a far distance like the sun, and then we have an area type light which is what we're gonna use, and an area type light is a rectangular light that illuminates in all directions similar to a computer monitor. But it's highly customizable. So if we go into the details tab, we have a ton of settings here, for example, the area shape. You don't have to stick with a rectangle. We could change it into a disc or a line or a sphere, even custom object and spines. So if I if I select that option, we get a field where we can drag in our objects into this field and they could become light sources. Now I'm gonna leave this at rectangle. We have, ah Size X and why? But we can change that. Fall off angle dictates how the light is shooting out from the and the light. So right now it's shooting in all directions, but you can limit it to ah, more narrow angle, say 1 20 that's going to make it at more concentrated light. Now. I wanted to be 100 80 for this, but you can change that. You can also create a more realistic light if you want. Most riel life lights have some sort of fall off. So we have a fall offsetting here too. It's set to none by default, but you can enable, say, inverse square, which is physically accurate. I'm not gonna do that. But you can. Um but I will add a shadow to this. So let's go back to the General tab and under shadow right now, it's set to none, but weaken Set this to an area shadow. The area shadow is the highest quality shadow. It also takes the longest to render, but it looks the best. So I typically used that most of the time. So let's go ahead and place our lights. I'm gonna rename this one instead of lights. Gonna call this key light and let's ah, open up the four views here so we can see a little bit better. And as we adjust the lights, keep your eyes open on this window cause you can see the results as we move the lights around. In fact, I'm gonna make this window a little bigger. And I also want this key light to continuously point towards the tourists. So as we move it, I wanted to point towards the tourists and we can achieve that by using a target tag. So let's do that key light, right click on it on select Cinema four D tags and a target tag. And in the target tax settings, we have a target object field that's do our tourists. That's drag that into that field. So now you can see that the axes flipped, so it's always going to look at the center off the tourists. So let's move that a little bit in place. So let's put it around here and down a little bit. Um, the light is way too strong, so I'm going to go to the General tab and then under intensity, gonna set this down to 60 and I looks good. Um, I have a few values I know are good for this money's 5 92 minus 58 5 83 So the first light is set up. Let's move on to the fill light, so I'm gonna command or control drag on the key light to make a copy. I call this too, Phil Light. I'm gonna disable the key light and take the fill light and drag it over to the other side around here. Don't move it up a little bit and it's too dark in the center And this feel light, I'm gonna disabled the shadows. So shadow area, I'm gonna set us to none. It's gonna make it brighter in here. That is good. Um, I don't need it to be that strong. Something set. Intensity to be 40. I just wanted to fill in the shadows. I don't want it to be a dominant light. Um, so you type in a few values here, um, is to 81 1 80 I minus 5 64 Okay, good. That's good. So now let's move on and add the rim light, and I control command drag, and I'm gonna disable the fill light. So the key light, let's name it key. I mean, that's name it rim light. So the rim light is gonna have to be on top of the objects of this movement and to approximate position. And let's move it up. That and that's make this a little wider. I mean, something like that. I'm gonna increase the intensity of this light. So instead of 40 let me set this just 60. So that's quite good. Um, let's in the detail set set this to an even number of us to 1100. And under the coordinates that set minus minus 1 32 and 903 and minus 5 85 Good. Now let's go back to a full view and enable all the lights. So that's the lights set up. It does look a little dark, but we're also gonna add an environment. A reflective environment was gonna make this considerably brighter. So this is good for now. And next up, we're gonna add the environment.
15. Creating an Environment for Reflections: we're gonna add an environment that can add reflections to the scene. But before that, let's do some house cleaning and organized this a little bit better. Eso Let's go up here and add a null and I'm gonna add three nails and we don't need to have the interactive render region actives. I'm gonna turn that off and limit control or command drag to make a copy and then one more And the 1st 1 here I'm gonna call seen And this this one I'm gonna call cameras and then the last one I'm going to call lights. So let's take the lights and put them in the lights folder twirled it up. And then the cam controller and the camera put that in the cameras and the rest is going to go into the scene. I can select multiple objects here in the Objects manager by dragging like this a marquee selection. So let's drop that into the scene's folder and I can twirl that up. So now we can add our environment and to do that, let's go up to this menu. Here, look and hold and there is an environment. We're going to use this one the sky. So let's add that the sky is an infinitely large sphere that wraps around our scene, and we need to add a material to this. So what I'm gonna add is an HDR I, ah, high dynamic range image. And I'm going to use one of the presets stat to come with cinema 40. So, in the content browser Um, I did this before, so that's why I have them here. If you start up fresh, you would start from here So under presets and then prime presets, light setups and then HD or I and then the Sunny Park, this one. So double click that that adds it to the materials manager. And I'm gonna close the content browser. Bring back the objects manager. Let's apply this one right away. And to apply it, we either drag it's to the editor here or directly to the object, and that's what I'll do. So now it shows up. Let's take this guy and put it in the folder here, too, so we can see that it looks pretty bad. It's all jagged, low rez. So let's took take a look at how we can fix that to go into the material. I'm gonna double click and it pops open on the other monitor limit. Bring it over. And to fix the Jag anus here first. That's just a preview. It's not gonna show up in the final Render, but to fix that, we can go to the editor and under texture preview size instead of default, we can set it to something larger like, um 2024. So that's good. It looks better now on the left hand hand side. Here we have all the channels. Um, we have right now luminant and reflecting enabled. We don't necessarily need reflectors for this, so I'm gonna turn that off. But if I click on the word luminous, we get the settings for it. The Luminess channel can emit light all by itself. So the way they have set this up is that they have added an image to the luminous channel, and the way they did that is, if we go into this drop down, you see that there's something called load image. So if you select that, you get to pick whatever image you want now, they did that already for us, so we don't need to do that. But what we need to do is I will not take out the color information. I want to reflections to show up on the object. But I don't want it to cull. Arise it right now is gonna cull. Arise it. So to do that, to take out the saturation What we can do is that we can drop this into filter shader. Let's do that filter and then let's go into the filter and in the filter We have lots of different settings. We have hue, saturation, lightness, contrast Gamma The one I'm after is saturation, So let's take it and drag it all way down. So now the saturation is gone. Okay, we're down here so we can close this now we're gonna get reflections from our sky object, but I don't want it to show up in the camera. So I wanna have the reflections, but I want to hide it from the camera and we can do that by adding something called a compositing tag. So back in the Objects Manager, we can either right click on this guy where we can go directly up here to the menu and say tags Cinema, 40 tags and a compositing tag in the compositing tax settings. I'm gonna leave everything at its default, but I'm gonna uncheck This one, seen by camera, has uncheck that. So now we still have the benefits off the reflections, but we don't have to see the image itself now. This won't have an impact yet because we haven't added a material yet, so that's up next.
16. Adding a Material: let's add a new material. So let's go down to the materials manager and we can add a material by going to the create menu and select a new material. Or we can simply double click in the materials manager and let's add it to our tourist. So twirl down the scene elements and drag the material on top off the tourists. We want to make sure that the projection is set to you be mapping so that it follows to flow of the polygons. Let's open up this material by double clicking it. Bring it over to this monitor and we're gonna be working with two channels to reflect INS channels and the color channel that's disabled reflections channels for now so we can focus on the Color channel first. We should also enable the interactive render region so we see what goes on when we make the changes. So in the color channel, um, we have HSV, which is hue, saturation and the brightness value. Or we can work with RGB if we so prefer and then we also have a spectrum you wanna have this visible or color wheel. Let me click on this icon again to hide that we can also work with swatches. So if we have a color and we want to save that as a swatch, we simply drag it down from this color box, drag it into this field here and let go, and then we have to create a new group for that. So let's call that abstract colors, for example. And now you can add mawr colors to this color group. Now, I'm not gonna use this. I just wanted to show you. So I'm gonna go to the H S V sliders and the material I'm going to set up is gonna be a dark grey with a tent of blue. So 209 is good for the tent. I want that. Let's set up the saturation to be 16 and that set this to want to be 31. So that's the base Now. I'm gonna change one more thing here in the Color Channel. And that's the model right now it's Cetelem version. Now. When I changed this, we're probably not going to see it in this one. No, cause it's too dark. So let me right click on this preview icon and say open window and we can see it pretty well in this big window. So the model is a inversion. Let's change that to an or in a er, the or in a ER is just a little dollar on its less plastic it, which is gonna be good for us. Let's close this one now and let's enable the Reflections Channel and we have this default speculator and the Reflections Channel. We don't need that. So let's delete that. And instead, let's add have phone and that turns this into this chrome shape, which of course, isn't exactly what we want. Um, but in the previous movie, when we set up the sky, we couldn't really see the reflections back then. But now we can see the effect it has. This is the result off the sky that we set up. So if I go up to the sky and disable that I can if I click and hold down the option were all I can disabled both these stoplights at the same time. So let's disabled at and now you can see that this Ah, this material is completely depend on the reflection. If I turn off this guy, we have nothing to see. So because there's nothing to reflect anymore, let's bring this guy back then the type I have here falling that we set up, I'm gonna right click and show help. There's a really good short in the help files that lets you preview what the different modes do. So here's a back man g X and a phone, and we can see them at different roughness setting. So this really helps for you to see what the materials are gonna look like. Just a good reference that's close. This and the shape is very reflective. It's also very bright. The attenuation here said to average, is gonna average the color channel with a reflection channel, and right now we have a layer color off white, so it's very bright. Let's set that to be the same color as we had in the color channels. 209 uh, 16 and 31. And now we're going in the right direction. So next up is roughness. It's We have zero roughness right now, but if it increased that, you can see that that it the surface gets a little rougher. A little dollar. It reflects a little bit less. And if I bring this up really high, we get this, which is the completely different. We can almost not see the reflections anymore. So I'm gonna set this to a value of 47. So something in between there and I want to keep the reflection strength pretty high, but not that highs. I'm gonna bring it down to 81. Next is the speculator strength. A speculator is this highlight. You see here. So the speculates strength controls how bright these are. So if I said it to zero and kind of teams that a little bit now, I want to really high speculate. I'm gonna set this right up to 91 and then we have the bumps strength, which is not gonna have an effect because we don't have a bump General enabled. Ah, the Bump channel can give you some surface imperfections, but we're not using that. So this is not gonna have an effect. But we are going to change one more thing here. And that stuff for Nell. Let me show you that, um, different l controls to fall off the reflection and objects in real life have for nails. If you look at them straight on. They're not gonna have that much reflection. But as the angle increases, so does the reflection. So we have two different types. We have die electric and conductor. Conductor is everything. Metal and die electric is everything else. So let's select that. And then under presets, we have some riel life examples of or, for example, ruby or PERL. And you can see that has a great impact on on the shape. And now the reflection is really on Lee towards the edges of the objects. The time we're gonna use, though, is conductor and I want to choose irony for the material, and that's the base material that we have set up. On top of this. We're gonna add the colorful stripes, and that's up next.
17. Adding the Color Streaks: So it's time to color our shape. And when we're done coloring, we're gonna end up with something similar to this. Not exactly, but very close to this where we have these saturated colors on these oranges purple, pink, blue, but also some dark areas. And we have some areas that fade from color to the darker color here. And I'm gonna show you how to how to do that off course. You can go a 1,000,000 different ways with this, but I wanted to show you how you can use layer masks to control the flow of the color and and to hide it in certain areas. So let's start back in our project. Let's open the material, double click it and, uh, let me bring it over to this monitor again. The color is gonna go in the reflective it's channel and under the layer color, let me make some room. So next to texture, that's a drop down. So let's click on that, and we're gonna add several greedy INTs to this. So we need a layer shader to host. Oh, so let's add that and let's go into the layer Shader. You can see that it got dark here and we're gonna fix that in just a little bit. But first, let's add the first greedy int So Shader Grady int And then we want to go into the dig radiant settings by clicking on this thumbnail, and we can see that it's not right. There's, ah, hard line here, and that's because the Grady int is going in the wrong direction. So to fix that would change the type from two to you to two D. V, and now it's starting to look better. What I'm gonna work on first is to get the orange side here, the orange have face to the darker color on the top. Let's twirl down the Grady in settings. I'm going to select one of the knots. I want all the knots to have, ah, hard interpellation. And right now it's smooth. So if I toiled down this drop down and I'm gonna set this two step in prior releases, this was called none in 19 and before this is called none, and in prior releases, we could only have one interpretation for all knots, but now all individual knots can have their own interpretation. So to set the interpretation for all knots. I'm going to right click, and I'm gonna select interpretation off all knots and I'm gonna set that to step. And then let's drag this this cover stop, and this one's gonna have, like, orange golden color. So let's take the color first. And it would help if I would get the saturation there, too. On may be a little bit more orange. Okay, so that's good. Um, it's a little slow to update, so let's see if we can get away with just getting the colors in the In The Standard Editor . So let's turn off interactive render region and let's control a command. Click this not and, uh, a little further, just a little bit more. I'm a little less. Okay, that's that's good. I'm not worried about this back here because we're gonna fix that with a layer mask and the next step. But let's introduce some color variations. So command control click and that set that to a brighter color. And let's command or control, click that one again. I just want to have a thin and deliver, and we could see that we're gonna move this one perhaps further. This way Yep, something like that is pretty good. Make that little thinner. I've been moved that a little bit. I mean, all these things are tweak ing's there. No, right there. No wrongs. And we could potentially spend a lot of time trying to get this exactly right. Let's see how efficient we can be. So now let's add the layer mask so we can have it fade from orange to black and we can get rid of this section. So let's go up one level and shader radiant. And we're gonna take this Grady int and we're gonna drag it underneath and we're gonna change the blend mode from normal to layer mask. And this works just like in photo shop, that white areas of this greedy int is gonna show the layer on top and any black areas is gonna hide. We can see the thumbnail here, Um, and it's important that the layer mask is sitting underneath the layer that he wants to effect. So let's go into this layer mask and bring this black over and this white in. You never get it back, See how we can how we're getting the fade in and fade out here, let me make a copy of this black one here. So now we got rid of the back part. No, it's just a matter how intense we want is fade off to be. I think we're going to start with that. We can always go back and tweak it. Now let's also fix the fact that this is dark. Now let's go up one level and one level more. It is old dark because the Grady Int or the later Shader that we added in the texture drop down is overriding the color here that we sat before. So they're not interacting, but we can have them interact by changing the blend mode from normal to add. And now we get the colors back. So let's go back into our layer and let's add next color, and the next color is gonna be like a pink purple that's gonna run next to the orange. So shader Grady int and we wanna change the blend mode from normal to screen because we want that we want this to interact with the other ones as well. And then let's go into the Grady Int and like before, let's switch this from a two d u to A to d. V. And I want hard interpretation. Not so I'm going to right click and I'm gonna say interpretation of all knots Step anise. Bring this white dot over and let's change the color to pink purplish and I want some separation between them. So I'm gonna push this one ever so slightly to the right ever so slightly more ever so slightly more and one more time. Okay, that's good. Uh, and that's make a copy of this one. Command control drag. And let's see, maybe something, maybe something like that. And let's introduce some color variation. So control, command, click. I think this a little brighter, another version, and make this little darker. And one more perhaps, um, maybe a little bit more towards pink. This one, too. Okay, so that is pretty good. Um, let's go. And let's add a layer mask for this one so that we can have it fade up, fade, fade on the top. So shader ingredient. Drag it underneath and said this one to layer mask and let's go into the layer mask and pull this one over, and now it's all very faint. But Let's bring this white over somewhere around here. Now I was coming back. Let's make a copy of this one sticking on this side because I wanted to fade at the bottom as well. But I need to be a little bit more aggressive with fading on the top. I m just a little bit more. That's good. Okay, so let's say that that is done. And, ah, let's do one more. I know from testing that I wanna have I wanna have purple pink on this edge to But I also know that that's going to interfere with this one here so we can again use layer masks to control where that color is showing. So let's add one more shader ingredient. Set the blend mode to screen and let's go into the Grady Int. We want to TV, and we want to interpellation of all knots. Step and let's drag this one over and now focused mainly on the back portion Here, we can fix this part with a layer mask in the next step, but let's get the color to be close to what we want. Strike this a little further, so a little further so something like that. See how is covering the edge here now, and let's ah, drag this, not copy that. Not. And I think that's good enough. If you go further, it's gonna start eating into the grade int over there, and I don't want that. So let's have a little bit of extra padding. Create some color variation. Just a little bit purple on a copy. That one again? Um, probably little. Not sure if you can see that. Yeah, we can see that. Okay, let's leave it at that. Let's add the layer mask. Um, but, uh, ingredient, drag it underneath, and the a mask Go into the layer mask and, well, this one over here, not that far. We don't want it to eat into that one. And then copy this one over to this side. Not that far. Something something like this. That is good. Now we don't have it here, but we have it on the back. Perfect. So now let's add some more colors, and we're gonna be able to add the rest of the colors on one single ingredient. So let's add one more ingredient. Go into the Grady int switch to two D. The and interpretation of all knots. Step and we need to do one more thing that I missed. Ingredient. This one needs to be set to scream, and then let's go back. So the first thing I want to do is I want to add, um, I want to add some blue and some orange here. So let's start with the blue and I want to blue to come. I want there to be a little bit of gap between the purple and blue. More the habit. Last. Okay on. Let's set that to be a blue and the little greener. I think that's pretty good. Let's copy the black one over here. So we're limited here and let's make a copy of this. Make it brighter, make another copy here a little darker, have a little bluer, and let's make one final one that's gonna be a really tight to the black one. And that one I'm gonna make really dark. Not that time for quite dark, and it's getting quite tight here. Uh, distance between the knots is is very ridiculous, almost, but with release 20 we can use to camera tools to zoom in. So if you hold on the two and click and zoom in to the Grady int. Then you can use the one key to pan. And if you want to zoom back out, you can use the H key to frame the whole Grady Int. Unfortunately, if you have released 19 or prior, that doesn't work because that is new from release 20. But what you can do is that you can just try to maximize the Grady int that gives you more control like this so you can see pretty well here. Okay, let me bring this back, Adam. Need to obscure the whole window here, so I'm a little bit more. So now I'm gonna add the orange that's gonna run here. So, command, drag this one and they are doing the black over a little bit on thing, this one and let's make this orange, gold, orange. Um, some like that. And let's make another copy a little brighter. I think that's good. Let's leave it at that now. I also wanna have a blue strip in the back. So let's add that next. Going to make a copy on one of these and let's move this over and we need to go further this way. I wanted to sit around here, but I wanted to be thick. I just wanted to be thin some distance from the pink purple A little bit more. Maybe something like that on. Let's make, uh, color variation. Maybe a darker even. I'm this good. Um okay, good. Next we're gonna add another blue that's gonna run on this side here and then also one more purple kind of in the center here. So let's start with the blue. This command control dragged that one out and let's put a limit black. Not there. Um, let's see how far we're gonna drag it. Let's leave it in a little bit more. Maybe that looks pretty good. Onda, let's make this a brighter blue. Make a copy a little darker, make another copy, make that brighter. So I don't I don't have a grand plan for this. I'm just trying to introduce some color variation into this so it looks a little bit more interesting on. Obviously, you can tweak this in any way you want, so that's good. Now I wanna have just a little bit of purple in there, so let me control drag this one out and this one out as well. And this one's gonna be pink purple, and we need to move it closer to the blue a lot closer. Cut that off. Maybe a little thicker. I'm looking at the crevices here. I'm trying to kind of fit them in. Let's have a little more and let's, ah, control, command, click Make some color of variation and let's move this one a little bit to the side. Andi, maybe make one copy more like this. Remember, this is too bright. Okay, so that's good. Um, I like that. Let me see what it looks like with the interactive Render Region. So I think most things are okay. I would like to have this purple go a little further, and I wonder if something is cutting this one off here may increase the quality takes longer to render, but then you can judge a little bit better. I think also this orange concertante to go up way further this way. It's too dim here. So let's attack the orange first. So that's the layer mask. Let's pull this from back a little bit that move the white over to So now It goes a little further up. I like that better. I think that's good. Let's go with pink purple. Here. Next, and Ah, Let's see. Do we want to move it in a little bit? I think so. Let's move the black. Yeah, I liked it better. I like that a little bit better. And then I can move the blue a little closer to that. So let's do that. Um that blue is sitting in sitting in the top. Radiant. So let's do this back first. And that will be this Grady int. Let's see, That does have an effect. No. What about this way? Yes. There you go. Okay. So now, now that works. Okay, Now, I still it's the little too thick here. Maybe so. Let me move these back out here. This direction. Okay? Okay. That's good. So I like that. Um, of course, now I would like to move the blue up here a little bit as well. Tweaking, tweaking, tweaking, tweaking. Move it this way. Too good, good, good, good. And then let's move this blue. So it goes a little closer to the purple. I see. It can be a distraction. Now, this way. Oh, it's over here, of course, Um, A bit more good. And then move the black over just a tad. I mean, I think this looks good, but I would like to have some more separation between the orange and the blue here. So I'm gonna zoom in, and I'm gonna use the one key to pan and for the black. Here, push these. Not Yeah, something like that. Maybe even war. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's good. I think that's good. Um, let's call that a day. Let's go up here and, uh, say that these are the colors that we're gonna work with. And next up, let's see how we can render this thing out.
18. Rendering with the Physical Renderer: Let's get ready to output this and let's set up the render settings now. I don't need the interactive render region, so let's turn that off and up to the render settings and in the output we set this one up before, so we have 2048 by 2048. And that's all we need to change in here if you're working with an animation than the frame range becomes important, but we're not, so I'm gonna leave it and then under the save, make sure that the check box is checked and then you have a file path. So click on this button to to tell your computer where you want to save the file. I did this already and then under formats. I'm gonna work with a PNG and I'm gonna bump up the bits per channel to 16 and I'm also going to enable an Alfa Channel and then we also have the type of renderers that we want to use. Um, I'm gonna show you how to set up both a standard and a physical Orender and I prefer to work with the physical. It's more streamline, and it's easier to work with. But not everybody has its I'll show both, but let's start with a physical. Once you select a physical, then we have one more setting here. So let's click on the physical settings, and we're gonna focus mostly on the midsection here. But we can enable depth of field here, and you can also enable motion blur here under the sampler, we have three different kinds. We have progressive, adapted and fix. Progressive is just gonna keep on rendering forever until you tell it to stop. And progressive is great to use with, um, the interactive render region because you get results really quickly Then we also have a mode called fixed, which applies to the exact same quality everywhere. And then you would start with a sampling quality of some sort of presets low, medium high, and then under sampling subdivisions, we can alter this. The higher you go, the better the quality. And of course, the better the quality that longer it takes to render. So that's gonna be a push and pull in addition to the fixed and progressive. We have adaptive, and the adaptive sampler is a little smarter in that it first evaluates to see what are some easy areas and water, some hard areas to render and the harder areas are going to be assigned. Ah, higher shaving subdivisions to the Max subdivision, whereas the easier areas, they're going to be a sign the minimums, a shading subdivisions. And then we have a threshold that controls what gets assigned to the maximum on what gets assigned to the minimum. So the lower the value here, the more gets assigned to the maximum shading subdivisions. And of course, the longer it takes to render at the bottom. We have a few more settings were not using subsurface scattering for this. So this doesn't apply to us saying with ambient occlusion, We don't have any ambient occlusion. We don't have any blurriness subdivision either. Imagine that you have a piece of glass that you're looking through. The material on the other side of the glass would be a little blurry. So in a situation like that, you can increase the quality. If you don't get good quality enough to begin with, and then we have shadows, subdivisions, and this could apply to us. If you find that your shadows are a little grainy, then you can try increasing this value. So say three or four Now, I did testing on this, and normally I would say that the adaptive is a better way to go. But for this, the fixed was rendering much faster. So I'm gonna set it to fixed and sampling quality. I'm just gonna set too high, and that's all I'm gonna do. I'm gonna leave it at that and then I'm gonna close this Render settings are done and to render this we click on this button here, this is render to picture viewers. So let's click it. So the rendering is a way this is gonna take a good 10 minutes or so to render on my machine. And if you have a beef, your machine is gonna be faster. Most operations since cinema 40 are single threaded, meaning that they only use one processor even if you have more. But the rendering engine is a different beast that can utilize all the power and all the course that you have. So if you have a lot of course in your machine, this will be significantly faster. Now we have some zoom controls here. We have some presets and you can set a specific value. If you want. You can also use your scroll wheel, which I'm going to use, So I'm gonna zoom in 125 and then you can see at 125 gets old jagged. So when you judge to quality, make sure that you're at 100%. 200% works as well to, but 100% is the ideal. Now, before you go ahead and output your final render, it's always a good idea to test. Now we're only doing a still image. It's not that big a deal. But imagine if you have an animation of 300 frames, then you want to make sure that you test beforehand and try to optimize the scene that don't just click highest and send it off. Sometimes you don't need the highest quality, so that's setting down. I'm gonna let this render and I'll be back once it's finished and the render is done. It took 13 minutes and 22 seconds, and he looks good on. We're gonna make it look better in after effects for some post work, and that's coming up. But first, let's look at how to set up the standard render, and that's up next
19. Rendering with the Standard Renderer: let's set up the standard render now. So I go up to the render settings and the output is gonna be the same. It's gonna be the 2048 2048 we don't need to touch anything else and then under save, it's also gonna be the same to save out, to file to the location that you want and P and G 16 bit. And we have an Alfa Channel enabled. Now let's wish the render to standard One of the differences between the standard and the physical renderers is that in the physical Renner, you have most settings in one location in the standard render. They're a little bit more spread out some or here in the render settings. But then we also have settings in the materials. We have settings for the lights and so on. The first thing we want to do is go into anti alias ing. Right now we have it set to geometry, and that's gonna be too jagged. So let's set the geometry. I mean, the anti A leasing to be best. That's step number one, and we're actually done here. We don't need to do anything more here I'm gonna close this window. But I'm going to go into the material double click it and bring it over. And in the reflect INTs channel all the way at the bottom, we have something called layer sampling, so let's twirl that down. And in this sampling subdivisions, we want to bring this up something that set this to a value of eight. And that kind of does it. We only have one material, but if you have more materials, you have to do that for every material eso that's set up here in this scene. We're not gonna have a problem with graininess in the shadows. At least I didn't. But if you do, you can go into the light. Any light that has shadows enabled, you can go in and do this So key light and under the shadow tab, we have minimum and maximum samples. You can increase that and you can also increase the accuracy if needed. But for now, this is good. So I'm gonna go ahead and start the render. So click the render to picture of your button and it's gonna render it. It's gonna take a little while and I will be back once it's done. So the render is done and, uh, it looks good. We can compare their results on the right hand side. Here we have the abstract standard renderers, and then we can flip to the physical render. And as I flip between them, you can see that quality is almost exactly the same. But the standard render it took 24 minutes and the physical took 13 minutes. So significantly longer for the standard Renner. But all in all, the same result. So next let's jump into after effects and add some post treatment to this.
20. Color Grading in After Effects: Okay, so here we are in after effects and let's style, it's something like this to go full screen here in after effects. If you want to go full screen on any active window, you can use to till icky. And the Tiller key is the key of on the left hand side of your keyboard, right above the tab key on the left of the number one key. That's a squiggly, line looking thing, and that's the tilde key that's going to allow you to maximize any active window. So I haven't gone to crazy here. I've added some glows, brightened it up. Overall, I've lowered the saturation, and I added some greens to this. And here is just a different sample what you could do with this, just using a part of the shape and using this with a phone design. So let's see how we can do this and, oh, by the Ram zooming by using my scroll wheel on the mouse. You have zoom settings here if you want to, or you can use to control or command key and the plus minus sign that's gonna allowed it to Zuma's Well, now, a lot of people are gonna prefer to working photo shop with this. I like to work in after facts, even though it's still I like the non destructive workflow of after effects. And I like to work with 32 bits per channel in after effects, especially when you're dealing with glows. Um, if you're setting is different than mine. You can hold on the altar option key and click. It's gonna take you between eight 16 and then 32. Let's make sure that that's set to 32 and let's bring in our rendered shape. I'm just gonna drag it on top of this project a window. And then I'm gonna drag this one on top of this composition icon that's going to create a new composition with same settings where the same dimensions as our image. And if I select the our image, I can see that in the information window on the top, we have an Alfa Channel, trillions of colors, plus and then straight. The Alfa Channel is set to straight after effects is guessing that we have a straight Alfa channel, but when we set this up in Cinema 40 it wasn't straight, so let's fix that I can right click on this and say Interpret footage main and then in the Alfa Channel settings instead of a straight Let's set this to a pre multiplied and then click. OK, okay. So my approach to this rather than going heavy handed with the facts here I'm gonna try to layer in the look and I'm gonna de saturated first and then I'm gonna add a focal point here. I'm gonna create a strong glow on this orange edge here. Eso Let's start this first de saturate this effect up I gotta be in this window first. Like this Go back effect and then color correction hue saturation. Unless you stratus down to say 20 Money's 28 30 something like that, it's good before and after. Now next, let's add an adjustment layer on top of this I'm gonna go effect are layer rather And then and I'm gonna select a solid And I'm gonna show you wine in just a second so solid and I'm gonna call this one a d g for adjustment layer make this comp size. I like to have my adjustment layers white, so I'm gonna leave it white and then I'm gonna click. OK, so now it comes in as a solid color, which is was what it is. But if we enable this check box down here that's gonna turn that into an adjustment layer and an adjustment layer is just a container that holds effects and it can affect everything underneath it. And the first thing I want to do I want to brighten up this image just a little bit, and I want to focus on this part here. So I'm gonna go to effect style eyes and then glow. And in the glow effect settings we have threshold, radius and intensity. Intensity is how strong it is, and then radios is how far it travels, how blurry it is. So So I increased is you can you can see that there it grows, and then the threshold is controlling what gets blurred and what doesn't. So the lower the number that mawr parts are going to get the glow. And if I go to zero, you conceded that we just have this white mess. So I'm gonna go pretty high with a threshold. I'm gonna set this up to around 70 something like that, and I'm gonna bring down the radius a little bit and is way too strong. So I'm gonna set this down to say 0.2 0.1, and if I turn it on and off, you can see that it's extremely subtle, but it asked us a little bit of brightening, especially in this part, and that's a good start. So now let's add the orange glow here. So I'm going to go back to my project window, and I'm gonna reuse that solid. When we added the solid before aftereffects created a folder called Solids for Us. And I'm gonna take this one, and I'm gonna drag it to my timeline here, and I'm gonna enable the adjustment layer. And the way that I'm going to confine the glow to this area here is by using a mask, I'm gonna go to my pencil and then I'm gonna drag around the edge here. I'm dragging, clicking and dragging to get the handles out and then right down here and then come up. And then I'm gonna put one here and I'm gonna eat into the grey area a little bit so that the glow travels a little bit. Now, if you make a mistake. If you say put a mass point here before you let go the mouse. You can position that mass point in a different location. If you made a mistake by adding the space bar as long as you haven't let go of the mouse, so then I'm gonna put it back here like all the space bar, and then I'm gonna come up and I'm gonna close to mask. And then let's add a glow to this so effect style ice and glow and let me set the threshold right down so we can see what's going on. So zero So the first problem that we see here is that the mask has a hard edge and we don't want that, So let's fix that first. So in the timeline, here we can twirl down the settings for this layer, and then we have masks, effects and transform. So I'm gonna twirl down from masks. And then there's our mask mask one and then we can twirl down again. Now, this is a lot of twirling. So a faster way to get to your mask properties is by simply hitting em em. So mm, so M twice and there we have it. So a mask, feather. Let's increase the mask, Feather. So that C like this, that's good. And now we have this white color here. So rather than using the glo colors original colors, I'm gonna set this to be a golden and an orange color. And we can do that by switching this from original colors to A and B colors. And now we have color and color Be at the bottom here. So let me set the white want to be like a golden color, something like so and then the black color. Let's set that tone orange, something like that. So that's looking a lot better already. Now I don't need to see the outline of the mask and we can turn it off by clicking this button. This system, the visibility for the mask outline toggle, and I'm gonna leave threshold at zero. But I'm gonna bring up the intensity, something like that, and let me increase the radios quite a bit like that. Let me turn the effect on and off. You can see that made a big difference. So that's good. Let's add ah glow for the purple or pink in the background. So let's go back to the project window. That's reuse are solid, and that's total up. The other one. Now let me start renaming things here in after effects to rename the layers I selected. And then I add the return key. And the first adjustment layer was just a general general glow. And the 2nd 1 here was the orange glows adjustment orange glow. And then there were last one that we added. I mean, make that turn that into an adjustment layer is gonna be the pink, pink purple glow and let's go ahead and draw mask around this edge. Here, get the pen tal on and something like that on, Let's go up and then they would close it, so I don't need to see the outline of the mascot. Let's toggle that and let's get the mask property. So mm and let's feather this mask right away for something like that. And let's add effect style eyes and then glow. And in the glo colors, let's set this to A and B colors and color A. Let's set that to a pink something like that, and then the 2nd 1 to more of a purple. That's good. And let's see the spring down the threshold and I'm gonna increase the radius like that and I may increase the intensity quite a lot. Spring this right up so we can start. It's coming along. We turn it on and off. Um, I wanted to travel a little further, and one way that we can do that is we go into the mask settings. There's something called mask expansion so we can have the mass expand say, 20. I think that is good. Now if I turn it on and off, Okay, so that's a good start. We're gonna add more glows to this, So let's leave it at that. Let's add one more general glow. So let me add again are adjustment layer and let's call this one overall glow and that's enabled theater just mint layer switch. So now I want to brighten up the overall thing here. So let me add stylized glow, and I'm gonna leave it at the original colors this time, um, me bring up the or bring down the threshold rather something like this, and I want this a lot bigger. The glow radius can go up so and This, of course, has his way too strong. So let's set this down to say, 0.2. Let's turn it on and off to sea. So I quite like this for this area here and here. I don't like it here. I think it's too strong here. So let's draw mass to hide it from the top. There, I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to get my pen tool. Let me draw mask What kind of hides the top there. Bring them right in and let's feather the mask right away. And we don't need to see it anymore. So let's turn off the visibility and then m n and that's feather this one up quite a lot. I want this really soft, even softer. Okay, I think that's good. Let me zoom back in. And, um yeah, okay, so that's good. Let's add a little bit off contrast to this, especially I want to make it a little brighter. So let me make one more adjustment layer and this one I'm gonna called adjustment contrast enable the switch for adjustment layer and then add effect color correction, and I'm gonna add a curves to this, and I'm gonna darken it ever so slightly. But then I'm gonna brighten it up quite a bit now. When I do that, it gets way too saturated. But let's fix that in the next step. I think something like that. So this is before and this is after, So let's leave it at that. Let's add one more adjustment layer, and on this one I want to add some green. I want to add some grain, and I want to take out the saturation za green and then you saturation. So let's start with a green effect and then noise and grain add green, and we have this little preview square here. That's for the viewing mode. Preview. Well, let's set this to final output so we can see. And I'm also gonna zoom in. So we're at 100% when we judged this. And, of course, this is way too much eso. Let's set down the intensity to same 0.15 and then the size was too big, so that sets us to 0.25. It's a little subtle, Um, but in general it's is a good idea to add green to your renders, especially the CD renders, then look a little less C g Ah, it helps with banding and a banding issues you may run into as well. So I typically at agreeing to almost everything that I do. So I think that's good. That means zoom out. So let's fix the saturation now. Its effect hue saturation and a spring is way down. I mean, of course it depends on what you're gonna do, but I think last saturation is gonna look a little bit more. I'm gonna go full screen on this. Let's see. I mean, I think that's pretty good. You could go little high, bring up the saturation, perhaps a little bit. Hopes go full screen. So I think that's good. I'm gonna leave it at that. Let's call it Ah, Miss Cholera date. That wraps up the project. We started in Cinema 40 by adding a Taurus. We deformed the tourists with a spline rap and then we added two levels of displacement. The first level of displacement created all the big bridges, and the 2nd 1 created the fine details. We added a camera and well lit to seem with a three point lighting system. Then we created a material that has all these colorful streaks in it and then was rendered with both the physical and a standard renderers. Finally, here we are in after effects where we've added some post effects. The techniques that we used can be applied to many different types of projects, not just abstract shapes. Most of all, I hope this inspire you to dig deeper into cinema 40 and to explore more of what this application has to offer. And you're gonna have a ton of fun while doing it. So for me, just for Sunday l thank you very much for watching.
21. Outputting the Final Result from After Effects: Okay, so the project is done. But we didn't look at how to save a file out of after effects. So let's do that. And related to that are two things. The resolution and equality. So the resolution in the composition window is here. If I click on this drop down, I can see that there's a mode called Auto Enabled and it says half on the top and auto is adjusting to the zoom level, and currently the zoom level is 50%. So we get half the resolution. If I increase this to 100% then we have full resolution. I can also choose to work with full half, third or even quarter. And why do you want to work with quarter third or half? Well, sometimes you add a lot of effects and other things, and it can get really sluggish and slow to work, so you may have to lower the resolution. I find that in most cases, auto is a pretty good moto work with, and then we also have the quality which is here or fast previews. So if I click on this right now, we have it set off, which means that we don't have any fast previews enabled. It always shows us the final quality. And this is what I typically work with when I'm working with a still image. If I worked with an animation, which tends to be a lot slower, I usually work with adaptive resolution, and adaptive resolution gives me a really good quality when I'm parked on a frame. But if I scrub my play head in the timeline, it reduces the quality and then goes back to full quality once I let go of the mouse. And then if you have a very heavy scene, you may have to go to, say, fast draft, which lowers the quality or in certain cases, even wire frame, although that isn't very common. So let me go back to off final quality. So to save the file out now, I'm going to go up to the composition menu and I could use at to render queue. But a more convenient way to work is to use save frame as, and I could choose either a file or a photo shop layers, and I'm gonna choose a file now say frame as is gonna look at the current position of the play head and render out that particular frame. Now. In our case, it doesn't make a difference because we have a still image, so old frames look the same. But if you have an animation, this is gonna make a difference. So to render out the first frame, I would go to frame one and then go to composition, say, frame as file, and that's going to open up something called the Render Queue. And in the render queue, we need to set three things we need to tell after effects, where to save the file and then what type of file we want to save it out as and then the render settings or the quality. So let's go into the render settings, click on current settings and the quality and resolution we talked about. So unless I'm doing some sort of test, I would always set this to best and then the resolution to full. And that's all you have to do here now and we can verify that at the bottom here it says Duration. 01 The way to read this is from right to left. We have frames, seconds, minutes, and then hours and this is one frame. If you you would have chosen composition at to render queue, it would default to the length of the composition so you would see the length of the composition in the duration. Now, you could still save out a single frame if you go to custom and then set the duration toe only one. So I'm gonna click, OK, and I'm gonna click. OK, And now in the output module, when I click on photo shop so you can save out any type of format that you want. I'm gonna choose a PNG. I don't need any post of render action. And in the video output, we have channels and depth. So in channels we have three options. We have RGB or Alfa or both. And in this case, I'm just gonna save out the RGB. I don't need an Alfa and the depth options is going to be dependent on the four months you've chosen. And the P and G has two options. It either millions of colors, which is an eight bit file or trillions of colors, which is a 16 bit file. I'm gonna choose the trillions of colors. Why not? And we could resize and we can crop here. I'm not gonna do any of that. And I'm happy, so I'm gonna click, OK? And now I just need to tell after facts where to save it. So I'm going to click on this, save it to the location you want on your hard drive, click save, and we're ready to render. So I'm gonna take on the render button here on the right side render and the file is saved .
22. Thank you for watching: Thank you for watching the course, the first of four on creating abstract shapes and cinema. 40. The 2nd 3rd and fourth are coming soon. Don't forget to post your work in the project section below and let me know if you have any questions or if you have ideas for future courses you'd like to see. You can reach out on velocity peak dot com, and I'm also on Twitter at Jesper Sandal. Hopefully, you found the course helpful, and if you did, I'd appreciate a review. That's the end of this course. I'll see you next time.
Jesper Sandell, 3D Designer - Velocitypeak
